Revisionist school of Islamic studies

The revisionist school of Islamic studies (also critical school of Islamic studies and critical historians of Islam)^[1] is a movement in Islamic studies^[2][3][4] that questions traditional Muslim narratives of Islam's origins.^[5][6]

Until the early 1970s,^[7] non-Muslim Islamic scholars, while not accepting accounts of divine intervention, accepted Islam's origin story^[8] "in most of its details",^[9] and accepted the reliability of its traditional literary sources – tafsir (commentaries on the Quran),^[10] hadith (accounts of what the Islamic prophet Muhammad approved or disapproved of), and sira (biographies of Muhammad).

Revisionists instead use a "source-critical" approach to this literature, as well as studying relevant archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and contemporary non-Arabic literature.^[11] They believe that those methodologies provide "hard facts" and an ability to crosscheck, and that traditional Islamic accounts, written 150 to 250 years after Muhammad, are/were subject to biases of and embellishments by the authors and transmitters.^[12]

Sasanid-style coins of early Islamic period, (Pahlavi scripts, crescent-star, fire altar, depictions of Khosrow II, bismillāh in margin). Unlike known historical figures such as Ibn Zubayr and Mu'awiya I, there are no coins minted in the names of caliphs titled Rashidun that could be evidence of official dominancy.^[13]

The school is thought to have originated in the 1970s and includes (or included) scholars such as John Wansbrough and his students Andrew Rippin, Norman Calder, G. R. Hawting, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, as well as Günter Lüling, Yehuda D. Nevo, Tom Holland, and Christoph Luxenberg.^[14] It is "by no means monolithic" and while its proponents share "methodological premises", they have offered "conflicting accounts of the Arab conquests and the rise of Islam".^[15] It is sometimes contrasted with "traditionist" historians of Islam who do accept the traditional origin story,^[1] though adherence to the two approaches is "usually implicit" rather than "stated openly".^[16]

Main theses

Revisionists suggest that the events in early Islamic times have to be newly researched and reconstructed with the help of the historical-critical/source critical method (the process of evaluating the validity, reliability, relevance, etc., of a source, to the subject under investigation). Revisionists are unwilling to rely on the Quran or on hadith. From the study of alternate primary sources from the surrounding milieus, they argue that Islam started as a monotheistic movement that included Arabs and Jews alike. The movement arose at the northern fringe of the Arabian peninsula, close to the Byzantine and Persian Empires. The change of the qibla, the direction of prayer, from Jerusalem to Mecca may be an echo of this earlier movement. A group of researchers rejected the historical existence of Muhammad and stated that his biography dealt not with an historical figure, but with a legendary one^[a][17] (comparable to Jesus or to Moses).^[18] According to Volker Popp, "Ali" and "Muhammad" were not names, but titles of these figures.^[b]

The revisionists view the initial "Islamic expansion" as a secular Arab expansion; only after the ascension of the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750 CE) was an exclusive Arabian Islamic identity shaped, shifting the origin narrative to the Arabian peninsula. In broader outline the revisionists argue that:

Nature of early Islam

A "Pseudo-Byzantine" coin with depictions of the Byzantine Emperor Constans II holding the cross-tipped staff and globus cruciger. There was no specific Islamic-religious identity and political stance with sharp boundaries in the early Islamic period.^[21]

• Islam did not rise among polytheistic pagans in Mecca but in a milieu in which Jewish and Christian texts were well known. The "infidels" were not pagan polytheists but monotheists who were polemically considered to deviate slightly from monotheism.^[22][23]
• The connection between Muslims and Jews was very close in the early times of Islam. Jews too were called "believers" and were part of the ummah. Anti-Jewish texts such as the account of the slaughter in 5 AH of the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe came into being long after Muhammad when Islam had separated from Judaism.^[24]

Consolidation of religious authority

• In the beginning, secular and spiritual power were united in the person of the caliph. There were no special religious scholars. Religious scholars came into being only later and wrested the spiritual power from the caliphs.^[25]

