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Essays on History, Religion, and Politics

Methods & Debates

Revisiting the ʿĪsawiyyah Hadith: Common Links, Anachronisms, and the Hierarchy of Evidence

November 12, 2024 by Joshua Little

Abstract: This blog article revisits a topic covered in one of my previous blog articles: a hadith that appears to have been created in response to the ʿĪsawiyyah, a Jewish messianic movement that erupted in Isfahan during the middle of the 8th Century CE. The present article incorporates some Hadith material that was not covered … [Read more…]

Posted in: Hadith, History, Methods & Debates, Textual Analysis, Theory Tagged: fabricated, Fabrication, Hadith, Harald Motzki, history, ICMA, Isawiyya, Isawiyyah, Isfahan, Islam, Islamic, isnad-cum-matn analysis, Joshua Little, Muhammad, prophecy, Prophet

Reflections on the 2024 ICMA Conference and the Future of Hadith Studies

February 27, 2024 by Joshua Little

On January the 27th and 28th, 2024, Georgetown University and Charles Sturt University jointly hosted the “Isnād-Cum-Matn Analysis (ICMA) as a Method in Contemporary Hadith Studies” Conference. As both a speaker at the conference and someone with a keen interest in the ICMA and the state of the field, I thought it might be of … [Read more…]

Posted in: Current Affairs, Hadith, Methods & Debates, Textual Analysis, Theory Tagged: Hadith, Harald Motzki, ICMA, Islam, isnad-cum-matn analysis, Joshua Little

The Unabridged Version of My PhD Thesis

March 7, 2023 by Joshua Little

My PhD thesis, entitled “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, is now publicly available. The full unabridged version can be accessed here: I originally submitted both an abridged and unabridged version of my thesis for examination, and my examiners advocated for the unabridged version to … [Read more…]

Posted in: History, Methods & Debates, Textual Analysis, Theory Tagged: Aisha, Aishah, Diagram, Diagrams, Dissertation, Hadith, Harald Motzki, Isnad, isnad-cum-matn analysis, Isnads, Joshua Little, Oxford, PhD, Thesis

Fred Donner, Pan-Abrahamitic Islam, and an Early Arabic Inscription about Muhammad

February 19, 2023 by Joshua Little

The hypothesis that early Islam—from the time of the Prophet to at least the second fitnah—constituted some kind of pan-Abrahamic or pan-Abrahamitic movement or coalition is widespread in recent secular, critical scholarship.[1] The earliest iteration of this hypothesis—which posited that proto-Islam was some kind of Judaeo-Arab alliance or coalition—can be found in Patricia Crone and … [Read more…]

Posted in: History, Methods & Debates, Quran Tagged: Abrahamic, Abrahamitic, Arabic, Believer, Believers, Community of Believers, Crone, Donner, Fred Donner, Hagarism, history, Inscription, Islam, Islamic, Joshua Little, Muhammad, Muslim, Muslims, Pan-Abrahamic, Pan-Abrahamitic, Patricia Crone, Prophet

The Origins of Early Sunni Hadith Criticism, Part 2: The Modern Debate

December 23, 2022 by Joshua Little

In Part 1 of this series on the origins of proto-Sunnī Hadith criticism (here), I outlined the traditional narratives on this issue, which are plagued by numerous contradictions and cannot be relied upon alone to resolve the historical question of exactly when and where the Hadith-critical method emerged. Now, in Part 2, I survey the … [Read more…]

Posted in: Hadith, History, Methods & Debates, Theory Tagged: criticism, Hadith, history, Islam, Islamic, Joshua Little

The New Historiography of Islamic Origins: A Review of Some Recent Trends in the Field

October 21, 2022 by Joshua Little

For many years, secular scholarship on Islamic origins and the first Islamic century was characterised by a relatively uncritical acceptance of 9th- and 10th-Century CE Islamic literary sources at face value and, consequently, a relatively uncritical acceptance of the conventional Islamic origins-narrative that predominates therein. In the context of the field of Islamic origins, the … [Read more…]

Posted in: Hadith, History, Methods & Debates, Quran, Theory Tagged: Fred Donner, Hadith, Hagarism, historiography, history, Islam, Islamic origins, Joshua Little, Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, revisionism, revisionist, Robert Hoyland, Stephen Shoemaker

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