Introduction: Early Islam as a Prosopographical Problem?

The vast corpus of early and classical Arabic-Islamic historiography narrating the history of the first three generations of Islam makes this period one of the most documented periods of pre-modern human culture. In large parts of this corpus, the ‘atomist’ mode of Arabic-Islamic scholarly discourses deploys multiple individual narrations or akhbār paratactically, frequently together with their respective chain of transmission or isnād. The eponymous compilers of the extant collections, however, only very rarely offer explicit commentary or validation on the frequently contradictory information given in the narrations. Therefore, very little of the information concerning the genesis of Islam and the Muslim community is uncontested in this corpus.

As the formative period of Islam continues to be deployed as the most important cultural memory of Muslim societies, this multiplicity of contradictory information should be interpreted as reflecting a multitude of competing normativities that intersect in the corpus of early and classical Arabic-Islamic historiography. As will be shown below, this contestedness of early Islamic memory is not restricted to the emblematic episodes of political succession that are particularly contested between the ‘master narratives’ of contemporary and historical Islamic traditions. Instead, the internal contradictions attesting to the contestedness of early Islamic memory constitute a pervasive feature in early and classical Arabic-Islamic historiography.

The multiplicity of Muslim cultural memories of the formative period of Islam is especially significant due to the frequently over-confident and substantialising engagement with this literature conducted both in nationalist–Islamist and colonialist–Orientalist epistemological frameworks. This substantialising and unsystematic engagement with early and classical Arabic-Islamic historiography has been critiqued by John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone and others since the 1970s. Nonetheless, the alternative frameworks proposed by these authors are frequently not based on less controversial methodologies than those interpretations they critique. The methodical ‘step outside’ in engaging with the formative period of Islam proposed so compellingly by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook therefore remains more of a desideratum than an accepted standard. Nonetheless, I believe a scholarly consensus could be postulated concerning the following three methodological challenges that should be met by engagements with early Islamic history and cultural memory that aim to contribute to the deconstruction of substantialising narratives:

• 1. The description of early Muslim and Islamicate societies should proceed within a relational framework that grounds analytical categories in the sources pertaining to this period.