According to this review, there exists now a Beck / Segovia school of Quranic revisionism. En banc, the judges' panel of university-published revisionists agree with (early)Crone and Wansbrough that the Quran developed over the Umayyad era. I belong to that party myself, albeit from the outside.
Unlike Crone, Beck and Segovia haven't yet bust out to the wider group of interested infidels. I don't read them at (say) Pipes or Spencer. Partly because their books are expensive. (The Qur'anic Jesus, yours for only $99!) But I think the real reason is that their arguments are, well, weak. "Speculative" is the polite term.
Segovia in particular has a bad habit of just rewriting a sura when it doesn't say what he wants it to say. This isn't new; Barth and Bell had indulged this fantasy before him. But it was dangerous when they did it. It shouldn't be indulged by scholars today, unless there's a witness in Qirâ'ât like in Arthur Jeffery's catalogue.
At their best, I haven't been convinced of their legwork in deciding which sura depends on what. I think suwar 74, 76, 81, 85 are later than when many scholars think, dependent on later suwar.
I would rather that university publishers not publish Kewl Idears. I'd rather that was left to, I dunno, Garnet, White Cloud, OneWorld, or (especially) Symposium to be submitted to paperback in the $15-25 range. Prometheus, if the idear is really kewl. This would encourage a wider dissemination of the kewl as can be evaluated on the cheap by the likes of me.
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