The Nature of Early Islamic Sources and Academics' Differing Views of their Historical Significance

Abstract

This paper offers a reconsideration of the Arab-Islamic resources which form the basis for Arab history. Written up to 150 years after the events they describe, the histories in question cover multiple stylistic forms—narrative, literary, juristic, geographical, and books of Hadith, exegesis, biographies or tabaqat and translations. They lack archival documents or other material that might be considered a primary source. Researchers, especially orientalists, disagree on the validity of these secondary sources and their reliability for writing the history of early Muslim communities. This paper revisits that debate. It begins by enumerating the approaches adopted by historians working between the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The approaches were: descriptive, which trusts everything found in the Arab Islamic sources; critical, which relies on the same material but subjects it to stringent criticism and compares it with non-Arabic sources, especially Hellenic and Assyrian sources; and a skeptical approach that doubts the credibility of the material found in the Arab Islamic sources and favors the wholesale adoption of non-Arabic sources, even though these suffer from the same problems as the Arabic materials.