History of the Saracens

Ockley based his work on an Arabic manuscript in the Bodleian Library which later scholars have pronounced less trustworthy than he imagined it to be.[5] Stanley Lane-Poole in the Dictionary of National Biography wrote that: "The work was based upon a manuscript in the Bodleian Library ascribed to the Arabic historian El-Wâkidî, with additions from El-Mekîn, Abû-l-Fidâ, Abû-l-Faraj, and others. Hamaker, however, has proved that the manuscript in question is not the celebrated 'Kitâb el-Maghâzî' of El-Wâkidî, but the 'Futûh esh-Sham, ' a work of little authority, which has even been characterised as 'romance rather than history'" citing the opinion of William Robertson Smith in the article on Ockley from the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The author in question is now known as pseudo-Waqidi.[6] Lane-Poole notes that the History
"formed for generations the main source of the average notions of early Mohammedan history."

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