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Title: Don't read for knowledge about the Qur'an
Review: Burton makes very clear his hostility towards Muslim sources very early on. His argument seems to be constructed more to find an excuse to reject these sources than to actually reconstruct the history of the collection of the Qur'an. He some how ends up at the conclusion that the Prophet(pbuh) collected the Qur'an in the form we have today. He rejects the knowledge of alternate early versions of the Qur'an as a fiction, invented by early Muslim scholars. While he does have a good critical knowledge of the early Muslim sciences, the conclusions he reaches are untenable. In addition recent research done in Yemen has found several very early Qur'an codexes that appear to be the very alternate versions that Burton rests his thesis upon rejecting.
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