Seventh-century mission, then empires and debates
Historians date Islam’s start to Muhammad’s seventh-century mission in Mecca and Medina; Muslims read it as restoring Abrahamic faith. Early conquests across Arabia and weakening northern empires spread the religion; much early history stayed oral until Abbasid times, complicating the archive.
By the thirteenth century Delhi sultans held northern India; Turkic powers took Anatolian Byzantine lands in the eleventh–twelfth. Mongol shocks followed. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European empires dominated much of the Muslim world, with independence struggles still echoing.
Descriptive historians such as Gibbon and Weil adjusted traditional outlines while bracketing miracles—one method among contested approaches that include revisionist readings of the conquests.
Historians disagree sharply over method. Beyond the descriptive approach, source critics such as William Montgomery Watt and Wilferd Madelung compare every surviving account to weed out weak informants and spurious material. Tradition critics, starting with Ignác Goldziher and continued by Uri Rubin, treat the reports as oral lore of murky origin and handle them with great caution. The sceptical school, early represented by John Wansbrough, doubts almost everything in the traditional sources and thinks any historical core is too distorted to recover. Broad surveys tend to stay descriptive, while specialists on origins usually favour source and tradition criticism. Evidence does get better after the eighth century, when accounts become closer in time to events and official documents start to survive.
Islam emerged in the late-antique Middle East. From roughly 380 onward Judaism was the dominant faith of Yemen's Himyarite kingdom, Christianity had footholds around the Persian Gulf, and a group called the Ḥanīf sought a monotheism distinct both from these imported faiths and from Arab polytheism, centred on a supreme god, Allah. By the traditional account, Muhammad was born around 570 in Mecca, a caravan trading hub, into the Quraysh, the city's leading tribe and a dominant force in the Hejaz, which upheld sacred months during which fighting was forbidden.
Source: History of Islam
