AUTHORS CONTRIBUTING to Almuslih and its section on Islam in History frequently make reference to major works of modern scholarship on matters related to the origins of Islam. To answer to the requests both of readers and contributors, it has been deemed useful to provide a library resource for these works.

The documents collected here are in the public domain, and have been assembled from various sources wherever they could be found, irrespective of the nature or purpose of the sites hosting them. Inclusion of these documents in the Almuslih catalogue therefore does not imply an endorsement or validation of these sites, nor does their inclusion imply any judgment by Almuslih as to the ultimate accuracy of these works, some of which have been superseded by later studies. The intention is not to host a library of religious polemics but rather to provide, as far as is possible, access to the source material used by our authors.

Many of these works have been authored by non-Muslims trained in modern historiographical methodologies of analysis, which include, amongst other things, archaeological investigation, philological study of Arabic and non-Arabic sources, comparative religious phenomenology and literary criticism, and to which the terms ‘revisionism’ or ‘scholarly Orientalism’ have been variously applied.

On the issue of the value of this ‘Orientalist’ scholarship, and in the light of some criticisms made as to their purpose and value, the reader is referred to the following works published by Almuslih: Lafif Lakhdar: A word on the Orientalists and Hashem Saleh’ essays: In Praise of Orientalism and Orientalism and the historicization of the Islamic heritage.

The Almuslih Library cannot in any sense be considered a bibliographical resource, or have any pretensions to comprehensiveness. The criterion for selection has been governed by online availability and merely seeks to provide a useful categorized source of complete works that may be downloaded (or where relevant read online). Since the field of research on early Islamic history is rich and extensive, documents will be added to the Almuslih Library incrementally and in so far as these reflect the interests of our authors and readers.