Historian Tom Holland, told the Times: 'It destabilises, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Koran emerged - and that in turn has implications for the history of Muhammad and the Companions.'
Keith Small, from the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, added: 'This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran's genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven.'
Students of the Koran in the West have long doubted the story of the miraculous origin of the words of the Koran given to the illiterate prophet, based in part on Muhammad's version of Christianity in it, which is derivative of heretical Nestorianism, not revelation. Muhammad had contact with Nestorians according to various accounts, but it is thought that it was primarily through the family of his wife Khadija, from whom he must have learned much of what he knew about Christianity and Judaism. An anonymous philologist (who fears for his life) has even proposed that much of the Koran was originally a Christian Arabic lectionary translated from Syriac sources, which makes even more sense now that a manuscript of the Koran appears to be dated precisely to the period when the words were supposedly circulating only as oral tradition, as recitation.
It would seem that Muhammad and his companions raided more than caravans.
