Historiography of early Islam
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The historiography of early Islam is the secular scholarly literature on the early history of Islam during the 7th century, from Muhammad's first purported revelations in 610 until the disintegration of the Rashidun Caliphate in 661, and arguably throughout the 8th century and the duration of the Umayyad Caliphate, terminating in the incipient Islamic Golden Age around the beginning of the 9th century.
Primary sources
7th-century Islamic sources
- Birmingham Quran manuscript. Between c. 568 and 645 CE
- Tübingen fragment.
- Sanaa manuscript. Between c. 578 and 669 CE
- Qur'anic Mosaic on the Dome of the Rock. 692 CE
- Shia hadith collection, attributed to Sulaym ibn Qays (death 694–714), and it is often recognised as the earliest such collection.[4] There is a manuscript of the work dating to the 10th century.[5] Some Shia scholars are dubious about the authenticity of some features of the book,[6] and Western scholars are almost unanimously sceptical concerning the work, with most placing its initial composition in the eighth or ninth century.[7] The work is generally considered pseudepigraphic by modern scholars.[4]
7th-century non-Islamic sources
There are numerous early references to Islam in non-Islamic sources. Many have been collected in historiographer
- 634 Doctrina Iacobi
- 636 Fragment on the Arab Conquests
- 639 Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem
- 640 Thomas the Presbyter
- 640 Homily on the Child Saints of Babylon
- 643 PERF 558[10]
- 644 Coptic Apocalypse of Pseudo-Shenute
- 648 Life of Gabriel of Qartmin
- 650 Fredegar
- 655 Pope Martin I
- 659 Isho'yahb III of Adiabene
- 660 Sebeos, Bishop of the Bagratunis
- 660 Khuzistan Chronicle
- 662 Maximus the Confessor
- 665 Benjamin I
- 670 Arculf, a pilgrim
- 676 Synod of Giwargis I
- 680 George of Resh'aina
- 680 The Secrets of Rabbi Simon ben Yohai
- 680 Bundahishn
- 681 Trophies of Damascus
- 687 Athanasius of Balad, Patriarch of Antioch
- 687 John bar Penkaye
- 690 Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius
- 692 Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ephraem
- 694 John of Nikiu
Epigraphy
According to archaeologists Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren, there are thousands of pagan and monotheist epigraphs or rock inscriptions throughout the Arabian peninsula and in the Syro-Jordanian desert immediately north, many of them dating from the 7th and 8th century.[11] According to historian Leor Halevi, Muslim tombstones from 30-40 AH / 650-660 CE named Allah (Arabic for God) and referred to the names of the months of the Hijri calendar, but showed few other indications of Islamization. From 70-110 AH/690-730 CE, Muslim tombstones began to reveal deeper signs of Islamization, invoking Muhammad and quoted from the Quran.[12]
Some epigraphs found from the first century of Islam include:
- Analysis of a sandstone inscription found in 2008caliph Umar bin al-Khattāb died on the last night of the month of Dhūl-Hijjah of the year 23 AH, and was buried next day on the first day of Muharram of the new year 24 AH/644 CE. Thus the date mentioned in the inscription (above) conforms to the established and known date of the death of ʿUmar bin al-Khattāb.[14][dubious]
- Jerusalem 32 - An Inscription unearthed at the south-west corner of the Muʿāwiya....the year thirty two"[15]
- An Inscription, at Muʿāwiya (abdalla Maavia), the commander of the faithful (amēra almoumenēn) the hot baths of the people there were saved and rebuilt..."[17]
- Tombstone of a woman named ʿAbāssa Bint Juraij, kept in Museum of Islamic Art Cairo, from 71 AH / 691 CE mentions,"In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. The greatest misfortune for the people of Islām (ahl al-Islām) is the death of
- An Inscription at Ḥuma al-Numoor, near Masjid al-Ḥarām was builtin the seventy eighth year."
Traditional Muslim historiography
Religious sciences of biography, hadith, and Isnad
The "
"The vagueness of ancient historians about their sources stands in stark contrast to the insistence that scholars such as Bukhari and Muslim manifested in knowing every member in a chain of transmission and examining their reliability. They published their findings, which were then subjected to additional scrutiny by future scholars for consistency with each other and the Qur'an."
