History Compass - 2022 - Little

Received: 31 March 2022 Revised: 7 August 2022 Accepted: 9 August 2022
DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12747
ARTICLE
Patricia Crone and the “secular tradition” of early

Islamic historiography: An exegesis
J. J. Little
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Abstract
Correspondence Patricia Crone famously identified three distinct
J. J. Little, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
sub-traditions within early Islamic historiography: a “reli-
Email: JJLittle1917@gmail.com
gious tradition”, a “tribal tradition”, and a “secular tradition”.
Whereas the first is extremely unreliable and the second is
partially unreliable regarding early Islamic history in general
(c. 600–750 CE), Crone argued that the third provides
“a coherent historical account”, at least as far back as the
beginning of the Umayyad period (c. 661 CE). Some confu-
sion has since arisen over the identity of this “secular tradi-
tion” (thanks to Crone's famously terse and technical style),
but a close examination of her work reveals that she had
in mind state-oriented chronology and prosopography (i.e.,
basic political information on early Muslim caliphs, gover-
nors, judges, and commanders) or proto-taʾrīkh. Crone
argued that this material (which mostly survives intermin-
gled with the religious and tribal traditions in extant Islamic
literary sources) derives via continuous written transmission
from rudimentary state-oriented chronicles and proso-
pographies composed by pro-Marwanid Muslim writers in
eighth-century Syria. Although these proto-tawārīkh are
now lost, Crone argued that their eighth-century existence
can be inferred from contemporaneous references thereto
in extant Christian chronicles—a conclusion strengthened by
more recent scholarship. For this reason, the “secular tradi-
tion” is substantially more reliable than the other traditions
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© 2022 The Authors. History Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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within early Islamic historiography, which underwent a

