The Qur'an

Notwithstanding A. J. Droge’s disclaimer that he is not ‘taking sides’ (p. xxxii) with the two leading Orientalists of our time, John Wansbrough and John Burton, his work on the Qur’an is vitiated by almost all the errors of the perspective spawned by his predecessor and contemporary Orientalists. For, on reading his work one is left with only such negative impressions about the Qur’an: it is a problematic text, teeming with lacunae, obscurity, and uncertainty of meaning, and marred by ‘later additions, glosses, and insertions’; ‘misplaced’ and ‘out of place’ clauses and parts, ‘revision’, ‘omission’, and mixed up ‘variant recessions’. Worse, his work parades some downright bizarre and even wildly contradictory conjectures about the revelation of the Qur’an: