The sectarian milieu

by John E. Wansbrough

"In this work, originally published in 1978, John Wansbrough, one of the most innovative thinkers in the field of Islamic studies, analyzes "early Islamic historiography - or rather the interpretive myths underlying this historiography - as a late manifestation of Old Testament 'salvation history.' " Continuing themes that he treated in a previous work, Quranic Studies, Wansbrough argues that the traditional biographies of Muhammad (Arabic sira and maghazi) are best understood, not as historical documents that attest to "what really happened," but as literary texts written more than one hundred years after the facts and heavily influenced by Jewish, and to a lesser extent Christian, interconfessional polemics. Thus, Islamic "history" is almost completely a later literary reconstruction, which evolved out of an environment of competing Jewish and Christian sects. As such, Wansbrough felt that the most fruitful means of analyzing such texts was literary analysis. Furthermore, he maintain