1/ I& #39;ve recently been reading the work of Josef van Ess, the great German scholar of Islamic Studies. Here& #39;s an accessible interview he did in English, in which he spells out his views of the origins of Islam. Some quotes below (see esp. the last point!)

http://www.goethe.de/ges/phi/prj/ffs/the/a96/en8626506.htm">https://www.goethe.de/ges/phi/p...
2/ Q. Is it even true that Islam has never had a Reformation?

A. "I consider the Koran itself to be a reformative text [with] a reformative intention, to the extent that the older religions are dismissed as wrong paths, and the basic intention is simply to go back to the roots"
3/ Q. You said that you have your own ideas about how the new religion [of Islam] developed.

A. "[Islam was not one thing at the beginning but] a conglomerate of different nuclei, primarily in the new garrison cities – Basra and Kufa, Fustat in Egypt, Hims in Syria ...
4/ "... So in these places there are a couple of so-called companions of the Prophet, who are later also revered and around whom a sort of Islam configures. But I’m convinced that it was quite different in Kufa to Hims or Fustat"
5/ Q. Why? Were these areas completely isolated from one another?

A. "The communication between the centres was weak. Of course people travelled, and of course they had some kind of Koran[ic] text that they adhered to ...
6/ "... [But] the question is whether the Koran was even central to the religion at this time. From my point of view: no, it wasn’t ..."
7/ "What united the congregation was far more the manner of their communal prayer. The peculiar gymnastics they perform in the process – the proskynesis – it’s quite unique. And everyone else noticed it...
8/ "Significantly, prayer was led by the governor, or by whichever general was present at the time – almost as a military discipline."
9/ Q. Does that mean that each city developed its own school of Islam?

A. "Yes. Even in places like Kufa, or later Baghdad, I would not assume that there was one unified Islam...As far as Kufa is concerned, we have reports from those crazy Gnostics from the early Islamic period"
10/ Q. You’re painting an almost atomistic image of Islam.

A. "Or I’m inverting the established image. In the beginning there is plurality – unity comes later… A fundamentalist would see it as the exact reverse ..."
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