The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing - Essay Example

?Review Narratives of Islamic Origins. The beginnings of Islamic historical writing. By Fred McGraw Donner. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1998. 358pp. Donner’s work has contributed to the burgeoning scholarship on the source material for early Islam, and in a more constructive way than the corpus of those deeply sceptical of the Islamic sources. The author, who has previously published a canonical work on the early Muslim conquests outside of the Arabian Peninsula, concerns himself in this work with the issue of reconstructing Islamic history on the basis of its early sources. It is constructive to briefly summarise the current state of the debate on the subject, so that this latest addition can be seen in its proper perspective. Donner succinctly outlines some of the main problems with the early Islamic sources in his introduction: ‘Chronological discrepancies and absurdities abound, as do flat contradictions in the meaning of events, or even, less frequently, on their fundamental course. Many accounts present information that seems clearly anachronistic; others provide ample evidence of embellishment or outright invention to serve the purpose of political or religious apologetic’ (6). The late Albrecht Noth opened the debate which challenged the conventional, almost literal approach to the Islamic source material in 1973, arguing that many of the accounts were merely anecdotes and themes used by the authors in the contexts they thought appropriate. In this latest work, Donner has built heavily on the work of the latter. Wansbrough produced a more radical critique in 1977, which was developed by Crone and Cook. They asserted that many of the established ‘truths’ concerning the Prophet’s lifetime could not be taken for granted. In the early 1970s, the reaction against the inclusion of the Islamic sources in historical study reached its apogee, as Patricia Crone and Michael Cook took issue with the presentation of Islam as the true faith in its own right by the historians of Abbasid Baghdad. They suggest that the tradition glossed over the realities of Islamic interaction with Judaism. They argued that the contradictory Islamic sources should be dismissed, and attention should be focused on contemporary, non-Muslim sources. Throughout Narratives of Islamic Origins, from the introduction to the conclusion, Donner makes clear that he is an opponent of Crone’s Hagarism, which he refers to as the radically ‘skeptical’ approach. Much of the introduction of devoted to this refutation. Even from this summary, it is clear that the history of early Islam is one of the most bitterly-contested fields in modern historiography, and due to the polarisation of the debate, it is unlikely to be smoothed over in the near future. With his contribution, Donner can scarcely have been hoping to categorically resolve any of the issues at stake. However, in a way somewhat similar to the work of Robert Hoyland, Donner is beginning to build a middle ground in the debate, in which the Islamic sources need not be rejected or passionately advocated, but can be included in a careful and scholarly analysis of the period. Donner’s Narratives of Islamic Origins is just that – a comprehensive and thoroughly scholarly analysis to a wide body of primary sources, which adds little new to the overarching debate, but does distil some important issues. We are concerned in this review with the introduction of the book, which offers a basic summary of Donner’s main argument, and the preoccupations which have motivated the study, and with chapter 5, entitled, ‘Themes of Prophecy’. The introduction focuses on the intellectual context of early Islam, and especially on the key issue of establishing the Quran as a text which existed in some form from the earliest period. This is obviously crucial to the way in which we view this document. Those who tended towards Crone’s view argue that the Quran is a later construction, put together from legendary sayings of the Prophet. It is held by this school to be a collection of sayings which was thrown together, with different segments taken completely out of context, and then put back together by the historians of Abbasid Baghdad, who tried to make sense of the chaos. This focus on the Quran is developed further in chapter 5, as Donner seeks to make sense of the theme of prophecy, which runs through the sacred text, and holds up the Quran as one of the most important examples of early documentary evidence of the importance of prophecy to the emergent faith. In the introduction, Donner makes a convincing refutation of this approach, and a defence of the Quran as a document which existed in some form from close to Islam’s beginnings, and can be regarded as the earliest documentary evidence of Islam written by believers, and thus a precursor to hadith literature. Surviving Arabic papyri suggest that written records were kept in the first century of Islam, and given the survival rate of documents from later periods; the loss of much material is scarcely surprising. When information had been incorporated into compilations, earlier documents became redundant. Donner builds a central thesis out of this assertion, of which the Quran being an early document is only one strand – that the Islamic tradition, which, from a variety of sources, is unanimous in its expression of certain basic and fundamental