protracted process of oral transmission and consequent
mutation, distortion, and growth.
Patricia Crone (d. 2015) is simultaneously one of the most celebrated and vilified scholars in the field of Islamic
origins, due to her skepticism towards the early Islamic literary sources, her revisionist reconstruction of early Islam,
and her sometimes inflammatory rhetoric. Crone's scholarship has sparked many debates, re-evaluations, and
constructive criticisms both in and beyond the academy, but it has also been subject to extensive misconception
and misrepresentation—most outlandishly, the idea that she denied the historical existence of Muḥammad. 1 Less
outlandish, but no less mistaken, is the idea that Crone rejected all historical data recorded in the later Islamic literary
sources. 2 Whilst it is certainly true that Crone marshalled some of the harshest criticisms of the general reliability
of early Islamic historiography that have ever been articulated in the field of Islamic origins, she also mounted the
strongest defence of at least some of this material. In other words, despite constant academic engagement with
Crone's work over the last few decades, her actual arguments continue to be severely misunderstood: on the one
hand, scholars frequently miss the subtleties of Crone's criticisms and, thereby, the severity of the problems with the
Islamic sources; and on the other hand, a crucial argument in favour of the reliability of at least some traditional data
has been generally overlooked. In light of this situation, a clarification is in order.
At the centre of all of this lies Crone's “Historiographical Introduction” to her 1980 monograph Slaves on Horses,
in which she famously outlined the various sources available for reconstructing early Islamic history (c. 600–750 CE). 3
The bulk of this chapter was devoted to evaluating the reliability of early Islamic historiography, which mostly consists
of collections of orally-transmitted reports (akhbār), drawn from the same vast corpus and selected and arranged
according to genre. 4 Some of these reports are purely informative or prosopographical, but most take the form of
short narratives or anecdotes; longer “coherent narratives” 5 are rare, let alone continuous narratives “in the synthetic
voice of the single historian”. 6
According to Crone, early Islamic historiography can be divided into three distinct sub-traditions: a “religious
tradition”, a “tribal tradition”, and a “secular tradition”. 7 Whereas the first and second are both unreliable (albeit with
notable exceptions in the second), the third is substantially reliable and can be used to reconstruct a basic political
outline of early Islamic history—at least as far back as the beginning of the Umayyad period (c. 661 CE). Moreover, the
development of the “secular tradition” can be traced back at least a century before the extant Islamic literary sources,
thanks to the evidence of earlier surviving Christian literary sources. In light of the general unreliability of early Islamic
historiography, this is a major gain for the field of Islamic origins: even if early Islamic religious identity and doctrine
remain unclear or highly debated, “the one thing we can pride ourselves on knowing in early Islamic history is who
held power and when.” 8
1 | THE RELIGIOUS TRADITION
The first tradition of early Islamic histography is the most obvious, and the one to which Crone devoted the most
attention: the “religious tradition” is explicitly identified with Prophetical biography (maghāzī/sīrah) and doctrinal
reports or Hadith (aḥādīth), 9 evidently including exegetical reports about the Quran (tafsīr and asbāb al-nuzūl) and
other such religiously-oriented material, along with biographical dictionaries (ṭabaqāt, etc.) about religious scholars
(ʿulamāʾ). 10 This material—at least as it pertains to the first Islamic century—is extremely unreliable, for several reasons.
To begin with, the reports constituting the religious tradition were mostly transmitted orally until at least the
mid-to-late eighth century CE (i.e., the late Marwanid and early Abbasid periods), 11 which means a century or more
of mostly oral transmission for reports of the Prophet, his so-called “Righteously-Guided Successors” (al-khulafāʾ
LITTLE 3 of 22
al-rāshidūn), and the first civil war or fitnah (c. 656–661 CE). This lengthy oral transmission was unsystematic due
to the lack of “rigorous procedures” on the part of early Muslim tradents, 12 whose rapidly-changing geographical,
social, political, and sectarian contexts resulted in a rapid loss of the original context of the reports that they inher-
ited and—in response to the constant emergence of new problems and situations to deal with—the elaboration and
reshaping of this material: “Oral transmission in the formative period of a new religion, in short, does not mean faith-
ful preservation, but rapid transformation of the tradition.” 13 In other words, Islamic historical memory underwent an
extremely rapid and extensive process of mutation, distortion, and growth over the course of the first Islamic century,
due to both the environmental pressures or “circumstances” affecting the process of oral transmission, and the pecu-
liarities of the oral transmission in question. 14 In the first case, Crone emphasised the discontinuous milieux of early
Islam and the rapid transformation of early Arab and Muslim society, 15 and in the second case, she emphasised the
rabbinical-seeming “atomistic method of transmission” that was generally adopted by early Muslim tradents, who
memorised and transmitted “isolated sayings, short accounts of people's acts, brief references to historical events
and the like,” as opposed to lengthy or coherent narratives. 16 Such a mode endowed its content with much “greater
mutability” than even other forms of oral transmission, 17 rendering early Islamic reports extremely vulnerable to loss
of meaning through decontextualisation and even minor alterations of content. 18 Thus, in addition to being highly
mutable, the Islamic oral tradition was transmitted in circumstances that selected for or incentivised the mutation
and transformation of existing reports and the creation of new ones, such as the need or desire for the fulfilment of
narrative or literary expectations, rationalisations for doctrines, ammunition for polemics and apologetics, the filling
in of blanks, and so on—all of which were constantly arising or changing over the course of the first Islamic century,
thereby constantly selecting for or incentivising ever more distortions of early Islamic historical memory. Such a
process should not be envisaged as mendacious or conspiratorial, as Crone repeatedly emphasised in later works: all
that it would require is the collective and synchronous paraphrasing, elaboration, and extrapolation of material by
tradents under a common régime of pressures, the aggregate of which would be the rapid mutation, distortion, and
growth of oral reports in the course of transmission. 19 Crone later identified early exegetes and especially popular,
oral storytellers and preachers as the main culprits behind this process: time and time again, biographical reports,
exegetical reports, and reports about pre-Islamic Arabia turn out to be exegetical speculation in disguise and/or
formulaic storyteller constructions. The main problem of the extant Islamic literary sources is thus not fabrication
per se, but rather, the constant retelling of stories and remixing of material in the course of transmission by early
storytellers who evidently prioritised edification, education, entertainment, and emotion over literal historical truth,
resulting in the rapid mutation and distortion—if not outright re-creation—of Islamic historical memory during the
first Islamic century. 20
Even the underlying chronological skeleton found in the biographical works and derivable from biographical
reports cannot be trusted: “The chronology of the Sīra is internally weak, schematized, doctrinally inspired, and
contradicted by contemporary non-Muslim sources on one crucial point.” 21 In particular, Crone had in mind the
numerous chronological contradictions concerning the Prophet's battles, 22 the numerological and symbolic patterns
in the Prophet's life (such as the recurring significance of Mondays and the month of Rabīʿ al-Awwal), 23 the way in
which the Prophet's life was substantially reshaped to conform to Biblical (especially Mosaic) archetypes, 24 and early
non-Muslim reports about the Prophet's overseeing of the invasion of Palestine. 25
The process of rapid mutation, distortion, and growth must have begun already in the time of Muḥammad,
who, as a busy political and military leader, probably did not establish rigorous or systematic transmission of his
teachings. 26 It was not until the Marwanid period that the ʿulamāʾ (professional religious scholars) arose, and thereby,
systematic or rigorous (and increasingly, written) transmission. 27 Even then, the ensuing politico-theological clash
between caliphs and the ʿulamāʾ (which continued until the middle of the ninth century CE) constituted a further pres-
sure for the reworking of extant reports and the creation of new reports (alongside continuing sectarianism, etc.). 28
This process of mutation, distortion, and growth only came to an end a century after the death of the Prophet, during
the mid-to-late Marwanid period—not long after the appearance of the ʿulamāʾ, when written transmission became
more commonplace, and enduring (e.g., proto-Sunnite) doctrines and institutions obtained. 29 By then, however,
4 of 22 LITTLE
“the basic damage was done”, and the Islamic historical memory of the earliest period had become distorted largely
beyond use. 30
Even with the rise of the ʿulamāʾ, written transmission, and enduring doctrines and structures, however, the
distortion of Islamic historical memory by no means ceased, or as Crone put it: “The onset of calmer weathers did not,
of course, mark the immediate stabilization of the Islamic tradition.” 31 The Marwanid (c. 684–750 CE) and Abbasid
(c. 750 ff. CE) periods saw the proliferation of doctrinal fabrications and interpolations in the form of Hadith at the
hands of the emerging ʿulamāʾ, 32 who also “began not just to collect but also to sift and tidy up the tradition,” or in
other words, to redact the material that they had inherited and censor unorthodox elements. 33 However, all of this
ʿulamāʾ-inflicted damage was secondary, as Crone repeatedly emphasised: “rabbinic censorship, though far from triv-
ial, eliminated only the remains of a landscape which had already been eroded.” 34 Likewise, when Hadith (specifically,
the doctrinal retrojections of the ʿulamāʾ) are stripped away from the corpus of reports pertaining to the first Islamic
century, “the layer underneath consists of rubble reorganized in minimal order.” 35 In the century preceding the rise of
the ʿulamāʾ, “the structural damage had been inflicted in the course of oral transmission.” 36
In short, the religious tradition of early Islamic historical memory was transmitted orally, paraphrastically, atom-
istically, and unsystematically by storytellers and the like for more than a century through massive and successive
conquests, migrations, civil wars, and sectarianism; this material was also heavily reworked, interpolated, and subject
to the mass-retrojection of anachronistic doctrines and ideals by later Muslim sectaries, jurists, and theologians, not to
mention redacted and selectively recorded. The extant religious tradition of early Islamic historiography—Prophetical
biographies, accounts of Quranic revelation and meaning, Hadith collections, accounts of the Companions and early
caliphs, and similar religiously-oriented material recorded in biographical dictionaries and general chronicles—thus
cannot be used for the most part to reconstruct the first century of Islamic history, and certainly cannot be accepted
at face value: any given report therefrom should be presumed unreliable or distorted until the contrary can be
demonstrated.
