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John Edward Wansbrough (February 19, 1928 – June 10, 2002) was an American historian who taught at the
University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...
's
School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS University of London (; the School of Oriental and African Studies) is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the federal University of London. Founded in 1916, SOAS is located in the Bloomsbury a ...
(SOAS), where he was vice chancellor from 1985 to 1992. Wansbrough is credited with founding the so-called "revisionist" school of Islamic Studies through his fundamental criticism of the historical credibility of the classical Islamic narratives concerning Islam's beginnings and his attempt to develop an alternative, historically more credible version of Islam's beginnings. He argued in general for a skepticism of the authorship of early Islamic sources, and most famously that the
Quran The Quran (, ; Standard Arabic: , Quranic Arabic: , , 'the recitation'), also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation from God. It is organized in 114 chapters (pl.: , s ...
was written and collected over a 200-year period, and should be dated not from the 1st-century
Hijaz The Hejaz (, also ; ar, ٱلْحِجَاز, al-Ḥijāz, lit=the Barrier, ) is a region in the west of Saudi Arabia. It includes the cities of Mecca, Medina, Jeddah, Tabuk, Yanbu, Taif, and Baljurashi. It is also known as the "Western Provi ...
, Western Arabia, but from the 2nd/3rd century AH in
Abbasid The Abbasid Caliphate ( or ; ar, الْخِلَافَةُ الْعَبَّاسِيَّة, ') was the third caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It was founded by a dynasty descended from Muhammad's uncle, Abbas ibn Abdul-Muttalib ...
Iraq.


Life

Wansbrough was born in Peoria, Illinois. He completed his studies at
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, and spent the rest of his academic career at SOAS. He died at
Montaigu-de-Quercy Montaigu-de-Quercy (; oc, Montagut de Carcin) is a Commune of France, commune in the Tarn-et-Garonne Departments of France, department in the Occitania (administrative region), Occitanie Regions of France, region in southern France. Bournac Fo ...
,
France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...
. Among his students were Andrew Rippin,
Norman Calder Norman Calder (1950-1998) was a British historian. Life Norman Calder was born in Buckie, Moray, Scotland, United Kingdom. In 1969 Calder went to Wadham College, Oxford, and received a first in Arabic and Persian language in 1972. Then he went t ...
,
Gerald R. Hawting Gerald R. Hawting (born 1944) is a British historian and Islamicist. Life Hawting's teachers were Bernard Lewis and John Wansbrough. He received his Ph.D. in 1978. He is Emeritus Professor for the History of the Near and Middle East at the Sc ...
,
Patricia Crone Patricia Crone (March 28, 1945July 11, 2015) was a Danish historian specializing in early Islamic history. Crone was a member of the Revisionist school of Islamic studies and questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginni ...
and Michael Cook.


