Abstract
This chapter concisely addresses the fundamental issue faced when trying to reconstruct the seventh century and early Islam: the intensely problematic nature of the Islamic sources. The texts on which conventional understandings tend to rely—notably the works of al-Balādhurī and al-Ṭabarī—were written centuries after the events they purport to describe and were ultimately based on a mercurial oral tradition. It is argued that they could not have accurately captured the world of Classical Islam’s seventh-century ancestors. Recent advances in the study of the Islamic historical tradition are, however, acknowledged as giving good reason not to dismiss the later texts entirely. Comparative study with other, more contemporary sources has proved itself one way of sifting sound information from the questionable. The chapter ends by asking whether there is any other kind of comparative approach that could prove fruitful.
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Notes
- 1.
M.J. de Goeje, ed., Liber expugnationis regionum auctore Imámo Ahmed ibn Jahja ibn Djábir al-Beládsorí (Brill, 1866).
- 2.
H. Kennedy , The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (Longman: Harlow, 1986) 356.
- 3.
J. Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford, 1964) 24–27 for the development of the office of qāḍī.
- 4.
M.J. de Goeje, ed., Annales quos scripsit Abu Djafar Mohammed ibn Djarir at-Tabari Vol. 4 (Brill, 1879–1901). The quote is taken from a speech given to a Persian commander by an Arabian captive—one of the many that resemble the episode quoted in Chap. 1—who assures him the Sasanian cause is hopeless as God, quite naturally, will give victory to the Muslims.
- 5.
C. Becker and F. Rosenthal, ‘al-Balādhurī’ , in P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs, eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam: Second Edition (Brill Online) accessed 5 June 2015.
- 6.
R. Hoyland , Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, 1997) 4 gives 780 as the date by which Islam crystallised into its Classical form.
- 7.
A. Al-Azmeh , The Arabs and Islam in Late Antiquity: A Critique of Approaches to Arabic Sources (Gerlach Press: Berlin, 2014) vii.
- 8.
Hoyland , Seeing Islam, 32–48.
- 9.
P. Crone , Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, 1987), 203–230 for a useful summary of her arguments with examples. See also P. Crone , Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, 1980) 3–17, which also highlights the role of later polemic in twisting historical transmission and presentation.
- 10.
Crone , Meccan Trade, 50.
- 11.
Crone , Meccan Trade, 218.
- 12.
J. Robson, ‘al-Buk̲h̲ārī, Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl’, in P. Bearman et al., ed., Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, accessed 20 May 2015.
- 13.
R. Humphreys, Islamic Tradition: A Framework for Inquiry (London, 1991) x for the source material; 78 for the entirely divergent readings it has provoked.
- 14.
G. Juynboll , Muslim Tradition: Studies in chronology, provenance, and authorship of early ḥadīth (Cambridge, 1983) 70–76 for a concise summary of his argument.
- 15.
Al-Azmeh , The Arabs and Islam, esp. 4–38.
- 16.
Probably one of the more comprehensive as well as controversial attempts to do so, with a heavy stress on archaeological evidence, is Y.D. Nevo and J. Koren, Crossroads to Islam: The origins of the Arab religion and the Arab state (Prometheus: Amherst, N.Y., 2003). Even though it was formally published relatively recently in 2003, it had circulated in typescript for almost a decade previously—as revealed for instance by its citation in Hoyland , Seeing Islam, 801—and seems to have been all but finalised upon the death of one of its authors in 1992. It makes reference to very little scholarship published after the early 1990s.
- 17.
Hoyland , Seeing Islam, esp. 545–559.
- 18.
H. Munt, with contributions from T. Daryaee, O. Edaibat, R. Hoyland , and I. Toral-Niehoff, ‘Arabic and Persian sources for Pre-Islamic Arabia’, in G. Fisher, ed., Arabs and Empires before Islam (Oxford, 2015) 434–500; see 450 for an example of al-Ṭabarī’s confused chronology.
- 19.
Ibid, 460.
- 20.
Ibid, 454–474.
- 21.
J. Howard -Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford, 2010) 372.
- 22.
Humphreys, Islamic Tradition, 80.
- 23.
Juynboll himself remained deeply uncertain that ‘we will ever be able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that what we have in the way of “sound prophetic tradition” is indeed just what it purports to be’ (Muslim Tradition, 71).
- 24.
H. Kennedy , The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State (Routledge: London & New York, 2001) esp. 4–5 demonstrates this tendency. ‘Arabs’ and ‘Persian soldiers’ are presented as rigid and immutable categories of person.
- 25.
See, for instance, al-Azmeh , The Arabs and Islam, esp. 83–86 for the academic quest for—and defence of the notion of—a Grundschicht.
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Wakeley, J.M. (2018). The Problem of the Islamic Sources. In: The Two Falls of Rome in Late Antiquity. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69796-3_3
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