2 | THE TRIBAL TRADITION
The “tribal tradition” was also clearly identified by Crone, who meant thereby the Arabian “tribal recollection of the
past,” 37 such as pre-Islamic Arabian battle stories (ayyām al-ʿarab), 38 Arabo-Islamic conquest reports (futūḥ), 39 geneal-
ogy (nasab), 40 battle-related prosopography (“lists of participants and fallen in battle”), 41 lists relating to Arabian tribal
nobility (ashrāf), 42 tribal awāʾil reports (“who was the first to say and do such and such”), 43 pre-Islamic poetry (such as
the muʿallaqāt), 44 information on pre-Islamic idols (aṣnām), 45 Arabian sayings (amthāl al-ʿarab), 46 and other such akhbār
and prosopography relating to Arabian history:
What the tribal tradition preserved was above all personalia: who married, divorced and killed whom,
who was the first to say and do such and such, who was the most generous of the Arabs, what
so-and-so said on a certain occasion, and so forth, in short the chit-chat and gossip of the Arab tribal
sessions. 47
The material constituting the tribal tradition was variously preserved in: (1) synthetic collections that also include
material from the other traditions, such as Ibn Hishām's al-Sīrah al-Nabawiyyah (which combines “strictly religious”
material with some “tribal” material) 48; (2) dedicated or special collections of sub-tribal genres, such as al-Balādhurī’s
Kitāb Futūḥ al-Buldān (which focuses upon the great Arab conquests) and Ibn al-Kalbī’s Jamharat al-Nasab (which
focuses upon genealogy); and (3) general collections of tribal material, such as Ibn Ḥabīb's Kitāb al-Muḥabbar (a collec-
tion of the aforementioned miscellaneous “personalia”). 49
As in the religious tradition, the akhbār of the tribal tradition exhibit fabrication and interpolation (reflecting later
doctrines and interests), 50 numerous contradictions, 51 artificial literary or narrative structures (comprising tropes,
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motifs, schemata, etc.), 52 and atomisation (which facilitated the easy decontextualisation and mutation of individual
reports in the course of oral transmission), 53 although the tribal tradition was less affected in the last respect. 54 The
reason for the doctrinally-inspired distortions therein in particular is that later Muslims invested both pre-Islamic
Arabia (al-jāhiliyyah) and early Muslim battles with religious importance (for polemics, apologetics, and salvation
history more generally), just as they did the life of the Prophet, and distorted reports thereof accordingly: “The tribal
tradition was, like politics, endowed with religious meaning, and for that reason it did not escape the ravages of the
whirlwind.” 55 In fact, according to Crone, “tribal and religious history up to the accession of Muʿāwiya are largely
beyond disentanglement”. 56
Despite all of this, some of the tribal tradition is not obviously artificial or reflective of some later doctrine or
interest, especially in reports concerning post-fitnah history, 57 presumably due to the lesser religious and political
importance of the Sufyanid and Marwanid periods to later Muslim sectaries, jurists, and storytellers (compared to the
life of the Prophet and the first fitnah), and perhaps also the non-doctrinal priorities of the tradents or sources of tribal
material. Whatever the cause, the tribal tradition at times appears to be more plausible or realistic than the religious
tradition, which led Crone to conclude: “of the Prophet the tribesmen remembered nothing, but of their own history
they obviously did remember something.” 58 Indeed, a wave of recent scholarship has argued that at least some of the
genealogy and tribal relations reported for the seventh century CE and even earlier are substantially reliable, 59 whilst
a recent spate of Arabian epigraphic discoveries has independently confirmed that Muslim reporters and writers of
the eighth and ninth centuries CE accurately remembered the names of many of their seventh-century ancestors. 60
Still, the accuracy of the material on early genealogy and tribal relations cannot be transferred to the tribal tradition
as a whole: the incoherence and artificiality of the narrative reports therein—not to mention the contradictions and
ideological tampering in battle-related prosopography—remain, whilst other scholarship has seriously undermined the
material on pre-Islamic religious beliefs and practices: on internal and general historical grounds; on the basis of conflict-
ing Quranic evidence; and on the basis of epigraphic evidence.61 Moreover, by itself, the reliable material within the tribal
tradition cannot be used to reconstruct early Islamic history in general—according to Crone, “it is not the stuff of history.”62
3 | THE COMMON PROBLEMS OF THE RELIGIOUS AND TRIBAL TRADITIONS
According to Crone, the religious and tribal traditions together comprise a vast corpus of orally-transmitted reports,
“an invariable canon formed between a hundred and fifty and two hundred years after the Prophet's death.” 63 These
reports constitute the overwhelming bulk of early Islamic religio-historical collections, 64 which Crone described as
“mere piles of disparate traditions… characterized by the inclusion of material in support of conflicting legal and
doctrinal persuasions.” 65 Both the religious tradition and the tribal tradition are beset by fabrications and interpola-
tions reflecting later religious, polemical, apologetical, theological, and legal interests, artificial literary or narrative
structures, contradictions, and atomisation, deriving from a century or more of unsystematic oral transmission in
extremely chaotic conditions—even if the damage is less severe in the case of the tribal tradition. 66 Moreover, Islamic
historical memory (whether religious or tribal) seems fundamentally disconnected from the Late Antique social and
cultural environment of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, despite constituting the context for most of early
Islamic history: “Nothing in the Arab accounts of the conquests betrays the fact that the Arabs were moving into the
colourful world described by historians of late antiquity”. 67
Crone repeatedly emphasised the homogeneity of the combined religious and tribal “corpus” or “canon” of early
Islamic historiography, regardless of the region or sect of any given collector: most extant works broadly reflect
the same body of reports, 68 which attained its extant pattern of arrangement during the eighth and ninth centuries
CE. 69 This homogeneity is not due to the reliability of the sources in question (as if all accurately preserve the same
authentic historical memory of Islamic origins), nor due to some common point of view reflected in all (as if enforced
by a central orthodoxy); rather, the corpus is homogenous in the sense that the same pool of stories—the same fabri-
cations, interpolations, topoi, and contradictions—reappear across different collections. Even seemingly ‘different’
6 of 22 LITTLE
reports or perspectives often turn out to be alternative elaborations of common themes, 70 or else mere sectarian
reworkings (rather than independent accounts of the events in question): for example, late Shi'ite collections rework
earlier proto-Sunnite collections, which in turn rework earlier proto-Shi'ite collections, and so on. 71 In other words,
“the diversity” of the extant Islamic literary sources “is depressingly deceptive.” 72 Crone did not elaborate on the
causes of this homogeneity, but other scholarship has pointed in this regard to the practice of ‘journeying in search
of knowledge’ (al-riḥlah fī ṭalab al-ʿilm) that arose during the eighth and ninth centuries CE, which must have resulted
in the mixing of hitherto discrete regional corpora (as Kufah, Madinah, and other such centres exchanged reports)
and/or the generalisation of certain regional corpora (as some centres dominated others), not to mention mutual
contamination (as stories or versions of stories in different regions influenced each other). Either way, this institution
“helped construct a more uniform corpus of extant ḥadīths out of the various disparate local collections,” as Herbert
Berg puts it. 73 And of course, once the regional centres had become more interlinked and their respective corpora
generally known, it must have become difficult to fabricate new hadiths whole cloth or make major adjustments to
Prophetical biography, etc.—thus, the emergence by the ninth century CE of an informal “historiographical sunna” or
a ‘closed canon’ of reports, as Crone put it. 74
Whatever the cause of this homogeneity, it amounts to a corpus of reports (comprising both religious and tribal
material) in which fabrications, interpolations, artificial literary or narrative structures, and contradictions of all kinds are
ubiquitous; the Late Antique context of most of early Islamic history is largely absent; and Islam is depicted as springing
fully-formed into existence. 75 There is thus little prospect of reconstructing early Islamic history (or at the very least, the
first century) from most of this corpus, or as Crone put it: “Passing from one source to another and finding them very
much the same, one is harassed by an exasperating feeling that one cannot see. And in fact one cannot see.” 76 Indeed,
in light of all of the factors outlined above, Crone was skeptical of our ability to develop viable methods to reconstruct
earlier layers of the Islamic historical tradition, 77 not to mention individual hadiths. 78 Thus, concerning the Islamic
religio-historical corpus in general (i.e., the religious and tribal traditions alike, excepting of course the partial utility of
the latter), Crone concluded: “one can take the picture presented or one can leave it, but one cannot work with it.” 79
Crone was writing before the rise of the isnād-cum-matn analysis, which aims to reconstruct and date earlier
redactions of Islamic reports through a painstaking textual comparison of numerous variants thereof. 80 In light of
this method, perhaps her characterisation of the Islamic religio-historical corpus as generally unusable should be
modified. However, if the ur-version of a hadith reconstructed by an isnād-cum-matn analysis is of the kind outlined
above (e.g., something formulated by a storyteller), then the problems adduced by Crone would apply regardless:
reconstructing a storyteller distortion from the early eighth century CE still leaves us with a storyteller distortion. 81
Regardless, Crone was talking about general unusability specifically in regards to pre-Marwanid history: on her view,
both the religious and tribal traditions can be extensively used to reconstruct the Marwanid period (even if indirectly)
and, as it happens, isnād-cum-matn analyses are usually only able to reconstruct the redactions of common links
operating in the early eighth century CE—or in other words, the Marwanid period. 82
That said, Gregor Schoeler has argued that some of these reconstructable redactions, especially those of ʿUrwah
b. al-Zubayr (d. 93–95/711-714), should be regarded as basically reliable historical memories of the life and times of
the Prophet, due to his proximity to some Companions, and due to some general findings about the basic reliability
of oral traditions in other cultures. 83 However, this flies directly in the face of the highly-disruptive conditions of early
Islamic society, not to mention the widespread evidence for extreme mutation, transformation, and growth, ahistor-
ical narrative distortions, storyteller construction, and a general discontinuity in early Islamic historical memory—all
of which were outlined by Crone. 84 Moreover, Schoeler's citations are questionable in light of more recent research
regarding individual memory distortion, collective memory distortion, and rapid legendary development, especially in
the context of new religions and social movements. 85
In short, both the religious and tribal traditions are unreliable in general until the Marwanid period, or as Crone put
it: “Whether one approaches Islamic historiography from the angle of the religious or the tribal tradition, its overall char-
