Publisher's Synopsis
If one reads the Islamic traditional literature, which was written only some 200 years after the events it ostensibly describes, not as historiography but as "salvation history" whose goal is the religious interpretation of the world, and if one gives preference instead to the findings of inscriptions, coins, excavations and contemporary manuscripts, then a completely new picture of the emergence and early days of Islam emerges. The oldest texts of a collection that later became what we call the Koran were not written in Mecca and Medina, but probably in an area between northern Mesopotamia and the Silk Road, as a protest of Syrian Christian "Old Believers" against the increasing Hellenization of the Syrian Church. But soon after the beginning of Arab rule, Quranic writing and reading became the business of the official scribal schools of the new rule. The addition of new texts, now known as Islamic traditional literature, betrayed dynastic interests and a desire for separation from the great rival Byzantium, its church and theology. In its place came an Arab Christianity from Semitic roots, that is, without the Hellenistic doctrine of the Trinity, a religion that proved very useful in legitimizing the power of the new masters. This development began as early as the Umayyad period, but under the Abbasids it became the formative factor in the emerging new world religion of Islam. With contributions by the editors as well as by Robert M. Kerr, Raymond Dequin, Mazdak Bambadan, Johannes Thomas, Volker Popp, Gerd-R. Puin, Habib Tawa, Marcin Grodzki, and Daniel A. Brubaker on the prehistory and early history of Islam, the Qur'an and its language, Islam and society, and the reception of historical-critical research on Islam.
