Albrecht Noth (1937 – 22 February 1999) was a German
historian of Islam.
[
Noth was born on 23 September 1937 to the Old Testament scholar ]Martin Noth
Martin Noth (3 August 1902 – 30 May 1968) was a German scholar of the Hebrew Bible who specialized in the pre-Exilic history of the Hebrews and promoted the hypothesis that the Israelite tribes in the immediate period after the settlement in Can ...
in Königsberg
Königsberg (, ) was the historic Prussian city that is now Kaliningrad, Russia. Königsberg was founded in 1255 on the site of the ancient Old Prussian settlement ''Twangste'' by the Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades, and was name ...
. He completed his PhD from the Bonn University in 1964 with thesis titled ''Heiliger Krieg und heiliger Kampf in Islam und Christentum: Beiträge zur Vorgeschichte und Geschichte der Kreuzzüge''.[ His 1973 work on Islamic historiography questioned the usefulness of the Islamic narrative sources in reconstructing the early history of Islam, stressing that the sources are collections of ]literary topoi
In classical Greek rhetoric, topos, ''pl.'' topoi, (from grc, τόπος "place", elliptical for grc, τόπος κοινός ''tópos koinós'', 'common place'), in Latin ''locus'' (from ''locus communis''), refers to a method for developing ar ...
having little to do with actual historical events.[ The work sparked a trend of strong criticism of the medieval sources, which ultimately gave rise to the revisionist camp of scholars in the field of Islamic studies.][
]
Works
* Noth, Albrecht (1973). ''Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen, Formen und Tendenzen frühislamischer Geschichtsuberlieferung''. Bonn: Selbstverlag des Orientalischen Seminars der Universität Bonn[
* Noth, Albrecht; Conard, Lawrence; Bonner, Michael (trans.) (1994). ''The Early Arabic Historical Tradition. A Source-Critical Study''. Princeton: The Darwin Press][
]
References
{{reflist, refs=
[ {{Cite journal , last = Motzki , first = Harald , author-link = Harald Motzki , title = Zum Gedenken: Albrecht Noth (1937-1999) , journal = Die Welt des Islams , year = 2000 , volume = 40 , issue = 1 , pages = 1–6 , doi = 10.1163/1570060001569884, jstor = 1571101 , language=German]
[ {{The First Dynasty of Islam , edition = Second ]
[ {{The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates , edition = Third ]
1937 births
1999 deaths
20th-century German historians
University of Bonn alumni