The orientalist Ernest Renan famously said in the 19th c. that Islam, compared to Judaism and Christianity, "was born in full light of history." After two centuries of scholarship, however, there are still many questions about the rise of Islam that remain unanswered not least because the authority and reliability of Muslim sources, as vast and detailed as they are, have been doubted in the last few decades. The revisionist wave that started in the 1970s questioned nearly everything that we thought we knew about the life of Muhammad, the Qur'an's textual history, Islam's relationship with other monotheistic religions of its time and the Muslim conquests. In the meantime, new discoveries such as ancient Qur'an manuscripts and inscriptions from the Arabian peninsula further reinvigorated the debate.

In this course we will explore the field of Islamic origins and the hot debates that made it a lively field in the last few years. A large portion of the class will be devoted to what we know about the rise of Islam and from what kind of sources we generate that knowledge. Students will be introduced to the fields of epigraphy, numismatics, and manuscript studies to get a sense of what is at stake when it comes to identifying and analyzing sources that inform the beginnings of Islam. We will also look at how the study of Islamic origins can benefit from the tools and methods of similar or adjacent fields such as biblical studies, early Christianity and New Testament studies.