THIS WORK is part of a collaboration between the Darwin Press and the Magnes Press to render the scholarship of Josef Horovitz on early Islamic history and historiography more widely available, both to students unfamiliar with German, the language in which many of Horovitz’ studies were written, and to colleagues in adjacent fields who have not previously encountered his work. Originally the project envisaged one volume containing all of the selected essays, but the present study was so much larger and so dominated the collection that in the end it was decided to publish it separately, with its own index and bibliography.

The origins of my own involvement with this work go back to 1974, when the late C.K. Zurayk, my first teacher in Western and Islamic historiography, suggested, inter alia, that I read everything I could find by Horovitz to prepare for the comprehensive examinations for my MA in the History Department at the American University of Beirut. Some years later I was again reminded of the study’s importance when I was translating A. A. Duri’s The Rise of Historical Writing among the Arabs, which frequently refers to it. Notes and corrections gradually accumulated on my own copy of the text, and later the progress of the Late Antiquity and Early Islam project, which seeks to establish broader bases for communication among the various distinct fields involved in the study of this period, suggested that perhaps it would be worthwhile to proceed further with this material. Issues that arose in the course of this work are discussed below in the Editor’s Introduction.

I would like to express my thanks, in the first instance, to the Horovitz family, and especially to Professor Menachem Horovitz, for authorising and encouraging this project. I am also grateful, as always, to Darwin Press and its Managing Director, Ed Breisacher, for their unfailing confidence in and support of an Unrepentently scholarly enterprise at a time when commercial considerations reign supreme in academic publishing. Mark Conrad keyboarded the text, and users of the index will immediately recognise the fine work of Barbara Hird, registered indexer of the Society of Indexers.