Expansion of Islam

• The Islamic expansion was probably not an Islamic religiously-motivated expansion but a secular Arab expansion. The expansion did not initially result in oppression of the non-Muslim population.^[26]

Reshaped identity of early Islam

• After Muhammad, at least two phases were of major importance for the formation of Islam in its later shape:
  • The Umayyad Caliphate (661–750 CE), especially under Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (647–705, r. 685–705), shaped the Islamic narrative, creating an exclusive Arabian Islamic identity.^[27] Under the fifth Umayyad caliph, Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was built. There the word "Islam" appears for the first time. Until this moment the Muslims called themselves simply "believers", and the Arab empire minted coins showing Christian symbols. Abd al-Malik also plays a major role in the reworking of the Quranic text.^[28]
  • During the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258) practically all Islamic traditional texts about Islam's beginnings were written. The Abbasids, as the victorious party in the conflict with the Umayyads, had great interest in legitimizing their rule. This motivation obviously crept into the traditional texts.^[29]

Influence of conquered peoples

• Patricia Crone argues that Sharia was founded not on traditions of rasul allah, the messenger of God, Muhammad, but on the law "of the Near East as it had developed under Alexander. The Muslims sifted and systematized this law in the name of God, imprinting it with their own image in the process."^[30] This provincial law that "the Umayyad caliphate in general and Muawiya in particular" employed, became what we now call sharia after a "long period of adjustments by the ulama."^[31]
• Robert G. Hoyland also argues that if the basis for sharia was the doings and sayings of Muhammad, they must have been carefully noted and carefully transmitted to later ulama by the early salaf generation. However, that doctrine is belied by quotes of salaf Islamic scholars who specifically deny common use of hadith of Muhammad:
  • "I spent a year sitting with Abdullah ibn Umar [d. 693 CE, son of the second Caliph] and I did not hear him transmit anything from the prophet";^[32][33]
  • "I never heard Jabir ibn Zayd (d. c. 720) say 'the prophet said ...' and yet the young men round here are saying it twenty times an hour".^[34][33]
• According to Tom Holland, the conquering Arab warriors were overwhelmingly illiterate, and the early Ulama (the class of guardians, transmitters, and interpreters of religious knowledge in Islam) consisted overwhelmingly of conquered peoples (Zoroastrians and Jews), who converted to Islam and had a strong scholarly tradition.^[35]

Textual integrity of the Quran

• The Quranic text in use today shows many differences to the earliest existing manuscripts. A core part of the Quran may derive from Muhammad's annunciations, yet some parts of the Quran were definitively added later or were reworked later. In addition, many small deviations came into the text, as with other ancient texts that were manually copied and copied again.^[36]
• The existence and significance of Muhammad as a historical person depends especially on the question whether any or, if so, how many, parts of the Quran can be attributed to his time or whether all or most parts of the Quran came into being only after Muhammad's time. The researchers' opinions differ over that question.^[37] Fred Donner suggests an early date for the Quran.^[38] (That thesis has been abandoned by many in the 21st century because of studies and dating of early manuscripts.^[39] Tom Holland states that "the evidence seems to suggest" that the contemporary standard Quran "was uttered by Muhammad in the period that Muslim tradition has insisted that he lived".)^[40]
• The Quran is not written in a "pure" Arabic, as the Syriac language seems to have had a certain influence on the language of the Quran that was forgotten later. That could provide a possible explanation of why a fifth of the Quranic text is difficult to understand.^[41][42]

Origins and methodology

The influence of the different tendencies in the study of Islam in the West has waxed and waned. Ibn Warraq believes "the rise of this revisionist school" may be dated from the Fifth Colloquium of the Near Eastern History Group of Oxford University in July 1975,^[43] and Robert Hoyland believes that revisionists were ascendant in the 1970s and 1980s.^[1]

