READING: A NOTE ON SOURCES OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE PROPHET'S LIFE AND EARLY ISLAMIC HISTORY

READING: A NOTE ON SOURCES OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE PROPHET'S LIFE AND EARLY ISLAMIC HISTORY

When we consider the context of the Quran, it is important to reflect on the sources of our knowledge. In order to answer this question, we need to gain a sense of how both Muslims and Western scholars have thought about the authenticity of historical information regarding early Islam. This is one of the most complex topics in Islamic studies, but we will endeavor to introduce it here, returning to some of these topics later in the course.

The question of the validity of sources received greatest attention from Muslim scholars when it came to hadith, or narrations of what the Prophet said, did and tacitly approved of. As the recipient of Revelation, Muslims have always seen the Prophet as a moral exemplar and guide for correct belief and action, and his sayings, actions and tacit approvals were deemed to be sources of law for the Sunni and Shii legal traditions, both of which coalesced in the 9th and 10th centuries.

But the problem was that large numbers of hadith had been forged by this time, often to suit political, sectarian or personal motives. As a response to this difficulty, Muslim scholars developed a complex system of hadith criticism, which required not only that there be an unbroken chain of transmitters (isnād) going back to the Prophet, before it could be taken seriously, but also that these transmitters (male and female) be considered morally upright and possessed of a sound memory. This chain of transmitters (isnād) usually preceded the text of the hadith (matn),  It would be no exaggeration to state that the sciences of critically investigating, corroborating and categorizing the hadith and their isnāds has occupied a significant proportion of Muslim scholarly attention over the centuries. Moreover, there are significant differences as well as overlaps in the hadiths considered reliable between Sunni and Shia Islam (in addition to the fact that the Shia include the hadith of their Imams), as well as differences of opinion among scholars within these traditions.

Western scholarship in the 19th and early 20th centuries, of which the most important scholars were Ignaz Goldziher (d.1921) and Joseph Schacht (d.1969) tended to be critical of the Islamic hadith sciences, sometimes almost discarding it wholesale. However, more recently, as Western scholars have gained greater knowledge of the complexity of Islamic scholarship and have carried out more penetrating research, of which that of Harald Motzki stands out, appreciation of the hadith as sources of knowledge about early Islam has grown. Although there are naturally significant differences in approaches to hadith between most Western academics and most Muslim scholars (we could call these epistemological differences), it is clear that Muslims have been engaged in source-critical analysis from very early in their history. We will discuss hadith more on Day 4 of this course.

Understanding early Islamic history, particularly the period of the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad, is closely related to understanding hadith, as Muslim historians would often critically appraise historical narrations using similar methods to the appraisal of hadith, and in many cases there is no definite line between historical narrations and the hadith themselves. The first Muslim historians that we know of were writing about 50 or 60 years after the Prophet passed away, and the earliest extant texts date from the late 2nd century of the Hijra, although many of these text contain extensive citations from earlier sources. From the earliest times these historical accounts were subject to critical investigation and debate. Furthermore, there often numerous accounts that do not agree with each other in all their details, which is a result of the oral nature of transmission. Nevertheless, when it comes to the lifetime of the Prophet himself there is a high level of agreement in the general series of events, though there is significant disagreement on the events that unfolded after he passed away.

Among Western scholars there have been diverse approaches to early Islamic history. Although most scholars also accept the general outlines of the Islamic account, there have also been ‘revisionists’ in recent decades, who have attempted to create pictures of early Islamic history without considering Muslim accounts. However, the accounts of these scholars differ widely and no coherent revisionist account that is widely accepted among scholars who take this approach.

When it comes to early Islamic history, as with so many other topics in this course, there are a wide variety of approaches available. What is particularly important for us here is to understand the reasons for this diversity, which generally derive from differing methods of weighing up the validity of the various historical sources.

When it comes to the Quran in its oral form, there are a limited number of recensions (qira’āt), usually numbered at 7 or 10, that are agreed upon as authentic by all Muslim schools today, and which differ only in minor vowel changes, adding minor nuances of meaning, but which can be all read from a single Arabic text in its simplest form (for in this form many of the vowels are not written). In Day 3, we will consider how the Quran came to be written down in codified form, as well as the earliest extant manuscripts, including the recently discovered Birmingham codex.