Machine summary:
It has become a fashion with a certain school of ori• entalists to regard Traditions which seem to tell against the Prophet as for that reason manifestly true, oblivious of the fact that among the later Companions of the Prophet the majority had been op• ponents of Islam in early days and knew the Meccan version of an incident or mixed it with the Muslim version, · thinking no harm ; while the later Mus• lim experts in Tradition, though they made a careful sifting, were concerned only with the reliability of each link in the chain of transmitters; not with the inherent probability or the reverse of a particular /:iadith.
ex• tensive enquiries into the antiquities of the race, states in another passage that he found that the Arabs had no exact knowledge of their history extending further back than about fifty years be• fore the time of the Prophet.
Later Arabic authors made attempts to pene• trate into this darkness, with little suc• cess, as is evident by the complete clif• ference between the names of kings and persons mentioned in Arabic works and such as are named in the inscriptions, mostly from South Arabia.
The reason is not far to seek, for we have to rely for the century before Islam, has to rely entirely upon non-Arab authors or upon the work of European scholars who have made a special study of the sub• ject and (this is an important point) to scrutinise whether their statements are correct.
For the author of a book on the history of education.