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==History of Muslim historiography==
==History of Muslim historiography==
The first detailed writings on the subject of historiography itself appeared in the works of the [[Muslim]] historian and historiographer [[Ibn Khaldun]] (1332-1406), who is regarded as the "[[List of people known as father or mother of something|father of historiography]]", especially for his historiographical writings in the ''[[Muqaddimah]]'' ([[Latin]]ized as ''Prolegomena'') and ''Kitābu l-ʕibār'' (''Book of Advice'').<ref>S. Ahmed (1999). ''A Dictionary of Muslim Names''. C. Hurst & Co. Publishers. ISBN 1850653569.</ref> His ''Muqaddimah'' also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of [[state]], [[communication]], [[propaganda]] and [[systematic bias]] in history.<ref>H. Mowlana (2001). "Information in the Arab World", ''Cooperation South Journal'' '''1'''.</ref>
The first detailed writings on the subject of historiography itself appeared in the works of the [[Muslim]] historian and historiographer [[Ibn Khaldun]] (1332-1406), who is regarded as the father of [[historiography]] and the [[philosophy of history]], especially for his historiographical writings in the ''[[Muqaddimah]]'' ([[Latin]]ized as ''Prolegomena'') and ''Kitābu l-ʕibār'' (''Book of Advice'').<ref>S. Ahmed (1999). ''A Dictionary of Muslim Names''. C. Hurst & Co. Publishers. ISBN 1850653569.</ref> His ''Muqaddimah'' also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of [[state]], [[communication]], [[propaganda]] and [[systematic bias]] in history.<ref>H. Mowlana (2001). "Information in the Arab World", ''Cooperation South Journal'' '''1'''.</ref>


[[Muslim]] historical writings first began developing earlier from the 7th century with the reconstruction of [[Muhammad]]'s life in the centuries following his death. Due to numerous conflicting narratives regarding Muhammad and his [[Sahaba|companions]] from various sources, it was necessary to verify which sources were more reliable. In order to evaluate these sources, various methodologies were developed, such as the "science of [[biography]]", "[[science of hadith]]" and "[[Isnad]]" (chain of transmission). These methodologies were later applied to other historical figures in the [[Muslim world]].
[[Muslim]] historical writings first began developing earlier from the 7th century with the reconstruction of [[Muhammad]]'s life in the centuries following his death. Due to numerous conflicting narratives regarding Muhammad and his [[Sahaba|companions]] from various sources, it was necessary to verify which sources were more reliable. In order to evaluate these sources, various methodologies were developed, such as the "science of [[biography]]", "[[science of hadith]]" and "[[Isnad]]" (chain of transmission). These methodologies were later applied to other historical figures in the [[Muslim world]].

Revision as of 15:28, 16 July 2007

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 traditional 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. A consideration of oral transmissions in general with some specific early Islamic reference is Jan Vansina's "Oral Tradition as History."

History of Muslim historiography

The first detailed writings on the subject of historiography itself appeared in the works of the Muslim historian and historiographer Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), who is regarded as the father of historiography and the philosophy of history, especially for his historiographical writings in the Muqaddimah (Latinized as Prolegomena) and Kitābu l-ʕibār (Book of Advice).[1] His Muqaddimah also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of state, communication, propaganda and systematic bias in history.[2]

Muslim historical writings first began developing earlier from the 7th century with the reconstruction of Muhammad's life in the centuries following his death. Due to numerous conflicting narratives regarding Muhammad and his companions from various sources, it was necessary to verify which sources were more reliable. In order to evaluate these sources, various methodologies were developed, such as the "science of biography", "science of hadith" and "Isnad" (chain of transmission). These methodologies were later applied to other historical figures in the Muslim world.

Ilm ar-Rijal (Arabic) is the "science of biography" especially as practiced in Islam, where it was first applied to the sira, the life of the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, and then the lives of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs who expanded Islamic dominance rapidly. Since validating the sayings of Muhammad is a major study ("Isnad"), accurate biography has always been of great interest to Muslim biographers, who accordingly became experts at sorting out facts from accusations, bias from evidence, etc., and were renowned throughout the known world for their honesty in recording history. Modern practices of scientific citation and historical method owe a great deal to the rigor of the Isnad tradition of early Muslims. The earliest surviving Islamic biography is Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah, written in the 8th century.

The "science of hadith" is the process that Muslim scholars use to evaluate hadith. The classification of Hadith into Sahih (sound), Hasan (good) and Da'if (weak) was firmly established by Ali ibn al-Madini (161 AH - 234 AH). Later, al-Madini's student Muhammad al-Bukhari (810 - 870) authored a collection that he believed contained only Sahih hadith, which is now known as the Sahih Bukhari.

