The study of the 7th-century Arab takeover of the Middle East and of the early decades of Islam has until recently been based almost exclusively on the Muslim sources, which usually provide several conflicting versions of an event, such as when, where, and how a battle was fought or a city surrendered, or who was the commander in a particular engagement. Western scholars who accept the historicity of the Muslim sources have therefore devoted considerable effort to reconstructing the progress of the conquest from the many conflicting and contradictory details reported.

The result is a "Traditional Account" of the Arab Takeover that makes considerable sense; and to formulate a coherent, plausible narrative out of a vast array of conflicting details is quite an achievement. However, it does not demonstrate that any of the conflicting accounts are "true"; and the question, indeed, is not whether the traditions can be moulded to make sense, but whether they are demonstrably historical.

The contemporary and near-contemporary evidence, both literary and material, presents a picture of the Arab takeover of the Middle East, and of the rise of Islam, that is so far removed from that found in the Muslim literature (and in all the other literary sources based on it) that no reconciliation is possible. One is forced to choose between two incompatible paradigms either to reject the main outline of the Traditional Account as history, and to formulate an alternative version based on the contemporary evidence, or to turn a blind eye to the evidence as presented and to work solely within the universe of discourse of the Muslim sources. In the opinion of Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren, the latter course is the study of literature, not history. Their alternative version derived from the contemporary evidence is the subject of this book. The authors offer new perspectives on such issues as the role of the Byzantine Empire in the rise of the Arab State, the Arabs' initial step away from paganism in the form of "Indeterminate Monotheism," the canonization of the Islamic Scripture, and the historicity of the Arab Prophet. In making their arguments, special attention is paid to semantic analysis of key religious terminology in the Arabic language, including the name Muhammad.