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 tradional 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.
There are numerous early references to Islam in non-Islamic sources. For some, the date of composition is controversial. Many of these references are short, fragmentary, or clearly based on prejudice or misinformation.
Links to some of these sources can be found at:
External References to Islam. There is also a book, Robert G. Hoyland's
Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, which covers the evidence in some detail.
*
644 - Inscription marking the death of
Umar,
Saudi Arabia.
[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)"]*
692 -
Qur'anic Mosaic on the
Dome of the Rock.
:
See also: List of Islamic texts*
Qur'an*
Hadith*
Sira and
Maghāzī*
Tafsir*
Fiqh*
Futūh* Inscriptions
*
Coinage* Manuscripts
** Great Mosque at San'a Qur'an graveyard
**
Oxyrhynchus papyri (eg
PERF 558)
** Qur'an collections
* Archaeological records
* Non-Muslim sources
*
Al-Baladhuri*
Ibn Ishaq*
Al-Tabari*
Al-WaqidiThe 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:
*
William Muir (1819-1905)
*
David Samuel Margoliouth (1858-1940)
*
William St. Clair Tisdall (1859-1928)
*
Leone Caetani (1869-1935)
*
Alphonse Mingana (1878-1937)
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:
*
Michael Jan de Goeje (1836-1909)
*
Theodor Nöldeke (1836-1930)
*
Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921)
*
Henri Lammens (1862-1937)
*
Arthur Jeffery (1892-1959)
*
H. A. R. Gibb (1895-1971)
*
Joseph Schacht (1902-1969)
*
Montgomery Watt (1909- )
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 on 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:
*
Martin Hinds (1941-1988)
*
Patricia Crone (1945- )
*
Michael Cook 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 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 negative: near total lack of reference to many early Islamic events in any contemporary non-Arab source. If such events could not be supported by outside evidence, then (according to Crone and Cook) they should be dismissed as myth.
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 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.
Claims for the late composition of the Qur'an have also been undermined 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. Puin has not published the entirety of his work and it is not clear whether the fragments support Muslim beliefs in the invariancy of the Qur'an, or whether they will reveal a text evolving in the first hundred years of Islam. However, they do refute
Hagarism's thesis that the Qur'an was a late composition.
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 it easier to guess in which direction the material might have been slanted. Notable scholars include:
*
Fred M. Donner*
Wilferd Madelung *
Gerald Hawting*
Jonathan Berkey*
Andrew Rippin*
G.H.A JuynbollBridging 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.
*
Fazlur Rahman*
Suliman Bashear*
Javed Ahmed Ghamidi* 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
* [
3] and following; an Islamic view of the development of the academic study of Islam
