After the writing of the essay Qur'an: A Work of Multiple Hands?, numerous Muslims expressed their disapproval, but none attempted a serious response. Recently however, the task of responding has been taken up by a very intelligent Malaysian polemicist and net-apologist for Islam named Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi (henceforth referred to by his preferred acronym, MENJ). We here at the FTMecca are familiar with MENJ's debates, and it must be admitted that his progress over time is either a testament to his own learning capabilities or the superiority of the Malaysian education system. MENJ, who has demonstrated a bit more erudition than most of the dawagandists selling theological oranges on the information super-highway, often describes himself as being a sort of ad-hoc acolyte following in the foot steps of such respectable cyber-mujahideen as Shibli Zaman and Dr. Muhammad Saifullah. Indeed, MENJ's style is quite similar to that great defender of the faith, Dr. Saifullah, and this has been both a benefit and hindrance to his approach.

MENJ's article can be found at http://bismikaallahuma.faithweb.com/multiple.html. This response by the FTMecca will consist of a number of accusations by us regarding MENJ's style and approach. First, we accuse him of applying far to much focus to an opening quote that was meant merely to set the tone of the "Multiple Hands" article. Second, we accuse him of committing a number of mild fallacies. Third, we accuse him of putting forth commentary that would be described as an abuse of relevant sources were it not for the innocence of his errors. Finally, we accuse him of presenting distorted views of the historical scene in pre-Islamic Arabia. This article should not, however, be seen as some sort of brutal attack on akhoona MENJ's character; rather these three articles (the multiple hands theory, MENJ's response, and out retort) should be considered the beginning stages of a mutual search for the truth regarding the text of the Qur'an. We are quite grateful for this opportunity to discuss the theory.

MENJ begins with an introductory paragraph designed to set the tone in a way that seems to put the FTMecca in the same boat with some of the "enemies" of Shaykh Saifullah:

Ever since the advent of Islam, the critics (who are mostly the Christian missionaries) have have been trying to determine the origins of the Qur'an by deconstructing the Islamic tradition, being unable to accept the Qur'an's declaration that it is the word of Almighty God. The attempts also includes claiming the Qur'an was "borrowed" from Judeo-Christian sources, that Muhammad^(P) is simply a plagiarizer.

The Cook-Crone Controversy

After his introduction, MENJ begins a perplexing attempt to evaluate the sources cited in the article. Unfortunately, this comes off as an exhibition of his own misunderstanding regarding the purpose of some of these works:

The article starts off with a quote from Cook and Crone criticizing the structure of the Qur'an. It seems that the whole claim of "multiple hands of the Qur'an" was originally "wholly inspired" from this source.

MENJ states quite bluntly that Cook and Crone's statement was "merely conjecture from their personal opinion," and then makes a passing remark about iltifaat and other aspects of the text described by the pious. First, it should be noted that the point of the statement was with regards to the Qur'an being a work of multiple hands, and this discussion is dedicated to that issue. As for iltifaat, this subject was partly covered in our article on Arabo-Judaic Hermeneutics. MENJ, in his citation, directs us toward an article on the style of the Qur'an. It does not really get into the issue at hand, and is thus unrelated. Regardless, it is humorous that this article cites works on iltifaat that are all written six centuries (or more) after the time the Qur'an was allegedly compiled. Read any text over and over again in the masajeed, and I'm sure the faithful will, after six centuries, assume this is the criterion for beautiful writing and recitation. Indeed, on the same token, if one asked any ultra-orthodox Yahood what they thought about the style of the Torah they would invoke the numerous colorful commentaries written by Jewish grammarians and sages.

From there MENJ attempts to tear into the text of Hagarism with a passionate, though seemingly irrelevant, onslaught. This attack on the book would have benefited from an actual reading of the text, as well as actual knowledge of the discussions revolving around it. The reality is that while MENJ attempts to demonstrate this text's lowly status, he is familiar with neither the book nor the works that comment on it. This is, however, forgivable considering the fact that MENJ drew his comments from a body of canned dawaganda offered by sites dedicated to these sorts of mechanical responses.

