THIS VOLUME comprises a new edition of The Earliest Biographies of the Prophet and Their Authors, a pioneering study on early Islamic historiography relating to the life of Muḥammad written by the German Orientalist Josef Horovitz (1874-1931) and published in four parts in the first two issues of the Hyderabad journal Islamic Culture in 1927 and 1928. It is a companion to a second volume, Studies on Early Islamy containing article-length essays by the same author. Fuller details on Horovitzlife, career, and general perspectives on his chosen subject are dealt with in the introduction to that volume;here my remarks will be limited to some observations on Horovitz place in the development of the study of early Islamic history and sīra historiography within European Orientalism and a few comments on the present edition of his work.

Nineteenth-Century Scholarship on Early Islam

European scholarship on early Islamic history and historiography made important advances in the half century prior to the career of Josef Horovitz. In a pattern reflective of a broad trend toward the professionalisation of Orientalist scholarship, which was centred in Germany and the Netherl ands, studies on the field were increasingly becoming the preserve of professors in the universities. Research was primarily of a philological and textual orientation, largely but not entirely due to the decisive role played by one scholar, H.L. Fleischer (1801-88), who took up the chair of Semitic studies at Leipzig in 1835 and remained there for more than 50 years. Fleischer was a major force behind the foundation of the Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft in 1845, and he trained three generations of students who went on to teach all over Europe and certainly dominated the study of the Middle East in Germany. It would be accurate but unfair to say that he was a scholar with no ability for synthesis: though the texts whose study Fleischer encouraged and promoted so decisively were historical and cultural documents, history was only an emerging discipline in European universities anyway, "Kulturgeschichte" was unknown until the last decade of his life, and Fleischer never claimed to be anything other than a philologist.