The Arabs and Islam in Late Antiquity: A Critique of the Critique

Abstract

This contribution reflects on the critique Aziz al-Azmeh addresses to the field of Islamic studies in his both companions-books: The Emergence of slam in Late Antiquity: Allāh and His People, Cambridge, 2014 and The Arabs and Islam in Late antiquity. A critique of approaches to Arabic sources, Berlin, 2014. Both volumes aim to give an insight into the scholarship about Islam as well as a new interpretation of the source material to study Islamic history. The paper engages a discussion with two problems: Al-Azmeh’s approach to the Arabic literary sources and more specifically, the question of literary genre and his ‘model’ for the Qur’ān composition. The first part of the paper is an overview of the author’s assessment of the field under study; the second discusses his approach to the Arabic literary sources.