acter thus remains the same: the bulk of it is debris of an obliterated past.”86 Although the tribal tradition does preserve
some reliable or at least plausible material from as far back as the Conquest period or even earlier (above all, concerning
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genealogy and tribal relations), the vast bulk of early Islamic historiography is dubious—at best unverifiable, at worst
shown to be ahistorical—and cannot be used to reconstruct early Islamic history, or at least, most of the first Islamic
century.
4 | THE SECULAR TRADITION
But all is not lost, according to Crone: in addition to the religious and tribal traditions, we also have a “secular tradition”
within early Islamic historiography, not to mention early non-Muslim literary sources and proto-Islamic documents. But
what is the “secular tradition”? Crone only explicitly uses the term “secular tradition” at the very beginning of her histo-
riographical introduction (p. 3), before commencing her lengthy exposition on the “religious tradition” (pp. 3–8). This is
followed by her discussion of the “tribal tradition” (pp. 8–10), then a summary of the common problems of both the reli-
gious and tribal traditions (pp. 10–12), then a summary of some relevant twentieth-century scholarship (pp. 13–15), then
an argument for the utility of early non-Muslim literary sources (pp. 15–16), before the following point is finally reached:
Stepping outside is, however, not the only solution as far as the political history of the Arabs after the
Rāshidūn is concerned. Here too the Grundschicht consists of a chronological and prosopographical
framework, and that the Arab horror anonymitatis contributed to the proliferation of names here as
elsewhere can hardly be open to doubt; but the lists include the names of governors who can be
checked against the evidence of numismatics, papyrology and epigraphy, and against the testimony of
non-Muslim sources, and the result of such a check is unshakeable, surprising and impressive agree-
ment. Who compiled these lists, when and why is one of the most intriguing problems of Islamic
historiography; but what matters in the present context is that the one thing we can pride ourselves
on knowing in early Islamic history is who held power and when.
It is thus not surprising to find that whereas the non-Muslim sources offer a wholly new picture of
the religion that was to become Islam, they generally confirm the familiar outline of the society that
was to become the Muslim polity; and since they do not usually offer many details, their importance
is necessarily reduced. Not that this does much to justify the reluctance of Islamic historians to touch
a non-Muslim source. Syriac sources offer a contemporary account of the revolt of Mukhtār, descrip-
tions of a proto-mamlūk army under Manṣūr and a slave revolt in Ḥarrān; and had it occurred to
Dennett to glance at a collection of Nestorian responsa edited, translated and indexed in 1914, he
would not have had to write his Conversion and Poll-tax in 1960 to prove that the Arabs did indeed
impose a tax on the unbelievers' heads. But the fact remains that for political history the non-Muslim
sources offer additional, not alternative, information. 87
In short, Crone argued that the “chronological and prosopographical” outline of the post-661 CE political
history recorded within later Islamic literary sources is substantially confirmed by earlier proto-Islamic documents
and non-Muslim literary sources. Crone then harks back to the partial utility of the tribal tradition (which can
provide some contextual biographical data for the prosopa in question), before reiterating and concluding that any
reconstruction of early Islamic history on the basis of the later Islamic literary sources “has to be almost exclusively
prosopographical.” 88
Crone's early works are infamous for their technical and terse style, 89 and even after four decades, many of
the nuances and particularities of her views have continued to elude scholars—including the exact meaning of the
“secular tradition” mentioned at the outset. Were the “secular” and “tribal” traditions just synonyms? After all, Crone
had contrasted the “secular tradition” (which can provide “a coherent historical account” of early Islamic history) with
the “religious tradition,” 90 then extensively discredited the latter, then acknowledged the partial utility of the “tribal
tradition”—all without ever using the term “secular tradition” again. On this basis, some have concluded that the
“secular” and “tribal” traditions are one and the same. 91
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But this reading does not really match the text: despite acknowledging the partial utility of the tribal tradition,
Crone concluded that it cannot be used in and of itself to reconstruct early Islamic history in general: even the plau-
sible elements of the tribal tradition are “not much”, “of very little use”, “useless information”, and “not the stuff of
history” (i.e., cannot be used to reconstruct an overarching account of Islamic origins and the first Islamic century). 92
Crone even explicitly likened the tribal tradition to the religious tradition in terms of general uselessness, 93 and
proceeded to describe both together as a common “canon” of incoherent and ahistorical material. 94 Thus, the tribal
tradition seems like an awkward fit for the “secular tradition”, which Crone described as follows:
Whereas the religious tradition is such that it must be accepted or rejected in toto, the secular tradition
can to some extent be taken to pieces, and though a great deal of it has to be discarded, there remains
enough for a coherent historical account. 95
Although identifying the presence of some dubious material therein, Crone nevertheless concluded that the
“secular tradition” has utility in and of itself for reconstructing early Islamic history in general—could this be the very
same tradition that Crone dismissed as “not the stuff of history” (viz., the tribal tradition)? If the “secular tradition” is
contrasted to the religious tradition in terms of general utility, and the religious tradition is likened to the tribal tradi-
tion in terms of general uselessness, then how can the “secular tradition” be the tribal tradition?
Another apparent ambiguity is Crone's view on the reliability of early Islamic prosopography: did she mean all
prosopography? What about the biographical dictionaries of traditionists, and awāʾil, and lists of battle-participants—
these too are varieties of early Islamic prosopography, yet all are famously incoherent and unreliable (at least regard-
ing the early period). 96 If Crone only meant some prosopography, then which, and why? Finally, how did Crone's
intended prosopography relate to her “secular tradition”?
The answers to all of these questions lay buried in Crone's vast body of references. In endnote 99, Crone criti-
cised Albrecht Noth—a pioneer of form criticism in the domain of Hadith, operating in the aftermath of the influential
and controversial reassessment of the development of Hadith and early Islamic historiography by Joseph Schacht—
for failing to distinguish between three distinct kinds of prosopography: (1) lists of government officials, (2) lists of
ʿulamāʾ, and (3) lists of battle-participants:
The chronology and prosopography of the Rāshidūn was analysed by Noth, Quellenkritische
Studien, pp. 40ff, 90ff, and on the whole rejected. The discussion is, however, somewhat unsatis-
factory because Noth (who mysteriously does not know Schacht’s work on this topic) treats the two
separately and dismisses the taʾrīkh as secondary (that the combination of taʾrīkh and akhbār is second-
ary is obviously true, but that is another matter). Equally, he makes no distinction between lists of
different types: those of governors and other magistrates clearly belong to a different tradition from
those of ʿulamāʾ or those of participants and fallen in battles. 97
Crone's tripartite division of Islamic historiographical sub-traditions is explicit here: the lists of “governors and
other magistrates clearly belong to a different tradition from those of ʿulamāʾ or those of participants and fallen in
battles.” If the lists of Muslim religious scholars belong to the religious tradition (which seems obvious), and the lists
of battle-participants belong to the tribal tradition (which Crone explicitly confirmed in a subsequent endnote), then
what third tradition could the lists of government officials belong to? By process of elimination, we are left with the
“secular tradition”. Moreover, Crone explicitly argued for the reliability of these lists of government officials (caliphs,
governors, judges, and commanders) in a subsequent endnote, which matches her claim from the outset that the
“secular tradition” can be used to reconstruct early Islamic history:
Lists of caliphs are attested from the mid-Umayyad period onwards in the form of Syriac ‘king-lists’,
which probably reflect Arabic models, and next in Zuhrī’s book of asnān al-mulūk. (Rotter, ‘Abū
Zurʿa’, p. 91; for the first ‘king-list’ see Land, Anecdota, vol. ii, p. 11 of the ‘Addenda’). Lists of governors
LITTLE 9 of 22
and qāḍīs must have been composed about the same time (cf. the unique and presumably archaic title
of Kindī’s work in which the earliest material on qāḍīs dates from the early part of the second century
(Schacht, Origins, p. 100), and note that Abū Zurʿa got his lists of caliphs and most of his lists of qāḍīs
from the same informant (Rotter, ‘Abū Zurʿa’, pp. 99f)). Lists of commanders of the summer campaigns
are not attested until early ʿAbbāsid Syria (ibid., p. 101), but it is hard to believe that they had not been
compiled before: the evidence would indicate that taʾrīkh originated in Syria (cf. ibid., p. 92), and that
the contents of the Syrian lists were caliphs and magistrates. Lists of muḥaddithūn, on the other
hand, attesting to the rabbinicization of Islam, are of later origin (pace ibid., p. 92) and first appear in
Iraq: we are told that Shuʿba, who died in Basra in 160, was the first to occupy himself with the study
of traditionists (Ibn Ḥajar, Tahdhīb al-tahdhīb, Hyderabad 1325–7, vol. iv, p. 345), and in the archaic
work of Abu Zurʿa these lists are still only vaguely chronological, not annalistic (ibid.). That leaves the
lists of participants and fallen in battle and other lists relating to the ashrāf, which clearly belong
to the tribal tradition and which are the most difficult to check for authenticity. As an ingredient in
the maghāzī they are attested in the Khirbet el-Mird fragment (above, note 4), but there is nothing to
indicate that they were part of a specifically Syrian tradition, and they are unlikely always to have been
dated. 98
The tripartite division of the traditions is even clearer in this endnote, where the lists of caliphs, governors,
judges, and commanders (i.e., the prosopography constituting the “secular tradition”) are juxtaposed with both the
lists of traditionists (i.e., the prosopography of the religious tradition) and the lists of battle-participants and tribal
leaders (“which clearly belong to the tribal tradition”). In light of this clarification, certain statements within the
main body of Crone's historiographical introduction become clearer—for example, the religious and tribal traditions
are both explicitly described as having been “belatedly committed to writing,” 99 whereas the lists of government
officials (i.e., the prosopography constituting the “secular tradition”) are identified by Crone (in endnote 102) as
deriving from Marwanid Syria, which is relatively early. Likewise, the following statement can now be understood
as a description of the “secular tradition”, vis-à-vis the later religious and tribal traditions: “the earliest historio-
graphical literature took the form of dry lists of names chronologically arranged—taʾrīkh as opposed to ḥadīth and
akhbār.” 100
This was the chronology and prosopography that Crone regarded as reliable (as far back as 661 CE): the
