Periodisation and the futūḥ: Making Sense of Muḥammad’s Leadership of the Conquests in Non-Muslim Sources
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of theories on the origins of Islam which have called into question long-held scholarly axioms. One such axiom is the traditional date of 632 CE for the death of the prophet Muḥammad, which some scholars have now sought to redate to after the beginning of the Muslim conquests on the basis of the evidence of non-Muslim sources. The present contribution aims to demonstrate that the prima facie disharmony between these sources and Muslim accounts of Muḥammad’s life and the conquests is a product of the reading imposed on both sets of data, which primarily has to do with the fact that, more often than not, modern scholarship unsuspectingly operates within the rigid framework of the classical periodisation of early Islamic history. Therefore, a revision of either the traditional date of Muḥammad’s death or the starting date of the conquests based on this evidence is uncalled for.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".