As we have seen in the previous chapter, converts played a leading role in the history of religious polemics. Among them, those boasting formal training in their religion of origin found in the tradition of dalāʾil al-nubuwwa a useful way to apply their knowledge of the Bible. However, this was not the only manner in which they could use their backgrounds to their advantage. They also incorporated historical and theological knowledge from both ends of their spiritual transition beyond the Holy Scriptures. For instance, in his Al-radd ʿala al-Nasara (Refutation of the Christians) ʿAli al- Tabari discussed at some length issues pertaining the Nicene Creed. In a similar fashion, Turmeda incorporated into his Tuhfa citations from a wide array of Christian sources, and in one of his minor works in Catalan, the Disputa de l’ase (Dispute of the Donkey), he drew from texts from the mystical brotherhood Ikhwan al-safaʾ (Brethren of Purity).

As we will see shortly, Jadid al-Islam too makes use of a rich corpus of sources beyond the biblical text. In discussing the similarities between Jadid al-Islam's work and the classics of the polemical genre regarding his treatment of biblical signs, I have already raised the question of his possible familiarity with earlier works of dalāʾil. This question is also relevant when considering his use of extra-scriptural materials, although less so because of the specific choice of sources than because of the fact that they served as a rhetorical resource, as we will now see.

Hadith in the Dalāʾil al-nubuwwa Genre

While dalāʾil al-nubuwwa literature necessitated an engagement with the biblical corpus in order to reclaim it as a tool for Islamic hermeneutics, the genre was not historically circumscribed only to interreligious polemics. An entire branch of dalāʾil texts developed in parallel which was more concerned with providing proofs for the prophecy from within Islamic sources and for the purpose of engaging in intra-Muslim theological discussions. From the earliest developments of the genre, scholars of different schools of thought specialising in different disciplines of Islamic learning drew upon a wide variety of sources to use them as argumentative tools. Scholars as diverse and antithetical as the Muʿtazilites al-Jahiz and ʿAbd al-Jabbar al-Hamadhani (d. 1025) on the one hand, and scholars with Ashʿarite tendencies, like Abu al-Hasan al-Mawardi (d. 1058) on the other, produced works which could be classified as belonging to this tradition.