Until the early 1970s,^[7] non-Muslim Islamic scholars, while not accepting accounts of divine intervention, accepted its origin story^[8] "in most of its details",^[9] and the reliability of tafsir (commentaries on the Quran),^[10] hadith (accounts of what the Islamic prophet Muhammad approved or disapproved of), and sira (biography of the prophet). Revisionists instead use a "source-critical" approach to literature and study relevant archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, and contemporary non-Arabic literature.^[11] They believe that those methodologies provide "hard facts" and an ability to crosscheck, whereas traditional Islamic accounts, written 150 to 200 years after Muhammad, are/were subject to biases of and embellishments by the authors and transmitters.^[12]

Postwar scholarship

From World War II to sometime around the mid-1970s, there was what the scholar Charles Adams describes as "a distinctive movement in the West, represented in both religious circles and the universities, whose purpose" was to show both a "greater appreciation of Islamic religiousness" and to foster "a new attitude toward it"^[c] and in doing so make "restitution for the sins of unsympathetic, hostile, or interested approaches that have plagued the [pre-World War II] tradition of Western Orientalism."^[45] Herbert Berg gives Wilfred Cantwell Smith and W. Montgomery Watt as examples of proponents of this "irenic" approach to Islamic history,^[46] and notes that the approach necessarily clashed with the questions and potential answers of revisionists since these clashed with Islamic doctrine.

Studies of hadith

The revisionist school has been said to be based on the study of hadith literature by Islamic scholars Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921) and Joseph Schacht (1902–1969), who argued that the traditional Islamic accounts about Islam's early times, written 150 to 250 years after Muhammad, cannot be relied on as historical sources.^[47] Goldziher argued, in the words of R.S. Humphreys, "that a vast number of hadith accepted even in the most rigorously critical Muslim collections were outright forgeries from the late 8th and 9th centuries—and as a consequence, that the meticulous isnads which supported them were utterly fictitious."^[48]

Schacht argued Islamic law was not passed down without deviation from Muhammad but "developed... out of popular and administrative practice under the Umayyads, and this practice often diverged from the intentions and even the explicit wording of the Koran... norms derived from the Koran were introduced into Muhammadan law almost invariably at a secondary stage."^[49][50]

Extension of hadith-arguments

The revisionists extended that argument beyond hadith to other facets of Islamic literature: sira, Muhammad's biography; the history of the Quran's formation; and the historical developments under the first Islamic dynasty, the Umayyad Caliphate. Revisionists believe that the true historical events in the earliest times of Islam must be newly researched and reconstructed by applying the historical-critical method,^[4] or alternately, in the words of Cook and Crone, historians must "step outside the Islamic tradition altogether and start again."^[51] That requires using the

1. "source-critical approach to both the Koran and the Muslim literary accounts of the rise of Islam, the Conquest and the Umayyad period";^[52]
2. comparing traditional accounts with
   1. accounts from the seventh and eighth century CE that are external to the Muslim tradition;^[52]
   2. archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics^[11] from the seventh and eighth century CE—sources which should be preferred when there is a conflict with Muslim literary sources.^[52]

Revisionists believe that the results of those methods indicates that among other things, the break between the religion, governance, and culture of the pre-Islamic Persian and Byzantine civilization and those of the 7th-century Arab conquerors was not as abrupt as the traditional history describes, an idea advanced in the statement of the Fifth Colloquium of the Near Eastern History Group of Oxford University. Colloquium organizers argued that if "we begin by assuming that there must have been some continuity, we need either go beyond the Islamic sources or... reinterpret them."^[43]

Major representatives

Among the "foremost" proponents of revisionism are John Wansbrough (1928–2002), Patricia Crone (1945–2015), Michael Cook, Yehuda D. Nevo (1932–1992), and Fred M. Donner.^[47] The new movement originated at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London with the publications of two works by Wansbrough: Quranic Studies (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu (1978). Andrew Rippin (1950–2016), Norman Calder, G. R. Hawting, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook were students of Wansbrough. In 1977 Crone and Cook published Hagarism, which postulated, among other things, that Islam was established after, not before, the Arab conquests and that Mecca was not the original Islamic sanctuary.^[4] Later, both distanced themselves from the theses of Hagarism as too far-reaching but continued to "challenge both Muslim and Western orthodox views of Islamic history."^[4] Martin Hinds (1941–1988),^[53] also studied at SOAS and Robert G. Hoyland was a student of Patricia Crone.^[54]

