San Diego State University, Spring, 2013
History 500 “The Formation of Islam: the Formative Period of Islamic Civilization”
AL 204, Mondays 7:00-9:400 PM
Professor Sandra Campbell
Office: Arts and Letters 574 (5th floor)
Office Hours: Thursdays, 7-8:30 PM and by appointment
Office Phone: (619) 594-2812
This syllabus is subject to revision, additions and changes.
COURSE GOALS / Learning Objectives
The primary goal of this course is to acquaint students well with the formative
period of early Islamic history while sharpening their skills as historians. Particular
emphasis will be placed on religious developments in early Islam and on historiographic
issues brought up by the nature of the sources upon which we rely to understand religious
developments (and the early Islamic past altogether).
This course should give students a deep familiarity with the life of the Prophet
Muhammad—a topic that is extremely important for Muslims—and the roots of sectarian
divisions in Islam, as well as certain aspects of the Umayyad and early Abbasid
caliphates. It should also give students a distinct sense of how recent Western
scholarship differs from both traditional Western scholarship and Islamic scholarship on
issues such as what we can know about the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the early civil
wars, the Umayyad caliphate, and even the early `Abbasid caliphate. Lastly, it should
give students a sense of the problems involved both in religious biography specifically
and in the histories of oral societies in general.
This course should enable students to recount the basic narrative of the life of the
Prophet and early Islamic history up to early Abbasid times, “the High Caliphate” period,
including basic dates. Students should be able to identify several ways in which the life
of the Prophet and the religio-political disputes of the formative period have impacted
Islamic civilization, Islamic practice and Muslim scholarly practice in the classical period
and until today. It should also enable students to identify the approaches taken by several
key modern scholars, including their treatments of source materials. Having taken this
class, students should be able to critically appraise articles (written for the educated lay
reader) about early Islam or about scholarly disputes within the field of early Islamic
history. Students should also gain significant experience in orally presenting
information, using evidence-based assessments, and identifying the assumptions that
underlay contrasting approaches to historical accounts.
Warning: This is an upper division, specialized course on early Islamic history. As such,
this is not an appropriate course for any student taking more than two or three other
courses, for any student who does not read diligently, or for any student who has grave
difficulties with foreign names and place-names. You must ascertain whether or not this
class is truly appropriate for you by the drop deadline; this course is grounded in the
informed participation of the students—it is not a lecture course. Every week you must
read thoughtfully and slowly, and be prepared to summarize and comment upon your
readings in class.
This syllabus is subject to revision, additions and changes.
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Course Requirements:
This course is an upper-division course that includes both undergraduate and graduate
students. It is a discussion-based course, in which you, the students, summarize and
discuss the readings, prompted and aided by me, the professor.
You must take notes on the readings to prepare for discussions on those readings;
the book or excerpt/article under discussion must always be brought to class for
reference, along with notes.
Students must read with the twin goals of both understanding the information presented
by any given author and identifying that author’s assumptions, framing questions, biases
or scholarly commitments.
Students will be asked to present information on the chief authors whose works we will
read, as well as on the works themselves. Differing tactics will be explored for
identifying and assessing our modern authors’ frameworks and commitments. Please be
creative when called upon to present information about an author; where might we look
besides Google and Wikipedia?
GRADES
Attendance and Participation: 35%. These points are awarded for successful
participation in the class, which involves summarizing the information covered, preparing
three or four discussion questions based on the readings, presenting on authors, and
critiquing the readings (or identifying interpretations).
Roll will be taken in class, and you will be expected to learn all of your colleagues’
names.
Final exam: 35% an in-class essay exam, comprehensive.
This exam will ask that you identify not only historical facts and historical figures, but
also the approaches or analysis adopted by different scholars. You may be asked to
identify authors from excerpts of their works, as well as to supply basic facts about both
your scholars and Islamic history.
Final Paper and Presentation: 30%
Papers for this course must use translated primary sources. The most important primary
source for the early period is the History of al-Tabari, available in English translation
with detailed critical annotation supplied by the scholars who translated the work. This
work is to be supplemented by (and contrasted with) the work of Ibn Ishaq/ Ibn Ishaq for
the period of the Life of the Prophet (in Alfred Guillaume’s translation).
