KNOW THY ENEMY! WE ARE SUJECTED TO THE SCORN OF MUSLIMS!
Submitted by: William Finley
THE ORIGNS OF AL-QUR`AN
Introduction
The
stereotypic image of the Muslim holy warrior with a sword in one hand
and the Koran in the other would only be plausible if he was left
handed, since no devout Muslim should or would touch a Koran with his
left hand which is reserved for dirty chores. All Muslims revere the
Koran with a reverence that borders on bibliolatry and superstition. “It
is,” as Guillaume remarked, “the holy of holies. It must never rest
beneath other books, but always on top of them, one must never drink or
smoke when it is being read aloud, and it must be listened to in
silence. It is a talisman against disease and disaster.”
In
some Westerners it engenders other emotions. For Gibbon it was an
“incoherent rhapsody of fable,” for Carlyle an “insupportable
stupidity,” while here is what the German scholar Salomon Reinach
thought: “From the literary point of view, the Koran has little merit.
Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic and coherence strike
the unprepared reader at every turn. It is humiliating to the human
intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of
innumerable commentaries, and that millions of men are still wasting
time absorbing it.”
For
us in studying the Koran it is necessary to distinguish the historical
from the theological attitude. Here we are only concerned with those
truths that are yielded by a process of rational enquiry, by scientific
examination. “Critical investigation of the text of the Qu’ran is a
study which is still in its infancy,” wrote the Islamic scholar Arthur
Jeffery in 1937. In 1977 John Wansbrough noted that “as a document
susceptible of analysis by the instruments and techniques of Biblical
criticism [the Koran] is virtually unknown.” By 1990, more than fifty
years after Jeffery’s lament, we still have the scandalous situation
described by Andrew Rippin: I have often encountered individuals who
come to the study of Islam with a background in the historical study of
the Hebrew Bible or early Christianity, and who express surprise at the
lack of critical thought that appears in introductory textbooks on
Islam. The notion that “Islam was born in the clear light of history”
still seems to be assumed by a great many writers of such texts. While
the need to reconcile varying historical traditions is generally
recognized, usually this seems to pose no greater problem to the authors
than having to determine “what makes sense” in a given situation. To
students acquainted with approaches such as source criticism, oral
formulaic compositions, literary analysis and structuralism, all quite
commonly employed in the study of Judaism and Christianity, such naive
historical study seems to suggest that Islam is being approached with
less than academic candor. The questions any critical investigation of
the Koran hopes to answer are:
1. How did the Koran come to us.?—That is the compilation and the transmission of the Koran.
2. When was it written, and who wrote it?
3. What are the sources of the Koran? Where were the stories, legends, and principles that abound in the Koran acquired?
4. What is the Koran? Since there never was a textus receptus ne varietur of the Koran, we need to decide its authenticity.
I
shall begin with the traditional account that is more or less accepted
by most Western scholars, and then move on to the views of a small but
very formidable, influential, and growing group of scholars inspired by
the work of John Wansbrough.
According
to the traditional account the Koran was revealed to Muhammad, usually
by an angel, gradually over a period of years until his death in 632
C.E. It is not clear how much of the Koran had been written down by the
time of Muhammad’s death, but it seems probable that there was no single
manuscript in which the Prophet himself had collected all the
revelations. Nonetheless, there are traditions which describe how the
Prophet dictated this or that portion of the Koran to his secretaries.
The Collection Under Abu Bakr
Henceforth
the traditional account becomes more and more confused; in fact there
is no one tradition but several incompatible ones. According to one
tradition, during Abu Bakr’s brief caliphate (632-634), ‘Umar, who
himself was to succeed to the caliphate in 634, became worried at the
fact that so many Muslims who had known the Koran by heart were killed
during the Battle of Yamama, in Central Arabia. There was a real danger
that parts of the Koran would be irretrievably lost unless a collection
of the Koran was made before more of those who knew this or that part of
the Koran by heart were killed. Abu Bakr eventually gave his consent to
such a project, and asked Zayd ibn Thabit, the former secretary of the
Prophet, to undertake this daunting task. So Zayd proceeded to collect
the Koran “from pieces of papyrus, flat stones, palm leaves, shoulder
blades and ribs of animals, pieces of leather and wooden boards, as well
as from the hearts of men.” Zayd then copied out what he had collected
on sheets or leaves (Arabic, suhuf). Once complete, the Koran was handed
over to Abu Bakr, and on his death passed to ‘Umar, and upon his death
passed to ‘Umar’s daughter, Hafsa.
