An Alternative Insight into the First Centuries of Islam on the Iberian Peninsula – Problems of Historiographic Sources Concerning the Early Islamic History of Al-Andalus

Abstract

The stream of historical revisionism within the Orientalist scholarship has offered in recent years a number of intriguing theories attempting to undermine some of the conventional concepts of the Arab-Muslim early history and religious tradition. Regardless of their actual scholarly value, they do shed light on various methodological problems concerning the critical research on early the Islamic historiography, raise sensitive and stimulating questions, and encourage to think possibly of revising certain axioms of knowledge about that epoch. This paper endeavours to present briefly an alternative image of the arrival of Islam on the Iberian Peninsula, as emerging from research by the revisionist school of West-European scholars called Inārah. Their controversial theory involving, among others, historical and dogmatic aspects of the development of Islam in Andalusia, disputes the generally accepted version of historical events beginning with the 8th century C.E. which is largely based on the traditional sources of Arabic historiography.