captions "Mohammed’s call" and "Mohammed’s visions". (1) These were followed by two more articles published in the Transactions of the Glasgow University Oriental Society for 1949 and 1951. The two articles were captioned respectively, "The Beginning of Muhammad’s Religious Activity" and "The Style of the Qur’ân". (2) In the meantime R. Blachère published in 1947 his Introduction au Coran. (3) Blachère generally reflects the pattern of orientalist thinking of the time regarding the Qur’ân and does not break much new ground. Almost in imitation of this latter work, however, Bell prepared his Introduction to the Qur’ân which was published from Edinburgh in 1953. (4) In it he consolidated his views and dealt mainly with three themes, namely, the dating and characterization of the Qur’ânic passages, the nature of Qur’ânic wahy and the theory of "revision".

Building upon the suggestion of N?ldeke and working on two basic but erroneous assumptions that (a) the normal unit of revelation was a short passage and (b) that the Prophet "revised" the texts before combining them into sûrahs, Bell classifies the Qur’ânic passages into various types, calling them the "sign" type, the "slogan" type, the "soothsayer" type, etc. He also assigns as many as ten different dates to the passages, such as "very early", "early Meccan", "Meccan", "late Meccan", "connected with Badr", "connected with Uhud", etc. Needless to point out that his dating is as conjectural and untenable as that of N?ldeke’s and is similarly not accepted by all orientalists.

As regards Qur’ânic wahy, Bell stresses six assumptions, namely, (a) that the tradition regarding the coming of wahy are inventions of a later age and are founded upon the Qur’ânic passage 53:1 - 8; (b) that before he "encountered" the "visions" in the above mentioned passage the Prophet had been "speaking" in some manner but had not started delivering the Qur’ân; (c) that the term wahy does not mean verbal communication of the text of