An influential historical model persisted for decades without direct evidence
Evidence
Lammens regarded the Prophet as a lascivious impostor, echoing here the theme of medieval Christian polemics. He attempted to give the rise of Islam a political and economic context that had been previously lacking and in La République marchande de la Mecque vers l’an 600 de notre ère (1910) he suggested that the aristocrats of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca had grown wealthy from spice caravans that travelled through the seventh-century Hejaz. Though there was no direct evidence for any of this, his presentation (or invention) of the socio-economic background was enormously influential and later biographers of Muhammad, such as Montgomery Watt and Maxime Rodinson, relied heavily on the model furnished by Lammens. Only in 1987 was this model systematically analysed and demolished by Patricia Crone in her Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 360
Categorization
- SEED: Good angle: how fabricated or speculative historical models entrench in a field and survive on authority until one decisive demolition - ‘the zombie hypothesis that outlived its evidence.’
- QUESTION: How did Crone’s demolition succeed where Goldziher and Nöldeke’s methodological criticism failed decades earlier?
- XREF: connects to: Models are abandoned for availability of alternatives, not merely false predictions — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 514