There
are however different versions of this tradition; in some it is
suggested that it was Abu Bakr who first had the idea to make the
collection; in other versions the credit is given to Ali, the fourth
caliph and the founder of the Shias; other versions still completely
exclude Abu Bakr. Then, it is argued that such a difficult task could
not have been accomplished in just two years. Again, it is unlikely that
those who died in the Battle of Yamama, being new converts, knew any of
the Koran by heart. But what is considered the most telling point
against this tradition of the first collection of the Koran under Abu
Bakr is that once the collection was made it was not treated as an
official codex, but almost as the private property of Hafsa. In other
words, we find that no authority is attributed to Abu Bakr’s Koran. It
has been suggested that the entire story was invented to take the credit
of having made the first official collection of the Koran away from
‘Uthman, the third caliph, who was greatly disliked. Others have
suggested that it was invented “to take the collection of the Quran back
as near as possible to Muhammad’s death.”
The Collection Under ‘Uthman
According
to tradition, the next step was taken under ‘Uthman (644-656). One of
‘Uthman’s generals asked the caliph to make such a collection because
serious disputes had broken out among his troops from different
provinces in regard to the correct readings of the Koran. ‘Uthman chose
Zayd ibn Thabit to prepare the official text. Zayd, with the help of
three members of noble Meccan families, carefully revised the Koran
comparing his version with the “leaves” in the possession of Hafsa,
‘Umar’s daughter; and as instructed, in case of difficulty as to the
reading, Zayd followed the dialect of the Quraysh, the Prophet’s tribe.
The copies of the new version, which must have been completed between
650 and ‘Uthman’s death in 656, were sent to Kufa, Basra, Damascus, and
perhaps Mecca, and one was, of course, kept in Medina. All other
versions were ordered to be destroyed.
This
version of events is also open to criticism. The Arabic found in the
Koran is not a dialect. In some versions the number of people working on
the commission with Zayd varies, and in some are included the names of
persons who were enemies of ‘Uthman, and the name of someone known to
have died before these events! This phase two of the story does not
mention Zayd’s part in the original collection of the Koran discussed in
phase one.
Apart
from Wansbrough and his disciples, whose work we shall look at in a
moment, most modern scholars seem to accept that the establishment of
the text of the Koran took place under ‘Uthman between 650 and 656,
despite all the criticisms mentioned above. They accept more or less the
traditional account of the ‘Uthmanic collection, it seems to me,
without giving a single coherent reason for accepting this second
tradition as opposed to the first tradition of the collection under Abu
Bakr. There is a massive gap in their arguments, or rather they offer no
arguments at all. For instance, Charles Adams after enumerating the
difficulties with the ‘Uthmanic story, concludes with breathtaking
abruptness and break in logic, “Despite the difficulties with the
traditional accounts there can be no question of the importance of the
codex prepared under ‘Uthman.” But nowhere has it yet been established
that it was indeed under ‘Uthman that the Koran as we know it was
prepared. It is simply assumed all along that it was under ‘Uthman that
the Koran was established in its final form, and all we have to do is to
explain away some of the difficulties. Indeed, we can apply the same
arguments to dismiss the ‘Uthmanic story as were used to dismiss the Abu
Bakr story. That is, we can argue that the ‘Uthmanic story was invented
by the enemies of Abu Bakr and the friends of ‘Uthman; political
polemics can equally be said to have played their part in the
fabrication of this later story. It also leaves unanswered so many
awkward questions. What were these “leaves” in the possession of Hafsa?
And if the Abu Bakr version is pure forgery where did Hafsa get hold of
them? Then what are those versions that seemed to be floating around in
the provinces? When were these alternative texts compiled, and by whom?
Can we really pick and choose, at our own will, from amongst the
variants, from the contradictory traditions? There are no compelling
reasons for accepting the ‘Uthmanic story and not the Abu Bakr one;
after all they are all gleaned from the same sources, which are all
exceedingly late, tendentious in the extreme, and all later
fabrications, as we shall see later.
But
I have even more fundamental problems in accepting any of these
traditional accounts at their face value. When listening to these
accounts, some very common-sensical objections arise which no one seems
to have dared to ask. First, all these stories place an enormous burden
on the memories of the early Muslims. Indeed, scholars are compelled to
exaggerate the putatively prodigious memories of the Arabs. Muhammad
could not read or write according to some traditions, and therefore
everything depends on him having perfectly memorized what God revealed
to him through His Angels. Some of the stories in the Koran are
enormously long; for instance, the story of Joseph takes up a whole
chapter of 111 verses. Are we really to believe that Muhammad remembered
it exactly as it was revealed?
Similarly
the Companions of the Prophet are said to have memorized many of his
utterances. Could their memories never have failed? Oral traditions have
a tendency to change over time, and they cannot be relied upon to
construct a reliable, scientific history. Second, we seem to assume that
the Companions of the Prophet heard and understood him perfectly.
