Customer Reviews

The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source-Critical Study (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, Vol. 3)

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Noth's study is worth to read several times. It has been translated from German and has also been revised by Noth himself. While reading through, you will get to know more about the tools that were available to the early Islamic Historians in their workshop. As a rare endeavour, Noth lays out the the prevalent themes, topoi and schemata frequently used in the early Islamic historical writing.

This translated and much expand edition of Albrecht Noth's Quellenkritische Studien serves a great how-to book for deciphering the literary themes, forms, topoi and schemata organizing the vast materials the comprise most of the principle sources currently available for the historian of early Islamic history. Noth's work maintains its value because it is able to take one past the basic textual appreciation that the histories of Islam tend to come in the form of khabars consisting of matns and isnaads to get under the hood of how histories and narratives were effectively created in the stylized forms that we now have. None of this is as dull as it may seems insofar as it goes a long way to provide the historian with tools for separating the wheat from the chaff in these ancient narrative. Of course, Noth does not solve all of the problems presented to us by the sources, but he does give us some useful tools that rigorous and much less mystifying that the notorious `sixth-sense' that Islamicists tend to evoke when commenting on the historicity of any series of details on a historical event.