Constantin A. Panchenko Destroying the Consensus: Interpretations of the Birth of Islamic Civilization in Modern Western Historiography

Abstract

The last, unfinished article by Professor Constantin Alexandrovich Panchenko provides an overview of modern research on the origins of Islam from the 1970-ies to the present day, beginning with the provocative book Hagarism by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook and ending with the latest research by Stephen Shoemaker. The article is based on the professor's paper presented at the «Lomonosov Conference» in Moscow on April 2, 2024. The unfinished sections have been finalized by the editors based on the professor's notes as well as the new outline of the article prepared by him just prior to his death. In this outline, published in the appendix to the article, Constantin Panchenko accords a special place to Stephen Shoemaker's monograph The Death of a Prophet. Shoemaker accepts Fred Donner's theory, according to which early Islam was a supra-confessional Abrahamic movement of «believers», which included not only the followers of Muḥammad but also numerous Jews and Christians. This movement had a pronounced eschatological orientation, which explains its focus on the conquest of Jerusalem. Only during the reign of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (685–705) did the Muslims become a separate religious community, and the impetus was given to the formation of an Arabian Islam, isolated from other Abrahamic religions, with a centre in Ḥijāz, rather than Palestine. It is in the works of the authors of the revisionist school and especially in Stephen Shoemaker's monograph The Death of the Prophet that Professor Panchenko found a scientific paradigm based on which he hoped to forge a new consensus on the origins of Islam within the Russian academic community.

Keywords

Origins of Islam, Modern Western Historiography, Qurʾānic Studies, Eschatology, Jerusalem

For Citation

Panchenko С.A. Destroying the Consensus. Interpretations of the Birth of Islamic Civilization in Modern Western Historiography / Prepared for publication by Elena Yu. Kovalskaya, priest Alexander S. Treyger // The Historical Reporter. 2025. Vol. 53. P. 38–95. DOI: 10.35549/HR.2025.2025.53.012

Constantin A. Panchenko

D.Sc. (History), Professor of the Institute of Asian and African Studies of the Moscow State University, Department of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies
SPIN-код: 5210–5682
AuthorID: 404268

Elena Y. Kovalskaya

C.Sc. (History), Head of the Library Services of Church Research Center Orthodox Encyclopedia. Moscow, Russian Federation.
e-mail: ekovalskaya@mail.ru

Alexander S. Treiger

Priest, PhD (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations), Professor, Department of Classics with Religious Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada.
e-mail: atreiger@dal.ca
ORCID: 0000–0001–5251–5389

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