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The appearance of this book owes a great deal to the commitment of Judith Koren, an information specialist, who brought to its final form the thesis laid down by archaeologist Yehuda D. Nevo, whose death of cancer in 1992 left the project unfinished. The book joins the revisionist historiography of early Islam, attempting to accomplish a feat that seemed beyond the reach of the revisionist approach thus far. Not content with rejecting the traditional narrative, the authors reconstruct the rise of Islam with virtually no use of traditional Islamic sources.
Typical of the revisionist approach, the authors discard all Islamic sources as unreliable, including classical histories, sira , and the Qur
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an, all of which are regarded to be later inventions. Nevo's work, which forms the basis of this book, highlights material remains, and the authors flatly assert the superiority of archaeological and numismatic evidence above all kinds of textual evidence. (Yet, they freely make use of textual evidence whenever it supports their thesis--notably from Byzantine and church sources.)
The thesis set forth in the book is quite bold. There were no Islamic conquests into Syria; Byzantium had already abandoned its Eastern provinces, and Arab tribes began to move in. The Arabs at that time (corresponding in the traditional narrative to the Rashidi and early Umayyad periods) were largely pagans, not Muslims. Islamic descriptions of pagan life derive from cult practices in the Negev, not Hijaz. The elites of the new Arab populations in Syria, still clients of Byzantium, adopted an indeterminate form of monotheism that had its basis in Judeo-Christian trends in Syria, not Arabia....