Studying early Islam in a historical perspective has been always faced with methodological challenges not only in terms of available traditions that may provide an authentic understanding of »what really happened«, but also in the frame of analyzing the nature of early Islamic »historical« writing itself in context.
For a long time, the study of early Islam remained linked to the Sira (the Prophet's biography) and similar traditions in a way, for a reason or another, that made the Qur'an, a fundamental religious text, outside the historical debate about Islam. Paradoxically, the idea that led to this exclusion was based on considering that the Qur’an does not contain accurate historical data about the life of the Prophet, and accepting, at the same time, that the Qur’an belongs chronologically to the Muhammadan period.
Encountered by the paucity of documentary sources and the late nature of Islamic traditions, the issue of authenticity was subject of long-standing and sometimes controversial debates between scholars. Accordingly, the Qur’an gradually took its place in historical research on Islam, not only in the perspective of being a possible historical source, but also in the context of discussing the hypothesis that the Qur’an itself was a later product.
The fact that the text of the Qur'an can be a subject of historical research into its genesis, development, formation, collection, and canonization has been, during two centuries of academic research, at the heart of debates between different scholars of Qur'anic studies, and has always been a subject of disagreement and uncertainty that raise many questions the most important of is: can a text whose history is uncertain be considered a historical document?
On another level, the consideration of the Qur'anic text as a historical source has forced scholars to adopt, in one way or another, a chronology of the Qur'an. Knowing that this chronology is also multiple, uncertain, and based on several criteria far from being accepted by all scholars, another difficulty is added for those who consider the Qur'an to be a historical source.
Within this general framework, we try to revisit the problem of considering the Qur'an a historical source, focusing on the debates conducted by scholars of early Islam, the Sira, and Qur'anic Studies. (Nader Hammami)