state-oriented names, dates, rôles, and key events recorded within the later Islamic literary sources. This was the
“secular tradition”, as opposed to the prosopographies of the tribal and religious traditions—indeed, Crone at one
point expressly rejected the “chronology” and “prosopography” of Prophetical biography, 101 which is both religious
and tribal. All of this becomes even clearer when we reconsider endnote 102 in Slaves on Horses, in which the relia-
bility of state-oriented prosopography is explicitly contrasted with the lateness of religious prosopography and the
ambiguity of tribal prosopography. These three distinct bodies of material that Crone identified within early Islamic
historiography correspond exactly to the three distinct labels that she outlined at various points in her historiograph-
ical introduction: the “secular tradition” is clearly the state-oriented proto-tawārīkh (annalistic chronicles) of Marwa-
nid Syria, which constituted the “chronological and prosopographical framework” underpinning later Abbasid-era
historiography. Crone's varying descriptions of the tribal tradition as partially reliable yet generally useless also
now make sense: it is only within the framework of the “secular tradition”—the overarching account of early Islamic
history embodied primarily within the earliest extant tawārīkh—that the plausible “gossip” of the tribal tradition can
be utilised to “provide the background and status of the persons gossipped about.” 102 This was precisely Crone's
approach in her reconstruction of early Islamic social and political history, which focused heavily upon Arab tribes and
tribal leaders during the Umayyad period. 103
10 of 22 LITTLE
5 | THE UTILITY OF CRONE'S HISTORIOGRAPHICAL TAXONOMY
To recapitulate our findings thus far, Crone argued that early Islamic historiography can be divided into three distinct
traditions: a religious tradition, a tribal tradition, and a secular tradition. The first is overwhelmingly unreliable regard-
ing the seventh century CE, and can largely only be used to reconstruct the doctrinal and religio-historical statements
of figures from the eighth century CE (including the Marwanid period). The second is also substantially unreliable, but
can still be used to tell us about the identities and backgrounds of at least some early Muslim and Arab individuals
and families, and the dynamics between some Arabian tribes, perhaps even as far back as the eve of Islam. The third
is largely reliable and can be used to tell us about the basic political events and chronology of the caliphate and early
Muslim society, at least as far back as the beginning of the Umayyad period.
At this point, before we proceed deeper into the origins of the so-called “secular tradition” in particular, it is
worth asking whether Crone's categorisation and taxonomy of the early Islamic historical tradition is useful, or in
other words: do her categories actually track three different sets of material with discrete characteristics—and, if
so, should her naming scheme be retained? It should be clear by now that the so-called “secular tradition” deserves
to be marked off as such vis-à-vis the rest of the Islamic historical tradition, being manifestly discrete in its origins,
priorities, and form. However, matters are not as clearcut with the religious and tribal traditions, and one may ques-
tion Crone's division of the remaining Islamic historical tradition into such. Still, there is a strong case to be made
for Crone's taxonomy, given the different foci and even dominant authorities that can be readily observed therein:
the material identified by Crone as “religious” is primarily concerned with understanding and elaborating revelation
and doctrine and derives above all from the likes of ʿUrwah b. al-Zubayr (d. 93–95/711-714), Muḥammad b. Muslim
b. Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/741–742), and their fellow traditionists (muḥaddiṯūn), whereas the material identified as
“tribal” is primarily concerned with narrower, Arabian tribal and historical interests (personalia, genealogy, poetry,
local tales, the battles and exploits of tribes and tribal heroes, etc.) and derives above all from the likes of Muḥammad
b. al-Sāʾib al-Kalbī (d. 146/763–764), his family, and other such litterateurs and antiquarians. Still, there is clearly an
overlap between the two traditions, in terms of both material and authorities: reports and discussions of idols and
pre-Islamic customs clearly embody both religious and tribal interests, for example, and figures such as Muḥammad
b. ʿUmar al-Wāqidī (d. 207/823) and Muḥammad b. Saʿd (d. 230/845) feature prominently in both realms—in their
particular case, as authorities in both the biography of the Prophet, on the one hand, and tribal genealogy, battle
stories, etc., on the other. Moreover, the authorities primarily associated with one tradition can still often be found, in
a lesser capacity, in the other, so the traditions should not be regarded as completely separate. Still, Crone's taxonomy
arguably works overall, at least as a heuristic, in describing three distinct bodies of material with different foci and
even dominant authorities.
That said, there is reason to reject part of Crone's naming scheme. The religious and tribal traditions seem more
or less aptly named, but the rationale behind the naming of the “secular tradition” is still something of a puzzle. 104
Given that the “secular tradition” concerns the key events and personnel of the caliphate, and given that the caliphate
was actually invested with religious and even salvific authority (as Crone herself went on to argue), 105 the character-
isation of this tradition as “secular” is perhaps misleading. Thus, in the rest of the article, I will instead describe this
material as the state-oriented proto-taʾrīkh tradition.
6 | THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROTO-TAʾRĪKH TRADITION
Now that we have clarified that Crone's “secular tradition” refers to the state-oriented proto-taʾrīkh tradition of
Marwanid Syria and, thereby, the exact kinds of chronology and prosopography that she deemed reliable, a final ques-
tion remains: why was this chronology and prosopography more reliable than the other two traditions, and indeed, so
reliable that it can be used to reconstruct a political outline of early Islamic history as far back as 661 CE? Once again,
the answer was made explicit in Crone's aforementioned endnotes—the proto-taʾrīkh tradition was committed to
writing, and thus stabilised, long before the others, thereby better preserving the historical data transmitted therein:
LITTLE 11 of 22
“Lists of caliphs are attested from the mid-Umayyad period onwards in the form of Syriac ‘king-lists’, which probably
reflect Arabic models”. 106
Robert Hoyland has posited that “lists compiled from government records”—lists of caliphs, governors, judges,
and other such leaders and officials—“had been kept since probably the reign of Muʿāwiya (661-80),” 107 but cites
no direct evidence to this effect. Instead, he questionably infers the existence of such Sufyanid-era lists indirectly
from the fact that “Papyri, inscriptions and coins suggest that an effective Umayyad administration was in place
at a very early date.” 108 The earliest direct evidence for the proto-taʾrīkh tradition is a short Syriac list of Arab
“kings” written in 705 CE, which begins with the reign of Muḥammad, catalogues his political successors in chron-
ological succession, and ends with the ascension of the Marwanid caliph al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 705–715
CE). 109 The omission of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661) and ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Zubayr (d. 73/692) from this list indicates a
pro-Umayyad perspective, which is consistent with a Syrian origin for the text—but the regnal lengths assigned to
Muḥammad and ʿUmar are unusual, and it is not clear whether this Syriac chronology is borrowing from an Arabic
original. 110 In the case of a subsequent Syriac king-list from 724 CE, however, such a borrowing is much clearer, as
Hoyland notes:
The employment of the lunar calendar, the attempt to be accurate regarding names and terms of
office and the use of the Arabic words rasūl and fitna suggest that the above was translated from an
Arabic original. There may, then, be some relation between these short chronologies and the lists
of caliphs, governors, judges, secretaries, scholars and the like that form the backbone of Muslim
chronicles. 111
ʿAlī and Ibn al-Zubayr's continued absence suggests a Syrian provenance for this text as well, which must have
been written during the reign of the Marwanid caliph Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 724–743 CE). The correspondence
between this chronology and the chronology recorded in later Islamic historiography is significant, as R. Stephen
Humphreys notes: if the Syriac king-list is based on an Arabic original (which seems likely), then “that would imply
that by the beginning of Hisham's reign (724–43) Muslims had developed a standardized caliphal chronology.” 112
In short, we have evidence that Muslim writers in Marwanid Syria were composing rudimentary Arabic histo-
riography during the early eighth century CE, in the form of simple caliphal chronologies and prosopographies. 113
(According to Crone, similar “lists of governors and qāḍīs must have been composed about the same time,” 114 given
the consistency of that material within the extant Islamic literary sources and its corroboration by earlier sources.)
This proto-taʾrīkh tradition continued unbroken unto the Abbasid period, which explains why the political outline
recorded within the extant Islamic literary sources substantially corresponds to the evidence of contemporaneous
non-Muslim literary sources and proto-Islamic documents (such as coins, inscriptions, and papyri). 115 This could also
explain why said correspondence breaks down around the time of the first fitnah: if the written preservation of
the proto-taʾrīkh tradition commenced around the early eighth century CE (or even the end of the seventh century
CE), then it makes sense that the historical data conveyed forthwith would accurately reflect the contemporaneous
Marwanid period (680–740s CE) and perhaps the immediately-preceding decades of the Sufyanid period (660–680s
CE), but not much more. From around 661 CE backward, the basic political chronology and prosopography recorded
in the later Islamic literary sources becomes internally incoherent, 116 and also noticeably conflicts with earlier and
contemporaneous sources. 117 This is the part of the “secular tradition” that Crone argued “has to be discarded”—the
state-oriented chronology and prosopography of the Prophet and his Righteously-Guided Successors, which Crone
deemed to be largely unreliable.
That said, Crone cautioned (in an endnote) against the wholesale rejection of the “chronology and prosopogra-
phy of the Rāshidūn” by Noth, given that he “makes no distinction between lists of different types” (i.e., he did not
distinguish between material from the religious, tribal, and state-oriented traditions). 118 Indeed, the state-oriented
proto-taʾrīkh tradition is corroborated on the obscure governorship of ʿUmayr b. Saʿd in Ḥimṣ and Damascus in the
640s CE, 119 and “the order which has emerged from Hinds' prosopographical studies of the rebels against ʿUthmān”
12 of 22 LITTLE
(i.e., the coherency of the proto-taʾrīkh tradition thereon) “suggest that there is more to be said about this subject.” 120
But these seem to be exceptions:
It is certainly true that the chronology of the conquests is confused (Noth, Quellenkritische Studien, p. 41),
that the Rāshidūn are given Umayyad magistrates (ibid., p. 43; one might add Ibn Qunfudh, ʿUthmān’s
supposed ṣāḥib shurṭa), and that the lists of participants in battles testify to Namenmanie (ibid., p. 96).
And perhaps the Grundschicht of this period is as unsatisfactory as it is for the Prophet. 121