The study of Egyptology began in Arab Egypt from the 9th century. The first known attempts at deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs were made by Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya in the 9th century, who were able to at least partly understand what was written. Abdul Latif al-Baghdadi, a teacher at Cairo's Al-Azhar University in the 13th century, wrote detailed descriptions on ancient Egyptian monuments.[3] Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (838-923) is known for writing a detailed and comprehensive chronicle of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history in his History of the Prophets and Kings in 915.

Until the 10th century, history most often meant political and military history, but this was not so with Persian historian Biruni (973-1048). In his Kitab fi Tahqiq ma l'il-Hind (Researches on India), he did not not record political and military history in any detail, but wrote more on India's cultural, scientific, social and religious history. He also discussed more on his idea of history in another work The Chronology of the Ancient Nations.[4] Biruni is considered the father of Indology for his detailed studies on Indian history.[5] Other famous Muslim historians included Urwah (d. 712), Ibn Ishaq (d. 761), Al-Waqidi (745-822), Ibn Hisham (d. 834), and Ibn Hajar (1372-1449), among others.

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 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."[6]

Traditional Islamic sources for early Islamic history

See also: List of Islamic texts

7th Century Islamic sources

7th Century non-Islamic sources

There are numerous early references to Islam in non-Islamic sources, many have been collected in historiographer Robert G. Hoyland's compilation Seeing Islam As Others Saw It. One of the first books to analyze these works was Hagarism authored by Michael Cook and Patricia Crone. Hagarism concludes that looking at the early non-Islamic sources provides a much different and more accurate picture of early Islamic history than the later Islamic sources do, although its thesis has little acceptance. For some, the date of composition is controversial. Some provide an account of early Islam which significantly contradicts the traditional Islamic accounts of two centuries later.

See also: External References to Islam.

7th Century ambiguous sources

Islamic historians

Western-style secular scholarship

The 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:

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 in his "Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?" (1833). Geiger's themes were continued in Rabbi Abraham I. Katsh's "Judaism and the Koran" (1962)[8]

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:

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 to 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:

In 1977, Crone and Cook published Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, 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 based upon a contemporary body of non-Muslim sources to many early Islamic events. If such events could not be supported by outside evidence, then (according to Crone and Cook) they should be dismissed as myth.

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.

In her book Meccan Trade And The Rise Of Islam, Crone states:

If one storyteller should happen to mention a raid, the next one would tell you the exact date of this raid, and the third one would furnish you even more details. Waqidi (d. 823), who wrote years after Ibn Ishaq (d. 768), will always give precise dates, locations, names, where Ibn Ishaq has none, accounts of what triggered the expedition, miscellaneous information to lend color to the event, as well as reasons why, as was usually the case, no fighting took place. No wonder that scholars are fond of Waqidi: where else does one find such wonderfully precise information about everything one wishes to know? But given that this information was all unknown to Ibn Ishaq, its value is doubtful in the extreme. And if spurious information accumulated at this rate in the two generations between Ibn Ishaq and Waqidi, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that even more must have accumulated in the three generations between the Prophet and Ibn Ishaq. [9]

Claims for the late composition of the Qur'an have also been reinforced 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. His research team made 35,000 microfilm photographs of the manuscripts; Puin has not published the entirety of his work, but he has stated that there were 2 versions of the text in the manuscript, one written over the other, thus putting into the question the Muslim beliefs in the invariancy of the Qur'an. He has dated the documents to the early part of the 8th century.[10].

Contemporary scholars have begun to turn to the 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:

Bridging the divide

A few scholars have managed to bridge the divide between Islamic and Western-style secular scholarship.[citation needed] They have completed both Islamic and Western academic training.

Bibliography

  • 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
  • Vansina, Jan "Oral Tradition as History," University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1985
  • [3] and following; an Islamic view of the development of the academic study of Islam

References

  1. ^ S. Ahmed (1999). A Dictionary of Muslim Names. C. Hurst & Co. Publishers. ISBN 1850653569.
  2. ^ H. Mowlana (2001). "Information in the Arab World", Cooperation South Journal 1.
  3. ^ Dr. Okasha El Daly (2005), Egyptology: The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings, UCL Press, ISBN 1844720632. (cf. Arabic Study of Ancient Egypt, Foundation for Science Technology and Civilisation.)
  4. ^ M. S. Khan (1976). "al-Biruni and the Political History of India", Oriens 25, p. 86-115.
  5. ^ Zafarul-Islam Khan, At The Threshhold Of A New Millennium – II, The Milli Gazette.
  6. ^ Historiography. The Islamic Scholar.
  7. ^ 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)"
  8. ^ Online text: "Judaism And The Koran Biblical And Talmudic Backgrounds Of The Koran And Its Commentaries (1962) Author: Abraham I. Katsh". Internet Archive. Retrieved 2007-04-18.
  9. ^ Patricia Crone, Mecan Trade and the rise of Islam, (1987), pp. 223-224
  10. ^ Atlantic Monthly Journal, Atlantic Monthly article: What is the Koran ,January 1999
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