Ḥadīth or Athar refers to what most Muslims and the mainstream schools of Islamic thought believe to be a record of the words, actions, and the silent approval of the Islamic prophet Muhammad as transmitted through chains of narrators. In other words, the ḥadīth are attributed reports about what Muhammad said and did.
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.
Abū ʿĪsā Muḥammad ibn ʿĪsā as-Sulamī aḍ-Ḍarīr al-Būghī at-Tirmidhī, often referred to as Imām at-Termezī/Tirmidhī, was an Islamic scholar, and collector of hadith from Termez. He wrote al-Jami` as-Sahih, one of the six canonical hadith compilations in Sunni Islam. He also wrote Shama'il Muhammadiyah, a compilation of hadiths concerning the person and character of the Islamic prophet, Muhammad. At-Tirmidhi was also well versed in Arabic grammar, favoring the school of Kufa over Basra due to the former's preservation of Arabic poetry as a primary source.
John Edward Wansbrough was an American historian and professor who taught at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he was vice chancellor from 1985 to 1992.
The historiography of early Islam is the secular 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.
Abu al-Hasan Ahmad ibn Yahya ibn Ishaq al-Rawandi, commonly known as Ibn al-Rawandi, was a scholar and theologian. In his early days, he was a Mu'tazilite scholar, but then rejected the Mu'tazilite doctrine. Afterwards, he became a Shia scholar; there is some debate about whether he stayed a Shia until his death or became a skeptic, though most sources confirm his eventual rejection of all religion and becoming an atheist. Although none of his works have survived, his opinions had been preserved through his critics and the surviving books that answered him. His book with the most preserved fragments is the Kitab al-Zumurrud.
Criticism of Islam is questioning or challenging the beliefs, practices, and doctrines of Islam. Criticism of Islam can take many forms, including academic critiques, political criticism, religious criticism, and personal opinions.
Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author establishes the term "Orientalism" as a critical concept to describe the West's commonly contemptuous depiction and portrayal of The East, i.e. the Orient. Societies and peoples of the Orient are those who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Said argues that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern World, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power.
Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World is a 1977 book about the early history of Islam by the historians Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. Drawing on archaeological evidence and contemporary documents in Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Syriac, Crone and Cook depict an early Islam very different from the traditionally-accepted version derived from Muslim historical accounts.
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).
Arthur Jeffery was a Protestant Australian professor of Semitic languages from 1921 at the School of Oriental Studies in Cairo, and from 1938 until his death jointly at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Jeffery was awarded a D.Litt. from Edinburgh University in 1938. He is the author of extensive historical studies of Middle Eastern manuscripts. His important works include Materials for the History of the Text of the Qur'an: The Old Codices, which catalogs all surviving documented variants of the orthodox Quran text; and The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an, which traces the origins of 318 foreign (non-Arabic) words found in the Qur'an.
In Islam, Qirāʼah are different linguistic, lexical, phonetic, morphological and syntactical forms permitted with reciting the holy book of Islam, the Quran. Differences between Qiraʼat are slight and include varying rules regarding the prolongation, intonation, and pronunciation of words, but also differences in stops, vowels, consonants, and less frequently entire words. Qiraʼat also refers to the branch of Islamic studies that deals with these modes of recitation.
William St. Clair Tisdall (1859–1928) was a British Anglican priest, linguist, historian and philologist who served as the Secretary of the Church of England's Missionary Society in Isfahan, Persia.
The Quran is viewed to be the scriptural foundation of Islam and is believed by Muslims to have been sent down by Allah (God) and revealed to Muhammad by the angel Jabreel (Gabriel). The Quran has been subject to criticism both in the sense of being the subject of an interdisciplinary field of study where secular, (mostly) Western scholars set aside doctrines of its divinity, perfection, unchangeability, etc. accepted by Muslim Islamic scholars; but also in the sense of being found fault with by those — including Christian missionaries and other skeptics hoping to convert Muslims — who argue it is not divine, not perfect, and/or not particularly morally elevated.
The historicity of Muhammad refers to the study of Muhammad as a historical figure and critical examination of sources upon which traditional accounts are based.
Criticism of ḥadīth or hadithical criticism is the critique of ḥadīth—the genre of canonized Islamic literature made up of attributed reports of the words, actions, and the silent approval of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text and Commentary (2002) is a book edited by Ibn Warraq and published by Prometheus Books. The book is a collection of classical essays, some translated for the first time, that provide commentary on the traditions and language of the Koran, discussing its grammatical and logical discontinuities, its Syriac and Hebrew foreign vocabulary, and its possible Christian, Coptic and Qumranic sources. The title is taken from German author Manfred Barthel's 1980 book Was wirklich in der Bibel steht.
Hafs, according to Islamic tradition, was one of the primary transmitters of one of the seven canonical methods of Qur'an recitation (qira'at). His method via his teacher Aasim ibn Abi al-Najud has become the most popular method across the majority of the Muslim world.
The revisionist school of Islamic studies is a movement in Islamic studies that questions traditional Muslim narratives of Islam's origins.
Al-Sīrah al-Nabawiyyah also known as Siraat-e Ibn Hisham is a prophetic biography of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, written by Ibn Hisham. According to Islamic tradition, the book is an edited recension of Ibn Isḥāq's Sīratu Rasūli l-Lāh 'The Life of God's Messenger'. The work of Ibn Hishām and al-Tabari work, along with fragments by several others, are the only surviving copies of the work traditionally attributed to Ibn Ishaq. Ibn Hishām and al-Tabarī share virtually the same material.
