Revisionist school of Islamic studies


The Revisionist school of Islamic studies, is a movement in Islamic Studies
questioning much of "what the Muslim historical tradition can tell us about the origins of Islam".
Until the early 1970s, non-Muslim Islamic scholars — while not accepting accounts of divine intervention — did accept its origin story "in most of its details", and accepted the reliability of tafsir, hadith, and sira.
Revisionists instead use a "source-critical" approach to this literature, as well as studying relevant archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and contemporary non-Arabic literature. They believe these methodologies provide "hard facts" and an ability to crosscheck, whereas traditional Islamic accounts — written 150 to 200 years after Muhammad — are/were subject to biases of and embellishments by the authors and transmitters.
The school is thought to have originated in the 1970s and includes. It is "by no means monolithic" and while its proponents share "methodological premises", they have offered "conflicting accounts of the Arab conquests and the rise of Islam". It is sometimes contrasted with "traditionist" historians of Islam who do accept the traditional origin story, though the two approaches "usually implicit" rather than "stated openly".

Main thesis and the concept of Revisionism

The revisionist school has been said to be based on the study of Hadith literature by Islamic scholars Ignác Goldziher and Joseph Schacht, who argued that the traditional Islamic accounts about Islam's early times — written 150 to 200 years after Muhammad — cannot be relied on as historical sources. Goldziher argued, "that a vast number of hadith accepted even in the most rigorously critical Muslim collections were outright forgeries from the late 8th and 9th centuries — and as a consequence, that the meticulous isnads which supported them were utterly fictitious".
Schacht argued Islamic law was not passed down without deviation from Muhammad but "developed... out of popular and administrative practice under the Umayyads, and this practice often diverged from the intentions and even the explicit wording of the Koran... norms derived from the Koran were introduced into Muhammadan law almost invariably at a secondary stage."
The revisionists extended this argument beyond hadith to other facets of Islamic literature — sira, the history of the Quran's formation, and the historical developments under the first Islamic dynasty, the Umayyad Caliphate. The true historical events in the earliest times of Islam have to be newly researched and reconstructed by applying the historical-critical method, or alternately, in the words of Cook and Crone, historian must "step outside the Islamic tradition altogether and start again". This requires using the
  1. "source-critical approach to both the Koran and the Muslim literary accounts of the rise of Islam, the Conquest and the Umayyad period";
  2. comparing traditional accounts with
  3. #accounts from the seventh and eighth century CE that are external to the Muslim tradition;
  4. #archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics from the seventh and eighth century CE -- sources which should be preferred when there is a conflicts with Muslim literary sources.
Revisionists believe that the results of these methods indicates that the break between the religion, governance, culture of the pre-Islamic Persian and Byzantine civilization, and that of the 7th century Arab conquerors was not as abrupt as the traditional history describes. Colloquium organizers argued that if "we begin by assuming that there must have been some continuity, we need either go beyond the Islamic sources or... reinterpret them".
The designation Revisionism was coined first by the opponents of the new academic movement and is used by them partially still today with a less than positive connotation. Then, the media took up this designation in order to call the new movement with a concise catchword. Today, also the adherents of the new movement use Revisionism to designate themselves, yet mostly written in quotation marks and with a slightly self-mocking undertone.

Major representatives

Among the "foremost" proponents of revisionism are/were John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, Yehuda D. Nevo at the University of London with the publications of two works by Wansbrough: Quranic Studies and The Sectarian Milieu. Andrew Rippin, Norman Calder, G. R. Hawting, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook were students of Wansbrough. In 1977 Crone and Cook published Hagarism, which postulated -- among other things -- that Islam was established after, not before, the Arab conquests and that Mecca was not the original Islamic sanctuary. Later, both distanced themselves from the theses of Hagarism as too far reaching, but continued to "challenge both Muslim and Western orthodox views of Islamic history". Martin Hinds, also studied at SOAS and Robert G. Hoyland was a student of Patricia Crone.
In Germany at the Saarland University, Günter Lüling and Gerd-Rüdiger Puin focused on the historical-critical research of the development of the Quran starting in the 1970s, and in the 2000s, Karl-Heinz Ohlig, Volker Popp, Christoph Luxenberg and Markus Groß argued that Muhammad was a legendary, not historical figure. Hans Jansen from the Netherlands published a work in 2005/7 arguing in detail why known accounts of Muhammad's life were legendary. Yehuda D. Nevo also questioned the historicity of Muhammad. Sven Kalisch, a convert to Islam, taught Islamic theology before leaving the faith in 2008 when he questioned the historicity of Mohammad.
James A. Bellamy has done textual criticism of the Quran and his proposed "emendations", i.e. corrections of the traditional text of the Quran. Fred Donner, in his several books on early Islamic history has argued that only during the reign Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan did the early ecumenical monotheism of the Arab conquerors begin to separate from Christians and Jews.
Popular historian Tom Holland's work In the Shadow of the Sword has popularized the new research results and depicted a possible synthesis of the various revisionist approaches.

