Albrecht Noth (23 September 1937 – 22 February 1999) was a German historian of Islam.[1]
Noth was born on 23 September 1937 to the Old Testament scholar Martin Noth in Königsberg. He completed his PhD from the Bonn University in 1964 with a thesis titled Heiliger Krieg und heiliger Kampf in Islam und Christentum: Beiträge zur Vorgeschichte und Geschichte der Kreuzzüge.[1] His 1973 work on Islamic historiography questioned the usefulness of the Islamic narrative sources in reconstructing the early history of Islam, stressing that the sources are collections of literary topoi having little to do with actual historical events.[2][3] The work sparked a trend of strong criticism of the medieval sources, which ultimately gave rise to the revisionist camp of scholars in the field of Islamic studies.[3]
Works
edit- Noth, Albrecht (1973). Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen, Formen und Tendenzen frühislamischer Geschichtsuberlieferung. Bonn: Selbstverlag des Orientalischen Seminars der Universität Bonn[2]
- Noth, Albrecht; Conard, Lawrence; Bonner, Michael (trans.) (1994). The Early Arabic Historical Tradition. A Source-Critical Study. Princeton: The Darwin Press[2]
References
edit- ^ a b Motzki, Harald (2000). "Zum Gedenken: Albrecht Noth (1937-1999)". Die Welt des Islams (in German). 40 (1): 1–6. doi:10.1163/1570060001569884. JSTOR 1571101.
- ^ a b c Hawting, Gerald R. (2000). The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661–750 (Second ed.). London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-24072-7.
- ^ a b Kennedy, Hugh (2016). The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the 6th to the 11th Century (Third ed.). Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-78761-2.