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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.

Western academic historians have come to believe that the traditional Islamic version of those events is problematic. The Islamic sources are from a period dating between 100 and 150 years after the events being referred to had taken place. 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. They did so in an extremely politicized context, just after one dynasty, the Umayyads, had been overthrown, and when the groups that eventually became the Sunni and Shi'a sects of Islam were putting forth rival histories of Islam.

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. A consideration of oral transmissions in general with some specific early Islamic reference is Jan Vansina's "Oral Tradition as History."

Traditional Islamic sources for early Islamic history

See also: List of Islamic texts

7th Century Islamic sources

7th Century non-Islamic sources

There are numerous early references to Islam in non-Islamic sources, many have been collected in historiographer Robert G. Hoyland's compilation Seeing Islam As Others Saw It. One of the first books to analyze these works was Hagarism authored by Michael Cook and Patricia Crone. Hagarism concludes that looking at the early non-Islamic sources provides a much different and more accurate picture of early Islamic history than the later Islamic sources do, although its thesis has little acceptance. For some, the date of composition is controversial. Some 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 ambiguous sources


Islamic historians

Western-style secular scholarship

The earliest Western scholarship on Islam tended to be Christian translators and commentators. They translated the easily available Sunni texts from Arabic into European languages including 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 in his "Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?" (1833). Geiger's themes were continued in Rabbi Abraham I. Katsh's "Judaism and the Koran" (1962)

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 1970s, what has been described as a "wave of sceptical scholars" (Donner 1998 p. 23) challenged a great deal of the received wisdom in Islamic studies. They argued that the Islamic historical tradition had been greatly corrupted in transmission. They tried to correct or reconstruct the early history of Islam from other, presumably more reliable, sources such as coins, inscriptions, and non-Islamic sources. The oldest of this group was John Wansbrough (1928-2002). Wansbrough's works were widely noted, but perhaps not widely read. Donner (1998) says:

Wansbrough's awkward prose style, diffuse organization, and tendency to rely on suggestive implication rather than tight argument (qualities not found in his other published works) have elicited exasperated comment from many reviewers. (Donner 1998 p. 38)

Wansbrough's scepticism influenced a number of younger scholars, including:

In 1977, Crone and Cook published Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, 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 their theory the Qur'an was composed later, rather than early, and the Arab conquests may have been the cause, rather than the consequence, of Islam. The main evidence adduced for this thesis was based upon a contemporary body of non-Muslim sources to many early Islamic events. If such events could not be supported by outside evidence, then (according to Crone and Cook) they should be dismissed as myth.

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 writer claims that they have in fact disavowed the work ([1] [2]) but in the absence of direct comment from Crone and Cook, it is difficult to know what to make of his claims.

In her book Meccan Trade And The Rise Of Islam, Crone states:

If one storyteller should happen to mention a raid, the next one would tell you the exact date of this raid, and the third one would furnish you even more details. Waqidi (d. 823), who wrote years after Ibn Ishaq (d. 768), will always give precise dates, locations, names, where Ibn Ishaq has none, accounts of what triggered the expedition, miscellaneous information to lend color to the event, as well as reasons why, as was usually the case, no fighting took place. No wonder that scholars are fond of Waqidi: where else does one find such wonderfully precise information about everything one wishes to know? But given that this information was all unknown to Ibn Ishaq, its value is doubtful in the extreme. And if spurious information accumulated at this rate in the two generations between Ibn Ishaq and Waqidi, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that even more must have accumulated in the three generations between the Prophet and Ibn Ishaq. [2]

Claims for the late composition of the Qur'an have also been reinforced by the 1972 discovery of a cache of ancient Qur'ans in a mosque in Sana'a, Yemen. The German scholar Gerd R. Puin has been investigating these Qur'an fragments for years. His research team made 35,000 microfilm photographs of the manuscripts Puin has not published the entirety of his work and but he has stated that there were 2 versions of the text in the manuscript, one written over the other, thus putting into the question the Muslim beliefs in the invariancy of the Qur'an, and he has dated the documents to the early part of the 8th century.[3].

Contemporary scholars have begun to turn to the 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 it 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.Template:Fact They have completed both Islamic and Western academic training.

References

  • Donner, Fred Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing, Darwin Press, 1998
  • Hoyland, Robert G. Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, Darwin Press, 1997
  • Vansina, Jan "Oral Tradition as History," University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1985

External links

  • [3] and following; an Islamic view of the development of the academic study of Islam
  1. ↑ Twenty-three new inscriptions on Memory of the World Register of Documentary Collections - UNESCO, inscription reads "In the name of God (Bismillah), I Zuhair wrote the date of the death of Umar the year four and twenty (AH)"
  2. ↑ Patricia Crone, Mecan Trade and the rise of Islam, (1987), pp. 223-224
  3. ↑ Atlantic Monthly Journal, Atlantic Monthly article: What is the Koran ,January 1999
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