Revelation and Falsification. This item is unavailable.Revelation and Falsification

For all Muslims the Qurʾan is the word of God. In the first centuries of Islam, however, many individuals and groups, and some Shiʿis, believed that the generally accepted text of the Qurʾan is corrupt. The Shiʿis asserted that redactors had altered or deleted among other things all passages that supported the rights of ʿAli and his successors or that condemned his enemies. One of the fullest lists of these alleged changes and of other variant readings is to be found in the work of al-Sayyārī (3rd/9th century), which is indeed among the earliest Shiʿi books to have survived. In many cases the alternative readings that al-Sayyārī presents substantially contribute to our understanding of early Shiʿi doctrine and of the early and numerous debates about the Qurʾan in general.

Etan Kohlberg, D.Phil. (1971) in Oriental Studies, Oxford University, is Emeritus Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published extensively on Imami Shiʿi history, doctrine and literature including A Medieval Muslim Scholar at Work (Brill, 1992). Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi D.Phil. (1991) in Oriental and Religious Studies, Sorbonne (Paris), is Professor of Classical Islamic Theology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne. He has published mainly on Imami Shiʿi Islam, including La religion discrete : croyances et pratiques spirituelles en islam shiʿite (Vrin, 2006).