features, could not have come about by collective invention. Rather, they had, as he says later in the book, a ‘collective vision’ (139) of the past. We must assume, therefore, that later writers were working from a common reservoir of information, and the Quran should be seen as a central pillar of this canon. The assertion that the Quran was an early Islamic document is scarcely new, but Donner’s approach to the issue is beautifully simple, and while it will not be immune from detractors, its power to convince should not be doubted. As an aside, it is noteworthy that in the introduction, Donner establishes a convention of using the term ‘Believers’ rather than ‘Muslims’ for members of the nascent community. In doing so, he has come up with a temporary and attractive solution, used from the introduction onwards, to the issue of what to call the members of the early umma. Donner’s own reasoning is that it articulates the increasingly precise identity as a separate religious community that the umma gradually took on in the first few centuries A.H. Donner’s expertise in this field should, at this stage, be acknowledged. In earlier works, he argued convincingly that in the first decades of Islam, there was a category that Jews, Christians and Muslims could all fall into as believers, given an acknowledgement that they shared some crucial similarities. Given the large quantity of nomenclature that is thrown about in both the Islamic and non-Islamic sources for the early history of Islam, it can be difficult to find a term that can be agreed on. As is seen throughout Narratives of Islamic Origins, Donner’s solution proves workable throughout the book. Chapter 5 of this book, entitled ‘Themes of Prophecy’, is basically interested in the theory that before Muhammad, and at the time of his life and the subsequent events, there was a tradition of prophecy active in Arabia, on which Muhammad, and those who later came to write down his history, could build. Those who followed Muhammad were expected to believe not only in God and in the last day of judgement, but a crucial qualification for membership of the new Islamic community, or umma, was a recognition of the validity of Muhammad’s claim to be the true and greatest Prophet. Donner therefore emphasises that one could not be considered a believer without recognizing this claim, and also points out that it is unclear, from the available source material, how Muhammad’s claim was received and understood by Christians, Jews and members of other monotheistic groups, such as the Samaritans, who lived in local communities. Perhaps this was the reason for the eventual break between the Jews and the Muslims. In chapter 5, Donner therefore asserts, and convincingly, that the early movement was centred on a belief in monotheism, and a belief in Muhammad’s prophecy, and the notion that the revealed scripture was coming down to the Believers through the revelations offered by Muhammad. At this point, Donner’s arguments for the early existence of the Qur’an, which have already been discussed, become especially relevant, as the Qur’an makes clear that God has revealed His word to man on many occasions in the past, perhaps even giving some legitimacy to Judaism and Christianity as other enlightened groups, but also makes clear that Muhammad’s revelation is the last, and truest, such event. Therefore, Donner posits the Qur’an as firm evidence for the themes of prophecy that would then be built on by later writers who elaborated on the origins of Islam. Therefore, in this chapter, Donner also continues to develop the theme of a common pool of evidence on which the historians later working from Baghdad and other intellectual and cultural centres were drawing on. He uses the texts of such leading sources as al-Tabari to show common features which reflect a master narrative built up largely independently by several writers. Throughout the second part of the book, of which chapter 5 forms a significant part, Donner lists 12 episodes that comprise this master narrative. These include the creation of the world by God to the region of the Abbasids, ‘the human embodiment of the Islamic state’ (129). Donner is surely right to refute Crone’s iconoclastic approach to the Islamic source material, which is not to be discounted for the manifold difficulties it raises: ‘Not by rejecting the whole Islamic tradition ‘opaque’, but rather by patiently unravelling the strands and layers of the complex of traditional material, will the Islamic origins story finally come, at least partially, to light’ (290). Above all, Donner produces something which is a rarity in this enlivened field of historical enquiry – a thoughtful and careful work, not aimed at the refutation of the latest heresy, but an assessment of the merits and demerits of various sources, and an attempt to build them up into a broader and more lucid picture. Narratives of Islamic Origins serves as a useful departure point for new scholarship on the motivations for writing history in early Islamic culture. As Donner put it, why and when did Muslims first feel ‘impelled to write history’ (xi) and why did they proceed to ‘elaborate their tradition of historical writing, once they decided to do so’ (xi). As with every aspect of the debates which continue to rage over early Islamic history, the solution to this problem will not be simple, but the process will no doubt be instructive for those on all sides of the debate. Read More