The volume opens by taking stock of its own sources and of the scholarship that reads them. Documentary survival is thin and haphazard until the Ottoman records, after which a rich and systematically kept government archive becomes available; archaeology, epigraphy, palaeography, diplomatic and numismatics fill part of the earlier gap.

An account of European study follows. For a thousand years Christendom and Islam largely ignored or misread one another, the Christian side elaborating what has been called a deformed image of the religion and its founder. That gave way in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as trade and diplomacy multiplied, Arabic entered the universities, and critical textual and archival method took shape. Erpenius, Golius and above all Pococke published the texts; d'Herbelot, Ockley and Sale carried the new understanding beyond the academy.

The history proper starts in pre-Islamic Arabia, treated at once as the last phase of Semitic antiquity in the Near East and as the prelude to medieval Islam.