Non-Muslim Sources as Provocation of Islamic Studies

In 1977, three books appeared, all in England, that shook classical Islamic studies to its foundations: John Wansbrough's Quranic Studies, Patricia Crones and Michael Cook's Hagarism, and John Burton's The Collection of the Qurʾan. What all three authors have in common is that they consider the traditional accounts of early Islam and its culture, which had previously served Islamic studies for the most part as the most important basis for its critical research, to be untrustworthy or reject them altogether. This condemnation refers to the legal and historical traditions (aḥādīṯ and aḫbār), especially those concerning the life of Muḥammad (siyar, maġāzī) (Crone and Cook), as well as to the traditional accounts of the origin (collection, editing and dissemination) of the Qurʾānic text (Wansbrough, Burton, Crone and Cook). The reason for rejecting this material in all cases is mainly the fact that it is not based on contemporary accounts, but was only given the form it has today many generations later. The “sceptics” or “revisionists” base their theories and claims mostly on “external evidence” (coins, inscriptions), but especially also on non-Muslim historical sources that are supposedly older and more trustworthy than the Muslim ones and supposedly contradict them.

The reaction that the publication of these books triggered will not be discussed here, enough has been said about that. However, the discussion about whether the Muslim tradition is at all useful for the knowledge of what really happened, and whether the external, especially the non-Muslim sources, do not constitute a better path to this goal, is by no means finished. Even today, “revisionists” claim that the consonantal skeleton (rasm) of the Qurʾānic text only took on its final form around 700 after a lengthy process of stabilisation – some 50 years later than the Muslim tradition reports. However, the “revisionists” can no longer invoke Patricia Crone, “our field's most articulate skeptic” for their hypotheses; she has, in the Preface to her Collected Studies (2016), relying on and convinced by the research on a Palimpsest found in Ṣanʿāʾ fom the first century A.H., abandoned her earlier view.