Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi’s latest publication, analysing the stories about the beginnings of Islam according to Shī‘ī sources, and recent studies by Wilferd Madelung (of which some are still unpublished) complete and confirmeach other. There emerges from their scholarly work a totally new image of the origins of Islam and of the constitution of the text of the Qur’ān, as both appear to have been distorted by propaganda, developed on behalf of the orthodox Sunnīcaliphs by the authors of offi cial historiography.