The main goal of this section is to, once and for all, paint an accurate picture of what the scholarly community thinks of Hagarism. Anyone who would think their conclusions were widely accepted would be wrong; however, anyone who would try to claim that this revolutionary work was rejected in toto would also be incorrect. The citations in MENJ's article were almost always incomplete, thus this article will correct such problems in order to make these works accessible to others. The flow of second-hand citations begins with the following:

Anyway, what I wish to question is why the author quoted from a book which has been universally rejected by the Western scholars? In fact, Crone and Cook informs us that

This is a book written by infidels for infidels, and it is based in what from any Muslim perspective must appear an inordinate regard for the testimony of infidel sources. Our account is not merely unacceptable; it is also one which any Muslim whose faith is as a grain of mustard seed should find no difficulty in rejecting. [P Crone & M Cook, Hagarism: The Making Of The Islamic World, 1977, Cambridge University Press, pg. 8]

It is hilarious how many theists take quotes from atheist writers, and assume these statements are confessions in their favor, when in reality they are nothing more than subtle ridicule. For example, David Hume once said that the only miracle is that Christians actually believe the Bible, and some Christians actually take this and say that Hume admitted that faith was a miracle in itself. They never realized that brother Dawud Hume was actually trashing their holy book when he said that. Another analogous example might be the following from the collection of essays by Pantheist/Buddhist philosopher Brett Neichin:

"One thing that is painfully obvious to anyone with a modicum of training in logic is the circular nature of Christian arguments. As I have shown above, the Christian argument for the existence of their anthropomorphic grandfather god is a tautology. Their arguments cannot be falsified. Much to my surprise, when I have made light of this point during lectures Christians would rise to their feet and jubilantly exclaim 'exactly!' as if I had granted them some sort of felicity."
[Neichin, Pantheist Prophet, (Adamus, 2000) p. 13]

Humphreys summarizes this aptly by saying;

In the end perhaps we ought to use Hagarism more a 'what-if' exercise than as a research monograph...
[Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History, (Princeton, 1991), p.85]

The reality is that Humphreys was very much impressed with Cook and Crone's ability to show the weakness of the traditional sources from which we derive our understanding of Islamic history. Humphreys' main criticism was that numerous people disagreed with the authors' conclusions as to what really happened. This actually happens to be the main criticism of most scholars who comment on the book. Many find their 'negative' results excellent (the many inconsistent reports of orthodox Islamic historiography which they expose, et cetera), while they find the duo's 'positive' assertions (Syria instead of Mecca being the birthplace of Islam, et cetera) to be somewhat questionable. Humphreys is actually a fan of the work, and during a lecture presented at the University of Tokyo on October 21st 1997, he said that "medievalists have had their own shocker from a different direction, in particular the brilliant graduate-student essay of Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, 'Hagarism, The Making of the Islamic World'."

The quote actually comes from Humphreys' section on "Problems in Islamic History" (pp. 67-308), which covers the weakness of the Islamic sources, and discusses various book-length monographs (and/or PhD dissertations) which offer a systematic critique of the existing scholarly tradition. Among the authors discussed are Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. The sentence was deliberately truncated (though not by MENJ; rather by his source) in order to excise text that changed the tone of the last sentence. We will now present the entire passage so that readers can get the full view of what Humphreys said for and against Hagarism:

