An Overview of the Growth of Early Islamic Historiography

In the Introduction, we reviewed various approaches to the sources for Islamic origins, and cast a particularly critical eye on the most recent of these, what I have termed the skeptical approach. That critique offered a number of reasons for rejecting the skeptical approach, and suggested that what I have termed the tradition-critical approach appears to offer the best hope for sorting the wheat from the chaff in the early Islamic historiographical tradition. We noted at that time, however, that a convincing explanation and description of just why and how the extant narratives of Islamic origin came into existence was still wanting-and in the absence of a relatively clear and cogent picture of this process, the skeptical school, with its sweeping claim to have detected the wholesale rewriting of the history of Islamic origins by later tradition, would still have some appeal. The main objectives of the present work have been to situate the beginnings of historical writing in the Islamic community in its proper historical context (undertaken in Part I), and to provide some basis for understanding why the narratives of Islamic origin we have before us look the way they do (the task of Part II).

We can summarize our view of the emergence of historical writing in the early Islamic community as follows, drawing on the particular points discussed in the preceding chapters.

The community of Believers, preoccupied with issues of piety and living in accordance with the revealed Law (or with extra-Islamic concerns such as genealogy), lacked a properly hi storical vision of itself and had not yet clearly formulated historical questions related to its own self-conception . Individuals defined themselves simply as “Believers” ( mu ‘m inūn )-that is, they defined themselves by standards of piety and as part of a pietist movement-or according to “tribal” (i.e. extra- Islamic) conventions; they did not yet define themselves as members of a community defined historically, that is, by reference to specific historical events. Raw information about the recent past (including the life of Muḥammad, etc.) was available to the Believers during this phase in the form of personal memories or as incidental or contextual information embedded in stories that were related for moral, genealogical, or other purposes.