John Wansbrough

John Edward Wansbrough (February 19, 1928 – June 10, 2002)^[1] was an American historian of Islamic origins and Quranic studies and professor who taught at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he was vice chancellor from 1985 to 1992.^[2]

Wansbrough is credited with founding the so-called Revisionist school of Islamic studies through his fundamental criticism of the historical credibility of the Quran and other early Islamic texts, especially regarding the classical Islamic narratives concerning the early history of Islam and his attempt to develop an alternative, historically more credible version of Islam's beginnings. He argued in general for a methodological skepticism of the authorship of early Islamic sources, and most famously that the Quran was written and collected over a 200-year period, and should be dated not from the 1st-century AH Hijaz of Western Arabia, but from the 2nd/3rd century AH in Abbasid Iraq.^[3]