Gregor Schoeler, an Orientalist against Orientalist revisionism
An Orientalist apostate
Orientalists are quite infamous when it comes to their “historical-critical method” applied to Islam, pushing a revisionist approach when it comes to the Qur’an, the ahadith, the sirah, and more.
The ideological underpinnings are obvious, as during the colonial era it was the best way to defuse the prime factor of resistance - traditional Islam - while in more recent decades the likes of Yehuda Nevo from Israel have their own guessable biases.
The so-called revisionist school, which took its modern shape in the ‘70s and was amplified in the next decades, outside Nevo, had a number of other proponents more or less radical in their dismissal of classical Islamic historiography, including Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, and a few others.
Despite the authority of the revisionist movement (occupying academic departments does help) there have been dissenting voices within the Orientalist ecosystem as well, for instance, the late Harald Motzki when it comes to the transmission of the ahadith, mainly reevaluating the methodology of Joseph Schacht in textual criticism.
Another Orientalist apostate is the contemporary German scholar Gregor Schoeler, who in his The Biography of Muhammad ﷺ : Nature and Authenticity (2011) dissects the revisionist trends of the Orientalists.
After tracing the history of the revisionist method, he talks of a “paradigm shift”, or how more recent research tends to dismiss the revisionists in favor of the traditional Islamic approach :
Only three years after publishing his much-quoted article ‘The quest for the historical Muhammad’, in which he expressed his unreserved pessimism about our ability to establish any hard facts about early Islamic history, F. E. Peters (1994) wrote – according to Patricia Crone – a thoroughly ‘traditional’ study about the Prophet. R. Hoyland, a former student of Crone and now the pre-eminent authority on non-Islamic sources about early Islam, re-examined the non-Islamic sources Crone and Cook quoted in Hagarism. He shows that they are hardly suitable to support an alternative account of early Islamic history; on the contrary, they frequently agree with Islamic sources and supplement them. A few years ago, Crone and Cook themselves publicly repudiated the central hypothesis advanced in Hagarism. In their most recent publications, leading historians of early Islam such as F. Donner and C. Robinson strike a decidedly critical note when it comes to the ‘new scepticism’.
Among the recent epigraphical, papyrological and numismatical findings challenging the neo-sceptical paradigm, the following should be mentioned:
• ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ġabbān’s discovery in 1999 of the oldest Islamic inscription to date, the graffito of Qāʿ al-Muʿtadil (north-west Arabia). After the basmalah, it runs: anā Zuhayr katabtu zaman tuwuffiya ʿUmar sanat arbaʿ wa-ʿišrīn, ‘I, Zuhayr, wrote [this] at the time of ʿUmar’s death in the year 24 [644–5]’. Interestingly enough, the author already uses the hiǧrah dating, only a few years after its introduction (between 634 and 644). More interestingly, even sensationally, the graffito mentions ʿUmar (undoubtedly the second caliph) with his exact year of death. Hitherto, scholars have assumed that there was no evidence for any of the Prophet’s companions in external sources; Muʿāwiyah was regarded as the first caliph to be safely attested as a historical figure by such testimonies, both epigraphical and manuscript (in papyri).
• The two earliest known papyri with a hiǧrah dating, both of which originated in the year 22/643.166
• We find the first attestation of Muḥammad in an Islamic setting on two Arabic-Sasanian silver coins from the year 66 and 67 AH; in the margin, they feature an abbreviated form of the Islamic profession of faith (bi-sm Allāh Muḥammad rasūl Allāh). Thirteen or fourteen years later, the name Muḥammad is mentioned as a nasab (patronym) on a coin from the year 80 AH with an Arabic inscription which bears the name of the Umayyad general ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad (better known as Ibn al-Ašʿaṯ). Both Ibn al-Ašʿaṯ and his father Muḥammad (d. 41/661) were important historical figures and are well known from Islamic historical sources. This fact refutes Ohlig’s ludicrous claim that in first century AH sources, especially the inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, the word Muḥammad (written MḤMD) is not a personal name but an epithet of Jesus (without any reference to the Islamic Prophet) and should be translated as ‘the praiseworthy one’ or ‘the blessed one’. The first non-Islamic document to mention the Prophet is even older: a Syriac-Christian chronicle written around 640 (according to Hoyland) by Thomas the Presbyter refers to ‘a battle between the Romans and Muḥammad’s Arabs’ (ṭayyāyē d-Mḥmṭ).
• Inscriptions with an obviously Islamic content (including Qurʾānic phraseology) occur earlier (starting 31 AH) than previously thought.
• A very old, fragmentary Qurʾān manuscript, the ‘Codex Parisino-Petropolitanus’, recently discovered and recognized as a historical document of paramount importance by F. Déroche. On the basis of its writing style and archaic orthography (e.g. qāla consistently written as QL), he dates it to the third quarter of the first century AH. Like the fragments of an ancient Qurʾān manuscript from Ṣanʿāʾ, its text follows the ʿUṯmanic recension. This crucial piece of evidence conclusively puts to rest Wansbrough’s hypothesis that it was not until the year 800 that the Qurʾān assumed the form we know today.1
Schoeler in this book would himself expand on what he calls the historiographical school of Medina, that of a set of companions based in the city, beginning with ʿUrwah ibn az-Zubayr (radyAllahu ‘anhu), who led down the foundations of Islamic history through written material principally concerning the maghazi sub-genre of the sirah (about the military expeditions of our Prophet ﷺ)
There have literally been hundreds of books and thousands of articles penned by our scholars refuting the Orientalists, but it’s always enriching to see that even with their secular method some of their own end up being skeptical of their skepticism.
Gregor Schoeler, The Biography of Muhammad: Nature and Authenticity, Routledge (2011), pp. 13-14.