THE AL KALAM PROJECT

Al Kalam is an initiative led by academics specialising in Islamic studies. We decided to form a collective in order to share our passion for History and to promote knowledge about the origins of Islam. Like the work we produce, our collective is non-confessional: we promote no religion, nor any philosophical or doctrinal position whatsoever. The only stance we claim is one of moral, religious and political neutrality — the stance of the impartial scholar before the object of study.

The Al Kalam project grew out of an observation: although Islam regularly makes the headlines of public debate, it remains poorly understood by the general public. The question of the origins of Islam in particular is almost never addressed; what can be read or heard too often reflects theories that are now largely outdated. Yet, since the 1980s, the study of the formation of Islam has undergone a major revolution. New studies and methods of analysis, as well as material discoveries (archaeology, epigraphy, literary sources…), have cast fresh light on early Islam and its context, as the following three examples illustrate:

1. Our knowledge of Arabia has changed considerably thanks to the archaeological excavations carried out in the region. We now know that on the eve of Islam, Arabia had become largely monotheistic, and that the peninsula was fully integrated into the religious and cultural dynamics of the Near East. This clearly contradicts the later Islamic sources, which depict Arabia as a land of ignorance and polytheism.

2. Regarding the Quran, new research has highlighted the textual similarities between Islam's holy book and texts and legends of all origins (the Talmud, apocryphal books of the Bible, Syriac writings, etc.). Several studies have also shown that the Quran was the product of an editorial process involving revision, rewriting, additions and deletions. Thus the Quranic text would not be limited to the proclamations of Muhammad; it increasingly appears to be the work of several editors, whose composition spans a period of about a century and unfolds in heterogeneous “milieus” — including beyond the Arabian Peninsula.

3. Finally, the figure of the Prophet and his particular role in the emergence of Islam have been extensively revised in recent decades. Taking external sources into account, together with a critical examination of Muslim texts, has revealed the gulf separating the idealised narrative of the Islamic sources from historical reality. In fact, little is known of the historical figure of Muhammad (not even his real name!), and Islamic literature (sira, hadiths…) amounts at best to a profound legendarisation of the man he may have been, at worst to mere fiction.

The major advances in the field of Islamic studies have always had great difficulty becoming known outside specialist circles. Is it because of the language barrier? Because of a sclerotic way of working specific to the research world? Because of a certain code of silence around a subject deemed sensitive? Probably all of these at once. Whatever the case, the result is a situation that is unacceptable for the historian (and the public), in which the mainstream media — and even certain “popularisers”, who are supposed to guarantee factual accuracy — relay, with some exceptions, a narrative made obsolete by the most recent research.

Admittedly, initiatives exist that have tried to break the ice separating the specialist historian from the general public. In France, Le Coran des historiens (Éditions du Cerf), published in 3 volumes in 2019, offers a masterful synthesis of historical-critical research on the formation of the Quran. But such initiatives are sadly too rare and remain inaccessible to many.

The general public's interest in the history of religions (and of Islam in particular) nonetheless remains strong. Le Coran des historiens, despite its some 3,500 pages, has sold nearly 15,000 copies to date. The documentary Jésus et l'islam, broadcast on the ARTE channel in 2015, gave the floor for the first time to leading historians and passed the one-million-viewer mark. Many lectures on Islam given by specialists receive hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.

It is to meet this growing demand that we decided to form our collective, in order to take part in the democratisation of historical knowledge. We are indeed convinced that access to knowledge is a fundamental right, and that ignorance is an obstacle to the cultivation of the mind. The Al Kalam project aims to bridge the gap between academic research and the widest possible audience.

Al Kalam is an initiative meant to address as many people as possible. The general public will find what they are looking for in concise articles and videos on topics related to the history of religions, with a particular focus on Islam. Would you like to become familiar with the field but have no prior knowledge? You're in the right place! Our publications are intended especially for newcomers. But we do not forget history enthusiasts who already have some background and wish to deepen their research. Here, there is no question of approaching subjects superficially. On the contrary, we intend to introduce our readers to the most advanced academic work, combining rigour and pedagogy.

Our project is also aimed at members of secondary and higher education wishing to keep abreast of academic research in the field of Islamic studies. They will find all the resources they need, which they are naturally free to use in their teaching.