In Germany at the Saarland University, Günter Lüling (1928–2014) and Gerd-Rüdiger Puin focused on the historical-critical research of the development of the Quran starting in the 1970s, and in the 2000s, Karl-Heinz Ohlig, Volker Popp, Christoph Luxenberg and Markus Groß argued that Muhammad was a legendary, not historical, figure. Hans Jansen from the Netherlands published a work in 2005/7 arguing in detail why he assumed that known accounts of Muhammad's life were legendary. Yehuda D. Nevo also questioned the historicity of Muhammad.^[d] Sven Kalisch, a convert to Islam, taught Islamic theology before he left the faith in 2008^[17] and questioned the historicity of Mohammad (as well as those of Jesus and Moses).^[18][e]

James A. Bellamy has done textual criticism of the Quran and his proposed "emendations," or corrections, of the traditional text of the Quran. Fred Donner, in his several books on early Islamic history, argued that it was only during the reign Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (685–705) that the early ecumenical monotheism of the Arab conquerors began to separate from Christians and Jews.

The popular historian Tom Holland's work In the Shadow of the Sword (2012)^[55][56] popularized the new research results and depicted a possible synthesis of the various revisionist approaches.

Publications

Scholarly

Non-Islamic testimonies about Muhammad's life describe him as the leader of the Saracens,^[57] believed to be descendants of Ishmael, lived in the northern regions; Arabia Petrae and Arabia Deserta.

Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977)

In Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook set aside traditional Islamic history to draw on archaeological evidence and contemporary documents in Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Syriac. They depict a 7th-century Arab conquest of Byzantine and Persian lands that is not yet "Islamic."^[58] According to various sources the conquered people (Greek Magaritai, Syriac Mahgre or Mahgraye) call their conquerors "Hagarenes," rather than Muslims. Instead of being inspired to conquest by a new prophet, holy book, and religion, the Arabs are described as being in alliance with the Jews by following a Jewish messianism to reclaim the Promised Land from the Byzantine Empire. The Qur'an came later, according to the authors, as a product of 8th-century edits of various materials drawn from a variety of Judeo-Christian and Middle-Eastern sources, and Muhammad was the herald of Umar, "the redeemer," a Judaic messiah.^[59]

Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987)

In Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, Patricia Crone argues that Mecca could not have been a hub of overland trade from Southern Arabia to Syria during the time of Muhammad,^[60] for several reasons. It was not on the overland trade route from Southern Arabia to Syria,^[60] and even if it had been, that land route was not very important compared to the maritime trade route^[60] and had ceased to be used by the end of the 2nd century CE.^[61] Meccan trade, except for Yemeni perfume, was mainly in cheap leather goods and clothing and occasionally in basic foodstuffs,^[62] which were not exported north to Syria, which already had plenty of them, but to nearby regions.^[63] Furthermore, the literature of Arab trading partners who kept track of Arab affairs (Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, and Coptic) makes no mention "of Quraysh (the tribe of Mohammed) and their trading center Mecca."^[64] All of that suggests traditional "histories" passed down about Muhammad's life as a Meccan merchant traveling far and wide and suffering at the hands of powerful Meccan tribes are "pure fabrications"^[65] and that it is far more likely Muhammad's career took place not in Mecca and Medina or in Southwestern Arabia at all but in Northwestern Arabia.

Hans Jansen, De Historische Mohammed (2005/2007)

The arguments against the plausibility of the classical Islamic traditions about Islam's beginnings were summarized by Hans Jansen in his work De Historische Mohammed. Jansen points out that the cryptic nature of the Quran, which usually alludes to events, rather than describing them, and seldom describes the situation for which a revelation was made causes the historically questionable traditions to be very important to interpret and understand the Quran. Many Islamic traditions came into being long after Muhammad on the basis of mere guesses for what situation a Quranic verse had been revealed. Because of those historically-questionable traditions, the interpretation of the Quran has been restricted ever since.