Undergraduate students should prepare papers of 7-10 pages, using at least one primary
source in translation and three modern scholarly sources (some exceptions to this might
be granted for the use of older Western sources). One of these must be a book or an
This syllabus is subject to revision, additions and changes.
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article located through Index Islamicus; another could be the relevant Encyclopaedia of
Islam article, but this depends upon the topic. Graduate students must turn in a 14-20
page paper, using two primary sources, depending upon availability, and four Western
scholarly sources. Graduate students will be expected to include contextualizing material
on the authors whose works they use.
Grammar, spelling, accuracy, and clarity are extremely important to doing well on
this paper. Reading your work out loud to a peer will help you see how important the
input of others is to the process—and it is a process—of creating any well-written piece.
Paper topics must be chosen by the fifth week. Identify and turn in a topic and your
initial framing question—what interests you about the topic, or why you are interested in
finding out more about it—by that day. Pace yourself—start identifying topics of
potential interest soon. Read ahead!
You will be asked to present your work orally in front of the class in the last three weeks.
These presentations are not graded, but are required, and are important. If you are too
shy for this, come to talk to me.
Makeup Policy
In case of major medical problems or other emergency, please speak to me. Otherwise,
there are no make-ups.
Academic Honesty and Comportment
Plagiarism is the act of using someone else’s words or ideas without attributing them to
their author—in other words, presenting those words or ideas as if they were your own.
Plagiarism at this advanced level is punished as severely as possible without exception.
BOOKS AND READING MATERIAL
REQUIRED and available at SDSU’s bookstore and sometimes more inexpensively
elsewhere:
W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad, Prophet and Statesman. This book presents a
moderately detailed, popular biography of the Prophet written by one of the foremost
specialists on the topic in the 20th century; it has deeply influenced how the life of the
Prophet has been framed in university classes throughout the United States and Europe
for over half a century. Please buy it promptly.
Gerald Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam. Currently the best short history of the
Umayyad dynasty, written with an eye to historiographic problems. It admittedly
presents a succinct, careful, and sometimes dense historical account; be patient with it.
Hugh Kennedy, When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: the Rise and Fall of Islam’s
Greatest Dynasty. The most engaging work on the early Abbasids available. Kennedy
attempts to echo the thrill of reading the original narrative sources while giving the reader
This syllabus is subject to revision, additions and changes.
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a sense of some of the difficulty of using those sources to establish “what really
happened.”
Additional shorter readings will be handed out in class or distributed via Blackboard.
Additional Tools:
A paper and presentation will be required in this course. This will involve using both
scholarly secondary material and primary sources in translation. The one primary source
that each student must use is the relevant section of The History of al-Tabari. (Search
under “Tabari” as author.) Students whose projects involve the period of the prophet
Muhammad’s life will additionally use Alfred Guillaume’s translation of Ibn Ishaq’s
biography (attributed to Ibn Hisham as author at SDSU’s library), The Life of
Muhammad.
There are two additional important resources available in the library, which we will
discuss and use before the writing of the paper. The first is the New (Second) Edition of
the Encyclopaedia of Islam (please note the spelling: “paedia”), the leading reference tool
for Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Studies. (It is referred to as “EI2” in the field; the
third edition is now partially out, and is abbreviated “EI3”.) The second is the Index
Islamicus, a searchable index of articles and books in Western languages on Islamic
topics. (Abbreviated I.I.!) Both are available in SDSU’s library; the Index Islamicus is
online and at least one source must be noted in your bibliographies as having been
located through the use of this tool.
You will learn that interlibrary loan, ILL, is crucial for projects in Islamic Studies. Please
be forewarned that you will need to identify a topic early enough to request books for it.
Additionally, articles can be located and accessed through JSTOR, also available online
through the library. This database gives direct access to articles and book reviews from a
more limited number of journals than those indexed by II, yet it is a veritable treasure
house. It is available from the article databases category on SDSU’s library webpage.
Preliminary Schedule:
The exact course of readings will be determined in large part by the abilities of the
students as a group. Thus, the preliminary schedule provided below is likely to shift
somewhat.
