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Gerald Hawting came to SOAS in 1963 to study for an undergraduate degree in History, "with special reference to the Near and Middle East (Branch IV)". This included not only courses in the history of the Middle East from the early Islamic to the modern periods, but also the study of Semitic languages, particularly Arabic and Hebrew. When he retired in 2009 as Professor of the Near and Middle East, Gerald Hawting had spent over forty years at SOAS, studying, teaching, researching and writing about the origins and early history of Islam.
In the four decades of his official career, between 1970 and 2010, the academic study of the early history of Islam was fundamentally reshaped. Still a mostly conservative and positivist field in the 1970s, Islamic history, or "Islam in history", was shaken up by the publications of a group of young scholars - often called the "revisionists", or "sceptics" - many of whom met at SOAS in the 1970s and 80s: among them were Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, the late Martin Hinds and Gerald Hawting. The SOAS faculty lists of these decades similarly reads like a Who's Who of Middle Eastern studies (Bernard Lewis, P.M. Holt, M.E. Yapp, Colin Heywood), but it was above all the ideas and work of John Wansbrough, then teaching in the Arabic department, that influenced these young scholars. Central to the development of a new approach to the field was Wansbrough's insistence that early Muslim texts on the origins and early history of Islam, compiled decades and centuries after the events they claim to describe, cannot be used to reconstruct secular history but offer a version of "salvation history"; a history of Islam as conceived by the Muslim tradition where all actions are part of God's plan for the salvation of His people. Some of the consequences of this view were perhaps most starkly expressed in Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook (Cambridge, 1977), in which the authors presented an account of the origins of Islam using only non-Muslim sources, and thus presented a very different story to the traditional one - that of a Jewish messianic movement which eventually shed its Jewish...