Category:Early Islamic Studies

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Early Islamic Studies is a field of research that specializes in the study of formative Islam in its Jewish-Christian setting.

• This page is edited by Carlos A. Segovia, Camilo José Cela University, Spain

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Overview

The connections between formative Islam and late antique Judaism and Christianity have long deserved the attencion of scholars of Islamic origins. Since the 19th century, Muhammad’s early Christian background, on the one hand, his complex attitude – and that of his immediate followers – towards both Jews and Christians, on the other hand, and, finally, the presence of Jewish and Christian religious motifs in the Quranic text and in the Hadith corpus, have been widely studied in the West. Yet from the 1970s onwards, a seemingly major shift has taken place in the study of Islam origins. Whereas the grand narratives of Islamic origins traditionally contained in the earliest Muslim writings have been usually taken to describe with some accuracy the hypothetical emergence of Islam in mid-7th-century Arabia, they are nowadays increasingly regarded as too late and ideologically biased – in short, as too eulogical – to provide a reliable picture of Islamic origins. Accordingly, new timeframes going from the late 7th to the mid-8th century (i.e. from the Marwanids to the Abbasids) and alternative, mainly Syro-Palestinian, spatial locations are currently being explored. Likewise, the earliest Islamic community is presently regarded by many scholars as a somewhat indetermined monotheistic group that evolved from an original Jewish-Christian milieu into a distinct Muslim group perhaps much later than commonly assumed and in a rather unclear way, either within or tolerated by the new Arab polity in the Fertile Crescent or outside and initially opposed to it. On the other hand, a renewed attention is also being paid to the once very plausible pre-canonical redactional and editorial stages of the Qur’an, a book that many contemporary scholars agree to be a kind of “palimpsest” originally formed by different, independent writings in which encripted passages from the OT Pseudepigrapha, the NT Apocrypha, and several Christian hymns may be found, and whose liturgical and/or homiletical function contrasts with the juridical purposes set forth, and projected onto the Quranic text, by the later established Muslim tradition. Finally, the historicity of Muhammad, the founding figure of Islam, has also been challenged in recent times due to the paucity and, once more, the late date and the apparently literary nature of his earliest biographies. In sum, three overall trends define today the field of early Islamic studies: (a) the traditional Islamic view, which many non-Muslim scholars still uphold as well; (b) a number of radically revisionist views which have contributed to reshape afresh the contents, boundaries and themes of the field itself by reframing the methodological and hermeneutical categories required in the academic study of Islamic origins; and (c) several moderately revisionist views that stand half way between the traditional point of view and the radically revisionist views.

The traditional approach to Islamic origins

Moderately revisionist approaches

Radically revisionist approaches

References

External links