THERE IS ALREADY an extensive scholarly literature on early Islamic historical writing. Much of this literature is very learned, but it always left me unsatisfied. It offered, to be sure, much factual information (and a lot of common-sense speculation) on the early development of historical writing among Muslims, but despite this, the outlines of this development never seemed to me to be sharply defined; even more important, the forces that drove this development remained murky and mysterious. After wrestling with the subject for several years, it finally dawned on me that the existing scholarship never asked why Muslims began to write history, but rather started from the assumption that even the earliest Believers had “naturally” wanted to write history, and proceeded to explain (largely on a priori grounds, since little evidence exists) how this evolution might first have begun in the early decades of the Islamic era. The more I thought about this assumption, however, the less I was inclined to agree with it, and the more I realized that making it blinds us to evidence that, I believe, suggests a somewhat different picture than that usually drawn.

This book therefore strives to answer two questions. 1) Why (and, therefore, when) did Muslims first decide or feel impelled to write history? 2) How did they proceed to elaborate their tradition of historical writing, once they had decided to undertake doing so? These two questions form the basis of the two parts of the book; Part I attempts to identify the intellectual context in which Muslims began to think and write historically, while Part II tries to sketch out the issues, t hemes, and (more briefly) forms of the early Islamic historiographical tradition. Addressing these two questions has also required that I devote serious consideration to the value of some radically revisionist interpretations of early Islam that have appeared over the past two decades- to the extent that doing so has become a third central agenda of the book.

I started research for this topic over fifteen years ago, and can only hope that readers will find the results worth the wait.