RESPONSE TO FRED DONNER'S REVIEW OF PARABLE AND POLITICS IN EARLY ISLAMIC HISTORY: THE RASHIDUN CALIPHS (IJMES 43 [2011]: 570–71)

Abstract

In his recent review of my book, Parable and Politics in Early Islamic History, in the August 2011 issue of IJMES, Fred Donner provides several opinions that are in need of correction. His initial impression that the “basic point of Parable and Politics” follows previous scholarship “in an attempt to work out how much is ‘fact’ and how much is literary invention” (p. 570) sets the wrong tone for evaluating studies on historiography. Far from being merely an opposition between true and false, the study of “fiction” in historiography is actually an analysis of construction not of truthfulness. The complexity of doing this lies in reaching for a multifaceted commentary that was originally intended not only in the individual reports but also through a process of intertextuality, which casts implications on a range of issues and on the representation of characters across a cluster of reports.