Islam in its Arabic Context

The last two to three decades have seen the emergence of a new school of Islamic studies in the West, a school whose adherents commonly refer to themselves as ‘revisionists’.The main concern of this direction has been to contest the validity of the traditional Muslim accounts of the place and time of the origin of Islam and to locate this in a more northerly place and in a more recent time. In recent years the thrust of the revisionist tendency has been directed increasingly towards contesting the textual validity of the Qur’an and reconstructing a supposedly older version of the Muslim scripture. In this article, the author is going to talk about these issues.