"In Hagarism, The Making of the Islamic World (1977), Michael Cook and Patricia Crone have taken an even more radical step than Wansbrough. They regard the whole established version of Islamic history down at least to the time of 'Abd al-Malik (65-86/685-705) as a later fabrication, and reconstruct the Arab Conquests and the formation of the Caliphate as a movement of peninsular Arabs who had been inspired by Jewish messianism to try to reclaim the Promised Land. In this interpretation, Islam emerged as an autonomous religion and culture only within the process of a long struggle for identity among the disparate peoples yoked together by the Conquests: Jabobite Syrians, Nestorian Arameans in Iraq, Copts, Jews, and (finally) Peninsular Arabs. Unsurprisingly, the Crone-Cook interpretation has failed to win general acceptance among Western Orientalists, let alone Muslim scholars. However, their account does squarely confront the disparities between early Arabic tradition on the Conquest period and the accounts given by Eastern Christian and Jewish sources. The rhetoric of these authors may be an obstacle for many readers, for their argument is conveyed through a dizzying and unrelenting array of allusions, metaphors, and analogies. More substantively, their use (or abuse) of the Greek and Syriac sources has been sharply criticised. In the end, perhaps we ought to use Hagarism more as a 'what-if' exercise than as a research monograph, but it should not be ignored."
[Humphreys, Islamic History, (Princeton, 1991) pp. 84-85]

These harsh criticisms aside, MENJ does offer a legitimately hostile source:

Some rather less impressed critics are more direct in their reservations. R. B. Sergeant informs that

Hagarism . . . is not only bitterly anti-Islamic in tone, but anti-Arabian. Its superficial fancies are so ridiculous that at first one wonders if it is just a 'leg pull', pure 'spoof'.
[Sergeant, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1981, p. 210]

And Joseph Van Ess seems to think that:

" . . . a refutation is perhaps unnecessary since the authors make no effort to prove it (the hypothesis of the book) in detail . . . Where they are only giving a new interpretation of well-known facts, this is not decisive. But where the accepted facts are consciously put upside down, their approach is disastrous.
[van Ess, "The Making Of Islam", Times Literary Suppliment, Sep. 8 1978, p. 998]

"In principle the experiment might be welcomed. We are far from possessing any universally accepted historical picture of early Islam, and we should frankly admit that there are many facts - or better, reports - which still demand a convincing explanation. But all these facts and reports are open to more than one interpretation, and even if no explanation is given at all this is no proof that the authors' explanation is correct."
[van Ess, "The Making Of Islam", Times Literary Suppliment, Sep. 8 1978, p. 998]

"If we work with the hypothesis of an intentional "editing" of the past on the scale assumed by the authors we would have to presuppose not one forger, but a host of them[.]"
[ibid.]

In that work, Scholem relates numerous traditions that had evolved among the Messianic Jewish communities of the 17th century. Such stories were found in Southern Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. They related how Zevi had performed miracles, found the ten lost tribes, sacked Mecca, and demolished Muhammad's tomb. They evolved over a period of a few years, and all of them were false. The fact that such blatantly false stories could spread among a religious community found in different continents serves as a potent defeater for the aforementioned "impossible conspiracy" argument.

In the end, however, van Ess further compliments this separation of negative scholarship (deconstructions) vs positive scholarship (reconstructions) by stating that "one's verdict on the first half of the book does not necessarily affect the second part" (ibid.). This should be enough on van Ess' criticisms. We now move on to the final quote offered by MENJ:

Waines in his book An Introduction To Islam says:

The Crone-Cook theory has been almost universally rejected. The evidence offered by the authors is far too tentative and conjectural (and possibly contradictory) to conclude that Arab-Jewish [relations] were as intimate as they would wish them to have been.
[David Waines, An Introduction to Islam (Cambridge, 1995) p. 273-274]

"To this point, modern Western scholarship on Islamic origins may be said to have been "dovish" in its treatment of the Arabic source material. Now came the turn of the "hawks" to claim revenge. In 1977 a book appeared which its authors calculated would create a storm. The book was Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World/, by P. Crone and M. Cook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). In the preface the authors acknowledge that their account is radically new, a "pioneering expedition" (p. vii) "written by infidels for infidels" (p. viii). Readers had been forewarned. The novelty of the work lies in the method adopted toward the primary source material, and, of course, in its conclusions. The method reverses that of Watt."
[David Waines, An Introduction to Islam (Cambridge, 1995) p. 273]

"In addition, the non-Muslim sources themselves would seem to be of equally doubtful historical value since they are all polemical works of one kind or another, a point possibly appreciated by the authors but one they do not bother to make explicit as a fundamental problem."
[Ibid. p. 274]

In view of this, we wonder why the author even dared to reproduce material from Cook and Crone and call it "scholarship".

