by general arguments.

Despite the obvious absurdity of Wansborough’s views, others were affected by his fallacies. Notable among them are J. Koren and Yahuda d. Nevo. They undertook to supplement Wansborough’s theories by archaeological evidence and thus to dismantle the sources of Islamic history. In a joint article they postulated that it is "necessary to corroborate a view derived solely from the Muslim literary account" by the "hard facts" of material remains; "and where the two conflict the latter should be preferred"; and that if there is no evidence for an event outside the "traditional account", this should be taken as a "positive evidence in support of the hypothesis that it did not happen." (1) They further state that excavations carried out in the Central Negev have revealed some thirty pagan sites which correlate with the description of the Jâhilî pagan sanctuaries in the Muslim literary sources. From this they conclude that the accounts of the Jâhilî pagan religion in the Hijaz could well be back-projections of a paganism actually known from later and elsewhere. Elaborating these views in another article, Nevo states that the study of a number of early Arabic inscriptions from the Negev and elsewhere suggest the existence of a generic monotheism as well as a Judaeo-Christian environment in the Negev. "From the fact that the Qur’ân contains many phrases present in the Muslim inscriptions of the second century A. H. and later", concludes Nevo, "it was canonized quite late, i. e., after these phrases had entered the religious vocabulary." (2)

Clearly this Koren-Nevo theory is a reiteration in a different form of the Goldziher-Schacht-Wansborough view about the sources of Islamic history with the exception that, while Wansborough guards his assumption by the safety phrases that it is "tentative and emphatically provisional", Koren and Nevo take it as an established fact. And just as the extreme views of Goldziher, Schacht and Wansborough elicited sharp criticisms from members of their own rank, so have the views of Koren and Nevo come under attack by the more reasonable of the orientalists. Thus, for instance, Stella Whellan squarely joined issue with them in an article under the title "Forgotten Witness: Evidence for the Early