Research and thesis

Wansbrough work stresses two points—that Muslim literature is late, dating more than a century and a half after the death of Muhammad, and that Islam is a complex phenomenon which must have taken many generations to fully develop. Hawting, "John Wansbrough, Islam, and Monotheism", 2000: p.516 When Wansbrough began studying early Islamic manuscripts and the Quran, he realized that the early Islamic texts addressed an audience which was familiar with Jewish and Christian texts, and that Jewish and Christian theological problems were discussed. Criticism of "infidels" in this literature he reasoned was addressed not to idolaters and pagans, but to monotheists who did not live monotheism "purely". Those observations did not fit to the Islamic narratives on Islam's beginnings, which depicted Islam as coming into being within a polytheistic society. Wansbrough also found that early Muslim legal arguments did not refer to the Quran, along with other indication that there was not "a stable scriptural text" in Rashidun and
Umayyad The Umayyad Caliphate (661–750 CE; , ; ar, ٱلْخِلَافَة ٱلْأُمَوِيَّة, al-Khilāfah al-ʾUmawīyah) was the second of the four major caliphates established after the death of Muhammad. The caliphate was ruled by the ...
eras, suggesting the Quran as a source of law had been backdated. Wansbrough, 'Quranic Studies'', 1978: p.2226 Wansbrough analyzed the classical Islamic narratives which had been written 150 to 200 years after the Islamic prophet
Muhammad Muhammad ( ar, مُحَمَّد;  570 – 8 June 632 Common Era, CE) was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Muhammad in Islam, Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet Divine inspiration, di ...
died with the
historical-critical method Historical criticism, also known as the historical-critical method or higher criticism, is a branch of criticism that investigates the origins of ancient texts in order to understand "the world behind the text". While often discussed in terms of ...
, especially literary criticism. Thus, he claimed countless proofs that the texts are not historical accounts but later literary constructions in the sense of the concept of a "salvation history" (''Heilsgeschichte'') of the Old Testament, whose actual historical core is meager and cannot be detected. On that basis, Wansbrough developed the theory parts of which he qualified as "conjectural "provisional" and "tentative and emphatically provisional",Wansbrough, J., ''The Sectarian Milieu'', 1978, p.x as it implied (in the words of historian Herbert Berg) that "neither the Quran nor Islam is a product of
Muhammad Muhammad ( ar, مُحَمَّد;  570 – 8 June 632 Common Era, CE) was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Muhammad in Islam, Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet Divine inspiration, di ...
or even Arabia", nor were the original Arab conquerors of the
Umayyad empire The Umayyad Caliphate (661–750 CE; , ; ar, ٱلْخِلَافَة ٱلْأُمَوِيَّة, al-Khilāfah al-ʾUmawīyah) was the second of the four major caliphates established after the death of Muhammad. The caliphate was ruled by the ...
actual Muslims. Berg , "Methods and Theories of John Wansbrough", 2000: p.495 He postulated that Islam did not come into being as a new religion on its own but derived from conflicts of various
Jewish-Christian Jewish Christians ( he, יהודים נוצרים, yehudim notzrim) were the followers of a Jewish religious sect that emerged in Judea during the late Second Temple period (first century AD). The Nazarene Jews integrated the belief of Jesus ...
sects and from the need for a (fixed) sacred scripture upon which to base the Abbasid code of law: "The employment of scriptural ''Shawahid'' in halakhic controversy required a fixed and unambiguous text of revelation ... the result was the Quranic canon.Wansbrough, John, ''Quranic Studies, Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation'', Oxford University Press, 1977 (2nd Ed: Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2004) 208 Reynolds, "Quranic studies and its controversies", 2008: p.14 The Quran was written and collected in a long process over 200 years and thus cannot be attributed to Muhammad, being more recent than traditional accounts date it. The person of Muhammad would be a later invention, or at least, Muhammad cannot be related to the Quran. In later times, Muhammad had only the function to provide an own identity to the new religious movement according to the role model of a Prophet of the Old Testament.Andrew Rippin (ed.)
The Blackwell Companion to the Qur'an
2006; pp. 199 f.
Thus, Wansbrough argued that the Quran "became a source for biography, exegesis, jurisprudence and grammar".Wansbrough, John, ''Quranic Studies, Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation'', Oxford University Press, 1977 (2nd Ed: Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2004) 202 Reynolds, "Quranic studies and its controversies", 2008: p.11 around the 2nd/3rd century AH in
Abbasid The Abbasid Caliphate ( or ; ar, الْخِلَافَةُ الْعَبَّاسِيَّة, ') was the third caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It was founded by a dynasty descended from Muhammad's uncle, Abbas ibn Abdul-Muttalib ...
Iraq (not the 1st-century
Hijaz The Hejaz (, also ; ar, ٱلْحِجَاز, al-Ḥijāz, lit=the Barrier, ) is a region in the west of Saudi Arabia. It includes the cities of Mecca, Medina, Jeddah, Tabuk, Yanbu, Taif, and Baljurashi. It is also known as the "Western Provi ...
, Western Arabia) as traditionally dated and located. Specifically Wansbrough thinks it must have been completed by Ibn Hisham around the time he composed his ''
Sīra Al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya (), commonly shortened to Sīrah and translated as prophetic biography, are the traditional Muslim biographies of Muhammad from which, in addition to the Quran and Hadiths, most historical information about his life and the ...
'' of Muhammad because of the "preponderance of Quran-based (historicized) narratives therein". Wansbrough thought evidence for the "seventh-century
Hijaz The Hejaz (, also ; ar, ٱلْحِجَاز, al-Ḥijāz, lit=the Barrier, ) is a region in the west of Saudi Arabia. It includes the cities of Mecca, Medina, Jeddah, Tabuk, Yanbu, Taif, and Baljurashi. It is also known as the "Western Provi ...
" as the location of the Islam's origins was " reft of archaeological witness and hardly attested in pre-Islamic Arabic or external sources", but instead owed "its historiographical existence almost entirely to the creative endeavour of Muslim and Orientalist scholarhship".Wansbourgh, John, ''Res Ipsa Loquitur: History and Mimesis'', Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1987, p.9; quoted in "The Implications of and Opposition to, the Methods and Theories of John Wansbrough, by Berg, Herbert in ''The Quest of the Historical Muhammad'', p.491 Wansbrough argued that variants of Quranic text are so minor that they are not "recollections of ancient texts that differed from the Uthmanic text" but the outcome of exegesis.Wansbrough, John, ''Quranic Studies, Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation'', Oxford University Press, 1977 (2nd Ed: Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2004) 44 Reynolds, "Quranic studies and its controversies", 2008: p.12 "Variants" in the form of multiple versions of the same story within the text of the Quran "are present in such quantity" that they rule out the theory of an "Urtext" (original text) or "even that of a composite edition produced by deliberations in committee". And also that classical Arabic was developed later than the colloquial forms, "contemporaneously with the codification of the Quran." Reynolds, "Quranic studies and its controversies", 2008: p.13


