Burton's book is starting to get on my nerves. It's becoming too verbose/rambling, as well as less respectful. I'll bite the bullet and finish it, just to make sure that all the bases are covered.
I am glad I did. Just when I was about to give up, Burton provided the best part of the book. Item 3 of Chapter 6 (pages 107-108) is packed with information and analysis about 22:52 and its impact on the interpretation of 2:106, showing blatant inconsistencies in the writings of the early pro-abrogation scholars. We discussed some of this in
this post.
All in all, Burton's book was informative, providing different pieces of information and different points of view than the Muslim literature. It had some valuable tips that can be followed upon. However, at times, his contempt for the religion betrayed his effort to be objective in his writing, and there were few passages that were not appropriate. The main disadvantage of the book is that it is not modular. It is more of a stream of consciousness with significant redundancy whose break up into chapters and topics felt like an afterthought.
One remark he mentioned in the postscript on page 210 was interesting. He characterized the Medieval Muslim scholarly writers as knowledgeable in all facets of the religion, and he argued that because of this, they were brief in their writing and often used unelaborated terms that were assumed to be understood by a similarly scholarly reader without elaboration. He counts
naskh as one of those terms, and notes that modern readers need to to dig up what the term meant to the writer in order to understand what he was actually talking about.