only motive." (1)

It is of course a fact that some later Muslim writers state that the Qur’ân could not have been compiled during the Prophet’s lifetime because naskh could take place at any time during his life. But it is to be noted that this statement is neither the Prophet’s nor that of his Companions. It is merely the opinion of such writers who intend to justify the fact of the compilation of the Qur’ân after the Prophet’s death, not to suppress the fact of his having compiled the Qur’ân nor to sustain the theory of naskh. It is further to be noted that whatever the implication of the concept of naskh, it has its root in the Qur’ân itself. (2) It thus really betrays a lack of knowledge of the Qur’ân to make such a bold and unfounded assertion that the theory of naskh was forged by later Muslim jurists.

III. The Latest Period: Plunge Into Self-deception

(a) The Revisionists’ fallacies

The very year in which Burton was thus suggesting that it was the Prophet himself, and not his Companions, who compiled the Qur’ân, there appeared a work by another orientalist which, working on the same Goldziher-Schacht assumptions about hadîth literature, went to the other extreme of suggesting that it was neither the Prophet nor his Companions who compiled the Qur’ân but that it came into being much later than the coming into being of Islam and the Muslims, i. e., in the second century of Islam. This was J. Wansborough’s Qur’ânic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977). (3) He followed it up by another work, published the following year, entitled The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (1978). These publications may be said to have ushered in the latest period of orientalist study of the Qur’ân.

Wansborough represented a new generation of orientalists who set out to cast doubt on the whole course of Islamic history and are hence known as the "revisionists". By employing what is called the "instruments and techniques" of biblical criticism such as "form criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism" etc., Wansborough