Ignoring the Uncomfortable
Why Western Scholars are Parroting Islamic Historical 'Certainties'
As I show in my book ‘The Mecca Mystery - Probing the Black Hole at the Heart of Muslim History’ there are some very serious and substantial questions that should be asked about the standard accounts of Muslim history. Yet puzzlingly, these questions are being studiously ignored by many in Western academia and the popular media.
One can perhaps understand why Muslim historians would accept without question the historiographical tradition established by Ibn Hisham, Al Tabari and others, since it so significantly underpins traditional understandings of Islam. What is rather puzzling, however, is the readiness of many Western scholars to fall into line. Pick up just about any introductory text on Islamic history prescribed at Western universities and you will find essentially a standard retelling of the narratives first penned by Ibn Ishaq, Al Tabari and other Muslim historians following in their wake. References to actual contemporary primary sources will, by contrast, be conspicuous by their absence.
What is particularly ironic is that this uncritical acceptance of sources that would normally be laughed out of court or dismissed as ‘legendary material’ when applied to any other period (or religion), is occurring at universities and research institutions where revisionist projects questioning various other ‘accepted histories’ will often be actively encouraged.
The ignoring of accepted standards for historical enquiry when it comes to the history of Islam, including by Western scholars, has a long history. Even a figure as illustrious as Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his majestic ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ confessed to neglecting to rigorously examine the sources for Islamic history. He prefaces his discussion of Muslim history with this rather startling but eminently honest statement: “I am ignorant, and I am careless, of the blind mythology of the Barbarians: of the local deities, of the stars, the air, and the earth, of their sex or titles, their attributes or subordination.”
While few modern historians would be willing to quite so flippantly own up to being careless in checking out their sources, we evidently have not progressed too far from Gibbon’s supreme indifference to the idea of investigating the reliability of the sources supporting the standard Islamic account. In fact, scholars who dare to embark on critical investigations of early Islamic history are often vilified and ostracized for threatening accepted orthodoxy.
Instead, we are loudly called upon by the guardians of the traditional view to continue to believe that hundreds of literate people independently undertook the mammoth task memorizing a vast oral tradition despite the absence of any encouragement whatsoever from their God or his prophet to do so. We are also asked to believe that while engaged in this essentially pointless project (why did they not simply commit their precious memories of the prophet to paper?), Muslim leaders also apparently took great care to never so much as mention the existence of this supposedly authoritative oral tradition. Even as a basis for the laws that they were devising for their expanding empire. Not to put too fine a point on it: the standard narrative underpinning Islamic history stretches credulity beyond breaking point, even before we begin to investigate possible alternative sources for reconstructing the history of the beginning of Arab dominance in the Middle East.
There are many reasons behind the reluctance of many within the academic establishment to going beyond regurgitating the same supposed certainties (bereft of solid primary source evidence) when discussing the history of early Islam. An awareness of the fate of critics of Islamic orthodoxy almost certainly plays a part (which is, by the way, also why several scholars working in this area use pseudonyms).
There is also the well-established fact that many Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies departments in the West are generously supported by Islamic governments and other entities who have a vested interest in perpetuating the teaching of the orthodox narrative that have become so deeply embedded in the teaching of Islamic history.
There is, lastly, the belief that that the classic Islamic sources are essentially all that we have to work with. In other words, so the thinking goes, we must accept the standard Islamic sources, otherwise the period in question will be a blank canvas. This is simply not the case.
To find out what is being ignored, and why the standard histories of Islam (and therefore its truth-claims) should be forcefully challenged, please see my book ‘The Mecca Mystery - Probing the Black Hole at the Heart of Muslim History’.
Kind regards,
Peter
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