views as contained in his Mohammed and the Rise of Islam, dealing particularly with what he thought to be the "sources" of the Qur’ân, the theory of revelation, and chronology and arrangement of the text; and the latter, Mingana, focused his main attention on what he called "editions and various readings". (1) A few years subsequently, Mingana authored another work entitled Syriac Influence on the Style of the Koran which was published by the Manchester University Press in 1927.

It was soon realized that a study of the "readings" as noted by the Muslim scholars involved also a study of Qur’ânic vocabulary. Once again, therefore, the orientalists found themselves drawn into a consideration of what seemed to them unusual and "foreign" words in the Qur’ân. The result was the appearance in 1926 of the then Frankfort University Professor Joseph Horovitz’s (1874 - 1931) Koranische Untersuchungen (Qur’ânic Researches). In it he attempted a detailed analysis of the Qur’ânic language, using pre-Islamic poetry to understand the words and expressions in the Qur’ân. The work was bedevilled, however, by much exaggeration and errors so much so that it did not receive the approval even of the orientalists themselves. The same urge led Arthur Jeffery to write a thesis on "The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’ân" which he completed in the same year (1926). (2) Almost simultaneously he began the work of identifying and collecting the "variant readings" of the Qur’ân. At the same time, the Munich university Professor G. Bergstr?sser was working on a similar project and the first fascicule of his Geschichte des Qorantexts was published in that very year (1926). The publication of this work led Jeffery to meet Bergstr?sser at Munich and they "agreed to collaborate on a much bigger plan", as Jeffery writes, "of assembling all the material that would assist in some day making it possible to elucidate the history of the text." Jeffery was to go on with his task of collecting the variants and preparing an edition of the text, while Bergstr?sser was to commence gathering material for an archive of photographs of all the oldest Kufic manuscripts of the Koran, a collation of which he hoped would "throw much light on