Periodisation and the futūh: Making Sense of Muhammad's Leadership of the Conquests in Non-Muslim Sources

Abstract

The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of theories on the origins of Islam which have called into question long-held scholarly axioms. One such axiom is the traditional date of 632 CE for the death of the prophet Muhammad, which some scholars have now sought to redate to after the beginning of the Muslim conquests on the basis of the evidence of non-Muslim sources. The present contribution aims to demonstrate that the prima facie disharmony between these sources and Muslim accounts of Muhammad's life and the conquests is a product of the reading imposed on both sets of data, which primarily has to do with the fact that, more often than not, modern scholarship unsuspectingly operates within the rigid framework of the classical periodisation of early Islamic history. Therefore, a revision of either the traditional date of Muhammad's death or the starting date of the conquests based on this evidence is uncalled for.