David Samuel Margoliouth

“ The number of motives leading to the fabrication of traditions was so great that the historian is in constant danger of employing as veracious records what were deliberate fictions. I can only hope that I have not displayed greater credulity than my predecessors. In condemning traditions as unhistorical I have ordinarily considered the obelus of Goldziher, Nöldeke, or Wellhausen as sufficient. ”

“ During the time when Gibbon wrote, and for long after, historians mainly relied for their knowledge of the life of Mohammed on the Biography of Abu'l-Fidā, who died in the year 722 A.H., 1322 A.D., of whose work Gagnier produced an indifferent edition. [4] The scholars of the nineteenth century were naturally not satisfied with so late an authority ”

“ Reade's Martyrdom of Man, 14th ed., 260 foll., deserves mention. That by Wellhausen in the introduction to Das Arabische Reich und sein Sturz is masterly in the extreme. ↑ Oxford, 1723. Abu'l-Fidā is referred to as the chief authority perhaps for the last time by T. Wright, Christianity in Arabia. ”