MYTHS AND HISTORY

The Quran largely consists of narratives assumed to describe events that took place in a more or less distant past: the expulsion of Adam, the story of the flood, the Exodus of the Hebrews, the fall of the Kingdom of Sheba, etc. These stories have subsequently been enriched and developed by later Islamic tradition (hadiths, exegetical texts, etc.), but they often encounter the problem of their historicity. As we will see in this section, external data and the analysis of ancient sources do not confirm the events as reported in the Quran, and may even outright contradict them. We will also show that in a number of cases, the stories told by the Quran, the hadiths, and Muslim exegetes have their roots in Near Eastern myths.

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