Social Structures of Knowledge and Historical Perceptions of Early Islam

Historiography of early Islam gradually transforms from its primitive structure of Hadith, Ansab, and Ayyam to a canonized written form. Hadith’s social structure of knowledge is based on the present and lived interconnections of those who experienced the situation and those who narrate it in a cultural environment of oral transmission. There is a concatenation of narrators, passing down the narration by words of mouth. The initial narrator, stands by the last narrator several decades later, in a manner that animates the events of any time through the real direct network of relations and also enlivens the reader in the past. The past is not past anymore. This present and lived structure of historical perception, which may be considered science fiction nowadays, gradually transforms into professional references to the ‘dead’ people who had someday heard or experienced the narrated event. The gradual transformation realized by spatiotemporal distance from the first decades of Islam, becoming self-conscious of the primitive structure by formation of the science of hadith and history, alongside the genesis of a network of reliable professional narrators, who based the event only on their narrations. This new structure became dominant in the history of Islamic historiography and has lasted up to now.