Patricia Crone and the “secular tradition” of early Islamic historiography: An exegesis

Patricia Crone famously identified three distinct sub-traditions within early Islamic historiography: a “religious tradition”, a “tribal tradition”, and a “secular tradition”. Whereas the first is extremely unreliable and the second is partially unreliable regarding early Islamic history in general (c. 600–750 CE), Crone argued that the third provides “a coherent historical account”, at least as far back as the beginning of the Umayyad period (c. 661 CE). Some confusion has since arisen over the identity of this “secular tradition” (thanks to Crone's famously terse and technical style), but a close examination of her work reveals that she had in mind state-oriented chronology and prosopography (i.e., basic political information on early Muslim caliphs, governors, judges, and commanders) or proto-taʾrīkh. Crone argued that this material (which mostly survives intermingled with the religious and tribal traditions in extant Islamic literary sources) derives via continuous written transmission from rudimentary state-oriented chronicles and prosopographies composed by pro-Marwanid Muslim writers in eighth-century Syria. Although these proto-tawārīkh are now lost, Crone argued that their eighth-century existence can be inferred from contemporaneous references thereto in extant Christian chronicles—a conclusion strengthened by more recent scholarship. For this reason, the “secular tradition” is substantially more reliable than the other traditions within early Islamic historiography, which underwent a protracted process of oral transmission and consequent mutation, distortion, and growth.