Despite the fragmentary and contradictory nature of the available evidence, the events of the ridda have been recurrently scrutinised in modern historiography due to the centrality of the topic for the earliest Islamic history. Already the earliest historical representations of early Islamic history written in a positivistic manner in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries paid due attention to the topic and tried to establish the course of events, thereby fulfilling the Rankeian maxim of reconstructing the past ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen [ist]’. Yet the first single study of this theme dealing with it in a monograph was authored by Elias S. Shoufani (1932–2013) in the late 1960s and published in 1972. Shoufani's book was also conceived in the positivist spirit and, therefore, attempted to reconstruct the events based on the then-known Arabic sources and choose between their data by establishing their respective source value. Another detailed analysis of the ridda was conducted by Fred M. Donner for his fundamental evaluation of the early Islamic conquest. Besides Shoufani and Donner's volumes, the topic was mainly covered in studies devoted to single tribes and persons involved in the ridda, including Dale F. Eickelman's paper on Musaylima, Meir Jacob Kister's (1914–2010) studies on Musaylima and select aspects of the poetry related to the ridda, Ella Landau- Tasseron's studies on the Ṭayyiʾ and Tamīm, and Michael Lecker's articles on the Kinda. A common approach of the latter investigations was to make attempts at understanding the single conflicts through the motivations of the given leader(s) and tribal group(s) instead of focusing on the reconstruction of the actual events.

Another major step taken towards moving the scope of the analyses from historical reconstructions to the study of the texts in question as literary products was made by Albrecht Noth's influential Quellenkritische Studien (published in 1973). Among the primary themes (ursprüngliche Themen) established in his book, a prominent place was given to the theme of the ridda, the traditions of which were among the earliest of Muslim historical memory. Perhaps more importantly, Noth also placed a great emphasis on the formal elements, topoi, and schemata abundantly present in the historiographical compositions of early and classical Muslim history writing, including the ones providing ridda narratives.