Non-scholarly

Ibn Warraq, an author known for his criticism of Islam, compiled several revisionist essays in his book The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. Fred Donner, reviewing the book, noted that by favoring Wansbrough's school of revisionism, the author presents a "one-sided selection," which fails to consider the challenges to thaT line of revisionism. The result is "a book that is likely to mislead many an unwary general reader."^[66]

Robert B. Spencer, a notable CRITIX OF Islam, wrote a popular work on Islamic Revisionist studies called Did Muhammad Exist?.

Heyday of the revisionist school

Hoyland believes the "heyday" of revisionism occurred sometime before the 1980s, when the "public profile of Islam" increased "massively," and, Hoyland argues, the "left-leaning" tendency of Western academics "shy" of criticizing Islam and "favored the traditionalist approach," while "pushing skeptics/revisionists to become more extreme." (Hoyland seeks to find a middle way between revisionism and uncritical "traditionalism.")^[1]

The designation revisionism was coined first by the opponents of the new academic movement and is still used by them partially with a less than positive connotation.^[67][68] Then, the media took up that designation to call the new movement with a concise catchword.^[69] Today, the adherents of the new movement also use Revisionism to designate themselves, but it mostly written in quotation marks and with a slightly self-mocking undertone.^[70]

Criticism of revisionism

The consequent historical-critical analysis of early Islam met severe resistance in the beginning since theses with far-reaching meaning were published. Especially Patricia Crone's and Michael Cook's book Hagarism (1977) stirred up a lot of harsh criticism. Important representatives of Revisionism like Crone and Cook meanwhile distanced themselves from such radical theses.^[71]

Criticism is expressed by researchers like Tilman Nagel, who aims at the speculative nature of some theses and shows that some revisionists lack some scholarly standards. On the other hand, Nagel accepts the basic impulse of the new movement to put more emphasis on the application of the historical-critical method.^[72] A certain tendency to take revisionists seriously becomes obvious such as by the fact that opponents address their criticism not any longer to "revisionism" alone but to "extreme revisionism" or "ultra-revisionism."^[73]

Gregor Schoeler discusses the revisionist school and depicts the early controversies. Schoeler considers revisionism to be too radical, but he welcomes the general impulse: "To have made us thinking about this all and much more remarkable things for the first time—or again, is without any doubt a merit of the new generation of the 'skeptics'."^[74]

François de Blois, who is Teaching Fellow at the Department of the Study of Religions at SOAS, London, rejects the application of the historical-critical method to Islamic texts. He argues that method was developed with Christian texts in mind and thus, although it has been accepted as sound to be applied universally to any text, religious or not, there is no reason to apply the method to Islamic texts.^[75]

See also

• Historicity of Muhammad
• Historiography of early Islam
• History of the Quran
• Narratives of Islamic Origins
• Nabataeans

Notes

1. In Nevo & Koren (2003): Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State
2. The titles given to Jesus by Assyrian Christians living in the Sasanian Empire are equivalent to Muhammad's New Testament benedictus, ευλογημένος. In a numismatic study, Popp identified coins dating to 16 AH inscribed with mhmd (Arabic written without vowels, but lacking the rasulullah, which became common later). Popp added Arab-Sasanian and Syrian coins inscribed with MHMT in the Pahlavi script, and also partly with mhmd in the Arabic script, combined with Christian symbolism in some cases.^[19][20]
3. Adams wrote in 1976 and did not mention revisionism ^[44]
4. in his 2003 work Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State
5. Kalisch rejected the idea of teaching Islamic theology without taking into consideration the new results of historical-critical research and as of 2008 was teaching the history of ideas in the Near East in Late Antiquity in Münster, Germany.^[17][18]