Variant Versions, Verses Missing, Verses Added
Almost
without exceptions Muslims consider that the Quran we now possess goes
back in its text and in the number and order of the chapters to the work
of the commission that ‘Uthman appointed. Muslim orthodoxy holds
further that ‘Uthman’s Quran contains all of the revelation delivered to
the community faithfully preserved without change or variation of any
kind and that the acceptance of the ‘Uthmanic Quran was all but
universal from the day of its distribution.The orthodox position is
motivated by dogmatic factors; it cannot be supported by the historical
evidence…. Charles Adams
While
modern Muslims may be committed to an impossibly conservative position,
Muslim scholars of the early years of Islam were far more flexible,
realizing that parts of the Koran were lost, perverted, and that there
were many thousand variants which made it impossible to talk of the
Koran. For example, As-Suyuti (died 1505), one of the most famous and
revered of the commentators of the Koran, quotes Ibn ‘Umar al Khattab as
saying: “Let no one of you say that he has acquired the entire Quran,
for how does he know that it is all? Much of the Quran has been lost,
thus let him say, ‘I have acquired of it what is available’” (As-Suyuti,
Itqan, part 3, page 72). A’isha, the favorite wife of the Prophet,
says, also according to a tradition recounted by as-Suynti, “During the
time of the Prophet, the chapter of the Parties used to be two hundred
verses when read. When ‘Uthman edited the copies of the Quran, only the
current (verses) were recorded” (73).
As-Suyuti also tells this story about Uba ibn Ka’b, one of the great companions of Muhammad:
This
famous companion asked one of the Muslims, “How many verses in the
chapter of the Parties?” He said, “Seventy-three verses.” He (Uba) told
him, “It used to be almost equal to the chapter of the Cow (about 286
verses) and included the verse of the stoning”. The man asked, “What is
the verse of the stoning?” He (Uba) said, “If an old man or woman
committed adultery, stone them to death.”
As
noted earlier, since there was no single document collecting all the
revelations, after Muhammad’s death in 632 C.E., many of his followers
tried to gather all the known revelations and write them down in codex
form. Soon we had the codices of several scholars such as Ibn Masud, Uba
ibn Ka’b, ‘Ali, Abu Bakr, al-Aswad, and others (Jeffery, chapter 6, has
listed fifteen primary codices, and a large number of secondary ones).
As Islam spread, we eventually had what became known as the metropolitan
codices in the centers of Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Kufa, and Basra. As
we saw earlier, ‘Uthman tried to bring order to this chaotic situation
by canonizing the Medinan Codex, copies of which were sent to all the
metropolitan centers, with orders to destroy all the other codices.
‘Uthman’s
codex was supposed to standardize the consonantal text, yet we find
that many of the variant traditions of this consonantal text survived
well into the fourth Islamic century. The problem was aggravated by the
fact that the consonantal text was unpointed, that is to say, the dots
that distinguish, for example, a “b” from a “t” or a “th” were missing.
Several other letters (f and q; j, h, and kh; s and d; r and z; s and
sh; d and dh, t and z) were indistinguishable. In other words, the Koran
was written in a scripta defectiva. As a result, a great many variant
readings were possible according to the way the text was pointed (had
the dots added).
Vowels
presented an even worse problem. Originally, the Arabs had no signs for
the short vowels: the Arab script is consonantal. Although the short
vowels are sometimes omitted, they can be represented by orthographical
signs placed above or below the letters—three signs in all, taking the
form of a slightly slanting dash or a comma. After having settled the
consonants, Muslims still had to decide what vowels to employ: using
different vowels, of course, rendered different readings. The scripta
plena, which allowed a fully voweled and pointed text, was not perfected
until the late ninth century.
The
problems posed by the scripta defectiva inevitably led to the growth of
different centers with their own variant traditions of how the texts
should be pointed or vowelized. Despite ‘Uthman’s order to destroy all
texts other than his own, it is evident that the older codices survived.
As Charles Adams says, “It must be emphasized that far from there being
a single text passed down inviolate from the time of ‘Uthman’s
commission, literally thousands of variant readings of particular verses
were known in the first three (Muslim) centuries. These variants
affected even the ‘Uthmanic codex, making it difficult to know what its
true form may have been.”
Some
Muslims preferred codices other than the ‘Uthmanic, for example, those
of Ibn Mas’ud, Uba ibn Ka’b, and Abu Musa. Eventually, under the
influence of the great Koranic scholar Ibn Mujahid (died 935), there was
a definite canonization of one system of consonants and a limit placed
on the variations of vowels used in the text that resulted in acceptance
of seven systems. But other scholars accepted ten readings, and still
others accepted fourteen readings. Even Ibn Mujahid’s seven provided
fourteen possibilities since each of the seven was traced through two
different transmitters, viz,
1. Nafi of Medina according to Warsh and Qalun
2. Ibn Kathir of Mecca according to al-Bazzi and Qunbul
3. Ibn Amir of Damascus according to Hisham and Ibn Dakwan
4. Abu Amr of Basra according to al-Duri and al-Susi
5. Asim of Kufa according to Hafs and Abu Bakr
6. Hamza of Kuga according to Khalaf and Khallad
7. Al-Kisai of Kufa according to al Duri and Abul Harith
In
the end three systems prevailed, those of Warsh (d. 812) from Nafi of
Medina, Hafs (d. 805) from Asim of Kufa, and al-Duri (d. 860) from Abu
Amr of Basra. At present in modern Islam, two versions seem to be in
use: that of Asim of Kufa through Hafs, which was given a kind of
official seal of approval by being adopted in the Egyptian edition of
the Koran in 1924; and that of Nafi through Warsh, which is used in
parts of Africa other than Egypt.