(To this can be added all of the aforementioned contradictions with earlier and contemporaneous sources, many
of which were noted by Crone herself.) Thus, whilst Crone was inclined to reject the last point about the Grundschicht
(given the aforementioned instances of corroboration and coherency in the era of the Rightly-Guided Successors, in
contrast to the era of the Prophet), 122 she still agreed that the proto-taʾrīkh tradition is generally unreliable before
661 CE: the state-oriented “chronological and prosopographical framework” upon which modern historians can rely
concerns “the political history of the Arabs after the Rāshidūn” (as Crone put it in the main text). 123 In short, it is only
regarding the Umayyad period that basic political data in the later Islamic literary sources can be presumed to be
reliable.
That the writing of proto-taʾrīkh in Marwanid Syria continued unto the middle of the eighth century CE (and the
end of the dynasty) seems likely—once again, Christian literary sources provide the clues. Two Latin chronicles writ-
ten in Spain (post-741 CE) reflect a common eastern source: a Greek chronicle written in Marwanid Syria by a Chris-
tian circa 741 CE, which dates and notes the successive reigns and conflicts of Byzantine and then Arab rulers. 124
According to Hoyland, this inferable Greek common source “narrates events in the East caliph by caliph up to the
time of Hishām (724–43) in such a detailed manner that it must ultimately depend upon Muslim sources.” 125 Likewise,
Stephen Shoemaker notes that because this source's “view of Islam” is “so positive,” it is “tempting to suspect that
somehow there are Islamic sources lying just behind it”—more specifically, “some now lost early Islamic (Umayyad?)
historical traditions.” 126 In other words, this inferable Graeco-Syro-Christian chronicle indicates the continued
existence of rudimentary Arabic state-oriented chronology and prosopography (Crone's “secular tradition”) within
late-Marwanid Syria—specifically, the writing of chronological lists of caliphs, with notices on their reigns.
The continued existence of proto-taʾrīkh is perhaps evidenced in the chronicle of Theophilus of Edessa (d. c. 775
CE), which is reconstructable on the basis of later recensions and was originally written unto 754–755 CE. 127 This
chronicle contains both “fairly short and simple notices on individual caliphs up to and including Hisham (724–43),
which are pithy and unconnected,” and a “very full and detailed account of events from 743 to 54, which is presented
as a continuous narrative and includes causal explanations.” 128 According to Hoyland, the former (which resembles
the proto-taʾrīkh attested in previous works) probably derives from a contemporaneous Muslim source, whilst the
latter likely derives from his own experiences and is thus his own original contribution. Hoyland thus infers that
“there was already a fairly advanced tradition of Muslim history-writing by the mid-eighth century,” 129 at the rise of
the Abbasid Dynasty.
On the Islamic side of things (i.e., internally, independent of Christian sources), the continuation of the
state-oriented tradition can be detected as early as the reported Taʾrīkh of the Egyptian annalist and traditionist
al-Layth b. Saʿd (d. 175/791). Although this work is now lost, a riwāyah-cum-matn analysis of the quotations there-
from in later, extant Islamic chronicles has recently allowed Edward Zychowicz-Coghill to substantially reconstruct
the text (or at least, the recension thereof by al-Layth's student Ibn Bukayr, d. 231/845–846). Zychowicz-Coghill
explicitly identifies this Taʾrīkh as a manifestation and continuation of Crone's Marwanid-era state-oriented tradi-
tion, 130 and rightly so: in addition to reflecting the pro-Umayyad stance that initially characterised the tradition, 131
al-Layth's Taʾrīkh was little more than state-oriented chronology and prosopography, that is, a bare, year-by-year list
of notices on the ascensions and deaths of caliphs, the appointments and dismissals of governors, the campaigns
of commanders, and the identity of pilgrimage-leaders in given years—devoid of any proper narratives. 132 In other
words, the kind of material comprising al-Layth's Taʾrīkh—in terms of form, content, and bias—perfectly matches the
LITTLE 13 of 22
kind of material that inferably constituted Marwanid-era proto-tawārīkh, which makes it certain that the former is a
continuation or manifestation of the latter.
This archaic style of Islamic historiography is still evident in the earliest extant Arabic chronicle—the Taʾrīkh of
Khalīfah b. Khayyāṭ (d. 240/854–855), which Schacht characterised as little more than “dry enumerations of persons,
of events, of appointments and dismissals, of deaths, etc., year by year.” 133 Such early works stand in contrast to the
tawārīkh of later chroniclers like Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), who merged the state-oriented, tribal,
and religious traditions into synthetic compositions; these later chronicles are vast collections of Prophetical biog-
raphy, conquest reports, and other such reports, all arranged within a chronological framework. 134 The chronology
and prosopography of the proto-taʾrīkh tradition thus tends to be embedded within a mass of other material in later
works such as al-Ṭabarī, but can still be distinguished by their state-oriented content; per Crone's argument, the
names, rôles, key events, and dates of government officials (such as caliphs, governors, judges, and commanders) can
be picked out of this extant mass to reconstruct a reliable political outline of the Sufyanid and Marwanid periods of
early Islamic history. The substantial corroboration of this extant post-661 CE political data with earlier and contem-
poraneous sources is such that, even in instances where this data is uncorroborated, it can still be presumed to be
reliable—or as Crone put it, “enough has been confirmed to make rejection of the unconfirmed extremely difficult.” 135
This is not to say that absolutely everything in the post-661 CE proto-taʾrīkh tradition is reliable, but rather, that such
data can be presumed reliable until shown otherwise.
Incidentally, the ostensible Marwanid-era genesis 136 of the proto-taʾrīkh tradition in Syria and the rôle of this
tradition as the fundamental “chronological and prosopographical framework” upon which later Abbasid-era literary
sources rested could perhaps explain the ubiquity of distinctive Marwanid-era usages (such as islām and muslim as
the primary identifiers of the religion 137 and khalīfat allāh as a standard leadership title 138) within extant Islamic histo-
riography. The evolving self-identity and religious vocabulary of early Muslims—initially unconstrained in a mostly
oral culture—may have become somewhat frozen upon the advent of a written tradition during the early eighth
century CE, resulting in Marwanid-era innovations becoming embedded within the foundations of Islamic literary
self-image and historical memory. The hegemony of this Marwanid-era proto-taʾrīkh tradition—probably embodied in
the scholarship of al-Zuhrī, and thereby undergirding the seminal Abbasid-era work of Ibn Isḥāq 139—also explains the
ubiquity of the now-standard Islamic chronology of Islamic origins, and the near-total marginalisation of alternative
early chronologies. 140
7 | CONCLUSION
Crone identified three distinct bodies of material within early Islamic historiography, as contained within extant Islamic
literary sources: a religious tradition, comprising doctrinal reports from the Prophet and others (aḥādīth), Prophetical
biography (maghāzī/sīrah), biographical dictionaries (ṭabaqāt) of religious scholars, and other such religiously-oriented
material; a tribal tradition, comprising pre-Islamic Arabian battle stories (ayyām al-ʿarab), Arabo-Islamic conquest
reports (futūḥ), genealogy (nasab), prosopographical lists of battle-participants, tribal personalia, and other such
material related to tribal Arabia; and finally, a so-called secular tradition, comprising state-oriented chronology and
prosopography (i.e., lists of notices regarding caliphs, governors, judges, and commanders), or in other words, proto-
taʾrīkh. Although these three traditions are often intertwined within the extant Islamic historiographical compilations,
their respective origins are still discernible; this is important given that the state-oriented chronology and prosopog-
raphy of the proto-taʾrīkh tradition substantially corresponds to contemporaneous sources as far back as 661 CE, and
thus, can be used to reconstruct a basic political outline of early Islamic history. The reliability of this state-oriented
chronology and prosopography (in contrast to other materials within early Islamic historiography) results from the
fact that this data—as it exists within the extant Abbasid-era literary sources—derives from the continuous written
transmission of proto-taʾrīkh in Marwanid Syria, which began to be composed during the early eighth century CE at
the latest.
14 of 22 LITTLE
In addition to clarifying an important argument for the reliability of a sub-tradition within early Islamic historiog-
raphy, we have also clarified Crone's most devastating criticisms of the tradition in general, which many scholars—
even those engaging with and criticising her work—have mischaracterised as a problem of mere ‘fabrication’. On the
contrary, Crone was emphatic that the unreliability of early Islamic historiography arose primarily from the context
and mode of its early transmission, which facilitated a process of rapid mutation, distortion, and growth during the
first Islamic century. Given that recent scholarship has attempted to reach back into the first Islamic century and to
engage with ideas about oral tradition, Crone's arguments thereon retain relevance. Even if her views are ultimately
rejected, such a rejection must engage with what she actually said, not what she is commonly thought to have said.
ACKNOWLE DG E ME NT
I owe thanks to Prof. Christopher Melchert (University of Oxford), Ian D. Morris (University of Amsterdam), and
Ahsan Azim, for providing feedback on earlier drafts of this article; Dr. Edward Zychowicz-Coghill (University of
Cambridge), for kindly providing me with access to his (at that time) unpublished research; Dr. Hythem Sidky (Univer-
sity of Chicago) and Dr. Michael C. A. Macdonald (Khalili Research Centre), for offering valuable insights and sources;
the anonymous reviewers, for their excellent feedback; and, above all, Prof. Justin K. Stearns (NYU Abu Dhabi), for
his invaluable feedback and generous support during the submission and editing process.
O RC ID
J. J. Little https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2600-9938
EN D NOTE S
1
This is mercifully not a view that I have seen expressed in print, but one that I have repeatedly encountered with students
(including graduate students), religious intellectuals (including doctors), and ʿulamāʾ. Cf. Patricia Crone & Michael A. Cook,
Hagarism: The making of the Islamic world (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), ch. 1, and all of Crone and
Cook's subsequent works.
2
For example, Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, USA: The
Darwin Press, Inc., 1998), intro, esp. 25–26.
3
Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), ch.
1.
4
Ibid., 11; also see Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18.
5
Crone, Slaves on Horses, 9.
6
Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 36, 18.
7
In addition to these three, there was also “information derived from Sāsānid annals”, as noted in Patricia Crone, Meccan
Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1987), 203.
8
Ead., Slaves on Horses, 16.
9
Prophetical biography is repeatedly cited in Crone's discussion on the religious tradition (ibid., 4–8), as are Hadith (ibid.,
5–8).
10
For religious ṭabaqāt, see ibid., 213, n. 99.
11
Ibid., 3. Also see Gregor Schoeler (ed. James E. Montgomery and trans. Uwe Vagelpohl), The Oral and the Written in Early
