" revisionism" of Wasnsborough and says that he "has marked a path in broad outlines, but the road must still be cleared." (1) By way of "clearing" this road Rippin edited a collection of studies entitled Approaches to the History of the interpretation of the Qur’ân, published in 1988. He followed it up by editing two other compilations, The Qur’ân: Formative Interpretation, published in 1999, and The Qur’ân: Style and Contents, published in 2001. In the same year appeared his solo work: The Qur’ân and its Interpretative Tradition.

The twenty-first century opened with the publication of another work similar to Arthur Jeffery’s Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’ân and C. C. Torrey’s The Commercial-Theological Terms of the Koran. This new work is The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran by one Christoph Luxenberg, a pseudonym, who is said to be "a scholar of ancient Semitic languages in Germany". (2) Adopting the line of Wansborough and the "revisionists" in general, Luxenberg attempts to show that parts of the Qur’ân are derived from pre-existing Christian-Aramaic texts that were misinterpreted by later Islamic scholars who are said to have prepared the editions of the Qur’ân now in use. Each of the assumptions contained in this premise is wrong and unsubstantiated. It is nowhere clearly stated or established who prepared the "parts" of the Qur’ân on the basis of pre-Islamic Christian Aramaic texts, and when and where. If later Islamic scholars misinterpreted the parts of the text, why did the Muslims who had hitherto been reading and using the Qur’ân not raise any objections to the alleged misinterpretations? How could later Islamic scholars of a certain period all agree on such alleged misinterpretations? How, again, could any alleged misinterpretation of the text constitute any alteration or edition of it? Luxenberg does not ask himself these questions, let alone advancing any specific evidence on any of these points. Also, the attempt to ascribe Hebrew, Syriac or Aramaic origins of some words or expressions in the Qur’ân is nothing new. In fact Luxenberg’s main drive is towards this topic of the so-called foreign vocabulary of the Qur’ân,