History of Islam
Open-knowledge reference entry
The history of Islam is believed, by historians, to have originated with the Islamic prophet Muhammad's mission in Mecca and Medina at the start of the 7th century CE, although Muslims regard this time as a return to the original faith passed down by the Abrahamic prophets, such as Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jesus, with the submission to the will of God. The study of early Islamic history —spanning the period up to the rise of the Abbasids— based on insufficient objective data, combined with varying methodological approaches to traditional sources, has given rise to revisionist historical theses. These challenge the (conservative) narrative that the faith originated from a single root and spread across diverse regions; instead, they propose that the story is a construct built retrospectively by piecing together elements developed in different locales —such as texts, legal codes, genealogies, and anecdotes— and suggest that the actual history is best explained through evolutionary-syncretic models of varying nuances.
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This entry incorporates text from “History of Islam” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.