Keith E. Small

Background

Keith E. Small (d. 2018) was an evangelical scholar of Qur'anic manuscripts who applied the methods of New Testament textual criticism to the earliest Qur'an manuscripts. His significance for this wiki is methodological: he articulated the careful, non-polemical form of the Christian engagement with the Islamic preservation doctrine — comparing kinds of transmission history rather than trading corruption charges. {{UNSOURCED: biographical detail (affiliations, career) — none of Small's work or any biographical source is in corpus; acquire Textual Criticism and Qur'ān Manuscripts (2011) or an open-access article/review before attributing specific claims or an institutional affiliation}}

Positions held in this wiki

• Qur'an Preservation vs Textual History — the sole proponent of the view as the article states it: the Qur'an and the New Testament "have transmission histories of different kinds. The NT tradition is uncontrolled — thousands of manuscripts copied without central authority, whose very disorder allows the text's history to be reconstructed and verified. The Qur'anic tradition is controlled — an early state standardization that eliminated rivals, so that its purity claim, however sincere, cannot be independently tested" (Qur'an Preservation vs Textual History). On this argument the common polemic (Bible corrupted, Qur'an pristine) "compares a documented history unfavorably with an undocumentable claim, and should be retired in favor of honest textual history." Note that the article attributes this position to Small on the basis of general scholarly association, not yet from his own pages — the attribution is flagged there and here.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: none of Small's work is in corpus. The in-corpus materials that ground the comparative view's premises are: - Sale's Preliminary Discourse §III — the Uthmanic standardization and destruction of rival copies ("the old ones burnt and suppressed"). - Rodwell's Preface — "all previously existing copies were committed to the flames." The controlled-vs-uncontrolled interpretation of those events awaits Small's own text. Acquisition is logged in meta/gap-report.md.

Principal critics / interlocutors

• Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī — the classical insider position Small's comparison engages: companion oversight of the standardization functions confessionally as a guarantee, not a defeater, of purity.
• Secular textual scholars of the Qur'an — whose manuscript work (e.g., on the Sanaa palimpsest) supplies data both for and against strong preservation claims (not in corpus).

See also

• George Sale and John Medows Rodwell — the earlier Western text-critical accounts whose narrative Small's argument presupposes.
• Gary Habermas — a parallel evidentialist methodology (minimal, widely-conceded facts) applied to a different historical question.