Other famous Muslim historians who studied the science of biography or science of hadith included
Historiography, cultural history, and philosophy of history
The first detailed studies on the subject of
Franz Rosenthal wrote in the History of Muslim Historiography:
"Muslim historiography has at all times been united by the closest ties with the general development of scholarship in Islam, and the position of historical knowledge in MusIim education has exercised a decisive influence upon the intellectual level of historicai writing....The Muslims achieved a definite advance beyond previous historical writing in the sociology
— sociological understanding of history and the systematisation of historiography. The development of modern historical writing seems to have gained considerably in speed and substance through the utilization of a Muslim Literature which enabled western historians, from the seventeenth century on, to see a large section of the world through foreign eyes. The Muslim historiography helped indirectly and modestly to shape present day historical thinking."[23]
In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun warned of seven mistakes that he thought that historians regularly committed. In this criticism, he approached the past as strange and in need of interpretation. The originality of Ibn Khaldun was to claim that the cultural difference of another age must govern the evaluation of relevant historical material, to distinguish the principles according to which it might be possible to attempt the evaluation, and lastly, to feel the need for experience, in addition to rational principles, in order to assess a culture of the past. Ibn Khaldun often criticized "idle superstition and uncritical acceptance of historical data." As a result, he introduced a
World history
Until the 10th century, history most often meant political and military history, but this was not so with Central Asian historian
Famous Muslim historians
- Urwah ibn Zubayr(died 712)
- Hadith of Umar's speech of forbidding Mut'ah
- Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri(died 742)
- Hadith of Umar's speech of forbidding Mut'ah
- Hadith of prohibition of Mut'ah at Khaybar
- Ibn Ishaq (died 761)
- Sirah Rasul Allah
- Imam Malik(died 796)
- Al-Waqidi (745–822)
- Book of History and Campaigns
- Ali ibn al-Madini (777–850)
- The Book of Knowledge about the Companions
- Ibn Hisham (died 834)
- Sirah Rasul Allah
- Dhul-Nun al-Misri (died 859)
- Muhammad al-Bukhari (810–870)
- Sahih Bukhari
- Muslim b. al-Hajjaj(died 875)
- Ibn Majah (died 886)
- Sunan Ibn Majah
- Abu Da'ud(died 888)
- Sunan Abi Da'ud
- Al-Tirmidhi (died 892)
- Abu al-Hasan 'Alī al-Mas'ūdī(896–956)
- Muruj adh-dhahab wa ma'adin al-jawahir (The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems) (947)
- Ibn Wahshiyya (c. 904)
- Nabataean Agriculture
- Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham
- Al-Nasa'i (died 915)
- Sunan al-Sughra
- Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari(838–923)
- Al-Baladhuri (died 892)
- Kitab Futuh al-Buldan
- Genealogies of the Nobles
- Hakim al-Nishaburi(died 1014)
- Al-Mustadrak alaa al-Sahihain
- Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī(973–1048)
- Indica
- History of Mahmud of Ghazni and his father
- History of Khawarazm
- Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi(13th century)
- Ibn Abi Zar (died 1310/1320)
- Al-Dhahabi (1274–1348)
- Major History of Islam
- Talkhis al-Mustadrak
- Tadhkirat al-huffaz
- Al-Kamal fi ma`rifat al-rijal
- Ibn Kathir (1300-1373)
- Al-Bidāya wa-n-Nihāya
- Al-Sira Al-Nabawiyya
- Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406)
- Muqaddimah (1377)
- Kitab al-Ibar
- Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (1372–1449)
- Fath al-Bari
- Tahdhib al-Tahdhib
- Finding the Truth in Judging the Companinons
- Bulugh al-Maram
Modern academic scholarship
The earliest academic scholarship on Islam in Western countries tended to involve Christian and Jewish translators and commentators. They translated the readily available
- William Muir (1819–1905)
- Reinhart Dozy (1820–1883) "Die Israeliten zu Mecca" (1864)
- 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 centuries.
