Muhammad und die frühe islamische Gemeinschaft aus historischer Sicht

Abstract

The talk summarizes the traditional view of Islam’s origins and its limitations, particularly the problem of deficient sources, and then sketches out differing revisionist approaches on Islam’s origins and on the nature and early history of the Qur’an text. While skepticism about some information in the traditional Islamic narratives is warranted, it is also clear that these sources must be used, albeit critically, to reconstruct Islam’s origins. The paper closes with a summary of a reconstruction, based mainly on parts of the Qur’an, that posits an early community of Believers dedicated to strict monotheism and adherence to stringent standards of piety in which Jews, Christians, and Qur’anic monotheists all played some part. The fluidity or porousness of confessional identities in the early community seems to have given way to stricter boundaries around 700 CE, when the core of the community redefined itself around the Qur’an and the figure of the prophet Muhammad to become Muslims in the classic sense.