William St. Clair Tisdall


William St. Clair Tisdall was a British Anglican priest, linguist, historian and philologist who served as the Secretary of the Church of England's Missionary Society in Isfahan, Persia.
William St. Clair Tisdall was fluent in several Middle Eastern languages including Arabic, and spent much time researching the sources of Islam and the Qur'an in the original languages. He also wrote grammars for Persian, Hindustani, Punjabi and Gujarati.
As an early scholar of Gujarati grammar, he defined three major varieties of Gujarati: a standard 'Hindu' dialect, a 'Parsi' dialect and a 'Muslim' dialect.
Clinton Bennett, in his Victorian Images of Islam, clearly paints Tisdall as a confrontationalist perpetuating the traditional Christian anti-Muslim polemic. Tisdall was one of thirteen authors whose essays were compiled in The Origins of The Koran: Classic Essays on Islam’s Holy Book, a 1998 book edited by Ibn Warraq. In reviewing the compilation, religious studies professor Herbert Berg panned the inclusion of Tisdall's work as "not a particularly scholarly essay". Berg concluded "t seems that Ibn Warraq has included some of the essays not on the basis of their scholarly value or their status as 'classics', but rather on the basis of their hostility to Islam. This does not necessarily diminish the value of the collection, but the reader should be aware that this collection does not fully represent classic scholarship on the Quran."
Tisdall accuses Muhammad of inventing revelations according to what he believed to be the need of the moment.

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