Religious Scholars and the Umayyads

Academics now have the ambition of penetrating the ideological haze spread by Abbasid scholarship that obfuscates not only the intellectual contours of Muslim history but also acts as the bulwark of the Islamic doctrine. The goal is to subsume the account of ‘Islam’s origins’ to the West’s own teleology of world-history and render it as an epiphenomenon of ‘Late Antiquity’. In the eyes of the more radical iconoclasts, the imposing works of Muslim historiography, like their precursors in the Biblical tradition, are nothing but confessional accounts (Heilgseschichte) that pay no heed to the modern ethos concerning historical truth and must therefore be rejected in the discourses of Universal history (Weltgechichte). Little wonder that what characterizes their approach to pre-Abbasid history is the shrillness of its polemical tone. Others, like the author of the present volume, however, are able to interact with classical Arabic texts creatively, pursue historical research without invoking teleological myths and present a historical argument without the aura of meta-theory.