One primary factor which occasioned the various gradations of scepticism regarding Arabic literary sources is the view, neither remarkable nor surprising, that narrative sources reflected the concerns of periods subsequent to the events they narrate and during which they were composed, a view later enhanced and refined by reflections on motifemic and other kinds of literary patterning. Another factor concerns difficulties arising from material orally transmitted. We shall now turn to both in sequence, in order to show that the terms of the discussion are too much simplified and that the difficulties arising from the sources are by no means insurmountable or beyond the capacities of the sober-minded historian.

Initially, doubts were raised about the veracity and the authenticity of prophetic logia and exemplary deeds, the ḥadīth, by Ignaz Goldziher in the late nineteenth century, and these doubts were carried further, half a century later, by Josef Schacht, continued thereafter by the “Schacht renaissance” of which van Ess wrote. The reference being made here to hadīth has to do primarily with it being the first body of Arabic traditions treated in this way and in a consequent manner by modern scholarship, in a way that was to become paradigmatic overall; it provided a template according to which works of history properly so called were considered. That which makes a specific historical narrative a part of what was to become, technically, hadīth (and the meaning of the term was broad before it acquired a technical sense with the constitution of this particular genre, used interchangeably with athar, riwāya, and khabar), quite apart from having to do with the actions and sayings attributed to Muḥammad which the technical sense acquired gradually, is not so much the nature of this narrative or of its mode of transmission. It is the result of it having been integrated into a specific literary genre, as the purposes of this genre’s custodians developed, and as, in the fullness of time, it developed a number of formal technical desiderata.