& FREE Returns

FREE delivery: July 23 - 27 Details

Fastest delivery: July 21 - 26

Available to ship in 1-2 days.

$$36.99 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from	Amazon.com
Sold by	Amazon.com

Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Return policy: This item is returnable

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

$3.99 delivery: July 21 - 27

Used: Acceptable | Details

Sold by Goodwill Retail Services, Inc.

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 2 images

Follow the Author

Ibn Warraq

The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book Hardcover – September 1, 1998

by Ibn Warraq (Author)

21 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$36.99

$33.98

$30.00

Hardcover
$36.99

10 Used from $30.00 2 New from $33.98

This volume rejects the notion that Islam's sacred text is error free and cannot be critically evaluated. The study of the Koran must develop and mature. Scholars of Islam are of course familiar with the book's many errors and contradictions, but these inherent flaws have rarely been revealed to a wider public. This book is an attempt to remedy this deficiency by bringing together classic critical essays which raise key issues surrounding Islam's holy book. Divided into four parts, this important anthology begins with Theodor Nöldeke's first truly scientific study of the Koran. Part Two focuses on the difficulty of establishing a reliable Koranic text, while Part Three examines the Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian sources of Muhammad's "revelation." Part Four is a consideration of the controversial interpretations of contemporary scholar John Wansbrough, who questions the historical reliability of the earliest Islamic sources. This superb collection, which includes additional selections from Leone Caetani, Arthur Jeffery, David Margoliouth, Andrew Rippin, C.C. Torrey, and more, will prove indispensable to scholars and all those interested in the textual underpinning of one of the fastest growing religions in the world.

Print length

411 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Prometheus
Publication date

September 1, 1998
Dimensions

5.6 x 1 x 8.4 inches
ISBN-10

157392198X
ISBN-13

978-1573921985
See all details

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Unknown
57
Hardcover
9 offers from $43.39
Ibn Warraq
34
Hardcover
18 offers from $62.46
Karl-Heinz Phlig
56
Hardcover
9 offers from $148.93
Ibn Warraq
12
Hardcover
6 offers from $19.51
Ibn Warraq
336
Hardcover
43 offers from $2.13
Ibn Warraq
3
Paperback
7 offers from $18.50

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Ibn Warraq
34
Hardcover
18 offers from $62.46
Ibn Warraq
3
Paperback
7 offers from $18.50
Robert Spencer
Hardcover
in History of Islam
15 offers from $20.39
Karl-Heinz Ohlig
18
Hardcover
7 offers from $34.19
Christoph Luxenberg
44
Hardcover
17 offers from $40.67
Gabriel Said Reynolds
35
Paperback
40 offers from $12.17

Get everything you need

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Tom Holland
690
Paperback
63 offers from $9.25
Edward L. Smither
17
Hardcover
23 offers from $21.21
Gabriel Said Reynolds
35
Paperback
40 offers from $12.17
Michael A. G. Haykin
39
Paperback
65 offers from $1.69

Special offers and product promotions

Amazon Business: Make the most of your Amazon Business account with exclusive tools and savings. Login now

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Recommended to college libraries..." -- Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 35, 2001

About the Author

Ibn Warraq is the highly acclaimed author of Why I Am Not a Muslim, Virgins? What Virgins?, and Defending the West. He is also the editor of The Origins of the Koran, What the Koran Really Says, Leaving Islam, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, and Which Koran?.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Prometheus; FIRST EDITION, 2nd Printing (September 1, 1998)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 411 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 157392198X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1573921985
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.22 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.6 x 1 x 8.4 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,108,874 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #548 in Women in Islam (Books)
- #1,127 in Quran
- #17,863 in Christian Church & Bible History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
21 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		67%
4 star		16%
3 star 0% (0%)		0%
2 star		8%
1 star		8%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Jude

I found the book to be very interesting.

Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2018

Verified Purchase

It is part of my personal library.

Helpful

cagdas

A very informative book

Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2012

Verified Purchase

This book is very unusual and awakening the moslem world but unfortunately that world will be defiant to the facts exposed!

