Treating history as sacred precedent drove early Muslim source criticism

Evidence

One type, predominant in the earlier period, is what one might call the Sunna approach, the hfiadı¯th narratives concerning the actions and utterances of the Prophet, followed by narratives of the doings and sayings of the Companions of the Prophet and the early rulers of Islam. The purpose of these was to establish rules of procedure: the Prophet said or did this, therefore this is right and is an example which should be followed. These are what modern lawyers call casebooks, and they pose two problems: how to treat history as law, and how to treat law as history. … 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, 1933

Categorization

• XREF: Directly counters a common Occidentalist stereotype that Islamic learning was backward or uncritical; feeds the representation cluster by showing Islamic historiography produced sophisticated comparativism.
• DEEPTHINKING: The causal chain — theological purpose (God’s will in precedent) producing a rigorous comparative method centuries ahead of the West — is a paradigm-level point that cuts against teleological histories of criticism as a European invention.