"Anyone who finds implausible the idea that spurious ascription was rife among the old Muslim scholars may reflect on the dimensions of spurious originality among modern ones."
[Michael Cook, Early Muslim Dogma, (Cambridge, 1981) p. 202]

"Since external evidence is necessary to corroborate a view derived solely from the Muslim literary account, lack of such corroboration is an important argument against that account's historicity. This approach is therefore more open than the 'traditional' to acceptance of an argumentum e silentio. For if we are ready to discount an uncorroborated report of an event, we must accept that there may be nothing with which to replace it: that the evnt simply did not happen. That there is no evidence for it outside of the "traditional account" thus becomes positive evidence in support of the hypothesis that it did not happen. A striking example is the lack of evidence, outside the Muslim literature, for the view that the Arabs were Muslim at the time of the Conquest."
[Koren and Nevo, "Methodological Approaches to Islamic Studies" in Warraq, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad (Prometheus, 2000) p. 425; this was a reprint of the article originally published in Der Islam 68 (1991) pp. 87-107.]

In the long run, we should acknowledge that this is essentially irrelevant considering the fact that the soundness of Cook and Crone's monograph has no affect on the strength of the multiple hands theory. The point of that sole quote was to set the tone. It was the point of the article to present evidence for the claim, not cite the claim as evidence.

Appeal to the Jahiliya Stereotype

There is a notorious fallacy that is rife among Muslims that I would like to call "the appeal to the Jahiliyya stereotype." In this fallacious mode of argumentation, the Muslim always attempts to depict the pre-Islamic Arabs as a single monolithic entity, wholly obstinate towards the religion of Abraham, and prone to commit numerous atrocities. The reality is that the only information we have on these people comes from the polemical literature of the Muslims themselves! It is well known that no society can be squeezed into a single box the way religious polemics attempt to do, and this is particularly true of polytheist societies, where customs are always a rich conglomerate of multiple traditions. MENJ attempts to attack the multiple hands theory via some appeal to Islam's polemical stereotypes of people living in the time of pre-Islamic "ignorance":

The Critic, in his conclusion, claims that

With this now before us, how can we conclude that this text is the word of an Almighty God, or even a single Arab nomad? It is quite clear that the Qur'an is, as Cook and Crone said at the outset, "the product of belated and imperfect editing of materials from a plurality of traditions." There is simply no other possibility
But did a group of Arabs really wrote the Qur'an? That is what "The Dajjal" hints at and what his whole theory is dependent upon. [...] We note that what the Qur'an teaches goes directly against the pagan Arab culture, religion and gods that existed before the Qur'an was revealed. The Qur'an condemns idol worshipping, but the pagan Arabs loved their idol gods and worshipped them regularly.

First of all, the willingness of a pagan Arab to give up idol worship is as likely as a Hindu converting to Islam (which is roughly 50/50, depending on one's interpretation of nature and mystical concepts). If the Islamic sources are to be believed, the pagan Arabs were similar to Hindus with regard to the way they treated their idols (i.e. they were/are focal points, and nothing more). On the attitude of the Arab jahiloonitoonies towards their idols we can learn from the story of Imru l-Qais and the statue Dhu-l-Khalasa. He threw arrows at the statue to decide whether to go to battle for avenging the murder of his father. Three arrows: permitting, forbidding and neutral. In all tries he managed to aim only the forbidding arrow at the statue. In exasperation he put his arrows aside and said to the statue: "if your father had been killed you wouldn't have decided against going to battle!" and went out to battle. The jahiloonitoonies didn't really take their idols as seriously as Monotheists want us to believe, and according to the traditions, barely any died for the sake of Hubaal when Muhammad conquered Mecca.

