Keith Small was one of the foremost Qur’an scholars of our time. His work on early manuscripts was to provoke new questions among secular and Islamic scholars alike.
While at Dallas Theological Seminary, Keith read of Henry Martyn, and resolved to give his life to work among Muslims. He married Celeste Gardner in 1985, equally committed to the Muslim world, and they moved to the UK in 1989, settling in Dewsbury.
Ground-breaking work
The family would later move to London, for Keith to complete a doctorate. Taking the earliest 21 Qur’anic manuscripts, he applied to them the same tools used for examining biblical manuscripts and other ancient literature. His ground-breaking work showed that the ‘uncreated, perfect’ nature of the Qur’an existed only in the minds of believers, for the Qur’an stemmed from an earlier text, no longer extant. This discovery undermined the Muslim veneration of Mohammed as a worthy channel for the perfect word of God. His book Textual Criticism and Qur’an Manuscripts (Lexington Books, 2011) is now the standard text for this new field.
