The Question of Qurʾānic Narrative Sources in Muslim and Christian Polemics: A Comparative and Critical Study of W. St. Clair Tisdall’s The Original Sources of the Qur’ān and Abūl Fidā Muhammad Abdul Qādir’s Sarchashmah-e-Qurʾān

Abstract

This study investigates the polemical and source-critical debate surrounding Qurʾānic Christology and Mariology in the colonial Subcontinent, focusing on W. St. Clair Tisdall’s The Original Sources of the Qurʾān (1905) and Abū al-Fidāʾ Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Qādir’s Urdu rejoinder Sarchashmah-i Qurʾān (1962). Drawing on nineteenth-century European historicism (Historismus) and naturalistic evolutionism, Tisdall posited that Qurʾānic narratives concerning Mary and Jesus were derivative amalgamations of late antique Christian apocrypha, attributing narrative parallels to direct literary borrowing. Abū al-Fidāʾ countered Tisdall’s diffusionist claims through an internalist theological and philological defense exposing Tisdall's reliance on spurious narrations, misunderstandings of internal methodological contradictions. However, while Abū al-Fidāʾ successfully dismantled Tisdall's theological assumptions within the traditional genre of Subcontinental munāẓarah, his reliance on internal intra-Qurʾānic arguments left key external historical-critical questions.