RESOURCESargument has been between "externalists" and "internalists." To a
certain extent these issues derive from A. J. Wensinck's The Muslim
Creed: Its Genesis and Historical development (Cambridge, 1932;
London, 1965), which puts matters in terms of a body of coherent
doctrine, argues for external influences, and imposes a Christian un-
derstanding of doctrine onto it. Apart from modern Muslim cultural
nationalists who derive everything from abstract Islamic requirements,
the significance of the work of W. Montgomery Watt lies partly in his
attempt to show that post-Qur'anic doctrine developed out of early
issues and conflicts among Muslims. The summary of his position in
Islamic Philosophy and Theology (Edinburgh, 1962) is developed and
expanded in The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Edinburgh,
1973), where he eventually recognized the possibility that ideas might
have been provided by converts to Islam.
The most important current work on early Islamic doctrinal history
is being done by J. van Ess, who also tends to be an internalist. His
suggestion that Islamic methods of dialectic argument were self-gen-
erated is outlined in "The Beginnings of Islamic Theology," in The
Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed. J. E. Murdoch and E. D.
Sylla (Dordrecht and Boston, 1975), pp. 87-111, and "Disputations-
praxis in der islamischen Theologie," REI 44 (1976): 23-60. But the
current debate between van Ess and Wansbrough, which may be fol-
lowed in their reviews of each other in BSOAS 43 (1980), concerns
the acceptability of the attributions of the authors (and their dates) of
the texts on which van Ess has based his argument. Wansbrough's
criticism is based on (1) a radical skepticism of the texts born of text-
bound criticism that tends to throw out the baby with the bath water,
and (2) a reductionist emphasis on scriptural authority as an issue.
Whether one is convinced by either side depends on the confidence
one has in their methods. Neither puts the argument into any kind of
social context and barely into a political context and both treat con-
tinued assertions as proof. As usual, reality probably lies somewhere
in between, and if van Ess asserts too much, Wansbrough admits too
little. There is a better critique of van Ess in M. A. Cook's mistitled
article on "The Origins of kaliim," BSOAS 43 (1980): 32-43 (it should
have been "A possible origin ... "), which has the value of offering
dialectic methods of argument by contemporary sectarian Christians
as a positive alternative, but does not explain the circumstances that
led some Muslims to use such methods also. Cook's Early Muslim
Dogma: A Source-critical Study (Cambridge, 1981) is equally misti-