Instructor: Mohsen Goudarzi
The birth of Islam in the seventh century C.E. was a momentous historical turning point, but many aspects of this crucial process remain vigorously contested in modern scholarship. Was the Prophet Muhammad a local preacher of righteousness or the conscious creator of a religion with global ambitions? Is the Qur’anic text a record of Muhammad’s own preaching or the result of a collective effort that continued after Muhammad (and perhaps had begun before him)? Did the early Muslims believe in the imminent end of the world or not? Was Islam originally an ecumenical monotheistic movement open to Jews and Christians, or did Islam’s earliest adherents consider it a new and exclusive religion separate from Judaism and Christianity? Did Arabian tribes have a shared sense of belonging to a unified “Arab” ethnos before Islam, or did this sense of identity grow after disparate Arabian peoples conquered the Near East together?
This course is dedicated to an in-depth discussion of such fundamental historiographic questions. In the process, we will delve into some of the earliest literary and documentary witnesses to early Islamic history and read from seminal works of scholarship on Islam’s origins.