Editing Openai/690e264c-c9e4-800c-ae44-f3cf949de7b4 (section)

===== To give it scholarly grounding, you can weave in: =====
* Fred Donner (Muhammad and the Believers) — early communal simplicity
* Patricia Crone & Michael Cook (Hagarism) — cultural absorption and synthesis
* Marshall Hodgson (The Venture of Islam) — civilizational layering
* Richard Bulliet (Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period) — gradual Persianization
* Talal Asad (Genealogies of Religion) — religion as historical construct
* Charles Taylor (A Secular Age) — continuity between the religious and secular mind

Would you like me to help you draft the preface and introduction, setting the philosophical tone (“Why study Islam as an evolving organism rather than a fixed revelation”)?
That would establish the book’s narrative voice and purpose before diving into the chapters.