Nöldeke pioneered historical dating of the Qur’anic suras that anchored later scholarship.

Evidence

Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930) was a rationalist positiviast. His doctorate was entitled De origine et compositione Surarum qoranicarum ipsiusque Qorani (‘Concerning the origin of the Qur’an and the composition of its suras’) and this was later expanded into a more mature study, published in 1860 as Geschichte des Korans. He was the first to use historical method in an attempt to work out the chronological ordering of the revelation of various suras, or chapters of the Qur’an. Broadly speaking he dated the more mystical suras to the early years of the Prophet’s preaching in Mecca, while assigning the longer suras with their detail on legal and social matters to the Prophet’s later sojourn in Medina. Although Nöldeke’s conclusions are now widely queried by specialists in Qur’anic studies, they were for a long time highly influential and without them, for example, the biographies of Muhammad by William Montgomery Watt in 1953 and 1956and by Maxime Rodinson in 1961 could not have been written. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 351

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the mechanics of how Western scholars constructed an historical frame around Islam — a natural counterpoint when discussing how narrative frameworks get built atop a sacred text.
• XREF: Connects to the broader Orientalism-vs-Said debate Irwin is implicitly tracking throughout the book.