Another pioneer of Islamic studies, Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), a prominent Jewish rabbi, approached Islam from that standpoint in his "Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?" (What did Muhammad borrow from Judaism?) (1833). Geiger's themes continued in Rabbi Abraham I. Katsh's "Judaism and the Koran" (1962)[29]
Establishment of academic research
Other scholars, notably those in the German tradition, took a more neutral view. (The 19th-century scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) offers 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 as pious fiction. Such scholars included:
- 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(1909–2006)
The revisionist challenge
In the 1970s the
The oldest of this group was John Wansbrough (1928–2002). Wansbrough's works were widely noted, but not necessarily widely read, owing to (according to Fred Donner), his "awkward prose style, diffuse organization, and tendency to rely on suggestive implication rather than tight argument".[35] Nonetheless, his scepticism influenced a number of younger scholars, including:
- Martin Hinds (1941–1988)
- Patricia Crone (1945-2015)
- Michael Cook (1940- )
In 1977 Crone and Cook published
Crone defended the use of non-Muslim sources saying that "of course these sources are hostile [to the conquering Muslims] and from a classical Islamic view they have simply got everything wrong; but unless we are willing to entertain the notion of an all-pervading literary conspiracy between the non-Muslim peoples of the Middle East, the crucial point remains that they have got things wrong on very much the same points."[33]
Crone and Cook's more recent work has involved intense scrutiny of early Islamic sources, but not their total rejection. (See, for instance, Crone's 1987 publications, Roman, Provincial, and Islamic Law[36] and Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam,[37] 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,[38] which also cites early Islamic sources as authoritative.)
Both Crone and Cook have later suggested that the central thesis of their book "
In 1972 construction workers discovered a cache of ancient Qur'ans – commonly known as the
In their study of the traditional Islamic accounts of the early conquest of different cities—Damascus and Caesarea in Syria, Babilyn/al-Fusat and Alexandria in Egypt, Tustar in Khuzistan and Cordoba in Spain—scholars Albrecht Noth and Lawrence Conrad find a suspicious pattern whereby the cities "are all described as having fallen into the hands of the Muslims in precisely the same fashion". There is a
"traitor who, ... points out a weak spot in the city's fortification to the Muslim besiegers; a celebration in the city which diverts the attention of the besieged; then a few assault troops who scale the walls, ... a shout of Allahu akbar! ... from the assault troops as a sign that they have entered the town; the opening of one of the gates from inside, and the onslaught of the entire army."
They conclude these accounts can not be "the reporting of history" but are instead stereotyped story tales with little historical value.[43]
Contemporary scholars have tended 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
An alternative postrevisionist approach has made use of hadith of uncertain authenticity to tell a history of early Islam after the death of Muhammad. Here the key has been to analyze hadith as collective memories that shaped the culture and society of urban Muslims in the late seventh and eighth centuries CE. Muhammad′s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society by Leor Halevi is an example of this approach.[44]
Scholars combining traditional and academic scholarship
A few scholars have attempted to bridge the divide between Islamic and Western-style secular scholarship.
They have completed both Islamic and Western academic training.
See also
- Succession to Muhammad
- Timeline of early Islamic history
- Timeline of 7th-century Muslim history
- Timeline of 8th-century Muslim history
- List of biographies of Muhammad
- Early Muslim conquests
- Classical Islam
References
- ^ "The Spirit of Islam: Experiencing Islam through Calligraphy". UBC Museum of Anthropology. Archived from the original on 8 November 2002. Retrieved 12 September 2021.
- ^ "Tübingen University fragment written 20-40 years after the death of the Prophet, analysis shows". Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. February 15, 2016. Retrieved September 12, 2021.
- ^ "Kufisches Koranfragment". Universität Tübingen. Retrieved September 12, 2021.
- ^ S2CID 170426783.
- ISBN 978-1850434702.
- ^ Sachedina (1981), pp. 54–55 * Landolt (2005), p. 59 * Modarressi (2003), pp 82–88 * Dakake (2007), p.270
- ^ Gleave, R. (2015). Early Shiite hermeneutics and the dating of Kitāb Sulaym ibn Qays. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 78(01), 83–103. doi:10.1017/s0041977x15000038
- ^ Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report. Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. 1997. p. 47.
