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Historiography of early Islam

Encyclopedia : H : HI : HIS : Historiography of early Islam

The historiography of early Islam is the study of how various historians have treated the events of the first two centuries of Islamic history.

The tradional Islamic version of those events is problematic in that all of its sources are from a period dating between 100 and 150 years after the events being referred to had taken place. The non muslim sources are on the other hand exhaustive and paint a radically different history than the Islamic accounts. Furthermore the traditional Islamic accounts are also disputed by various Islamic sects, and there are very few surviving primary sources for the period. There are few surviving manuscripts and inscriptions, and only sketchy archaeological data. Islamic history seems to have been primarily transmitted orally until well after the rise of the Abbasid caliphate. Islamic scholars then sifted and recorded the traditions. Modern Western scholars are much less likely than Islamic scholars to trust the work of the Abbasid historians. Western historians approach the classic Islamic histories with varying degrees of circumspection.

Traditional Islamic accounts of early Islam grow expansionaly after the eighth century with more detail added into the accounts as the centuries unfold. As modern historians scrutinize historical evidence the picture being presented reveals a significant deviation from earlier assumptions that were based on a belief that the traditional accounts were historically founded.

Contents

7th Century non-Islamic sources

There are numerous early references to Islam in non-Islamic sources. For some, the date of composition is controversial. They provide an account of early Islam which significantly contradicts the traditional Islamic accounts of two centuries later :

See also: [External References to Islam].

7th Century Islamic sources

Traditional Islamic sources for early Islamic history 8th and 9th century

See also: List of Islamic texts

The Islamic versions, in outline

Islamic historians

Western-style secular scholarship

The earliest Western scholarship on Islam was often the work of Christian missionaries or scholars. They tended to be translators and commentators. They translated the easily available Sunni texts from Arabic into a European language such as German, Italian, French, or English, then summarized and commented in a fashion that was often hostile to Islam. Notable Christian scholars include:

All these scholars worked in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Another pioneer of Islamic studies, Abraham Geiger (1810-1874), was a prominent Jewish rabbi and approached Islam from that standpoint.

Other scholars, notably those in the German tradition, took a more neutral view. The late 19th century scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) is a prime example. They also started, cautiously, to question the truth of the Arabic texts. They took a source critical approach, trying to sort the Islamic texts into elements to be accepted as historically true, and elements to be discarded as polemic or pious fiction. These scholars might include:

In the 1960s, a group of English academics set the staid world of Islamic scholarship on its head, claiming that the Islamic historical tradition had been utterly corrupted. The slate was to be wiped clean and academics were to build upon sources that they had no reason to doubt. The mentor of this group was John Wansbrough (1928-2002). Wansbrough's works had little influence, as they were written in a dense hermetic styled that required intense concentration to parse. He had much more influence through his students:

In 1977, Crone and Cook published Hagarism, which argued that the early history of Islam is a myth, generated after the conquests of Egypt, Syria, and Persia to prop up the new Arab regimes in those lands and give them a solid ideological foundation. According to this theory the Qur'an was composed at that time too, and the Arab conquests may have been the cause, rather than the consequence, of Islam. The main evidence adduced for this thesis was negative: near total lack of reference to early Islamic events in any contemporary non-Arab source.

Hagarism has not been reprinted. Crone and Cook's more recent work has involved intense scrutiny of early Islamic sources, but not total rejection of those sources. (See, for instance, Crone's 1987 publications, Roman, Provincial, and Islamic Law and Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, both of which assume the standard outline of early Islamic history while questioning certain aspects of it; also Cook's 2001 Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, which also cites early Islamic sources as authoritative.) One Legal scholar claims that they have in fact disavowed the work in a commentary he published in [Baltimore Chronicle]and [Daily Star], but in the absence of direct comment from Crone and Cook, it is difficult to know what to make of his claims.''

Qualified trust in Islamic sources

Contemporary scholars have generally returned to a study of the Islamic sources in a sceptical mood. They tend to use the histories rather than the hadith, and to analyze the histories in terms of the tribal and political affiliations of the narrators (if that can be established), thus making easier to guess in which direction the material might have been slanted. Notable scholars include:

Bridging the divide

A few scholars have managed to bridge the divide between Islamic and Western-style secular scholarship. They have completed both Islamic and Western academic training.

External links

 

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