Michael Cook

Explaining Contradictions in Exegetical Hadith

In a recent thread on the website formerly known as Twitter, a user named D1mashqi criticised one of the points I outlined in my podcast discussion with Javad Hashmi regarding some of the problems with the authenticity of Hadith. The point in question concerns the unreliability of exegetical Hadith in particular, which I summarised on … [Read more…]

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

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…]