 | |
| Author | Fred Donner |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Islam |
| Publisher | Darwin Press |
Publication date | 1998 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 358 pages |
| ISBN | 0878501274 |
Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing is a 1998 book by historiographer of early Islam Fred Donner. The work was first published in January 1998 through Darwin Press as the fourteenth volume in the Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam series and has since gone through three editions. [1]
The book presents a tradition-critical account of the origins of Islam. It argues that the need to legitimize the community and affirm its standing to the outside world influenced the narrative which became woven into the Arab chronicles in the late 7th to the 10th century.
The work has received reviews from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin and Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. [2] [3] Narratives of Islamic Origins was also reviewed by the Middle East Journal, which wrote that it "represents a major contribution to Islamic historiography and historical thought." [4] The International Journal of Middle East Studies also commented on the work, stating that it was "important for many reasons, not least because it clarifies the history of the issues that have divided historians, offering pointed critiques of major, particularly recent, works in the debate, while at the same time marking out a position that the author consistently defends in the Introduction and twelve chapters and appendixes." [5]
Islamic scholar Wilferd Madelung has praised the work, stating that "Altogether the book offers a broad range of perceptive observations about the nature of early Islamic historical writing and should contribute to a more positive assessment of its source value for the origins of Islam than has been conveyed by the majority of recent studies." [6]
Ibn Warraq is the pen name of an anonymous author critical of Islam. He is the founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society and used to be a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry, focusing on Quranic criticism. Warraq is the vice-president of the World Encounter Institute.
The historiography of early Islam is the scholarly literature on the early history of Islam during the 7th century, from Muhammad's first purported revelations in 610 until the disintegration of the Rashidun Caliphate in 661, and arguably throughout the 8th century and the duration of the Umayyad Caliphate, terminating in the incipient Islamic Golden Age around the beginning of the 9th century.
Patricia Crone was a Danish historian specializing in early Islamic history. Crone was a member of the Revisionist school of Islamic studies and questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam.
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Fred McGraw Donner is a scholar of Islam and Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago. He has published several books about early Islamic history.
Peter Benjamin Golden is an American historian who is Professor Emeritus of History, Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University. He has written many books and articles on Turkic and Central Asian Studies, such as An introduction to the history of the Turkic peoples.
The Origins of The Koran: Classic Essays on Islam’s Holy Book is a 1998 book edited by Ibn Warraq. It contains a collection of 13 critical studies of the Qur'an written over the past two centuries by historians and scholars of the Middle East: Ibn Warraq, Theodor Nöldeke, Leone Caetani, Alphonse Mingana, Arthur Jeffery, David Samuel Margoliouth, Abraham Geiger, William St. Clair Tisdall, Charles Cutler Torrey and Andrew Rippin. Most of these authors wrote their essays on the Qur'an before World War II (1939–1945).
Lawrence Irvin Conrad is a British historian and scholar of Oriental studies, specializing in Near Eastern studies and the history of medicine. He currently serves as historian for the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London.
Devin Deweese is a professor of Islamic and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Asma Afsaruddin is an American scholar of Islamic studies and Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University in Bloomington.
Ehud R. Toledano is professor of Middle East history at Tel Aviv University and the current director of the Program in Ottoman & Turkish Studies. His areas of specialization are Ottoman history, and socio-cultural history of the modern Middle East.
David Cook is an American historian and professor of the history of Islam at Rice University. Cook earned his PhD at the University of Chicago.
Andrew Charles Spencer Peacock FBA is a British historian and author. He specializes in the histories of the Seljuk Empire and Ottoman Empire.
Mohammad Gholi Majd, also known as M.G. Madjd, is an author whose primary field of work is modern history of Iran.
Nehemia Levtzion was an Israeli scholar of African history, Near East, Islamic, and African studies, and the President of the Open University of Israel from 1987 to 1992 and the Executive Director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute from 1994 to 1997.
Fatma Müge Göçek is a Turkish sociologist and professor at the University of Michigan. She wrote the book Denial of Violence in 2015 concerning the prosectution of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, for which she received the Mary Douglas award for best book from the American Sociological Association. In 2017, she won a Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award from the university.
Maya Shatzmiller is a historian whose scholarship focusses on the economic history of the Muslim world. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2003. She received her PhD from the University of Provence in 1973, and was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1992. Shatzmiller is a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario.
The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia is a 1998 book by Adeeb Khalid, published by the University of California Press. The work is part of the Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies series.
Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 a research book by Barbara D. Metcalf, Professor of University of California. The book was published in 1982 by Princeton University Press. The main theme of the book is the Deoband movement and the first 40 years of Darul Uloom Deoband which originated in Deoband, a small village in Saharanpur, district of Uttar Pradesh, India.
Robert Dankoff is Professor Emeritus of Ottoman & Turkish Studies, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at University of Chicago