The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate ad 661-750

The Byzantine and
Early Islamic Near East. Problems in the Literary Source Material
(Princeton: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1992). As well as contributions
on texts in Greek and Syriac, that volume also contains articles by
Wadad Kadi, Stefan Leder and Conrad himself which discuss
aspects of the Arabic Muslim sources.
Noth’s rather pessimistic conclusions about the possibility of
composing detailed narrative history for the early Islamic period on
the basis of the literary sources have not been accepted by all.
Academic scholarship on early Islam generally could be said to be
divided into two camps. On the one hand are those who—like Harald
Motzki and Michael Lecker—argue that it is possible to recover
from relatively late works materials which originated at a time from
which no contemporary texts have survived, and to use those
materials to reconstruct some elements of pre- and early Islamic
history. On the other are those who stress the primarily literary
character of the texts and question their value as sources of
historical information about the events they are explicitly concerned
with. In this latter category one might put scholars as diverse as
Noth himself, John Wansbrough and Uri Rubin.
None of those just mentioned, apart from Noth, were or are really
directly concerned with the history of the Umayyads as such, but
one who is, and who is mentioned in Appendix 2 in connexion with
his work on the Arab conquests is Fred M.Donner. He takes a point
of view which is positive regarding the historical value of the
sources, one critical of those he refers to as sceptics, and his detailed
analysis and discussion of the problem has now also been published
in the 
LAEI
 studies series: 
Narratives of Islamic Origins: The
Beginnings of Arabic Historical Writing,
 Princeton: Darwin Press,
Inc., 1998.

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Bibliographical Postscript to the Second Edition
It is not possible to mention here all of the recent articles relevant
to our understanding of the sources for and historiography of the
Umayyad period. Some of them (for example, studies of al-?abari’s
source Sayf ibn ?Umar by Martin Hinds and by Ella Landau-
Tasseron, and the recent publication by Qasim al-Samarrai of a
manuscript containing large parts of works ascribed to Sayf) are
indirectly relevant for our understanding of the sources for the
Umayyads even though not immediately concerned with Umayyad
affairs. A statement of some of the problems, and discussion of
different approaches, may be found as chapter 3 (‘Early Historical
Tradition and the First Islamic Polity’) of R.Stephen Humphreys,
Islamic History. A Framework for Inquiry
 (revised edition Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991). An even more recent discussion
is that by Chase Robinson, ‘The Stud
y
 of Islamic Historiography. A
Progress Report’ (
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,
 1997).
Interest in the non-Arabic and non-Muslim literary sources
relevant for early Islamic history, to some extent rekindled by
Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s 
Hagarism. The Making of the
Islamic World
 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), has
led to appearance of a number of works of direct relevance to the
Umayyad period. Some of the relevant Syriac texts and passages are
discussed by John F.Healey and by Jean Maurice Fiey in two articles
published in the English language volume which resulted from the
Bilad al-Sham conference mentioned above. Sebastian Brock has
translated the part relevant for the Second Civil War (see chapter 4
above) of a work by the Jacobite monk John of Phenek: ‘North
Mesopotamia in the Late 7th Century. Book XV of John Bar
Penkaye’s