Islam (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006), passim; Michael A. Cook, ‘The Opponents of the Writing of Tradition in Early Islam’,
Arabica, Tome 44, Issue 4 (1997), passim; Donner, Narratives, ch. 12; Robinson, Islamic Historiography, passim.
12
13
Ibid., 4.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid., 4–5.
16
Ibid., 5.
17
Ibid.
LITTLE 15 of 22
18
Ibid.
19
Ead., ‘Muhammad and the origins of Islam. By F. E. Peters’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland,
Volume 5, Issue 2 (1995), 270–271; ead., Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press,
2004), 126 (incl. n. 3); ead., ‘What do we actually know about Mohammed?’, Open Democracy (10 th/June/2008): https://
www.opendemocracy.net/en/mohammed_3866jsp/. Also see Robert G. Hoyland, ‘Writing the Biography of the Prophet
Muhammad: Problems and Solutions’, History Compass, Volume 5, Number 2 (2007), 587.
20
Crone, Meccan Trade, esp. ch. 9; ead., ‘Two legal problems bearing on the early history of the Qurʾān’, Jerusalem Studies in
Arabic and Islam, Volume 18, Number 1 (1994), 13–20. For more on the storytellers, see Gautier H. A. Juynboll, Muslim
tradition: Studies in chronology, provenance and authorship of early ḥadīth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 11–14, 17, 23, 74; Michael A. Cook, Muhammad (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1983), 66–67; Andrew L.
Rippin, ‘The Function of Asbāb al-Nuzūl in Qurʾānic Exegesis’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Volume
51, Issue 1 (1988), 19; Schoeler (trans. Vagelpohl), Biography, esp. 12, 74, 79; Harald Motzki, ‘The Origins of Muslim Exege-
sis. A Debate’, in Harald Motzki, Analysing Muslim Traditions: Studies in Legal, Exegetical and Maghāzī Ḥadīth (Leiden, the
Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2010), 265–266; Robert G. Hoyland, ‘History, fiction and authorship in the first centu-
ries of Islam’, in Julia Bray (ed.), Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam: Muslim horizons (Abingdon, UK: Routledge,
2006), 31–32; Andrew G. Bannister, An Oral-Formulaic Study of the Qur'an (Lanham, USA: Lexington Books, 2014), 45–46,
60 (n. 19); Andreas Görke, ‘Between History and Exegesis: The Origins and Transformation of the Story of Muḥammad
and Zaynab bt Ǧaḥš’, Arabica, Volume 65, Issue 1–2 (2018), 36, 62. There has been a tendency to equate these storytellers
with the quṣṣāṣ of later Islamic memory, but this is clearly a mistake, since the quṣṣāṣ were not storytellers per se; cf. Lyall
R. Armstrong, The Quṣṣāṣ of Early Islam (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2017), passim.
21
22
Citing John M. B. Jones, ‘The Chronology of Maghāzī—A Textual Survey’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies,
Volume 19, Part 2 (1957), 245. Also see Stephen J. Shoemaker, ‘In Search of ʿUrwa's Sīra: Some Methodological Issues in
the Quest for “Authenticity” in the Life of Muḥammad’, Der Islam, Volume 85 (2011), 260, and The Death of a Prophet: The
End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Philadelphia, USA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 74–75, 99
ff., on the chronology of the sīrah in general.
23
Crone, Slaves on Horses, 212, n. 93.
24
Ibid., 212, n. 94. Also see Uri Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muḥammad as viewed by the Early Muslims: A Textual
Analysis (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1995), Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, 103–104, 114–116; Görke,
‘Between History and Exegesis’, 36–37 (incl. n. 18), 49, 62; etc.
25
Crone, Slaves on Horses, 212, n. 95. Also see ead. & Cook, Hagarism, ch. 1, and Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, passim.
However, cf. Mehdy Shaddel, ‘Periodisation and the futūḥ: Making Sense of Muḥammad's Leadership of the Conquests in
Non-Muslim Sources', Arabica, Volume 69, Issue 1 (2022), 96–145.
26
Crone, Slaves on Horses, 5. Also see Schoeler (trans. Vagelpohl), The Oral and the Written, 61.
27
Crone, Slaves on Horses, 5–6. Also see Jonathan E. Brockopp, Muhammad's Heirs: The Rise of Muslim Scholarly Communities,
622–950 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
28
29
Ibid. For the rise of systematic written transmission, also see ibid., 3, and the other references cited above. For some
possible candidates for Crone's intended “doctrinal structures”, see Matthew J. Kuiper, ‘The Roots and Achievements of
the Early Proto-Sunni Movement: A Profile and Interpretation’, The Muslim World, Volume 104 (2014), 71–88. For specific
examples of old caliphal or pre-ʿulamāʾ doctrines that were ultimately replaced, see Patricia Crone, ‘The First-Century
Concept of Hiǧra’, Arabica, Tome 41 (1994), 352–387, and ead. & Martin Hinds, God's Caliph: Religious authority in the first
centuries of Islam (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
30
31
Ibid.
32
In general, also see Ignáz Goldziher (ed. Samuel M. Stern and trans. Christa R. Barber & Samuel M. Stern), Muslim Studies,
Volume 2 (Albany, USA: State University Press of New York, 1971); Joseph F. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurispru-
dence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1950); Juynboll, Muslim tradition; Hiroyuki Yanagihashi, Studies in Legal Hadith
(Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2019); etc.
33
34
Ibid., 6.
35
Ibid., 8.
16 of 22 LITTLE
36
Ibid., 7.
37
Ibid., 8.
38
Ibid., 9, 205 (n. 39), 206 (n. 47).
39
Ibid., 9, 205 (n. 40), 206 (n. 47).
40
Ibid., 9, 205 (nn. 39, 41).
41
Ibid., 214, n. 102. Also see Gautier H. A. Juynboll, ‘On the Origins of Arabic Prose: Reflections on Authenticity’, in Gautier
H. A. Juynboll (ed.), Studies on the First Century of Islamic History (Carbondale & Edwardsville, USA: Southern Illinois Univer-
sity Press, 1982), 164.
42
43
This is what is meant by “who was the first to say and do such and such” (ibid., 10).
44
Ibid., 205, n. 39.
45
Ibid.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid., 10.
48
Ibid., 9; presumably, Crone has in mind material such as poetry and battle-related prosopography.
49
Ibid., 206, n. 53. Also see Ilse Lichtenstädter, ‘Muḥammad Ibn Ḥabîb and His Kitâb al-Muḥabbar’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society, Part 1 (1939), 13 ff.
50
Crone, Slaves on Horses, 9, 206 (n. 48), 212 (n. 96). Also see ead., Meccan Trade, chs. 8–9 (much of which concerns reports
of pre-Islamic Arabia), and ead., ‘Muhammad and the origins of Islam. By F. E. Peters’, 270.
51
See the preceding references. Also see Albrecht Noth & Lawrence I. Conrad (trans. Michael Bonner), The Early Arabic Histor-
ical Tradition: A Source-critical Study, 2nd ed. (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1994), 41; Parvaneh Pourshariati,
Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian–Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran (London, UK: I. B.
Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2008), ch. 3.
52
Crone, Slaves on Horses, 9, 205–206 (nn. 47, 49). Also see ead., Meccan Trade, ch. 9; John R. Porter, ‘Pre-Islamic Arabic
Historical Traditions and the Early Historical Narratives of the Old Testament’, Journal of Biblical Literature, Volume 87,
Number 1 (1968), 17–26; Noth & Conrad (trans. Bonner), The Early Arabic Historical Tradition; Wolfhart Heinrichs, ‘Proso-
metrical Genres in Classical Arabic Literature’, in Joseph Harris & Karl Reichl (eds.), Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives
on Narrative in Prose and Verse (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 255; Walter Oller, ‘Al-Ḥārith ibn Ẓālim and the Trope
of Baghy’, in Philip F. Kennedy (ed.), On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic Literature (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz
Verlag, 2005), 249; Ehsan Roohi, ‘Between History and Ancestral Lore: A Literary Approach to the Sīra's Narratives of
Political Assassinations', Der Islam, Volume 98, Issue 2 (2021), 425–472.
53
54
Ibid., 10.
55
Ibid., 9.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid., 9–10.
58
Ibid., 10. Likewise, ibid., 15: “There is of course no doubt that Muḥammad lived in the 620 and 630s A.D., that he fought
in wars, and that he had followers some of whose names are likely to have been preserved.”
59
For example, Asad Q. Ahmed, The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Ḥijāz: Five Prosopographical Case Studies (Oxford, UK:
Prosopographica et Genealogica, 2011); Georg Leube, Kinda in der frühislamischen Geschichte. Eine prosopographische
Studie auf Basis der frühen und klassischen arabisch-islamischen Geschichtsschreibung (Baden-Baden, Germany: Ergon Verlag,
2017); Brian J. Ulrich, Arabs in the Early Islamic Empire: Exploring Al-Azd Tribal Identity (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University
Press, 2019); Majied Robinson, Marriage in the Tribe of Muhammad: A Statistical Study of Early Arabic Genealogical Literature
(Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2020).
60
For example, see the various articles on Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog, discussing many of the recent inscriptions
that have been published on Twitter. See also the forthcoming work of Ahmad al-Jallad.
61
For example, Crone, Meccan Trade, ch. 8; Gerald R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic
to History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Patricia Crone (ed. Hanna Siurua), The Qurʾānic Pagans
and Related Matters: Collected Studies in Three Volumes, Volume 1 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2016);
Christian J. Robin, ‘The Judaism of the Ancient Kingdom of Ḥimyar in Arabia: A Discreet Conversion’, in Gavin McDowell,
LITTLE 17 of 22
Ron Naiweld, & Daniel S. B. Ezra (eds.), Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1000 CE
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 166. See also the forthcoming work of al-Jallad—e.g., with Hythem
Sidky, ‘A Paleo-Arabic inscription on a route north of Ṭāʾif’, Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy (forthcoming). Of course,
even in this domain, the Arabs of the eighth and ninth centuries CE accurately remembered at least the names of some
ancient Arabian deities—but their ‘memories’ of the worship, locations, and significance of these deities are contradictory
and/or conflict with Quranic and/or epigraphic evidence, at least as far as Arabia on the eve of Islam is concerned.
62
Crone, Slaves on Horses, 10; also see ibid., 17.
63
Ibid., 11.
64
Ibid., 10–11.
65
Ibid., 10.
66
See above, and also, ibid., 3–8 (for the religious tradition), 8–10 (for the tribal tradition), and 10 ff. (for both together).
67
Ibid., 11–12.
68
Ibid., 10–11. Also see Herbert Berg, The Development of Exegesis in Early Islam: The Authenticity of Muslim Literature from the
Formative Period (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000), 10–11 (summarising Goldziher); Robinson, Islamic Historiography,
18.
69
70
Crone only touched upon this briefly in Slaves on Horses (e.g., 205–206, n. 47), but elaborated the matter in Meccan Trade
(esp. ch. 9), as has been noted already.
71
Ead., Slaves on Horses, 11, 207–208 (n. 60).
72
Ibid., 11.
73
Berg, Development, 10–11. Also see Goldziher (trans. Barber & Stern), Muslim Studies, II, 166–168, and Juynboll, Muslim
tradition, 66–70.
74
75
Ibid., 11–12.
76
Ibid., 11.
77
Ibid., 12–14.
78
Ead., Roman, provincial and Islamic law: The origins of the Islamic patronate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1987), esp. 29–31.
79
Ead., Slaves on Horses, 4.
80
Examples of such research are numerous, but the usual starting place is the works of Harald Motzki, Gregor Schoeler, and
Andreas Görke.
81
For example, Motzki, ‘The Origins of Muslim Exegesis’, in Motzki, Analysing Muslim Traditions, 270–271; Ehsan Roohi,
‘Between History and Ancestral Lore’ (re-evaluating the results of one of Motzki's earlier studies). More generally (on
the limits of this kind of analysis), see Motzki, ‘The Origins of Muslim Exegesis’, in Motzki, Analysing Muslim Traditions,
