advanced mainly the following assumptions:

(a) That different parts of the Qur’ân originated in different communities located not in Arabia but in Iraq and Syria and that these evolved only gradually from originally independent prophetical traditions ("prophetical logia") during a long period of oral transmission, assuming their final and "canonical" form in the late second/eighth century.

(b) That this development took place in a "sectarian milieu" in which Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and the Believers hurled ideas and claims against one another until these groups had clearly delineated their confessional, theological and ritual boundaries.

(c) That this "canonization" of the Qur’ânic text was linked with the rise of Classical Arabic and its grammar and the appearance of the Qur’ânic commentaries.

(d) That the Islamic tradition is an example of what is known to biblical scholars as "salvation history": "a theologically and evangelically motivated story of a religion’s origins invented late in the day and projected back in time," the whole process being similar to that of the canonization of the Hebrew scripture. Taking Schacht as his authority, Wansborough further states that the Qur’ân did not serve as a basis for Muslim law before the ninth century.

Concurrent with the appearance of Wansborough’s works, there appeared another highly controversial work prepared along similar lines by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook under the title Hagarism: The making of the Islamic World (1977). Crone and Cook admit that they did not say much about the Qur’ân in their book that was not based on Wansborough. The latter’s conclusions, however, immediately elicited sharp criticism even by a number of orientalists, some of whom describe his work as "drastically wrongheaded", "ferociously opaque" and a "colossal self-deception". In fact it is simply a high-sounding nonsense; and the whole manoeuvre is indeed a plunge into self-deception. "His awkward prose-style, diffuse organization" and "confused presentation", observes one critic, "makes grasping his basic points all the more difficult." (1) Wansborough relies on a series of assumptions and suggestions rather than on straight arguments; and these can be refuted