Early Muslim historians pioneered source criticism far ahead of any contemporary method

Evidence

One consequence of this desire to collect precedents and examples from the sanctified figures of the past is an almost obsessive concern with accuracy. If your purpose in history is to find out the manifestation of God’s will—and from a Muslim point of view, Sunna is no less than that—it is obviously extremely important to get it right. From an early time, there are not only variant versions but even contradictory versions of the same event; hence the development, by early Muslim historians, of a very sophisticated science of source criticism, a comparative method far in advance of anything known in the world until that time. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1935

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the modern source-criticism tools of the Milgrom law-merchant and reputation-system materials — early Islam built an institutional verification apparatus for the same credibility problem.
• DEFINE: This is the passage that actually explains what the ‘science of source criticism’ looked like in practice: variant versions each backed by an attestation chain.