George Sale, The Koran, commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed, translated into English immediately from the original Arabic; with Explanatory Notes, taken from the most approved Commentators. To which is prefixed A Preliminary Discource (1734)

revelation, as an infallible expedient in all nice cases; and he found the success of this method answer his expectation. It was certainly an admirable and politic contrivance of his to bring down the whole Korân at once to the lowest heaven only, and not to the earth, as a bungling prophet would probably have done; for if the whole had been published at once, innumerable objections might have been made, which it would have been very hard, if not impossible, for him to solve: but as he pretended to have received it by parcels, as God saw proper that they should be published for the conversion and instruction of the people, he had a sure way to answer all emergencies, and to extricate himself with honour from any difficulty which might occur. If any objection be hence made to that eternity of the Korân, which the Mohammedans are taught to believe, they easily answer it by their doctrine of absolute predestination; according to which all the accidents for the sake of which these occasional passages were revealed, were predetermined by God from all eternity.

Its author and manner of publishing.
That Mohammed was really the author and chief contriver of the Korân, is beyond dispute; tho’ it be highly probable that he had no small assistance in his design from others, as his countrymen failed not to object to him ¹; however they differed so much in their conjectures as to the particular persons who gave him such assistance ², that they were not able, it seems, to prove the charge; Mohammed, it is to be presumed, having taken his measures too well to be discovered. Dr. Prideaux ³ has given the most probable account of this matter, tho’ chiefly from Christian writers, who generally mix such ridiculous fables with what they deliver, that they deserve not much credit.

However it be, the Mohammedans absolutely deny the Korân was composed by their prophet himself, or any other for him; it being their general and orthodox belief that it is of divine original, nay that it is eternal and uncreated, remaining, as some express it, in the very essence of God; that the first transcript has been from everlasting by God’s throne, written on a table of vast bigness, called the preserved table, in which are also recorded the divine decrees past and future: that a copy from this table, in one volume on paper, was by the ministry of the angel Gabriel sent down to the lowest heaven, in the month of Ramadân, on the night of power ⁴: from whence Gabriel