Revisionist school of Islamic studies

The revisionist school of Islamic studies (also critical school of Islamic studies and critical historians of Islam) is a movement in Islamic studies that questions traditional Muslim narratives of Islam's origins.

In the early 1970s some non-Muslim Islamic scholars (now often called "revisionists") began to question the traditional/conventional account of the rise of Islam. This origin story was subscribed to not only by the Islamic world but by most non-Muslim Islamic scholars, who accepted it "in most of its details", (excluding elements involving divine intervention) and accepted the reliability of it's traditional literary sources.

However, these "revisionist" scholars (such as John Wansbrough and his students Andrew Rippin, Norman Calder, G. R. Hawting, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook; as well as Fred Donner, Günter Lüling, Yehuda D. Nevo and Christoph Luxenberg; popular historian Tom Holland, and ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq; who all drew on the earlier work of Ignác Goldziher and Joseph Schacht), questioned the reliability of the basis of the traditional account, i.e. Muslim "literary sources", written 150 to 250 years after Muhammad and (the new scholars argued) subject to biases of and embellishments by the authors and transmitters. Instead they proposed employing a "source-critical" approach to these literary sources -- which included traditional commentaries on the Quran (tafsir), oral accounts passed down of what the Islamic prophet Muhammad said, did, approved of or didn't (hadith), and traditional biography of the prophet (sira) -- and including as relevant evidence archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and contemporary non-Arabic literature, that they argued provided "hard facts" and an ability to crosscheck.

Revisionist theories are "by no means monolithic", but they do share some "methodological premises": and theories: namely that Muhammad did not come from Mecca and the belief that he did is an invented tradition from decades after his death; that the relationship between Muhammad and Jews and Christians may have originally been much less adversarial than traditionally described; that what we know of as Islam (its basic principles) was formed not during the ten years of Muhammad's mission (622-632 CE) before the 7th century Arab invasion of Byzantine and Persian empires; but over a longer period including Muhammad's mission, Rashidun caliphs and the Umayyad Caliphs; that the religious, political, cultural break between the civilizations of Persia and Byzantium, and the new 7th century Arab empire, was not as abrupt as the traditional history describes. Issues not agreed on include the historicity of Muhammad and questions on the Quran such as when did it first appear, how was it written, how was it transmitted from from one generation to another in its early years?