of India and North Africa, where versions that differ in titles of the surahs, divisions between ayat, and occasionally vocalizations are in use; furthermore, it is clear from surviving manuscripts that such variants have persisted through the history of Islam.
Wansbroughs difficulty appears to be that these divergences are not substantive but rather involve details that he perceives as formalistic, perhaps even trivial. Yet there is abundant evidence from the relatively well-documented period of the ninth and tenth centuries that such divergences were not perceived as trivial within Islam itself.
Perhaps the most valuable results of Wansbroughs study for the historian are his analyses of aspects of the text that, though already familiar, had not previously been so carefully delineated or explored in all their implication s. One of these aspects is the polemical character of much of the Quran, which, as Wansbrough convincingly demonstrates, was focused on Jewish scripture and tradition, implying an important Jewish opposition as one of the motivations behind the canonization of Islamic scripture. A second is the nature of the text itself, a series of independent pericopes placed side by side but expressed in a unified language and style.