Trent Carl Approaching Islam from the West The only one word that seems fitting to describe

how Western scholars have approached Islamic history is: critically. Beyond that there are a variety of recorded views that have been published, written on, critiqued, argued in defensive of, and accepted over, especially, the last century. Each view then contains certain implications about what the author felt about Muslim historians and the development of Islamic history. Of course, it may be said that a certain scholar came in with preconceived notions but this would seem, in general, hard to determine. For the purpose of this short essay I will give examples of critical comments and outline some of the critical approaches to Islamic tradition and history that have been advanced and developed by scholars in Europe and the United States. To prove that Western scholars developed a number of critical methodologies to organize, evaluate, and understand traditions and history from Islamic writers there should exist comments that portray doubt or skepticism. This is not hard to find in Western scholarship on Islam: Reliable information about the fate of the copies of the Qur'an produced by direction of 'Uthman is as good as non-existent; however, using traditional Muslim accounts and the later version of the Qur'an, a number of conclusions can be drawn concerning the state of the 'Uthmanic edition of the Qur'an.1 Gatje's statement here plainly puts at odds reliability and traditional accounts relayed by Muslim scholarship. This is a theme seen in, and probably that extends from the root of Ignaz Goldziher's scepticism. In summary, Goldziher sees in hadiths 'a battlefiled of the political and dynastic conflicts of the first few centuries of Islam; it is a mirror of the aspirations of various parties, each of which wants to make the Prophet himself their

1Helmut Gatje, The Quran and Its Exegesis, (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2004), p. 25.

Trent Carl witness and authority.'2 Many scholars followed Goldziher's lead including the famous Schacht who elaborated on Goldziher's theory with stronger evidence and a stronger approach. There also exist statements made that are not so much critical of sources but make claims that seem to denigrate the early Muslim society's civil structure without offering any evidence. Noth comments, in regard to an organized governmental body, that regular offices such as we have just mentioned cannot have existed in the first decades after the death of the Prophet.3 He offers no evidence to support this claim. Besides heavily negative critical comments such as the above there exists critical studies of these skeptical accounts which also critique, often with more nuance and methodological care, Islamic sources in order to achieve more clarity; these accounts will be outlined below. As I have mentioned, Goldziher is known as one of the founders of the skeptical outlook in regards to Muslim sources and history; Motzki even goes as far as to characterize his and his school's followers (including Schacht) as expressing suspicion4. This school believed that Islamic traditions developed over a long period of time and that Muslim scholars fabricated ahadith in order to support their personal, legal, sectarian, and/or political views. This group also focuses heavily on the oral nature of the Muslim tradition. Since later written history (by Muslim scholars) relied on this corpus of tradition, by extension, this history is also largely worthless. Another group of scholars came forward to refute many of these claims. This group included Nabia Abbot and Muhammad Mustafa Azami. They downplayed the issue of oral transmission without overlooking it altogether. Instead, as Azami does, the written activity is
2 Herbert Berg, The Development of Exegesis in Early Islam, (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2000), p. 12. 3 Conrad and Noth, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source-Critical Study (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, Vol. 3), (?: Darwin Press Incorporated, 1994), p. 52. 4 Harold Motzki, The collection of the Quran: a reconsideration of Western views in light of recent methodological developments, Der Islam, 78, 2001, p.7.

Trent Carl emphasized. He [Azami] then proceeds to list eh hundreds of Companions, Successors, and scholars from the first 150 years of Islam who, according to him, wrote down hadiths, along with the names of their students who received hadiths from them in written form.5 In retort to Schacht's claim that the isnad in traditional accounts cannot be trusted Azami formulates a counter argument that re-evaluates when the isnad system developed and how it can be relied upon. In so doing these scholars have both offered a different view from the skeptical perspective and also have contributed interesting ideas about how Islamic tradition developed. Scholars like Harold Motzki have attempted to find what Berg describes as Middle Ground6. Their scholarship has put into question much of the previous studies without stating that Muslim scholarship is completely sound either. Motzki states, Western studies dealing with the issue of the collection of the Qur'an make clear that premises, conclusions and methodology of these studies are still disputable. Whether their alternative views on the history of the Qur'an are historically more reliable than the Muslim tradition on the issue thus remains an open question.7 (Bear in mind that studies on the collection of the Qur'an is directly related to, if not the same as, studies in Muslim hadith and historical collection). Their perspective is that one can find, with stringent analytical methods, stronger conclusions to these questions somewhere in between the conclusions met by the above groups of scholars. Motzki and Guatier Juynboll undergo developing sophisticated methodologies to analyze isnad structures in order to make using isnad structures more historically reliable and allowing a scholar to effectively date when a particular hadith originated and thus help clarify some of the questions raised by previous scholarship. However, it seems to be an interesting assumption that
5 Berg, p. 23. 6 Berg, p.26. 7 Motzki, p.15.

Trent Carl middle ground (implied accuracy) is to be found between to stages of previous scholarship. Critical study of Islamic sources has spawned a variety of outlooks, methodological approaches and conclusions. Something taken for granted in the above discussion as well as in other outlines of the same works is that these scholars were all objective when viewing their material. I do not claim to have evidence for the contrary, but it is something that, in my view, should be considered. This raises many questions. It remains to be seen where historical critique will lead the field of Islamic studies next.