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

ESSAYS AND A BOOK ON THE HISTORY/DEVELOPMENT OF THE KORAN

Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2019

Editor/translator Ibn Warraq (a pen name) wrote in the Introduction to this 1998 book, “For us in studying the Koran it is necessary to distinguish the historical from the theological attitude. Here we are only concerned with those truths that are yielded by a process of rational enquiry, by scientific examination… The questions any critical investigation of the Koran hopes to answer are: 1. How did the Koran come to us?... 2. When was it written, and who wrote it? 3. What are the sources of the Koran?... 4. What is the Koran?... I shall begin with the traditional account that is more or less accepted by most Western scholars, and then move on to the views of a small but very formidable, influential, and growing group of scholars inspired by the work of John Wansbrough.” (Pg. 9-10)

Alphonse Mingana wrote in his essay, ‘Three Ancient Korans,’ “The internal criticism of the Koran will easily shew this elementary evidence of a foreign source; but what we can by no means explain, are the wonderful anachronisms about the old Israelite history. The only possible way of accounting for these would be the distance which separated the moment of the inspiration of the verses from the moment when the Prophet received the oral communication. Who then will not be astonished to learn that in the Koran, Miriam, the sister of Aaron, is confounded with the Virgin Mary? … and that Haman is given as minister of Pharaoh, instead of Ahasuerus?... All these historical mistakes receive another and not less topical support from the utter confusion which is made between Gideon and Saul in Suratul-Ba1arah 2:250.” (Pg. 79)

Arthur Jeffrey wrote in ‘Materials for the History of the Text of the Koran,’ “a number of … Companions of the Prophet had made personal collections as private affairs. It was after the death of the Prophet that these collections became important… Orthodox theory, even to the present day, has insisted that the word ‘jama’a’ ‘to collect’ used in these traditions means nothing more than ‘to memorize’ and so does not imply that the collection was made in written form. As, however, ‘Ali brought along what he had collected…’ and as ‘Uthman, after sending out his official copies to the metropolitan cities, had to order all other copies to be burned,’ there cannot be the slightest doubt that there were written collections.” (Pg. 117) Later, he adds, “we have in our hands only a very small portion of the variants from these codices, and … what we have consists in the main only of such variants as were not too unorthodox…” (Pg. 125)

In ‘Textual Variations of the Koran,’ David Margoliouth observes, “The Koran… assumes that it is perpetuated partly in the memory and partly in writing; and asserts that Allah at times commits texts to oblivion or causes them to be erased, to substitute something better or not inferior. This process was regarded by some of the Prophet’s contemporaries as clear evidence of imposture… we may at least notice that… a text might be officially removed, yet survive, owing to those in possession of it being ignorant of the abrogation or neglecting it. Hence among the various readings which are quoted some may actually represent an earlier or a later form of the same revelation… The fact that the revelations might be abrogated is likely to have seriously affected the importance attached to the Koran in the Prophet’s time; he had the reputation of being at the mercy of each speaker.” (Pg. 155)

Later, he adds, “One who deciphered the Koran afresh in these days---i.e., based a new edition on an unpointed text---would be likely to adopt many uncanonical readings, and might even introduce some that were new… But in the endeavor to produce a Koran such as the Prophet might have approved he would be confronted with the difficulty which was too great for the original collectors---the theory of SUBSTITUTION, the limits of which he would be unable to fix. Where the same narrative is repeated, should one version only be retained? The exercise of this theory would reduce the Koran to a fraction of its present bulk; yet repetition of the narratives has no place in a single book, equally with or without discrepancies.” (Pg. 161)

The Foreword to W. St. Clair-Tisdall’s ‘The Sources of Islam’ explains, “Chapter IV … shows the apocryphal Christian sources from which Islam has so largely borrowed. There were many Christian tribes in Arabia belonging heretical sects who had sought refuge there from persecution in Roman lands. Little versed in their own Scriptures, they spend the time in imaginary and childish fables. The Prophet, longing for a universal faith, listened gladly to such stories, which thus became the source of much we find in the Koran.” (Pg. 228-229)

St. Clair-Tisdall himself wrote, “Such, then, are the tales regarding the Virgin Mary which we find in the Koran and ancient Muslim commentators. From whence did such strange fictions come? Clearly not from the true Gospel, but nearly all of them from the schismatic writings of ignorant men, spread abroad in ancient times amongst a people given to wild fictitious stories.” (Pg. 261)

Later, he adds, “we learn that Muhammad had among the companions a Persian called Salman, who at the siege of Medina advised him… Now it is said that some of the Prophet’s opponents spoke of this person as having assisted him in the composition of the Koran… we find that much of the Koran and tradition has the closest resemblance to the contents of the Zoroastrian books… [Muhammad] was assisted by the Persian Salman. Hence … it is clear that the Zoroastrian writings formed one of the sources of Islam.” (Pg. 286)

This book will be of great interest to those looking for “critical” perspectives on the Koran and its origin.

