How do historians study the Quran, and where do they disagree?

Historians study the Quran with the tools scholars use for other ancient texts, including the Bible. The academic field, called Quranic studies, uses philology, textual criticism, the study of manuscripts, literary criticism and comparative religion, and has three goals: the Quran's original meaning and history, how people have understood it over the centuries, and its appreciation as literature. Its main method, the historical-critical method, does not mean criticising a text. It means putting inherited assumptions about origin, transmission and meaning aside and testing them against the text and other sources. Muslims, for their part, believe the Quran as it stands today is complete and untouched.

The field's history has swung. Until about the 1970s, non-Muslim scholars generally assumed the traditional story. Then, in the 1970s, revisionists such as Wansbrough, Crone and Cook began to question the Islamic literary sources. In 1999 Cook and Crone wrote that there was no hard evidence for the Quran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century. Crone later abandoned that view and said it is difficult to doubt that Muhammad uttered all or most of it.

Today, according to a recent summary of the field, radiocarbon, orthographic and stemmatic analyses of manuscripts converge on an early canonization under Uthman, and most historians accept that the Quran came from the Hejaz. But the questions are open: whether it had one author or several, how far it draws on Syriac Christian literature, and the unfinished business of a critical edition, which still does not exist.