That being said, it should be noted that MENJ's claim is itself an argument that predates Islam. First of all, the derogatory statements made about the non-Muslims living at the time of Muhammad cannot be confirmed via any non-Arab sources. Furthermore, the sort of claims made by the Muslim writers bare a striking resemblance to the sort of polemics Jewish missionaries launched at the assorted polytheist "heathens" for the six centuries leading up to the advent of Islam. The similarities are so strong that it makes much of the Islamic anti-Jahiloonitoony polemic seem like an obvious outgrowth of Jewish proselytizing.

Such polemics against the polytheists date back to the century just prior to the dawn of Christianity, where the Jews had made great use of the Greco-Roman prophetess Sibyl. They mimicked her style to create their own poetry which attacked the polytheism and idolatry of their coreligionists, and thus was born the Judean Sibyl. The polytheists were accused of every vile crime by the this oracle, including infanticide. The Jews and their Monotheist mythology were exalted as true followers of the true God, while the polytheists were depicted as ignorant fools. There was even promise of the afterlife for those who followed the true path. Much of this can be found in Heinrich Graetz' History of the Jews (JPS, 1902) Vol 2, pp. 203-208.

There were Monotheists in Arabia during the days which are considered the time Islam began, thus to accuse me of attributing the Qur'an to polytheist Arabs is absurd. Has MENJ ignored the existence of Jews, Christians and Sabians living in Arabia? Jews and Christians had already been in Arabia for centuries, and the amount of time they were there was more than enough to influence large portions of the population. There is a possibility that the presence of Jews dates back to before the common era; consider the following:

"Historical data concerning the Jews of Arabia do not reach further back than the first century of the common era; but, judging by the important positions which they occupied then in parts of Arabia (compare Yakut, "Geog. Worterbuch," ed. Wustenfeld, iv. 461 et seq) and by the purely Arabic names which they bore, Jews must have already been settled in the country for several centuries."
["Arabic Language Among the Jews" in The Jewish Encyclopedia, (Funk and Wagnalls, 1916) vol. II, p. 49]

"Although the settlement of the Jews did not extend further south than the [land now called] Medina, the spread of their religion was not confined to that district. The accounts of this are rather fantastic, and include the following: When Abu Karib, the last of the Tobba Kings of Yemen, besieged Yathrib (the ancient name of Medina), he was persuaded by two rabbis (to whom later sources give the names of Ka'ab and Asad) not only to raise the siege, but also to adopt the Jewish creed. Taking the two rabbis with him, he converted his army and subsequently his people; but it was not till the time of Dhu Nuwas (sixth century) that Judaism was more widely spread in Yemen."
[Arabia in Ibid. p. 42]

"The fanaticism of Dhu Nuwas was such that he burned alive whoever refused to become a Jew."
["Dhu Nuwas" in The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (1948) vol. 3, p. 557]

"Jews were present in all areas of Arabian society. There were Jewish merchants, Jewish Bedouin, Jewish farmers, Jewish poets, and Jewish warriors. Jews lived in castles and in tents. They spoke Arabic as well as Hebrew and Aramaic."
[Gordon Darnell Newby, A History of the Jews of Arabia, (Univ. of South Carolina, 1988) p. 49]

"The onomastic evidence from such sites indicates that the Jews were integrated into the communities of Northwestern Arabia at nearly all social and economic levels."
[Newby, Jews of Arabia, p. 50]

"From another perspective, we see that the process of conversion to Judaism in Arabia in the pre-Islamic period is paralleled by the patterns of conversion to Islam during Muhammad's lifetime. [...] Conversion to Judaism in pre-Islamic Arabia, as well as conversion to either Monophysite or Nestorian Christianity, was both a rejection of the old social and spiritual order and a declaration of adoption of a completely new political and social matrix. [...] [T]he conversion of large groups to Judaism indicates the dominant social force that Judaism exerted in Arabia in the fifth and sixth centuries."
[ibid., pp. 53 & 54]

"Christianity may be defined as the outcome of a syncretic bargain between Jewish missionaries and gentile proselytes."
[Crone, "Islam, Judeo-Christianity and Byzantine Iconoclasm, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. II, 1980, pp. 62]

The Qur'an raised the status of women; the Arabs treated women next to animals.

