I've seen posts claiming that the early history of Islamic was written during the Abbasid dynasty - over a hundred years after Muhammad. Is this completely true - is there no surviving native literature from the first century of Islam?

by Seswatha

If so, was the Umayyad Caliphate a non-literate society or is there evidence the Abbasids systemically destroyed older histories?

block4

during the Abbasid dynasty

I'll start with addressing this first. It's better, in this context, to view the term Abbasid as an identifier of time rather than territory (the term can be used to identify a territory). A text written in the Abbasid era wasn't necessarily written in a territory under the jurisdiction of the Abbasid government, as the Abbasids when they first emerged only ruled part of the Muslim world (though a large one), and the size of their territory kept decreasing as time progressed.

If I'm understanding it correctly, your question is not concerned with epigraphic materials. So, I'll leave those aside. There were many pre-Abbasid scholars, for the sake of brevity, I'll limit myself to a few examples:

  1. You have Hammam bin Munabbih, one of the early collectors of hadiths. He lived during the Rashidun and Umayyad eras.
  2. One of the oldest biographies of Muhammad was written by MaŹ»mar bin Rashid (714-770 CE).
  3. Though the books he authored didn't survive, Urwa bin al-Zubayr (a grandson of Abu Bakr) was cited in the works of some Abbasid scholars in the fields of hadith and sira . For example, in Ibn Ishaq's biography of Muhammed, some of the narratives mentioned in the book were attributed to ibn al-Zubayr.