criteeking david wood

The American interenet commentator David Wood is someone whose work I hold in high regard,
I think it's appropriate to have a healthily critical attitude towards those we most admire.
I rate Mr Wood highly for his scholarship, for his role in creating open discussion regarding Islam, and for his personal testimony regarding his own life experiences.
He has what I call the quality of the genuine.
But he's unlikely to be incapable of error.
For a start, I would not endorse his use of pejoratives in his assessment of the Prophet Muhammed.
Nor would I stand over all his textual criticisms of the Quran.
Textual criticism is by its nature quite a speculative science.
In Western university circles, textual criticism of the Jewish and Christian Bibles began in a serious way in the 19th century, largely among German university professors.
It made quite the sensation in academic and cultural and religious circles at first.
A speculation had only to be unveiled to be deemed true (or thrillingly dangerous) by the sort of gulpens who are overly impressed by university professors pronouncing sentence on Holy books.
Apologies to any gulpens reading this.
I'm a gulpen myself.
No offence.
I would suggest that the initiators of Biblical textual criticism propagated an awful lot of inuendo and had an awful lot of influence before the science established a few basic guidelines, and er, standards.
At one stage any ambitious young prof willing to devise a few sensational speculations about the Bible, would have been assured of money, influence, possible fame, and academic respect without any real testing for his often purely notional theories about who wrote what gospel, or when they were written, or about the manner in which they were written, or about what's a genuine gospel anyway, or about the version of Middle Eastern geography contained therein or about errors in the historiographic accounts of Hebrew kingships, Roman personages, politics and such like.
Thankfully a more measured view has prevailed as some of the earlier speculations about supposed inaccuracies in the Bible, have been refuted from within Academe itself.
I merely point this out to contextualise some of the criticisms of the Quran which are at present influential.
Some textual criticisms of  the Quran will most probably over time prove specious.
Some more will be irrelevant to the truth of the text.
One other proint as I attempt to critique David Wood, a man of towering courage and insight.
I've heard him answer some challenges by saying: "That's an ignorant question."
But surely whoever we are, every question we ask is an ignorant question.
We're asking the question to obtain knowledge because we recognise we don't know something.
We attempt to gain knowledge by asking a question in such a way that the answer may dissipate ignorance.
There's no shame in it.
And David Wood isn't always right.