ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the positivist perception of early-Islamic historiography against the background of skeptical approaches to the Islamic literary sources and compares it with external literary, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence. Both sira and Sunna deal with the same central subject – the life of the Prophet and his closest Companions, and both make use of the same cognitive source – the hadith. The interplay between historical and legal discourse about the Prophet brought forth questions about their mutual dependence and chronological precedence over one another. The functional dichotomy between sira and Sunna was responsible for their uneven authority in the formative period of Islamic sciences. Non-Islamic literary sources sometimes present well-known sira events in an unexpected light. Numismatic and epigraphic evidence as well as dated administrative papyri are another important means of studying the history of early Islam.