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Esoteric, and Limited in Audience

Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2000

While this volume was a collection of scholarly essays, most over seventy or eighty years old, some parts of the essays have a continued relevance in refuting fundamentalism, besides being a portrait of the state of textual criticism of the Qur'an in the earlier part of the 20th century. The essays taken as a whole provide sufficient evidence to doubt the orthodox account of the Qur'an's origins, even though each individual scholar's take on a sometimes murky subject is open to question. One self-evident shortcoming in the collection is a lack of modern essays (though I suppose the subtitle might have served as a disclaimer) to shed light on the current state of scholarship, but in the Introduction Ibn Warraq does make reference to some of the movers and shakers, so an interested reader can track down works by Cook and Crone, et al. (As I recall there was a Atlantic Monthly article which reported on developments, though I haven't had a chance or desire to seek out the seminal works for myself). But most of the material seems to be from the sources that Ibn Warraq drew upon in composing Why I am not a Muslim, a title echoing Bertrand Russell's enjoyable collection of essays in Why I am not a Christian. In terms of locating the source of some of the obscurer passages in the Qur'an in the Jewish midrash, Christian apocrypha, and even from Zoroastrianism, I found it useful, though not likely to appeal to a very wide audience. Distracting in the collection, however, is the numerous typographical errors that litter the pages, making me increasingly wary of the publisher Prometheus Books, though I have thought of approaching them with my book proposals due to the subject matter. I have further quarrels with the state of Ibn Warraq's Why I am not a Muslim, Fregosi's Jihad, and Taslima Nasreen's Shame- the urge to give air to a critique of Islam, just because it is a critique of Islam seems to have subverted quality control. But I got my vocab word of the day- Heilgeschichte- salvation history (or so I think, many of the German and French parts remaining untranslated)! So I suppose it wasn't a total loss, trudging through the sometimes onerous reconstructions of Qur'anic orthography and philology.

20 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kunjani

A scholarly work

Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2010

This is a thoroughly and well researched book, drawing on contributions by some of the world's leading scholars in the field of Koranic studies. It helps to answer many of the questions that linger around the origins, linguistic and literally style, and it's sources for the text of the Koran. It will appeal to open minded Muslims eager to understand more about the Koran and the role of Muhammad in its origins and history. I highly recommend it to everyone eager to know more about the Koran.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Michael Scott

great eye-opener

Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2006

Some of the reviews of this book from muslims are quite laughable. The reason you dont know much about Ibn Warraq is that it is not his real name - if he reveiled his true identity he would more than likely be killed by some nutcase muslim in the name of Islam. Look at what Salman Rushdie went through after he published the book "The Satanic Verses". Well this book totally shows up Islam as a fraud, it highlights the deludedness of the followers of Islam, and their refusal to look at the facts. It's a great read, dont let the muslims put you off, you owe it to yourself to read this. (I'm an atheist by the way, I'm certainly not a Christian or a Jew out to score points, but Christianity and Judism have been revieled as false by many books, Islam is a more difficult one because of the way muslims react when their religion is critisised).

26 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

C. J. Boorman

"Do not correct a fool, or he will hate you; correct a wise man and he will appreciate you." ~Proverbs 9:8

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 30, 2017

Verified Purchase

A basic 'Reader' for sources on the Origins of the Koran. For those who take a critical approach to thought on matters of pretended knowledge. I had brought Geiger's Essay separately.. but it was included here in a far better format (but lacking the Arabic and Hebrew footnotes from the original sources of the original). A collection of sources, hard to obtain individually, unless you have easy access to university level libraries who specialise in 'Oriental' language studies. It is neither anti-Islamic, nor anti-Koranic. It simply presents classic essays by former experts in language and Koranic study sources. It is critical of the opinions of many muslim apologists and so they don't like it.

4 people found this helpful

See all reviews

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Buy new: $36.99 FREE delivery: July 23 - 27 Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com

Buy used: $31.15

Follow the Author

Similar authors to follow

The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book Hardcover – September 1, 1998

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Customers who bought this item also bought

Get everything you need

Special offers and product promotions

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Product details

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Buy new:

$36.99

FREE delivery: July 23 - 27

Ships from: Amazon.com

Sold by: Amazon.com

Buy used:

$31.15