William Montgomery Watt (1909–2006) was one of the most important and respected scholars of Islamic studies alive when I was beginning my scholarly career in the late 1960s and early 1970s – certainly, he was one of the most important for me, although, unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to meet him in person. His numerous studies – above all his works on the Prophet Muhammad and his several short introductory volumes in the Edinburgh University Press's Islamic Surveys series (which he instigated), especially his Islamic Philosophy and Theology (1962) and Islamic Political Thought: the Basic Concepts (1968) – were, on the one hand, models of lucid, careful scholarship and, on the other, incredibly helpful introductions to various topics within Islamic studies. Without his work to learn from and absorb, I know that my own development as a scholar would have been far more difficult, and much less pleasant. And I am sure that I am not the only scholar of my generation who owes such a debt to Professor Watt and his work.

Watt's Work in its Time

Reflecting back on his work forty years later, however, it is possible to see it with more perspective. I still esteem it very highly, but now I can also see Watt's contributions as products of their time. The social sciences, after a period of gestation in the first half of the twentieth century, became in the years following World War II the regnant academic disciplines in much of the Western academy (and outside it, in the arena of policy formation). Watt's work, like that of everyone else in that time, reflects this. His interpretation of Muhammad's life, for example, focuses on the economic and social tensions that, he argued, had developed in Meccan society because of the nascent inequality produced by the burgeoning commerce of Mecca. He spoke of the demise – under the corrosive effect of the growing rift between rich and poor – of what he called ‘tribal humanism’, the ethos of mutual responsibility according to which members of a tribe shared and looked after each other. Watt saw Muhammad's teachings as, in part, a response to this essentially socio-economic and, hence, moral dislocation in Meccan society. There was relatively little emphasis on the impact of Muhammad's religious ideas as a factor in Islam's appearance.