ALL PARTS OF THIS BOOK are published here for the first time. A preliminary version of Chapter 4 was read in the Sixth Colloquium “From Jāhiliyya to Islam”, held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1993. The first draft of Chapter 11 was part of a paper I read in the Colloquium on Hadith and Historiography, held in Oxford in 1988. I have benefited much from the notes and comments of the participants in these two conferences. An excellent opportunity for reviewing and improving on various aspects of my findings was given to me during discussions with my students at Tel Aviv University over the past few years.

Special thanks are due to Dr. Lawrence I. Conrad, Co-Director of the Late Antiquity and Early Islam project, for his painstaking editorial work on several drafts of this book, as well as for his corrections of style, and invaluable suggestions concerning the book's final form and contents. I am particularly grateful to him for talking me into adding a summary (Chapter 13) which-to use his words would serve “to focus and draw together all the various trends of thought and argument in the book.“

The very nature of the source materials, and what I have sought to derive from them, makes it inevitable that this book will be full of Arabic personal names and terms. While this will pose no difficulty for those conversant with early Is- lamic studies, for students and colleagues in other fields it may prove daunting. This very common problem is of course an obstacle to communication across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and I have tried to take it into account here. As a further aid, persons and terms are briefly identified in the Index.

The translation of Quranic verses throughout the book is my own, drawing occasionally on Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (Oxford, 1964). The numbering of kitābs (“Books“) and bābs (“Chapters“) in ḥadīth compilations arranged by topics (muṣannaf) are given in parentheses after the indication of the volume and page; e.g. Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, IV, 225 (61:17).