"In Elam daughters seem to have had full and equal rights of inheritance with sons. They may even have had preferential rights over sons, but that was exceptional."
[Zafrira Ben-Barak, "Inheritance by Daughters in the Ancient Near East," Journal of Semitic Studies, Vol. XXV, 1980 p. 27]

MENJ offers another perplexing argument regarding the pre-Islamic Arabs:

Further, no group or individual in Arabia ever claimed to have written it,

Attention to Details

MENJ's method involved multiple attacks from different angles. While such a style can be powerful at times, MENJ sometime dwelled a bit too much on irrelevant minutia. In his section on Further Analysis of the Methodology MENJ offered a well-cited justification for the use of oaths in the Qur'an. The first argument was that oaths are part of a deliberate style of the Qur'an (and this argument was corroborated by two nearly identical quotes). The second was mildly related, and seemed to argue that the Qur'an was merely a product of its time:

The use of oaths in the Qur'an is not inconsistent with the style of the pagan Arabs who use oaths in their poetry. Mustansir Mir states that
In pre-Islamic Arabic literature, two main types of oaths are to be found, the first in poetry, which may, therefore, be called the poetical oath, and the second in the utterances of kahins, which may be called the kahin oath. The poetical oath is typified by such expressions as (i) la 'amri (by my life), la 'armu abika (by the life of your father), bi rabbi'l-ka'bati (by the Lord of the Ka'bah), and (ii) wa farasi (by my horse) and wa rumhi (by my spear).
[cited from the net]

Even more unrelated is a link offered by MENJ as his sole response to the question of unwarranted repetition in the Qur'an. This is MENJ's sole response to what is essentially one of the stronger aspects of the multiple hands theory. Furthermore, the link itself leads to an article that says nothing about repetition in the Qur'an, and is thus not of any value to this discussion. It is strange that akhoona would devote copious amounts of typed text to commentary on minor aspects of the article, yet sum up his thoughts on a major pillar of the theory with a single unrelated sentence.

Contradictions vs Pious Hermeneutics

The multiple hands theory not only on the unnecessary repetion of the text, but also on the way such repeated stories come in variant forms. The term used to describe this was "contradiction," though it should be admitted that no religious text has any contradictions that can be demonstrated to the pious. If one starts from the premise that the text is the Word of God, one knows there are no contradictions; any perceived "contradiction" is obviously the result of improper hermeneutics. The fact that al-Muttaqeen and the FTMeccans are working from two obviously incommensurable paradigms makes the task of convincing the pious rather daunting. Nevertheless, we will offer the alleged contradictions along with MENJ's responses, and allow the readers to come to their own conclusions.

Of the two contradictions covered by MENJ, the first was with regards to the apparent discrepancy between two sections that cover the annunciation of the birth of Jesus. The question was simply "how many angels spoke to Maryam? MENJ replied as follows:

Sura' Aal-Imran (3):45 and Sura' Maryam (19):17 never stated that the incident is the one and the same. What could prevent both of the statements to be said at two different periods of time? If we read Sura' 3:45, the angels (plural) foretold Mary the good news about the coming of Jesus (P) but did not give the specific time of that event, which was left for Gabriel in a future presentation to Mary, as seen in Sura' 19:17. Note that in Sura' 19:17, we are told of the specific time of the conception of Jesus (P) inside Mary's womb. After reading these verses it becomes evident that the assumed contradiction is a direct result of the author's poor understanding of the Qur'an.

