Revisionist school of Islamic studies

The revisionist school of Islamic studies (also historical-critical school of Islamic studies and skeptic-revisionist Islamic historians)^[1] is a movement in Islamic studies^[2][3][4] that questions traditional Muslim narratives of Islam's origins.^[5][6]

Until the early 1970s,^[7] non-Muslim Islamic scholars—while not accepting accounts of divine intervention—did accept Islam's origin story^[8] "in most of its details",^[9] and accepted the reliability of its traditional literary sources – tafsir (commentaries on the Quran),^[10] hadith (accounts of what the Islamic prophet Muhammad approved or disapproved of), and sira (biography of Muhammad). Revisionists instead use a "source-critical" approach to this literature, as well as studying relevant archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and contemporary non-Arabic literature.^[11] They believe these methodologies provide "hard facts" and an ability to crosscheck, whereas traditional Islamic accounts—written 150 to 250 years after Muhammad—are/were subject to biases of and embellishments by the authors and transmitters.^[12]

The school is thought to have originated in the 1970s and includes (or included) scholars such as John Wansbrough and his students Andrew Rippin, Norman Calder, G. R. Hawting, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, as well as Günter Lüling, Yehuda D. Nevo and Christoph Luxenberg.^[13] It is "by no means monolithic" and while its proponents share "methodological premises", they have offered "conflicting accounts of the Arab conquests and the rise of Islam".^[14] It is sometimes contrasted with "traditionist" historians of Islam who do accept the traditional origin story,^[1] though adherence to the two approaches is "usually implicit" rather than "stated openly".^[15]