234–235, 272; Sean W. Anthony, Muhammad the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam (Oakland, USA:
University of California Press, 2020), 7.
82
Christopher Melchert, ‘The Early History of Islamic Law’, in Herbert Berg (ed.), Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic
Origins (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2003), 302; Pavel Pavlovitch, ‘The Origin of the Isnād and al-Mukhtār
b. Abī ʿUbayd's Revolt in Kūfa (66-7/685-7)’, al-Qanṭara, Volume 39, Number 1 (2018), 40.
83
Schoeler (trans. Vagelpohl), Biography, for example, 106, 113; id., ‘Méthodes et Débats: Character and Authenticity of
the Muslim Tradition on the Life of Muḥammad’, Arabica, Volume 49, Issue 3 (2002), 361–362. Also see Andreas Görke,
‘Prospects and Limits in the Study of the Historical Muhammad’, in Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort, Cornelis H. M.
Versteegh, & Joas Wagemakers (eds.), The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam: Essays in Honour of
Harald Motzki (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2011), 148.
84
In particular, see Crone's discussions on the so-called “Constitution” of Madinah, in Slaves on Horses, ch. 1; Roman, provin-
cial and Islamic law, ch. 2; and her review of Peters. See also her form-critical analysis of Hadith in Meccan Trade, ch. 9, and
those of Noth and Roohi, cited above.
85
For various summaries thereof, see Zeba A. Crook, ‘Collective Memory Distortion and the Quest for the Historical Jesus’,
Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, Volume 11 (2013), 53–76; Richard C. Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why
We Might Have Reason to Doubt (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014), 249 ff. (incl. n. 21); Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus
18 of 22 LITTLE
Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (San Francisco,
USA: HarperOne, 2016). Also see Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 8–13; Shoemaker, ‘In Search of ʿUrwa's Sīra’, 324–325;
id., ‘Andreas Görke and Gregor Schoeler, Die ältesten Berichte über das Leben Muhammads: Das Korpus ʿUrwa ibn az-Zubair’,
Der Islam, Volume 89, Issue 2 (2012), 209–210.
86
87
Ibid., 16.
88
Ibid., 17.
89
Michael Bonner, ‘The Legacy and Influence of Patricia Crone (1945–2015),’ Der Islam, Volume 93, Number 2 (2016),
349–350.
90
91
For example, Brian J. Ulrich, Constructing Al-Azd: Tribal Identity and Society in the Early Islamic Centuries (Madison, USA:
University of Wisconsin, 2008), 43. Based on personal correspondences with other scholars, I can verify that this view is
not an isolated one.
92
Crone, Slaves on Horses, 10. For a related point, see Ahmed, The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Ḥijāz, 6.
93
Crone, Slaves on Horses, 10: “Whether one approaches Islamic historiography from the angle of the religious or the tribal
tradition, its overall character thus remains the same: the bulk of it is debris of an obliterated past.”
94
Ibid., 10–12.
95
Ibid., 3.
96
For example, ibid., 212, n. 96.
97
Ibid., 213, n. 99. Emphasis mine.
98
Ibid., 214, n. 102. Emphasis mine.
99
Ibid., 13.
100
Ibid., 14.
101
Ibid., 15; also see ibid., 212, n. 96.
102
Ibid., 17.
103
That is, “Part II” (comprising chs. 3–8). Also see ibid., 215, n. 108: “Most of the information in Appendix I is to be taken in
this sense.”
104
Perhaps this was a reference to the etymology of the word “secular”, given by the Online Etymology Dictionary as follows:
“seculer, in reference to clergy, "living in the world, not belonging to a religious order," also generally, "belonging to the
state" (as opposed to the Church).” (Emphasis mine). However, as Reviewer 1 pointed out, “secular tradition” may instead
be a reference to the profanity or worldliness of the state and politics.
105
See esp. God's Caliph and Medieval Islamic Political Thought.
106
107
Robert G. Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa's Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early
Islam (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 31.
108
Ibid., n. 100.
109
Id., Seeing Islam as others saw it: A survey and evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian writings on early Islam (Princeton,
USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1997), 394–395.
110
For the suggestion that the source of this chronology was another Syriac chronicler known as James of Edessa, see
Andrew Palmer, ‘Text No. 6: A list of caliphs, composed after AD 705’, in Andrew Palmer, Sebastian P. Brock, & Robert G.
Hoyland, The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1993), 44.
111
Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 396. Also see id., Theophilus of Edessa's Chronicle, 29–30; Andrew Palmer, ‘Text No. 8: A list of
caliphs from the Arabic’, in Andrew Palmer, Sebastian P. Brock, & Robert G. Hoyland, The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian
Chronicles (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1993), 50; Robinson, Islamic historiography, 23; Michael P. Penn,
When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (Oakland, USA: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2015), 197.
112
R. Stephen Humphreys, Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan: From Arabia to Empire (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2006), 13.
113
As Crone, Slaves on Horses, 214, n. 102, noted, the Marwanid-era Madino-Syrian scholar Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d.
124/741–742) is ascribed a certain Asnān al-Khulafāʾ by al-Ṭabarī, from which a short prosopographical and chronological
LITTLE 19 of 22
notice concerning the reign of Yazīd b. Muʿāwiyah is cited. If al-Zuhrī ever did write such a work (as some historians
seem to think—e.g., Donner, Narratives, 239), then this would be an example of a proto-taʾrīkh written in Marwanid Syria.
However, al-Zuhrī was a “lightning rod” for later ascriptions to this period (as Ian D. Morris once put it to me), so this
reference within al-Ṭabarī cannot simply be accepted at face value.
114
115
Ibid., 213–214, n. 101.
116
Ibid., 15, 213 (nn. 92–96, 99).
117
For example, ibid., 15–16, 203–204 (n. 30), 214 (n. 103). For more examples, see ead. & Cook, Hagarism, ch. 1 (along with
the relevant endnotes); Crone & Hinds, God's Caliph, 69; Lawrence I. Conrad, ‘Abraha and Muḥammad: Some Observa-
tions Apropos of Chronology and Literary “topoi” in the Early Arabic Historical Tradition’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental
and African Studies, Volume 50, Number 2 (1987), 225–240; James Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis: Histo-
rians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 380–383, 386;
Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, passim; Robert G. Hoyland, In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an
Islamic Empire (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 38–39; Stephen J. Shoemaker, A Prophet has appeared: The rise
of Islam through Christian and Jewish eyes (Oakland, USA: University of California Press, 2021), passim.
118
119
Ibid., nn. 99, 101.
120
Ibid., n. 99.
121
Ibid. Also see Noth & Conrad (trans. Bonner), The Early Arabic Historical Tradition, 45, 52–53.
122
123
Ibid., 16. Emphasis mine.
124
Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, 40–42. Hoyland (Seeing Islam, 627) thinks that this common source originally contin-
ued until 750 CE (i.e., it was written then, and not in 741 CE), but Shoemaker (The Death of a Prophet, 44–45) is doubtful.
125
Robert G. Hoyland, ‘Albrecht Noth: The early Arabic historical tradition: a source-critical study,’ Bulletin of the School of Orien-
tal and African Studies, Volume 60, Number 1 (1997), 131.
126
Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, 47.
127
Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa's Chronicle, intro.
128
Ibid., 29.
129
Ibid.
130
Edward Zychowicz-Coghill, The First Arabic Annals: Fragments of Umayyad History (Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter
GmbH, 2021), 1–2.
131
Ibid., 59.
132
See Zychowicz-Coghill's reconstructed text in ibid., 66–116.
133
Joseph F. Schacht, ‘The Kitāb al-Tārīḫ of Ḫalīfa b. Ḫayyāṭ’, Arabica, Volume 16, Number 1 (1969), 79.
134
Crone, Slaves on Horses, 213, n. 99: “that the combination of taʾrīkh and akhbār is secondary is obviously true.” Also see
Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa's Chronicle, 30–31. For a summary of the nature of the later synthetic chronicles written by
the likes of al-Ṭabarī, see R. Stephen Humphreys, ‘Taʾrīk̲h̲: II. Historical Writing: 1. In the Arab world,’ in Peri J. Bearman,
Thierry Bianquis, Clifford E. Bosworth, Emeri J. van Donzel, & Wolfhart P. Heinrichs (eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New
Edition, Volume 10: T–U (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2000), 271–272, and also Zychowicz-Coghill, The
First Arabic Annals, 2.
135
136
Cf. Hoyland, cited above, who argues that this tradition had emerged already in the Sufyanid period, but for which there
is no solid evidence.
137
Crone & Cook, Hagarism, 8–9; Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, UK:
Harvard University Press, 2010), 57–58, 86, 203; id., ‘Robert Hoyland, In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation
of an Islamic Empire’, al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā, Volume 23 (2015), 137; Ilkka Lindstedt, ‘Muhājirūn as a Name for the First/Seventh
Century Muslims’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Volume 74, Number 1 (2015), 67–73; Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet,
ch. 4; Ilkka Lindstedt, ‘The Makings of Early Islamic Identity’, Freedom to Think! HCAS blog (9 th/October/2019): https://
blogs.helsinki.fi/hcasblog/2019/10/09/the-makings-of-early-islamic-identity/.
138
Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 209–211.
20 of 22 LITTLE
139
Id., Narratives, 242; Schoeler (trans. Vagelpohl), Biography, 17, 26, 36, 91, 116; Andreas Görke, Harald Motzki, & Gregor
Schoeler, ‘First Century Sources for the Life of Muḥammad? A Debate’, Der Islam, Volume 89, Issue 1–2 (2012), 12;
Shoemaker, The Death of the Prophet, 102–103; Andreas Görke, ‘Authorship in the Sīra literature’, in Lale Behzadi & Jaakko
Hämeen-Anttila (eds.), Concepts of Authorship in Pre-Modern Arabic Texts (Bamberg, Germany: University of Bamberg Press,
2015), 76; Anthony, Muhammad, 144–146.
140
For example, Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, ch. 1. Again, however, cf. Shaddel, ‘Periodisation’.
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AUT HOR BI OGRAPHY
J. J. Little did his undergraduate degree and honours degree at Monash University in Australia, before completing
an MPhil in Islamic Studies & History at the University of Oxford. He is currently finishing his DPhil in Oriental
Studies at the University of Oxford, where he tutors and occasionally lectures. His research focuses on the
origins, transmission, and regionality of Hadith; proto-Sunnī Hadith criticism; and the methods and debates of
modern Hadith Studies.
How to cite this article: Little, J. J. (2022). Patricia Crone and the “secular tradition” of early Islamic
historiography: An exegesis. History Compass, 20(9), e12747. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12747

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Received: 31 March 2022 Revised: 7 August 2022 Accepted: 9 August 2022

Patricia Crone and the “secular tradition” of early

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

History Compass. 2022;20:e12747. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hic3 1 of 22

within early Islamic historiography, which underwent a

1 | THE RELIGIOUS TRADITION

2 | THE TRIBAL TRADITION

3 | THE COMMON PROBLEMS OF THE RELIGIOUS AND TRIBAL TRADITIONS

4 | THE SECULAR TRADITION

5 | THE UTILITY OF CRONE'S HISTORIOGRAPHICAL TAXONOMY

6 | THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROTO-TAʾRĪKH TRADITION

AUT HOR BI OGRAPHY

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