During our Summer Institute meetings, participants often criticized the work of revisionist scholars of early Islam. While I agree with many of those criticisms, I believe the revisionists have opened up the history of the earliest Islamic communities geographically and chronologically in enormously helpful ways. Scholars of early Christianity long ago placed early Christian communities in what I think of as Peter Brown's world of late antiquity, a world boiling over with conflicting religious ideals, philosophies, and ideas about community. Islamicists, in contrast, have traditionally seen earliest Islam as arising in the near-isolation of pagan western Arabia. By challenging received notions about the religious environment of late antique western Arabia and by suggesting that Islam did not reach its classical form until it spread to the Fertile Crescent, revisionist scholars have drawn early Islam into the complex and fascinating world of late antiquity.

Behind much of the revisionists' work lurks John Wansbrough and his theory that Quran, Hadith, and the tradition of commentary on them all originated in the late eighth century at the earliest. Wansbrough has been justifiably criticized for (among other things) ignoring fairly obvious signs that Quran and Hadith did not emerge from an identical body of material and for his profoundly incomprehensible prose. Yet even if one rejects his dating of the Quran to ca. 800 C.E. as impossibly late, his ideas force us to explore the possibility that the Quran did not emerge fully formed in Arabia during the Prophet's lifetime, but that parts of it may have developed in what Wansbrough calls the "sectarian milieu" of the Fertile Crescent--that is, the world of late antiquity in which scholars place the development of early Christianity.

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