More interestingly, even sensationally, the graffito mentions ʿUmar (undoubtedly the second caliph) with his exact year of death. ![]() Interestingly enough, the author already uses the hiǧrah dating, only a few years after its introduction (between 634 and 644). After the basmalah, it runs: anā Zuhayr katabtu zaman tuwuffiya ʿUmar sanat arbaʿ wa-ʿišrīn, ‘I, Zuhayr, wrote at the time of ʿUmar’s death in the year 24 ’. ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ġabbān’s discovery in 1999 of the oldest Islamic inscription to date, the graffito of Qāʿ al-Muʿtadil (north-west Arabia).Robinson strike a decidedly critical note when it comes to the ‘new scepticism’.Īmong the recent epigraphical, papyrological and numismatical findings challenging the neo-sceptical paradigm, the following should be mentioned: In their most recent publications, leading historians of early Islam such as F. A few years ago, Crone and Cook themselves publicly repudiated the central hypothesis advanced in Hagarism. ![]() He shows that they are hardly suitable to support an alternative account of early Islamic history on the contrary, they frequently agree with Islamic sources and supplement them. Hoyland, a former student of Crone and now the pre-eminent authority on non-Islamic sources about early Islam, re-examined the non-Islamic sources Crone and Cook quoted in Hagarism. Peters (1994) wrote – according to Patricia Crone – a thoroughly ‘traditional’ study about the Prophet. Only three years after publishing his much-quoted article ‘The quest for the historical Muhammad’, in which he expressed his unreserved pessimism about our ability to establish any hard facts about early Islamic history, F. ![]() The so-called revisionist school, which took its modern shape in the ‘70s and was amplified in the next decades, outside Nevo, had a number of other proponents more or less radical in their dismissal of classical Islamic historiography, including Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, and a few others.ĭespite the authority of the revisionist movement (occupying academic departments does help) there have been dissenting voices within the Orientalist ecosystem as well, for instance, the late Harald Motzki when it comes to the transmission of the ahadith, mainly reevaluating the methodology of Joseph Schacht in textual criticism.Īnother Orientalist apostate is the contemporary German scholar Gregor Schoeler, who in his The Biography of Muhammad ﷺ : Nature and Authenticity (2011) dissects the revisionist trends of the Orientalists.Īfter tracing the history of the revisionist method, he talks of a “paradigm shift”, or how more recent research tends to dismiss the revisionists in favor of the traditional Islamic approach : The ideological underpinnings are obvious, as during the colonial era it was the best way to defuse the prime factor of resistance - traditional Islam - while in more recent decades the likes of Yehuda Nevo from Israel have their own guessable biases. Orientalists are quite infamous when it comes to their “historical-critical method” applied to Islam, pushing a revisionist approach when it comes to the Qur’an, the ahadith, the sirah, and more.
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