Periodisation and the futūḥ: Making Sense of Muḥammad’s Leadership of the Conquests in Non-Muslim Sources

The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of theories on the origins of Islam which have called into question long-held scholarly axioms. One such axiom is the traditional date of 632 CE for the death of the prophet Muḥammad, which some scholars have now sought to redate to after the begin...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Shaddel, Mehdy (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Brill 2022
In: Arabica
Year: 2022, Volume: 69, Issue: 1/2, Pages: 96-145
Further subjects:B periodisation
B non-Muslim sources for the rise of Islam
B Muḥammad
B Arabic historiography
B Roman Palestine
B Muslim conquests
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Summary:The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of theories on the origins of Islam which have called into question long-held scholarly axioms. One such axiom is the traditional date of 632 CE for the death of the prophet Muḥammad, which some scholars have now sought to redate to after the beginning of the Muslim conquests on the basis of the evidence of non-Muslim sources. The present contribution aims to demonstrate that the prima facie disharmony between these sources and Muslim accounts of Muḥammad’s life and the conquests is a product of the reading imposed on both sets of data, which primarily has to do with the fact that, more often than not, modern scholarship unsuspectingly operates within the rigid framework of the classical periodisation of early Islamic history. Therefore, a revision of either the traditional date of Muḥammad’s death or the starting date of the conquests based on this evidence is uncalled for.
ISSN:1570-0585
Contains:Enthalten in: Arabica
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/15700585-12341633