Week 1. Introduction to the course, basic schema of early Islamic history; Arabic names
I: Ibn/ Bint, Abu, `Abd; history, historiography and historical memory. Film: 1st
installment, The Message.
Reading: pp. 1-82 of Watt’s Muhammad, Prophet and Statesman. What is Watt’s
approach? What are his framing questions? His assumptions? How does he begin his
story, and to what context does he then proceed? What does he tell us in these pages?
Take notes and mark up your books. It will show in your ability to participate!
This syllabus is subject to revision, additions and changes.
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Week 2: The various ways in which the rise of Islam can be contextualized. The
problem of religious biography. The early life of the Prophet. Arabic names II. Film: 2nd
installment of the Message.
Reading: Watt, pp. 57-101; the Constitution of Medina (a primary source). Graduate
students present initial information on the author, Montgomey Watt, and the reading.
Arabic Names II. (Oral Transmission Exercise 1)
Weeks 3-4: The position of the Prophet in Islamic Piety and Law—Hadith and maghazi.
Reading: Watt, pp. 102-175. (The main battles) (Oral Transmission Exercise 2)
Weeks 3-4: Reading: Watt, pp. 175-240. Who is Watt’s intended audience? What kind
of approach marks his work? What skills did he bring to this task? How does his
presentation of the life of the Prophet differ from the film’s? (Ibn Ishaq/ al-Tabari
assignment.)
Week 5: Summing up of Watt: Watt’s assessment of the Prophet, the students’
assessment of Watt’s biography. Sketch of Rashidun era, the 1st civil war, and of
transition to the Umayyad caliphate. (Reading by Crone here.) (Index Islamicus
assignment)
Reading: Hawting, pp. xi-33. Who is Gerald Hawting? Where does/did he work, if he is
still alive? What do you notice about his approach? Who were the Umayyads and why
were they important?
Week 6: The Umayyads 1; the Use of Material Evidence. The problem of oral
transmission. Sufyanids and Marwanids. (Encyclopaedia of Islam assignment.)
Reading: Hawting pp. 34-89.
Film: Islam, Empire of Faith. Students assess the documentary.
Week 7. The Marwanids and the Dome of the Rock—the scholarly controversy over this
building. (Brief political history.)
Reading: Hawting, pp. 89-128. Do not worry about the tribal factions!
Do carefully read the two short appendices—very carefully, with good notes.
Weeks 8. The Abbasid Revolution. Assessment of Hawting. Hawting’s assessment of
the Umayyads and the degree to which we can understand them from our source
materials. Discussion of projects, with student input on one another’s choices.
Week 9: The Early Abbasids and the Establishment of Abbasid Rule.
Reading: Kennedy, pp. xix-50. What kinds of figures have entered into the narrative
here? How does Kennedy’s account differ from Hawting’s? Who is Hugh Kennedy?
What does he tell us about how he will give us information on the Abbasids, and why?
Week10: The High Abbasid Caliphate.
Reading: Kennedy, pp. 51-111. Students summarize the narrative; review all of early
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Islamic history as a timeline. If our earliest authors date from this period, what has
changed since the time of the Prophet? How easily should we expect them to be able to
understand the earlier Islamic past?
Week 11: The High `Abbasid Caliphate: Culture. Initial assessment of Kennedy’s
presentation. Why is Kennedy presenting history the way he is, and how does it impact
your understanding of the past?
Reading: Kennedy, 112-199.
Week 12: Al-Ma’mun, the Mihna, and the Scholars. (The Mu`tazila.)
Reading: Kennedy, pp. 200-260. Students recap the information on Montgomery Watt,
Gerald Hawting, and Hugh Kennedy.
Week 13: Student presentations of their work, assessments of what we can establish
through the historical sources that have come down to us. Review of the basic narrative
of early Islamic history, authors’ approaches, and alternative frameworks.
Weeks 14, 15: Catch up to schedule, continued student presentations.
Final Exam in class, Monday, May 13, 7-9:00 in this classroom. Final papers are due on
the last day of actual class—pace yourselves!
This syllabus is subject to revision, additions and changes.
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