John Wansbrough | |
|---|---|
| Born | John Edward Wansbrough (1928-02-19)February 19, 1928 Peoria, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | June 10, 2002(2002-06-10) (aged 74) Montaigu-de-Quercy, France |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Occupation | Historian |
John Edward Wansbrough (February 19, 1928 – June 10, 2002)[1] was an Americanhistorian of Islamic origins andQuranic studies and professor who taught at theUniversity of London'sSchool of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he was vice chancellor from 1985 to 1992.[2]
Wansbrough is credited with founding therevisionist school of Islamic studies through hisfundamental criticism of thehistorical credibility of the Quran and otherearly Islamic texts, especially regarding the classical Islamic narratives concerning theearly history of Islam and his attempt to develop an alternative, historically more credible version of Islam's beginnings. He argued in general for amethodologicalskepticism of the authorship of early Islamic sources, and most famously that theQuran was written and collected over a 200-year period, and should be dated not from the 1st-century AHHijaz of Western Arabia, but from the 2nd/3rd century AH inAbbasid Iraq.[3]
Wansbrough was born inPeoria, Illinois. He completed his studies atHarvard University, and spent the rest of his academic career at SOAS. He died atMontaigu-de-Quercy,France. Among his students wereAndrew Rippin,Norman Calder,Gerald R. Hawting,Patricia Crone andMichael Cook.
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.[4]
When Wansbrough began studying early Islamic manuscripts and the Quran, he realized that the early Islamic texts addressed an audience which was familiar withJewish andChristian texts, and that Jewish and Christiantheological problems were discussed. Criticism of "infidels" in this literature he reasoned was addressed not toidolaters andpagans, but tomonotheists who did not live monotheism "purely".[citation needed]Those observations did not fit to the Islamic narratives on Islam's beginnings, which depicted Islam as coming into being within apolytheistic 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" inRashidun andUmayyad eras, suggesting the Quran as a source of law had been backdated.[5]
Wansbrough analyzed the classical Islamic narratives which had been written 150 to 200 years after the Islamic prophetMuhammad died with thehistorical-critical method, especiallyliterary 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.[6]
On that basis, Wansbrough developed the theory parts of which he qualified as "conjectural[7][8] "provisional"[9] and "tentative and emphatically provisional",[10] as it implied (in the words of historianHerbert Berg) that "neither the Quran nor Islam is a product ofMuhammad or even Arabia", nor were the original Arab conquerors of theUmayyad empire actual Muslims.[11] He postulated that Islam did not come into being as a new religion on its own but derived from conflicts of variousJewish-Christiansects[12] and from the need for a (fixed)sacredscripture upon which to base theAbbasid code of law: "The employment of scripturalShawahid inhalakhiccontroversy required a fixed and unambiguous text of revelation ... the result was the Quranic canon.[13][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 therole model of aProphet of theOld Testament.[12]
Thus, Wansbrough argued that the Quran "became a source for biography,exegesis, jurisprudence and grammar"[3][15] around the 2nd/3rd century AH inAbbasid Iraq (not the 1st-centuryHijaz, Western Arabia, as traditionally dated and located). Specifically Wansbrough thinks it must have been completed byIbn Hisham around the time he composed hisSīra of Muhammad because of the "preponderance of Quran-based (historicised)narratives therein".[14] Wansbrough thought evidence for the "seventh-centuryHijaz" as the location of the Islam's origins was "[b]ereft ofarchaeological witness and hardly attested in pre-Islamic Arabic or external sources", but instead owed "itshistoriographical existence almost entirely to the creative endeavour of Muslim and Orientalist scholarhship".[16]
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.[17][18] "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".[19][20]And also that classical Arabic was developed later than the colloquial forms, "contemporaneously with the codification of the Quran."[21]
Wansbrough's theories have neither been "widely accepted" nor rejected, according toGabriel Said Reynolds.[21]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 historianAndrew Rippin and religious scholarHerbert Berg[22] 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 ofBiblical criticism,[23] requiring competency in other languages than Arabic, familiarity with "religious frameworks" other than Islam, and locations other "than Arabia on the eve of Islam"[24] and treading on very sacred territory in Islam.[22]
Wansbrough's theory about the long process (over 200 years) of writing and collection of the Quran is today considered untenable by many[25] because of the discoveries ofEarly Quranic manuscripts[26] many of which were tested withradiocarbon analysis (around 2010-2014) and have been dated to the seventh century CE.
Students and scholars who also doubt the traditional view of the genesis of the Quran include:
Others who are said to have been influenced by his work includeYehuda D. Nevo, Norman Calder, Joseph van Ess, Christopher Buck, and Claude Gilliot.[27]
His line of research was investigated in Egypt byNasr Abu Zayd, but he left Egypt following death threats generated by his conclusions about the Qur'an.
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