ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book expresses that skepticism about the sources extends to the Quran. It explains the debates and the positions on the critical texts and figures of early Islam. The book introduces the form and content of the Quran, and then considers the text's putative date of closure and its milieu of emergence. It focuses on the community or communities that identified their origins with the Quran and Muhammad. The book covers the most central issues and developments in early Islam or Islamic origins. It explores how modernists such as al-Afghani, Abduh, and Rida sought to engage the modern world by upholding the paradigm of early Islam in hopes of reforming the Islam of their own time that had focused on imitation and isolation that had led to its decline.
