The Origins of The Koran: Classic Essays on Islam’s Holy Book

The Origins of The Koran: Classic Essays on Islam’s Holy Book, is a 1998 book edited by Ibn Warraq. It contains a collection of 13 critical studies of the Qur'an written over the past two centuries by historians and scholars of the Middle East: Ibn Warraq, Theodor Nöldeke, Leone Caetani, Alphonse Mingana, Arthur Jeffery, David Samuel Margoliouth, Abraham Geiger, William St. Clair Tisdall, Charles Cutler Torrey and Andrew Rippin.

The book examines widely held beliefs about the historical origins and sources of the Islamic holy book. It challenges the notion that the Qur'an is error free, a view held by Muslims. Divided into four parts, the book presents an examination of the Qur'an. After an introduction in Part One, Part Two focuses on the difficulty of establishing a reliable Qur'anic text, while Part Three claims to detail the Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian sources of the Qur'an. Part Four attempts to disprove the historical reliability of the earliest Islamic sources.

Herbert Berg in his review from the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies summarized the essays lauding the inclusion of the essay by Theodor Nöldeke while panning the inclusion of William St. Clair Tisdall's as "not a particularly scholarly essay". He concluded "[i]t seems that Ibn Warraq has included some of the essays not on the basis of their scholarly value or their status as 'classics', but rather on the basis of their hostility to Islam. This does not necessarily diminish the value of the collection, but the reader should be aware that this collection does not fully represent classic scholarship on the Quran."

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