The text does not seem to support the view that these are two separate events. The general structure is the same in both cases:

1. An angel (or angels) tell Maryam she is about to have a son.
2. Maryam asks how this is possible in light of her virginity.
3. The angel (or angels) tell her anything is possible for God.

MENJ's second choice to respond to covered the apparent contradiction between Soorat al-Baqarah 2:62 and Soorat Aal-Imraan 3:85. MENJ essentially makes an appeal to Rabbinic literature. He argues that there is a history to this verse that we have not considered, though this "history" can only be found in the tendentious extracanonical litterature found in the writings of Islamic theologians and pseudo-historians (none of which are precisely cited by MENJ by the way). MENJ's claim was basically that the former verse (2:62) only applied to Jews, Christians, and Sabians that lived before the advent of Islam, while the latter was for people after Islam. Corroboration for MENJ's strange claim can be found in my copy of The Noble Qur'an, where there is a footnote after the former verse:

"(V.2:62) This verse (and verse 5:69, mentioned in the Qur'aan should not be misinterpreted by the reader as mentioned by Ibn Abbaas (Tafseer at-Tabari, Vol. I, page 323) that the provision of this verse was abrogated by the verse 3:85[.]"

Textual Analysis: the Bible vs al-Qur'aan

Finally MENJ makes the odd claim that it is a fallacy to use Biblical criticism against the Qur'an. It would seem to us to be rather valuable in light of the fact that such applications bear similar fruit. We would like to offer MENJ's complete argument on this issue:

The critic acknowledges that he is merely reapplying textual criticisms of the Bible to the Qur'an. However, this is already an anachronistic fallacy. It is well-known that the memorisation of the Qur'an took place during the Prophet's (P) time and long after his death, and efforts of compiling the whole text of the Qur'an took its final form during the rule of the Caliph Uthman. However, the Bible was compiled after a series of contributions of various multiple authors, some of which are unknown. We read that

The other glaring difference between the methodology of the exegesis of the Bible and that of the Qur'an is that the former has multiple authorship, while the latter is the revelation from Allah to the Prophet (S.A.W.). As for example, 'the canonical book of Isaiah, though constituting a single book has at least two seperate authors; one addressing an eighth century B.C. situation, the other a sixth century B.C. event'. In the New Testament, thirteen other writings are attributed to the apostle Paul. His authorship of six of these is widely disputed. They appear to have been compiled and collected into their final form long after Paul's death, but are still attributed to him.
['Abd al-Rahman I. Doi, The Sciences of the Qur'an: A Study in Methodology and Approach, (Synergy Books International, 1998), pp. 307-308]

Thus, it is clear to us that it would be a sad mistake to apply the same methodologies used for Biblical textual criticism to the Qur'an, as we are talking about two different books with two different historical background.

However, funniest of all is the question begging found in MENJ's source. The source claims that the Bible is a work of multiple hands (we agree), while the Qur'an is from a single author! Well, does this settle the issue, or is this just an attempt to state the opposite of what we have stated? The point was that the Bible was a work of multiple hands, and so was the Qur'an in light of mutual scholarship applied to both. MENJ's source notes that the textual structure of Isaiah implies multiple authors (something many scholars agree with). Does MENJ know how these scholars came to this conclusion? Is he familiar with the methodology used? Essentially, all MENJ's citation does is say "yeah, the this methodology works on the Bible, but not on the Qur'an because it is the word of Allah." This is not an argument; rather it is a statement of faith.

Conclusion

MENJ attacked the multiple hands theory on a plurality of fronts, and it was indeed a valiant effort. Still, the point must be stressed that his arguments focused on irrelevant points, gave inaccurate pictures of historical situations, and failed to meet the core tenets of the theory. It would seem that the theory, at this point, remains intact, though only time (and more discussions) will allow us to gain a better understanding of the Qur'an's origins.