Mazaim al-Mustashriqin hawl al-Quran al-Karim
- Author died
- 1428 AH
- Editions
- King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran
Mazaim al-Mustashriqin hawl al-Quran al-Karim (The Allegations of the Orientalists Concerning the Holy Qur'an) is a critical treatise written by the scholar Muhammad Mehr Ali (d. 1428 AH / 2007 CE), examining and refuting Western Orientalist theories and claims regarding the authorship, origins, and textual history of the Quran . The work was initially presented as a research paper for a conference organized by the King Fahd Glorious Quran Printing Complex in Saudi Arabia during Rajab 1421 AH .
Background and Classification of Orientalist Claims
The treatise begins by asserting that Western Orientalist efforts to prove that the Quran is of human manufacture—specifically authored by Muhammad ﷺ—mirror the arguments originally raised by the pagan polytheists of Mecca, who claimed it was poetry, magic, or borrowed legends . Mehr Ali outlines seven fundamental ways in which the Quranic text itself refutes such claims, including explicit denials that it is human speech or poetry, confirmations of divine revelation, the textual transmission of verbatim phrasing rather than mere concepts, divine reassurance to the Prophet against opposition, stern warnings against attributing false statements to God, divine witnessing of the revelation, and the standing challenge to produce a single comparable chapter .
Mehr Ali categorizes modern Orientalist scholarship on the Quran into two main historical streams:
- Traditional Authorship Theories: Initiated in the mid-19th century by Orientalists such as Aloys Sprenger, William Muir, Theodor Nöldeke, Ignaz Goldziher, Julius Wellhausen, Leone Caetani, and David Samuel Margoliouth, and further developed in the 20th century by Richard Bell and William Montgomery Watt . This group argues that Muhammad ﷺ authored the Quran himself, alleging that he possessed personal ambitions, studied poetry, possessed literacy, borrowed narratives from Judaism and Christianity, reflected contemporary cosmological misconceptions, and experienced revelation as internal intellectual suggestion rather than external divine locution . Mehr Ali notes that he analyzed this first category in his larger work, Sirat al-Nabi and the Orientalists .
- Revisionist Evolutionary Theories: Developed in the last quarter of the 20th century by scholars such as John Wansbrough, J. A. Bellamy, Andrew Rippin, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, Kenneth Cragg, and Toby Lester . This movement claims that the Quran was not authored by the Prophet alone, but evolved gradually through adaptations and revisions over the first two Hijri centuries, relying on the dismissal of early Islamic historical sources and interpretations of archaeological discoveries and early manuscripts .
Critique of Revisionist Hypotheses
The core of the book concentrates on responding to the revisionist school and its methodologies:
The Theories of Wansbrough and His Predecessors
Mehr Ali traces the origins of late 20th-century revisionism back to Ignaz Goldziher’s skepticism regarding hadith literature and Joseph Schacht’s thesis in The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, which claimed that Islamic reports were fabricated for later legal purposes . Mehr Ali observes that although these theories were critiqued by Muslim scholars as well as Western academics like Josef Horovitz, N. J. Coulson, W. M. Watt, and Maxime Rodinson, faculty members at the School of Oriental and African Studies—most notably John Wansbrough in Qur'anic Studies (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu (1978)—applied biblical historical-critical tools to the Quran . Wansbrough, followed by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook in Hagarism (1977), argued that the Quran was canonized in the 8th and 9th centuries CE from oral variants in a polemical sectarian environment .
In refutation, Mehr Ali argues that:
- Scriptural canonization across an empire spanning from the Indian subcontinent to Europe would have necessitated documented councils or synods, yet no Islamic, Greek, Persian, or Indian historical record mentions any such assembly .
- Wansbrough's claim creates an internal contradiction by asserting that historical records were entirely invented in the 9th century while simultaneously claiming that oral Quranic accounts survived reliably across two centuries .
- The Quran was continuously preserved in written book form from the caliphate of Uthman ibn Affan alongside oral memorization .
- The Quranic text addresses various Arabian polytheistic cults, Persian dualism, Christian doctrines, and specific historical occurrences directly tied to the Prophet's immediate lifetime, which refutes the notion of an Abbasid-era sectarian origin .
Epigraphic and Archaeological Claims
Mehr Ali critiques the claims of Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren, who argued that because pagan and monotheistic inscriptions were found in the Negev desert while early physical pagan inscriptions were lacking in the Hijaz, Islamic historical accounts of pre-Islamic Arabian paganism were retroactively invented . Mehr Ali counters this by pointing out that idolatry in the Hijaz had been imported from Greater Syria by Amr ibn Luhayy and was systematically eradicated upon the advent of Islam, leaving fewer physical pagan relics, while identifiable pre-Islamic sites like the fortress of Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf near Medina remain extant .
He also draws upon epigraphic scholarship, citing studies by Fred M. Donner and Estelle Whelan that documented early material attestations of the Quranic text . These include the Dome of the Rock mosaic inscriptions commissioned by the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik in 72 AH (691–692 CE), Quranic legends on Umayyad coinage minted between 77 AH and 132 AH, and the architectural inscription commissioned by Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz along the southern qibla wall of the Prophet's Mosque in Medina in 88 AH (706 CE), which contained Surah al-Fatiha followed by Surahs 91 through 114 in their established sequence .
The Sana'a Manuscripts
The work addresses Orientalist speculation surrounding the cache of early Quranic manuscript parchment fragments uncovered in 1970 in the Great Mosque of Sanaa . Following an invitation from Yemeni antiquities director Ismail al-Akwa' in the early 1980s, German researchers Gerd-Rüdiger Puin and H.-C. Graf von Bothmer microfilmed thousands of folios and presented papers on them at a 1998 conference in Leiden . Mehr Ali critiques the attempts by revisionist writers to use these manuscript finds to claim textual instability in early Islamic history .
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