and the abrogated verses; nothing was missing from it, [not even] a letter alif, nor lam. But they did not accept it from him" They also believe that Ali's version of the Quran contained verses that are not seen in the Uthmanic codex we have today. They believe changes in the order of verses and suras did take place and that there were variant readings, tabdil, exchange of words such as umma to imma, rearrangement of words and deletion of words pertaining to the right of Ali being the first caliph. The contemporary Shia scholar Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei provides a counter argument to this belief. He states that even if Ali's Quran incorporated additions that are not part of the existing Quran, this does not mean that these additions comprised parts of the Quran and have been dropped from it due to alteration. Rather, these additions were interpretations or explanations of what God was saying, or were in the form of revelations from God, explaining the intention of the verses in the Quran. These additions are not part of the standard Quran and not considered part of what the Muslim Messenger of God was commanded to convey to his community. View of non-Muslim scholarship The origin of the Quran has been a subject of sustained academic research. There have also been a number of proposals for refinement of the traditional view and even its fundamental re-evaluation. Until around the 1970s, non-Muslim scholars—while not accepting the divinity of the Quran—did accept its Islamic origin story. Ernest Renan famously declared that "Islam was born, not amid the mystery which cradles the origins of other religions, but rather in the full light of history"—an empire ruling in the name of the religion of Islam and whose expansion was fuelled by religious fervor, and which presided over the compilation, editing, approving and distributing of the holy book of that religion (the Quran). But in the 1970s revisionist historians began to question Islamic "literary sources" — tafsir or commentaries on the Quran, hadith, or accounts of what the Islamic prophet Muhammad approved of or didn't, and sira, biography of the prophet — upon which the traditional account of the Quran were based. They employed a "source-critical" approach to this literature, including as evidence relevant archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, and contemporary non-Arabic literature, that they argued provided "hard facts" and an ability to crosscheck. By 2008, Fred