Band 9: Studies of Djaït’s Work on Early Islam

Hichem Djaït (1935–2021) is a key name that stands out among the contemporaneous Arab historians and intellectuals. The Tunisian historian advocated for the necessity of subjecting especially the early period of Islamic history to a process of rigorous scientific re-examination and published several studies of the foundational period of Islamic history through which he sought to offer a critical and unsanctimonious reading of the early period of Islamic history.
His intellectual endeavour begins at the Sorbonne in Paris with an investigation of the emergence of the city of Kufa during the first century after the Hijra. He also broached a topic considered taboo, namely the Islamic civil strife (al-fitna). His three-volume work Fī s-sīra an-nabawiyya is the outcome of a scholarly endeavour that lasted for more than a decade, in which he took on the task of excising from the biography of the Prophet Muhammad all the myths and falsehoods that it had accumulated over the years, thus freeing it of the prevailing notions which had gradually de­veloped in people’s minds into certain facts that could be neither challenged nor questioned. Further, Djaït’s work on early Islamic history did not only deal with the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East. He also wrote on the beginnings of Islam in the region now referred to as the Maghreb.
The present volume is a collection of readings and critical reviews of Djaït’s various works on early Islamic history, both regarding their content and the methodologies which underpin them.