The study of islam pre-1969

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jul 5, 2011 at 21:06

Thank you Dr. Pipes for such great article

Little did I know, but by taking up Islamic history when I did meant slipping in before the deluge of revisionism. Back in 1969, scholars respected Islamic civilization while usually (but not always) maintaining a proudly Western outlook. Symbolic of old-fashioned learning, my first Middle East history professor assigned us Julius Wellhausen's study, Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (in English translation to be sure), published in 1902.

There is no doubt that even before 1969 there was a lot of skepticism about the history of early islam as transmitted by the Islamic historical tradition and indeed the great Wellhausen tried to apply the same tools of literary criticism that he applied with great results to his study of the Hebrew bible but this time it was the Qur'an in his prolegomena zur altesten Geschichte des Islams and it just did not work as it worked with the study of the Bible and it took another great German historian and that is Albrecht Noth and his quellenkritik he was able to prove through his form criticism that once you try to peel the layers the Qur'an as a text falls apart (see Crone) and this is why Wellhausen's Islamic prolegomena did not work and indeed Noth was also able to prove that the genre of Islamic literature called tarikh or history is no more that topoi and schemata that mean nothing and lead us no where and so much for Islam tarikh

The other pre 1969 significant scholarship in regard to the history of early Islam are the following

1. In study of the Hadith it was Ignaz Goldziher that proved beyond any doubt that the hadith is anachronistic and it represents the hopes, political and legal aspirations of the emerging Islam in the 3rd century of Islam in distant Mesopotamia and no hadith can be linked with the historical Muhammad and this was followed by Joseph Schacht's great work on the legal hadith where he went one step beyond Goldziher's conclusions by concluding that we can almost draw a line in the year 100 AH beyond which we have no way of connecting the isnads with the historical Muhammad and more evidence the hadith literature is late and it is all made up. In other words all the hadith is made up in later times

3. The concept of al-jahiliyya that is proposed by the Islamic historical tradition to explain the religious and liguistic converstion of the "civilized" to Islam and they became Arabic speakers when we should have expected that the Muslim invaders would have converted to the religions of the Middle east and they would have been Syriac or Greek or Coptic speakres by now. Karl Becker another great German historian was able to prove with ease that the evidence that we have just does not support historical discontinuity in his celebrated phrase: with out Alexander the great there wouls have been no Islamic civilization and that history is about continuity

4. Now i move on to Henri Lammens and yes he hated Islam but in his study of the sira he was able to demolish any hope that the sira literature be it Ibn Ishaq's al-sira al-nabawiyya or al-Waqidi al-Maghazi (and for this see his fatal attack on the sira in his monumental work Fatima and the daughters of MUhmmad and the age of Muhammad and the chronology of the sira), that the sira is not an independent historical source and that is no more than another form of Quranic exegesis and no more. And no serious student of early Islam would be foolish enough to do any more serious research in the sira until we know where to go from here and this is why Karen Armstrong's book Muhammad is such a poor book and really no more than poor scholarly work

So much for the islamic sira

5. The next comes from another great German historian and that is Noldecke who was puzzled by the foreign vocabulary of the Qur'an and indded pointed out that the likes of ahad and furqan are Syriac words and not Arabic words and indeed it would make lots of sense as the major language in the Middle East in the late antique period was Syriac. And like it or not Christoph Luxenberg in his Syro-Aramiac reading of the Qur'an makes a good case for Easter in the Qur'an and Christmas in the Qur'an and that a LBDA must be 3ABDA and is he right or wrong? This is indeed a problem with the study of early Islam as here in the US students are not expected to have knowledge of Semitic languages and Syriac in particular and only Arabic is enough

And this is only before 1969 in the second part I will review the changes in the study of early Islam from about 1975 and John Wansbrough until now

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