In the concluding section of a major work, Josef van Ess commented on the Methodenstreit besetting studies of Paleo-Islam. Insisting, characteristically, that questions of method should arise from the sources themselves, rather than from what he regards as some epigonal or parasitic relationship to disciplines other than Islamic Studies, he added that the parties to the dispute, particularly the party characterised by what I shall describe as a hyper-critical attitude towards the sources, were fired by institutional groupdynamics and what he calls “Fortschrittspathos,” observing, rather hopefully but not entirely mistakenly, that we have now reached a point where “the old fronts” have lost their attractiveness. Very broadly characterised, these “fronts” are the source-critical and the tradition-historical, the former originally identified with Wellhausen, the latter with Goldziher, followed by Schacht in mid-century and the late twentieth-century Schacht “renaissance,” after a period of abeyance during which the scholarship of Goldziher had not been much in evidence.

These two approaches to the early Arabic sources were established by scholars who in their times were pioneers: Goldziher, the veritable founder of Islamic Studies, alive to contemporary philology and the history of religion, and Wellhausen, the founder of Arab history as a branch of international historical scholarship as well as “the Darwin of Deuteronomy.” Both approaches were revived a century later in terms of a dispute over the reliability and the very utility of Arabic literary sources for the reconstruction of the Paleo-Muslim period, with a considerable sharpening of boundaries. The initiative was taken, and the challenge was offered, by a hyper-critical school, sometimes expressing itself often with a tart celebration of “Fortschrittspathos” expressed in daring and imaginative views, at others times with a plodding pace spawning one improbable conjecture after another, but in all cases with little conceptual alteration of certain nineteenth-century approaches to the writing of history.

Van Ess's is a conservative position, but is yet, not unlike Wellhausen's when regarded from today's perspective, one which draws on the strengths of philological research to yield historical reconstructions of considerable importance, and produces results that push far beyond what conservative scholarship might be expected to produce.