Reception and critique

Wansbrough's theories have neither been "widely accepted" nor rejected, according to
Gabriel Said Reynolds Gabriel Said Reynolds is an American academic and historian of religion, who serves as Jerome J. Crowley and Rosaleen G. Crowley Professor of Theology and Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology at the University of Notre Dame. His sc ...
. By his fundamental criticism of the historical credibility of the classical Islamic narratives concerning Islam's beginnings and his attempt to develop an alternative, historically more credible version of Islam's beginnings, Wansbrough founded the so-called "revisionist" school of Islamic Studies. According to historian Andrew Rippin and religious scholar Herbert Berg Berg , "Methods and Theories of John Wansbrough", 2000: p.501-2 lack of interest by non-Muslim scholars in Wansbrough's ideas can be traced to the fact that Wansbrough strays from the path of least effort and resistance in scholarship by questioning the vast corpus of Islamic literature on the history of Islam, the Quran, and Muhammad; "destroying" what had been historical facts without replacing them with new ones; calling for using the techniques of Biblical criticism,Wansbourgh, John, ''Res Ipsa Loquitur: History and Mimesis'', Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1987, p.15; quoted in "The Implications of and Opposition to, the Methods and Theories of John Wansbrough, by Berg, Herbert in ''The Quest of the Historical Muhammad'', p.491 requiring competency in other languages than Arabic, familiarity with "religious frameworks" other than Islam, and locations other "than Arabia on the eve of Islam".Rippin, A., "Literary Analysis of Quran, Tafsir, and Sira: The Methodologies of John Wansbrough" In ''Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies'', edited by Richard C. Martin, p.159. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1985; quoted in Berg , "Methods and Theories of John Wansbrough", 2000: p.501-2 and treading on very sacred territory in Islam. Wansbrough's theory about the long process (over 200 years) of writing and collection of the Quran is today considered untenable by many because of the discoveries of
Early Quranic manuscripts In Muslim tradition the Quran is the final revelation from God, Islam's divine text, delivered to the Islamic prophet Muhammad through the angel Jibril (Gabriel). Muhammad's revelations were said to have been recorded orally and in writing, th ...
many of which were tested with radiocarbon analysis (around 2010-2014) and have been dated to the seventh century CE.


Selected Publications

* ''Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation'' (Oxford, 1977) * ''The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History'' (Oxford, 1978) * ''Res Ipsa Loquitur: History and Mimesis'' (1987) * ''Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean'' (Curzon Press, 1996; Reprint by World Scientific Publishing, 2012) This line of research was investigated in Egypt by
Nasr Abu Zayd Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd ( ar, نصر حامد أبو زيد, ; also Abu Zaid or Abu Zeid; July 10, 1943 – July 5, 2010) was an Egyptian Quranic thinker, author, academic and one of the leading liberal theologians in Islam. He is famous for his proj ...
but he left Egypt following death threats generated by his conclusions about the Qur'an.


Influence

Students and scholars who also doubt the traditional view of the genesis of the Quran include: * Michael Cook *
Patricia Crone Patricia Crone (March 28, 1945July 11, 2015) was a Danish historian specializing in early Islamic history. Crone was a member of the Revisionist school of Islamic studies and questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginni ...
*
Martin Hinds Martin Hinds (10 April 1941 in Penarth, Wales – 1 December 1988) was a British scholar of the Middle East and historiographer of early Islamic history. Life Dr. Hind's interest in Islamic culture began as early as the year 1960 when he was a ...
*
Gerald Hawting Gerald R. Hawting (born 1944) is a British historian and Islamicist. Life Hawting's teachers were Bernard Lewis and John Wansbrough. He received his Ph.D. in 1978. He is Emeritus Professor for the History of the Near and Middle East at the Sc ...
*
Christoph Luxenberg ''The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran'' is an English-language edition (2007) of ''Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache'' (2000) b ...
*
Gerd R. Puin Gerd Rüdiger Puin (born 1940) is a German scholar of Oriental studies, specializing in Quranic palaeography, Arabic calligraphy and orthography. He was a lecturer of Arabic language and literature at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, German ...
* Andrew Rippin Others who are said to have been influenced by his work include Yehuda D. Nevo, Calder, Joseph van Ess, Christopher Buck, and Claude Gilliot. Ibn Warraq, "Studies on Muhammad and the Rise of Islam", 2000: p.69


References


Citation


Bibliography

* * *
* Carlos A. Segovia and Basil Lourié, eds. ''The Coming of the Comforter: When, Where, and to Whom? Studies on the Rise of Islam and Other Various Topics in Memory of John Wansbrough''. Orientalia Judaica Christiana 3. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2012. . * *


External links

* at
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John Wansborough remembered
''The Religion Report'',
Radio National Radio National, known on-air as RN, is an Australia-wide public service broadcasting radio network run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). From 1947 until 1985, the network was known as ABC Radio 2. History 1937: Predecessors a ...
(Australia), 26 June 2002.
John Wansbrough. Foreword, Translations, and Expanded Notes by Andrew Rippin
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wansbrough, John 1928 births 2002 deaths Academics of SOAS University of London 20th-century American historians American male non-fiction writers Harvard University alumni History of Quran scholars American orientalists 20th-century American male writers