Category:Early Islamic Studies

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This page is edited by Carlos A. Segovia, Camilo José Cela University, Spain, and Emilio González Ferrín, University of Seville, Spain

Overview

Early Islamic Studies is a field of research that specializes in the study of formative Islam in its Jewish-Christian setting and early Islamic history and culture. 4 Enoch focuses on Second Temple Judaism, i.e. the period from the Babylonian exile to the Bar-Kokhba Revolt. Here the Encyclopedia offers a selection of the most influential scholarly and fictional works in the field of Early Islamic Studies by international specialists and authors. Some of these works touch upon "Second Temple Judaism" too, as they study the interrelationship between Jewish, Christian and Islamic Origins and the reinterpretation of Jewish and Christian traditions in the early Islamic tradition. Even when works do not include references to Second Temple Judaism, they have however deeply affected the understanding of Second Temple Judaism and the development of scholarly research in the field.

History

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 Syro-Palestinian and Mesopotamian spatial locations are currently being explored. 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 whose core many contemporary scholars agree to be a kind of “palimpsest” originally formed by different, independent writings in which encrypted passages from the OT Pseudepigrapha, the NT Apocrypha and other writings of Jewish, Christian and Manichaean provenance 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. Likewise the earliest Islamic community is presently regarded by many scholars as a somewhat undetermined 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. Finally the biography 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 the earliest biographical accounts at our disposal. 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. Surveying the history of these three competing views and their different approaches to the manner in which Islam emerged, the role played by Muhammad and the nature of the Qur'an should provide a comprehensive overview of the significance of this particular field of research for late-antique religious studies, both Jewish and Christian.

Early modern Islamic studies and the traditional approach to the origins of Islam, Muhammad and the Qur'an

The founding in Paris in 1795 of the École Spéciale des Langues Orientales Vivantes marks off the beginnings of modern Islamic studies, for it was under the school's second director, Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, that the first systematic curriculum for the teaching of Islamic languages, culture and civilisation was established in Europe. Yet the modern study of the Qur'an began with Gustav Flügel (1802-1870), Gustav Weil (1808-1889) and Theodor Nöldeke (1836-1930) in Germany. Flügel published the first modern edition of the Qur'an in 1834 (which was largely used before the Royal Cairo edition of 1923) and a Concordance to its Arabic text in 1842, whereas both Weil and Nöldeke published in 1844 and 1860, respectively, two historical-critical introductions to the Quranic textus receptus of which Weil's knew a second edition in 1878 and Nöldeke's, initially published in Latin in 1856 and later completed by Friedrich Schwally (in 1909 and 1919) and Gotthelf Bergsträsser and Otto Pretzl (in 1938), soon became the seminal and most authoritative work in the field, gaining wide, even uncontested reputation until the present day. As to Muhammad, the first modern studies were those published by Abraham Geiger (1810-1878) in 1833, Gustav Weil in 1843, Aloys Sprenger (1813-1893) between 1861 and 1865, William Muir (1819-1905) between 1858 and 1861, and again Nöldeke in 1863. Geiger's pioneering essay on Muhammad's life was also the first work to explore a number of possible early Islamic borrowings from Judaism, whilst its apparent Christian influences (on which a few authors like Ignaz Goldziher and Henry Preserved Smith already had provided some useful insights in the second half of the 19th century) were first systematically explored by Carl-Heinrich Becker in 1907. But modern scholarship on Islam's origins is indebted too to the groundbreaking works of Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), whose Muhammedanische Studien, published in 2 vols. between 1889 and 1890, represented a first, successful and in many ways still valid attempt to thoroughly examine the making and early development of Islamic identity, and its literature, against its complex historical and religious setting.

For the most part, however, and notwithstanding their undeniable intrinsic value, these early studies (save those of Geiger and especially Goldziher, which were little conventional in both their approach and conclusions) tended to adopt and either explicitly or implicitly subscribe, and thus validate, the grand narrative of Islam's origins provided in the early Islamic sources. This is particularly noticeable in Nöldeke's case, whose chronology of the Qur'an largely follows the traditional Muslim chronology, and whose approach to the Quranic text as a single-authored unitary document is nowadays considered too naif, and accordingly regarded as outdated, by an increasing number of scholars. After all Nöldeke had studied with, and was the most salient disciple of, Heinrich Ewald (1803-1875), a German conservative theologian and orientalist who opposed the new critical methods essayed by Ferdinand-Christian Baur and the Tübingen School in the neighbouring field of early Christian studies. In Ewald's view, all a scholar of early Islam was expected to do was to learn as much Arabic as possible and willingly accept the traditional account of the rise of Islam provided in the early Islamic sources, which veracity ought not to be questioned.

Moderately revisionist approaches

Defenders of moderately revisionist approaches contend that even though some of the early written sources of Islam may date to a later period, they are reliable enough and offer us a fair picture of the events they comment upon or describe. Some of the details they provide us with might be contradictory and even doubtful, yet the master narrative that they support should remain unchallenged, as there is no real reason to question it.

Radically revisionist approaches

Conversely, defenders of radically revisionist approaches sustain that the whole narrative of Islamic origins must be revised, reframed, and retold differently.

From "Islamic Religious Studies" to "New Islamic Studies"?

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