Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

The awareness that the historian is always part of society – as bard and moralizer – contributed to the battering that claims of presenting objective history and historical truth have taken in the Western academy since the 1970s. Scholars of historiography like Hayden White have exposed how historians construct their narratives according to the same themes of tragedy, satire, redemption, and so on, as are used by less meticulous storytellers. This critical re-evaluation of Western historiography proposed that the conception of truth operative in the genre was less that of Correspondence than that of Coherence. There was no account of history that corresponded to what really happened. There were only narratives, told from perspectives and only as true as they could be nestled into the worldviews of the communities that recounted them. More conservative and confident defenders of history as a discipline argue that, like the Pragmatic Theory of Truth, while interpretation and even many areas of fact are relativistic, there is a ‘factual bedrock’ of undeniable historical truths, such as Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, that cannot be declared untrue simply through a change of perspective.40 Such a bedrock must exist, many contend, because denying it would have the same impact as denying the common-sense reality of our sense perception and leave us stranded, disoriented in time.41