It must be reiterated that Al Kalam is a non-confessional project based on the historical-critical method. As such, believers should not expect to find answers to their theological and doctrinal questions. Alongside their faith, they have everything to gain by taking an interest in historical research. It is first of all an exercise in intellectual curiosity that contributes to everyone's culture, and then a means of enriching one's knowledge of one's own religion and that of others.

We can never say it enough: believers should not perceive historical research as a threat to faith or religion. This supposed antinomy between faith and history is a sadly widespread but nonetheless inaccurate belief, which collapses by the mere fact that the historical-critical method was initiated and promoted by often devout believers. Moreover, faith is something intimate and sensitive, arising from the depths of one's being. It is impossible to prove or refute faith on historical grounds.

Our only compass is the scientific method applied to religious texts, known as the historical-critical method. Its origins go back to the Renaissance, but it was above all from the 19th century onwards that this approach became the reference framework for studying the founding texts of the great religions (the Bible, the Quran, the Avesta…), and that it became a scientific discipline in its own right.

The historical-critical method consists in suspending all judgement and presupposition as to the origin, transmission or meaning of the text under study. In other words, this approach amounts to analysing the text in itself, independently of the religious tradition attached to it. Not that this tradition has no value on the historical level, but the contradictions, inconsistencies and biases are too numerous for it to be taken at face value. A critical use of sources is an essential step, carried out through a meticulous examination of the historical value they contain. This is, moreover, the very definition of History (from the Greek Ἱστορία), which, from Herodotus onwards, means “inquiry”.

The historian is therefore one who inquires in order to reconstruct, objectively, the data of a past event or phenomenon. In this, history differs from the confessional approach. For religious-type authors, indeed, the aim is not so much to represent things as they actually happened, but rather as they believed, or wanted others to believe, they had happened. It is the fabrication of a “sacred myth of origins” (Heilsgeschichte) intended to anchor the community in an idealised fictional history.

The Quran, like any religious text, thus becomes for the historian the object of a historical “inquiry”. As such it is a document like any other, one that is inscribed within History, a phenomenon of human extraction. The supernatural or non-supernatural origin of the text itself obviously cannot be the object of an inquiry, and is therefore not within the historian's remit.

The Quran as a human phenomenon, on the other hand, can be the object of such an inquiry, the aim of which is to reconstruct the history of its composition by raising a number of questions:

• What is the profile of the author(s) of the text?
• What sources do they use?
• What are they trying to convince the audience they address of? By what arguments?
• Who makes up this audience?
• In what immediate context(s) was the text composed?

To answer these questions, the historian relies on a meticulous examination of the text, drawing on tools and methods such as source criticism, textual criticism, redaction criticism, etc. Of course, recourse to elements external to the text is often essential. This is why we turn to literary sources (religious and non-religious), to archaeological and epigraphic data, and so on. All these elements are sorted, analysed and compared with one another in order to bring out usable data that may inform us about the formation of the phenomenon under study. We will have the opportunity to return in more detail to the method through a dedicated series of articles.

By way of conclusion, we share the first “theses on method” of the historian of religions Bruce Lincoln, which we make our own.

Thesis 1. The preposition “of” that joins the two terms of the disciplinary ethnonym “History of religions” has a precise function: to indicate a relationship of possession and subordination — history is the method and religion the object.

Thesis 2. The conjunction of these two terms further implies a tension that appears as soon as one takes the trouble to specify their meanings: religion is a discourse whose defining feature lies in its claim to speak of eternal and transcendent things with an equally transcendent and eternal authority; history, by contrast, is a discourse that speaks of temporal and earthly things, adopting a human and fallible voice and seeking to ground its authority in a rigorous critical examination of the data.

Thesis 3. The history of religions is therefore a discourse that resists the discourse constituting its object, and reverses its orientation. To be a historian of religions without contradicting the name of the discipline is to insist on the temporal, contextual, situated, interested, human and material dimensions of those discourses, practices and institutions that typically claim an eternal, transcendent, spiritual or divine status.

Thesis 4. The same destabilising and irreverent questions that can be put to any discourse or statement can also be put to religious discourse. The first of these questions is: “Who is speaking?” — that is, which person, group or institution is at the origin of a text, whatever the supposed or attested author the text claims for itself. Then: “Whom is it addressing? In what immediate context? Through what media or supports? With what interests?” And further: “Of what do the speaker(s) seek to convince the audience? What would the consequences be, should they succeed? Who gains what, and how much? Conversely, who loses?”