Historical description of the school

The influence of the different tendencies in the study of Islam in the West has waxed and waned. Ibn Warraq believes "the rise of this revisionist school" may be dated from the Fifth colloquium of the Near Eastern History Group of Oxford University in July 1975, and Robert Hoyland believes revisionists were ascendant in the 1970s and 1980s.
Prior to that, from World War II to sometime around the mid-1970s, there was what scholar Charles Adams describes as "a distinctive movement in the West, represented in both religious circles and the universities, whose purpose" was to show both a "greater appreciation of Islamic religiousness" and to foster "a new attitude toward it"
And in doing so make "restitution for the sins of unsympathetic, hostile, or interested approaches that have plagued the tradition of Western Orientalism".
Herbert Berg gives Wilfred Cantwell Smith and W. Montgomery Watt as examples of proponents of this "irenic approach" approach to Islamic history, and notes that the approach necessarily clashed with the questions and potential answers of revisionists since these clashed with Islamic doctrine.
Hoyland believes the heyday of revisionism, diminished as the "public profile of Islam" increased "massively" sometime after the 1980s, when, the tendency towards "left-leaning" liberalism "shy of criticizing Islam", of Western academics "favored the traditionalist approach" while "pushing skeptics/revisionists to become more extreme."

The thesis of the implausibility of the traditional Islamic accounts

The arguments against the plausibility of the classical Islamic traditions about Islam's beginnings were summarized by Hans Jansen in his work De Historische Mohammed. Jansen discusses chapter by chapter the depictions in the prophet's biography by Ibn Ishaq, by way of Ibn Hisham, which is an important text for traditional Islam. Jansen reveals self-contradictions; contradictions with other historical sources; embellishments by later authors; politically or theologically motivated distortions of the depiction; symbolic meanings of allegedly historical names; literary construction of the depiction according to biblical models; and chronological and calendrical improbabilities.
Some examples:
Jansen points out that because of the cryptic nature of the Quran, which usually alludes to events rather than describing them, and seldom describes the situation for which a revelation was made, the historically questionable traditions are of great importance for the interpretation and understanding of the Quran. Many Islamic traditions came into being long after Muhammad on the basis of mere guesses for what situation a Quranic verse had been revealed. Because of these historically questionable traditions, the interpretation of the Quran has been restricted ever since.
In her work Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, Patricia Crone gives a general examination of the credibility of Islamic traditions. This work is often cited in literature and discusses a few aspects of Muhammad's biography, which are intended to illustrate the nature of Islamic traditions. Concerning the encounter of the young Muhammad with Jews who recognize him as a prophet, and other stories, Crone writes: "These stories are no different from those on Muhammad's encounter with Jews and others. Being non-miraculous, they do not violate any laws of nature, of course, and in that sense they could be true. In fact, they are clearly not. We cannot even tell whether there was an original event: in the case of Muhammad's encounter with the Jews and others there was not. Either a fictitious theme has acquired reality thanks to the activities of storytellers or else a historical event has been swamped by these activities."

The new theses about the beginnings of Islam

The events in early Islamic times have to be newly researched and reconstructed with the help of the historical-critical method. In the following the theses of the revisionists in broad outline:
The consequent historical-critical analysis of early Islam met severe resistance in the beginning since then provocative theses with far-reaching meaning were published without sufficient evidence. Especially Patricia Crone's and Michael Cook's book Hagarism stirred up a lot of harsh criticism. Important representatives of Revisionism like Patricia Crone or Michael Cook meanwhile distanced themselves from such radical theses and uncautious publications.
Criticism is expressed by researchers like Tilman Nagel, who aims at the speculative nature of some theses and shows that some revisionists lack some scholarly standards. On the other hand, Nagel accepts the basic impulse of the new movement, to put more emphasis on the application of the historical-critical method.
A certain tendency to take revisionists seriously becomes obvious e.g. by the fact that opponents address their criticism not any longer to "revisionism" alone but to "extreme revisionism" or "ultra-revisionism".
Gregor Schoeler discusses the revisionist school and depicts the early controversies. Schoeler considers revisionism to be too radical yet welcomes the general impulse: "To have made us thinking about this all and much more remarkable things for the first time -- or again, is without any doubt a merit of the new generation of the 'skeptics'."
François de Blois rejects the application of the historical-critical method to Islamic texts. He argues that this method was developed for Christian texts and thus there is no reason to apply this method to Islamic texts, too.

A challenge for reflection and reform to Islam

By nature new findings about the early times of Islam touch the identity of the Islamic religion. Thus it is a justified claim of religious people that any research concerning their religion has to progress with high diligence and cautiousness in order to avoid unnecessary irritations. At the same time it is a justified claim by academics that they can do their research freely and without any restraint, even if the results run contrary to religious teachings.
The gravity of irritation provided to Islam depends on the question whether core teachings of Islam are touched or not, especially the historicity of Muhammad and the attribution of the Quran to Muhammad. According to this question, the historical-critical school can roughly be divided into two groups :
Besides the discussion of the historicity of Muhammad as a historical person and the Quranic text attributed to him, Islam faces the following debates:
, an author known for his criticism of Islam, has compiled several revisionist essays in his book, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. Fred Donner, reviewing the book, notes that by favoring Wansbrough's school of revisionism, the author presents a "one-sided selection" that fails to consider the challenges to this line of revisionism. The result is "a book that is likely to mislead many an unwary general reader."

Citations