the earlier translator Rodwell: the Koran only came to be
written down in the seventh century because the most
devout Muslims, those who had memorised the entire
Koran, were being killed in wars fought to force Islam on
others. Thus Pickthall says:
in a battle which took place during the
Caliphate of Abu Bakr – that is to say, within
two years of the Prophet’s death – a large
number of those who knew the whole Koran
by heart were killed [in battle, so] a collection
of the whole Koran was made and put in
writing.^313So even if politicians and journalists in the West had been
reading either the chronological Rodwell translation or
the later translation by Mohammed Pickthall, our elite
still could not honestly have considered Mohammed’s
apostles to be men of peace, since the Introduction to both
of these Korans shows that the most devout early Muslims
were dying off in wars imposing Islam on others. If
politicians and journalists had read no more than the
Introduction to either of these most popular translations
of the Koran they must have known that Islam was a
religion of war.
In recent decades the world has been flooded with the
publication of even more translations of the Koran, the vast
majority of which conceal the chronological ordering of the
chapters, thus ensuring that it is harder to find a
chronological Koran. In turn this ensures that people