The twentieth century started with a further extension of the Muir-N?ldeke approach of tracing the origins of the Qur’ân. Thus in 1901 the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London published the Church Missionary Society’s the Rev. W. St. Clair Tisdall’s The Sources of Islam. William Muir himself wrote a "Foreword" for it exultantly remarking: "Now if it can be shown that much of this grand book [Qur’ân] can be traced to human sources existing daily around the Prophet, then Islam falls to the ground. And this is what the author proves with marvellous power and erudition." Muir also suggested that the book "should be translated into Arabic, Urdu and other languages of the East, and so made accessible to Muslim readers everywhere." (1) Tisdall had been engaged in missionary activities in Persia and he had written the original of his work in Persian. The book is divided into six chapters in which he discusses, respectively, what he supposes to be (i) the Muslim view of the sources of Islam, (ii) the borrowings from the doctrines and practices of the Arabs of the "days of ignorance", (iii) the borrowings from the doctrines and histories of the Jews and the Sabaeans, (iv) the borrowings from the "tales of the heretical Christian sects", (v) the borrowings from the Zoroastrian and Hindu beliefs and (vi) the influence of the hanîfs. Needless to say, this work of Tisdall is beset with much prejudice, misconception and misunderstanding of the Qur’ân. The height of prejudice is the attempt to relate the Qur’ânic teachings to the doctrines of Hinduism and polytheism which the Qur’ân relentlessly denounces. It is strange that this Christian missionary turns a blind eye to the striking similarity between the Christian doctrines of incarnation of God and the Trinity on the one hand, and the Hindu doctrine of incarnation of God and the concept of Tri-Deva, a sort of trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, on the other. Tisdall’s book was reissued with modifications in 1905 under the title The Original Sources of the Qur’ân.