and that nonetheless the Qur’ân is not complete. He also spoke about the literary style of the Qur’ân and of the "foreign" words in it, reiterating Sprenger’s view that the Prophet made a show of his knowledge of these words.

These views of N?ldeke are faulty in many respects. Specially he is wrong in supposing that Zayd ibn Thâbit collected the many disjointed passages into sûrahs or "edited/redacted" them and that the Qur’ân is nonetheless incomplete. The chronological order given by him to the passages and sûrahs is not agreed to by the other orientalists themselves. Even his contemporary Muir gives a different order for the sûrahs. All these are essentially guess-work and suppositions. (1)

(c) Extensions of N?ldeke’s assumptions

Nevertheless, the fashion thus set for determining the chronology of the sûrahs and passages of the Qur’ân, led the Rev. J. M. Rodwell to publish in 1861 his The Koran: Translated from the Arabic, the sûrahs arranged in Chronological Order, with Notes and Index. In a rather lengthy preface Rodwell discusses the rise of Islam and of the Qur’ân and refers his readers to the works of Sprenger and Muir, and also reproduces their views about the Qur’ânic wahy and their theory of the Qur’ân and Islam being an amalgam of bits from Judaism and Christianity. (2) The Prophet of Islam produced a doctrine, Rodwell wrote, which is "Judaism divested of its Mosaic ceremonial, and Christianity divested of its Atonement and the Trinity." In a footnote to this statement he advised his fellow-Christian missionaries saying: "A line of argument to be adopted by a Christian Missionary in dealing with a Mohammedan should be, not to attack Islam as a mass of error, but to show that it contains fragments of disjointed truth ــ that it is based upon Christianity and Judaism partially understood ــ especially the latter, without any appreciation of its typical character, pointing to Christianity as a final