FRED M. DONNER, Narratives of lslamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 14 (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1998). Pp. 373.

The origins and early development of Islam as determined from its most important and foundational texts is the project this book undertakes. As such, it stands in a tradition of Orientalist scholarship on early Muslim historiography that reaches back to the 19th century and that continues to generate debates among historians. Narratives of Islamic Origins is important for many reasons, not least because it clarifies the history of the issues that have divided historians, offering pointed critiques of major, particularly recent, works in the debate, while at the same time marking out a position that the author consistently defends in the Introduction and twelve chapters and appendixes. The use of the term “Orientalist” here is not meant to evoke, but rather to recognize—as Donner states at the outset—that European scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries took Arabic sources seriously and made them available to succeeding generations. Donner's purpose is not to question their motives for doing this; rather, it is to analyze the textual evidence, arguments, and conclusions they adduced. The author has also written numerous articles and chapters on early Islamic history as well as the acclaimed and not uncontroversial book The Early Muslim Conquests (1981).