Wellhausen applied biblical source-criticism techniques to Islamic history
Evidence
Instead of translating and then pasting together snippets from Arabic chronicles, which was pretty much what William Muir had done in his history of the caliphate, Wellhausen tried to sift the surviving texts and to deduce what lost original sources those texts were based on and how the historical narrative was distorted over the centuries. This, of course, was exactly what contemporary biblical scholars were doing. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 331
Related
- Wellhausen read pre-Islamic Arab lore as evidence for early Hebrew life (similarity 0.82)
- Biblical source-criticism techniques inevitably transferred to studying early Islam (similarity 0.81)
- Advanced textual analysis did not beat naive compilation in finding historical truth (similarity 0.79)
- Published al-Tabari editions enabled analytic Islamic historiography (similarity 0.78)