The Revisionist school of Islamic studies (also Historical-Critical school of Islamic studies and skeptic/revisionist Islamic historians) is a movement in Islamic studies that questions traditional Muslim narratives of Islam's origins.
Textual integrity of the Quran: The Quranic text as is in use today shows many differences to the earliest existing manuscripts. A core part of the Quran may derive from Muhammad's annunciations, yet some parts of the Quran were definitively added later or were reworked later. In addition to this, many small deviations came into the text as with other ancient texts which were manually copied and copied again. The existence and significance of the prophet Muhammad as a historical person depends especially on the question whether any, and if so, how many, parts of the Quran can be attributed to his time, or whether all or most parts of the Quran came into being only after Muhammad's time. The researchers' opinions differ over this question. Fred Donner suggests an early date for the Quran. (This thesis has been abandoned by many in the 21st century thanks to studies and dating of early Manuscripts. Michael Cook, who earlier supported it, says recent studies are “a testimony to the continuing accuracy of the transmission of the variants”. Tom Holland also agrees that "the evidence seems to suggest" that the contemporary standard Quran "was uttered by Muhammad in the period that Muslim tradition has insisted that he lived".) The Quran is not written in a "pure" Arabic as the Syriac language seems to have had a certain influence on the language of the Quran which was forgotten later. This could be a possible explanation of why a fifth of the Quranic text is difficult to understand.
Consolidation of religious authority: In the beginning, secular and spiritual power were united in the person of the caliph. There were no special religious scholars. Religious scholars came into being only later and conquered the spiritual power from the caliphs.
Origins and methodology
The influence of the different tendencies in the study of Islam in the West has waxed and waned. Ibn Warraq believes "the rise of this revisionist school" may be dated from the Fifth colloquium of the Near Eastern History Group of Oxford University in July 1975, and Robert Hoyland believes revisionists were ascendant in the 1970s and 1980s.
Until the early 1970s, non-Muslim Islamic scholars—while not accepting accounts of divine intervention—did accept its origin story "in most of its details", and accepted the reliability of tafsir (commentaries on the Quran), hadith (accounts of what the Islamic prophet Muhammad approved or disapproved of), and sira (biography of the prophet). Revisionists instead use a "source-critical" approach to this literature, as well as studying relevant archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and contemporary non-Arabic literature. They believe these methodologies provide "hard facts" and an ability to crosscheck, whereas traditional Islamic accounts—written 150 to 200 years after Muhammad—are/were subject to biases of and embellishments by the authors and transmitters.
Post-War scholarship
From World War II to sometime around the mid-1970s, there was what scholar Charles Adams describes as "a distinctive movement in the West, represented in both religious circles and the universities, whose purpose" was to show both a "greater appreciation of Islamic religiousness" and to foster "a new attitude toward it" and in doing so make "restitution for the sins of unsympathetic, hostile, or interested approaches that have plagued the tradition of Western Orientalism". Herbert Berg gives Wilfred Cantwell Smith and W. Montgomery Watt as examples of proponents of this "irenic approach" (traditionalist) approach to Islamic history, and notes that the approach necessarily clashed with the questions and potential answers of revisionists since these clashed with Islamic doctrine.
Studies of Hadith
The revisionist school has been said to be based on the study of Hadith literature by Islamic scholars Ignác Goldziher (1850-1921) and Joseph Schacht (1902-1969), who argued that the traditional Islamic accounts about Islam's early times—written 150 to 250 years after Muhammad—cannot be relied on as historical sources. Goldziher argued (in the words of R.S. Humphreys), "that a vast number of hadith accepted even in the most rigorously critical Muslim collections were outright forgeries from the late 8th and 9th centuries—and as a consequence, that the meticulous isnads which supported them were utterly fictitious".
