ABSTRACT
The narrator of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953) declares that, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Among the many different sights, practices, customs, habits, and behaviors which might baffle us on our visits to any past, we may encounter some which appear reassuringly familiar, from the recognition of which we can derive reassurance, if not pleasure. Yet the “familiar” and the seduction of recognition are the Scylla and Charybdis of any journey into any past, for our contentment may beguile us, despite our best efforts, into unwittingly misconstruing the “familiar,” be it through anticipation, for example, or through the suppression of the unfamiliar in that which is but superficially familiar, or through the elision of the unfamiliar by garbing it in the guise of the familiar.1 As an example of the last of these, we can take our various, intellectual and scholarly, responses to the phenomena of variety and variation in the textual remnants of any literate society, in our case the societies and individuals who together constitute what we refer to as “early Islam,” the Islam of the first three Muslim centuries (seventh to ninth centuries ad).
