Book Reviews / Studia Islamica 108 (2013) 255-272 259 Françoise MICHEAU, Les débuts de l’Islam. Jalons pour une nouvelle histoire, Paris, Téraèdre, Coll. « L’Islam en débats », 2012. In 1943, Jean Sauvaget published a brief handbook entitled Introduction à l’histoire musulmane in order to provide basic guidance for students and others wishing to do research in what was a small, but growing, field of study. A second, enlarged edition of this work was published by Claude Cahen in 1961, and an English version of this work (with additional English- language bibliography) appeared very quickly thereafter, under the title Jean Sauvaget’s Introduction to the History of the Muslim East: a bibliograph- ical guide (University of California Press, 1965). These works surveyed not only the basic research tools, but also the bibliography relating to the his- tory of the Middle East and North Africa from the rise of Islam until some- time in the nineteenth century, and were indispensable tools in the hands of every student of Islamic history of my generation and before. The next contribution to the genre was R. Stephen Humphreys’ Islamic History: a framework for inquiry (initially published in 1988 by Bibliotheca Islamica, then re-issued in slightly edited form in 1991 by Princeton Univer- sity Press). While similar in some ways to the Sauvaget-Cahen works, much of Islamic History: a framework consisted of evaluative essays focused on particular topics about which a considerable number of differing scholarly opinions had been voiced. Compared with its predecessors, then, Hum- phreys’ work made apparent how much our scholarly “field” had developed in the intervening twenty-five years. This development was also made clear in the fact that, whereas Sauvaget-Cahen extended from the beginnings of Islam until the nineteenth century, Humphreys made its cut-off date around 1500, thus eliminating much of Ottoman and all of Safavid and Qajar history, the study of which had burgeoned so much by then that including it would have made the book unwieldy. Moreover, that very development meant that the history of the early modern Middle East (esp. Ottoman his- tory) was increasingly seen as a field in itself, so that few students could claim to be expert in both “medieval” Islamic history and the later periods. François Micheau’s Les débuts de l’Islam reflects the tremendous growth that has taken place over the past thirty-five years in the bulk and sophis- tication of scholarship on the first century or two of Islamic history. In this volume, we have a kind of survey of the main themes and problems of early Islamic history structured, à la Sauvaget et al., around discussion of key publications, but now the scope has been restricted to the period from the Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/19585705-12341289