- ISBN 0-521-42929-3.
- ^ Gent, R.H. van. "Islamic-Western Calendar Converter - frame layout".
- ^ Neva & Koren, "Methodological Approaches to Islamic Studies", 2000: p.437-8
- ^ a b Halevi, Leor. “The Paradox of Islamization: Tombstone Inscriptions, Qurʾānic Recitations, and the Problem of Religious Change.” History of Religions 44, no. 2 (2004): 120–52. https://doi.org/10.1086/429230.
- ^ "Current events on Seeker - Science. World. Exploration. Seek for yourself".
- ^ "The Inscription Of Zuhayr - One Of The Earliest Dated Hijazi Inscriptions, 24 AH / 644 CE". www.islamic-awareness.org.
- ^ Sharon, Moshe (2018). "Witnessed By Three Disciples Of The Prophet: The Jerusalem 32 Inscription From 32 AH / 652 CE". Israel Exploration Journal. 68: 100–111.
- ^ Imbert, Frédéric (2015). "Califes, Princes et Poètes Dans Les Graffiti du Début de l'Islam". Romano-Arabica. 15: 65–66 and 75.
- ^ J. Green & Y. Tsafrir (1982). "Greek Inscriptions From Hammat Gader: A Poem By The Empress Eudocia And Two Building Inscriptions". Israel Exploration Journal. 32: 94–96.
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- ^ Ahmad, I. A. (June 3, 2002). "The Rise and Fall of Islamic Science: The Calendar as a Case Study". Faith and Reason: Convergence and Complementarity (PDF). Al Akhawayn University. Retrieved 2011-05-07.
- ^ Mohamad Abdalla (Summer 2007). "Ibn Khaldun on the Fate of Islamic Science after the 11th Century", Islam & Science 5 (1), p. 61-70.
- ISBN 1-85065-356-9.
- ^ a b H. Mowlana (2001). "Information in the Arab World", Cooperation South Journal 1.
- ^ Historiography. The Islamic Scholar.
- ISBN 0-691-01754-9.
- ISBN 1-85065-356-9.
- ISBN 978-983-9541-53-3.
- ^ Dr. S. W. Akhtar (1997). "The Islamic Concept of Knowledge", Al-Tawhid: A Quarterly Journal of Islamic Thought & Culture 12 (3).
- ^ a b M. S. Khan (1976). "al-Biruni and the Political History of India", Oriens 25, p. 86-115.
- ^ Online text: "Judaism And The Koran Biblical And Talmudic Backgrounds Of The Koran And Its Commentaries (1962) Author: Abraham I. Katsh". Internet Archive. 1962. Retrieved 2007-04-18.
- ^ Lester, Toby (1 January 1999). "What Is the Koran?". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 25 August 2012.
- S2CID 162350288. Retrieved 29 January 2020.
- ^ Donner 1998 p. 23
- ^ a b Crone, P., Slaves on Horses, Cambridge, 1980, 15-16
- ISBN 9781573927871.
- ^ Donner 1998 p. 38
- ^
ISBN 9780521529495. Retrieved 2018-04-14.
- ^
ISBN 9781593331023. Retrieved 2018-04-14.
- ^
ISBN 9781139431606. Retrieved 2018-04-14.
- ISSN 1556-5068.
- ^ Atlantic Monthly Journal, Atlantic Monthly article: What is the Koran Archived 2006-02-02 at the Wayback Machine ,January 1999
- ^ Ohlig, The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research into Its Early History, Muhammad as a Christological Honorific Title 2008 interview http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-478/_nr-756/i.html
- ^ Der frühe Islam: eine historisch-kritische Rekonstruktion anhand zeitgenössischer Quellen, Karl-Heinz Ohlig, p.333, Verlag Hans Schiler, 2007
- ISBN 9781573927871.
- ^ Halevi, Leor. Muhammad's Grave : Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society. New York (N.Y.): Columbia University Press, 2007 and 2011.
Bibliography
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- ISBN 978-0878501274.
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- ISBN 0-521-64696-0.
- ISBN 978-0299102142.
External links
- Muslim historiography an article by online Britannica