By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 16 August 2026
Arculf and Jerusalem: A Snapshot of the Arab Empire Before Islam
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Tag Archives: Ishmaelites
“Religion” is Not a Human Universal
Assessing the Historicity of Abu Bakr, Islam’s First Caliph
John Wansbrough’s Review of ‘Hagarism’
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 27 June 2025
In 1978, shortly after Patricia Crone and Michael Cook published their book challenging the traditional story of Islam’s origins, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, it was reviewed for the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies by John Wansbrough, their mentor and the most important figure in the “Revisionist” movement that arose in Islamic Studies in the 1970s. Wansbrough’s review is reproduced below.
Continue readingReview: “The Sacred City” (2016)
Was Islam’s Ka’ba Always in Mecca?
A Note on the Problems of the “Constitution of Medina” for the Islamic Tradition
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 9 June 2025
The “Constitution of Medina” or “Medina Document” (Sahifat al-Medina) is recorded in the Islamic Tradition literature, which post-dates the ninth century, i.e., two-hundred years after the Prophet Muhammad died, but most modern historians accept the Tradition’s claim that the Sahifa is the authentic record of a covenant between the early Muhammadan community and the Jews of Yathrib to establish governance in the city, dating from around 622 AD. This view is taken because the Sahifa is linguistically distinct from the surrounding material and, crucially, it contains elements that are theologically awkward from the perspective of “final form” Islam that stabilises after 800 AD.
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