History's Heroic Failures - Talking Points Memo - 0 views
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Scholars have been applying these source critical tools to the origins of Christianity and Judaism for going on two centuries. But it only within the last couple decades that scholars have begun to apply them to the origins of Islam
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Many still believe that Islam was, as the historian Ernest Renan once put it, “born in the full light of history.” But this is far from the case. Montgomery Watt’s standard short biography of Muhammad is the product of deep scholarship but operates largely within the canonical historiography of the Islamic tradition
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The level of detail we seem to know about Muhammad’s life in Mecca and Medina, his prophetic call and early battles is astonishing. But there is a big problem. This level of detail is based on source traditions that don’t meet any kind of modern historical muste
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