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John Edward Wansbrough (February 19, 1928 – June 10, 2002) was an American historian of Islamic origins and Quranic studies and professor who taught at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he was vice chancellor from 1985 to 1992.Arnold David (ed.), SOAS since the sixties 2006; p.56
Wansbrough is credited with founding the revisionist school of Islamic studies through his fundamental criticism of the historical credibility of the Quran and other early Islamic texts, especially regarding the classical Islamic narratives concerning the early history of Islam and his attempt to develop an alternative, historically more credible version of Islam's beginnings. He argued in general for a methodological skepticism of the authorship of early Islamic sources, and most famously that the Quran was written and collected over a 200-year period, and should be dated not from the 1st-century AH Hijaz of Western Arabia, but from the 2nd/3rd century AH in Abbasid Iraq.
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 "" in this literature he reasoned was addressed not to idolatry and , 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 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 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 died with the historical-critical method, 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.Harald Motzki et al., Analysing Muslim Traditions, 2010; p. 285 ff.
On that basis, Wansbrough developed the theory parts of which he qualified as "conjecturalWansbrough, J., Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation, 1977, p.ixWansbrough, J., Quranic Studies, 1977, p.xi "provisional"Wansbrough, J., Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation, 1977, p.ix 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 or even Arabia", nor were the original Arab conquerors of the Umayyad empire 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 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) 208Reynolds, "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) 202Reynolds, "Quranic studies and its controversies", 2008: p.11 around the 2nd/3rd century AH in Abbasid Iraq (not the 1st-century Hijaz, 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 of Muhammad because of the "preponderance of Quran-based (historicised) therein". Wansbrough thought evidence for the "seventh-century Hijaz" as the location of the Islam's origins was "bereft 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) 44Reynolds, "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
Wansbrough's theory about the long process (over 200 years) of writing and collection of the Quran is today considered untenable by many
Others who are said to have been influenced by his work include Yehuda D. Nevo, Norman Calder, Joseph van Ess, Christopher Buck, and Claude Gilliot.Ibn Warraq, "Studies on Muhammad and the Rise of Islam", 2000: p.69
His line of research was investigated in Egypt by Nasr Abu Zayd, but he left Egypt following death threats generated by his conclusions about the Qur'an.
Reception and critique
Wansbrough's theories have neither been "widely accepted" nor rejected, according to Gabriel Said Reynolds.
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 BergBerg , "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.
(2025). 9781134109449, Routledge. ISBN 9781134109449 because of the discoveries of Early Quranic manuscripts many of which were tested with radiocarbon analysis (around 2010-2014) and have been dated to the seventh century CE.
Selected publications
Influence
Students and scholars who also doubt the traditional view of the genesis of the Quran include:
Citation
Bibliography
External links
Categories: 1928 Births, 2002 Deaths, Academics Of Soas University Of London, 20th-century American Historians, American Male Non-fiction Writers, Harvard University Alumni, American Orientalists, 20th-century American Male Writers, Quranic Studies Academics, American Islamic Studies Scholars, People From Peoria, Illinois, Revisionist School Of Islamic Studies
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