The misunderstandings and prejudices produced by the previous orientalist writings continued, however, to influence European concept about the Qur’ân and Islam. In fact the new trend in the Qur’ânic studies attempted only to justify and perpetuate the old misconceptions. A characteristic instance of the continuance of such prejudices is provided by Thomas Carlyle who, while advocating in 1841 the "sincerity" of the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم) gave vent to the age-old bias against the Qur’ân saying that "it is a wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; insupportable stupidity, in short." (1) Two years afterwards, in 1843, was published E. W. Lane’s Selections from the Qur’ân with an Interwoven Commentary. (2) It was not quite a departure from the previous pattern of issuing translations with "refutations" and notes. Before the close of the first half of the nineteenth century, however, the printing of the Qur’ân was well under way. In 1831 it was printed in Calcutta (Kolkata), Bengal, with the help of a new kind of types which became very popular in the south Asian subcontinent. Three years subsequently, in 1834, Gustav Fluegel had the Qur’ân printed in Europe which came to be used by the orientalists and other researchers.

(b) The pattern set by Sprenger-Muir-N?ldeke

Early in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, more serious studies about the Qur’ân started appearing. The lead was given by the German scholar Aloys Sprenger who was appointed principal of the Calcutta Madrasa in 1850 by the English East India Company’s administration in Bengal to de-Islamize the courses of studies in that institution. In the course of his work he came in contact with a number of classical Arabic works including Al-Suyûtî’s al-Itqân fî ‘ulûm al-Qur’ân. This work contains a chapter on the naturalized Arabic words in the Qur’ân, (3) which is a summary