Recent scholarship has sought to gather and analyze what was suggested to be the agreements made in the early years of Islam with other faith communities. The veracity of these documents was a question (not a new question). In “The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad: From Shared Historical Memory to Peaceful Co-Existence” (2023), Ibrahim Zein and Ahmed El-Wakil seek to assess the documents and develop a methodology to assess the documents and their accuracy. The opening includes a summary of the journey to discover the works, which included travels to a range of countries to uncover a largely unearthed treasure of documents, and years of research. This is a remarkable contribution for its collection of the documents as well as a methodology to assess them (as the typical tools in the Islamic sciences for such documents would not apply). The methodology includes ten criteria to assess the veracity of the documents, which is included at the end of the book. It offers quite a counter narrative for some who suggest the engagement with others was consistently conflictual. The book was hand delivered to the Pope, by the Dean of the College of Islamic Studies at HBKU. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to work with Ibrahim Zein, including currently on a research project about social cohesion, which his knowledge on this topic greatly enriched. A few notes from the book:

“We focus on the Prophet and his first Caliphs’ covenants that have been preserved in the archives of non-Muslim communities and that constitute part of early Islam’s official decrees. By “official decrees”, we mean the treaties, land grants, truce agreements, accords, and edicts first issued by the Prophet, including the Constitution of Madina”. (p. 7)

“Up until this point, the covenants continue to be dismissed without any careful investigation or analysis of their content and related historical context, mainly based on an unwillingness to question the accepted narrative that they are “forgeries”; the enduring study of the covenants and the political documents of early Islam in silo; and prejudice against the covenants because of their obvious implications. It is no secret that for more than two decades there has been a dominant narrative of Islam a fundamentally intolerant religion, but the covenants clearly show that their is a precedent for peaceful co-existence despite wrongdoings which were committed in Islam history. Consequently, the covenants set the stage for reviving the tradition of formulating peace agreements based on justice and mutual respect”. (p. 285)