As Charles Adams reminds us:
It
is of some importance to call attention to a possible source of
misunderstanding with regard to the variant readings of the Quran. The
seven (versions) refer to actual written and oral text, to distinct
versions of Quranic verses, whose differences, though they may not be
great, are nonetheless substantial. Since the very existence of variant
readings and versions of the Quran goes against the doctrinal position
toward the Holy Book held by many modern Muslims, it is not uncommon in
an apologetic context to hear the seven (versions) explained as modes of
recitation; in fact the manner and technique of recitation are an
entirely different matter. Guillaume also refers to the variants as
“not always trifling in significance.” For example, the last two verses
of sura LXXXV, Al Buraj, read: (21) hawa qur’anun majidun; (22) fi
lawhin mahfuzun/in. The last syllable is in doubt. If it is in the
genitive -in, it gives the meaning “It is a glorious Koran on a
preserved tablet”—a reference to the Muslim doctrine of the Preserved
Tablet. If it is the nominative ending -un, we get “It is a glorious
Koran preserved on a tablet.” There are other passages with similar
difficulties dealing with social legislation.
If
we allow that there were omissions, then why not additions? The
authenticity of many verses in the Koran has been called into question
by Muslims themselves. Many Kharijites, who were followers of ‘Ali in
the early history of Islam, found the sura recounting the story of
Joseph offensive, an erotic tale that did not belong in the Koran.
Hirschfeld questioned the authenticity of verses in which the name
Muhammad occurs, there being something rather suspicious in such a name,
meaning ‘Praised’, being borne by the Prophet. The name was certainly
not very common. However the Prophet’s name does occur in documents that
have been accepted as genuine, such as the Constitution of Medina.
Most
scholars believe that there are interpolations in the Koran; these
interpolations can be seen as interpretative glosses on certain rare
words in need of explanation. More serious are the interpolations of a
dogmatic or political character, which seem to have been added to
justify the elevation of ‘Uthman as caliph to the detriment of ‘Ali.
Then there are other verses that have been added in the interest of
rhyme, or to join together two short passages that on their own lack any
connection.
Bell
and Watt carefully go through many of the amendments and revisions and
point to the unevenness of the Koranic style as evidence for a great
many alterations in the Koran:
There
are indeed many roughness of this kind, and these, it is here claimed,
are fundamental evidence for revision. Besides the points already
noticed—hidden rhymes, and rhyme phrases not woven into the texture of
the passage—there are the following abrupt changes of rhyme; repetition
of the same rhyme word or rhyme phrase in adjoining verses; the
intrusion of an extraneous subject into a passage otherwise homogeneous;
a differing treatment of the same subject in neighbouring verses, often
with repetition of words and phrases; breaks in grammatical
construction which raise difficulties in exegesis; abrupt changes in
length of verse; sudden changes of the dramatic situation, with changes
of pronoun from singular to plural, from second to third person, and so
on; the juxtaposition of apparently contrary statements; the
juxtaposition of passages of different date, with intrusion of fare
phrases into early verses.
In
many cases a passage has alternative continuations which follow one
another in the present text. The second of the alternatives is marked by
a break in sense and by a break in grammatical construction, since the
connection is not with what immediately precedes, but with what stands
some distance back. The Christian al-Kindi (not to be confused with the
Arab, Muslim philosopher) writing around 830 C.E., criticized the Koran
in similar terms:
The
result of all this (process by which the Quran came into being) is
patent to you who have read the scriptures and see how, in your book,
histories are jumbled together and intermingled; an evidence that many
different hands have been at work therein, and caused discrepancies,
adding or cutting out whatever they liked or disliked. Are such, now,
the conditions of a revelation sent down from heaven?
Skepticism of the Sources
The
traditional accounts of the life of Muhammad and the story of the
origin and rise of Islam, including the compilation of the Koran, are
based exclusively on Muslim sources, particularly the Muslim biographies
of Muhammad, and the Hadith, that is the Muslim traditions.
The
Prophet Muhammad died in 632 C.E. The earliest material on his life
that we possess was written by Ibn Ishaq in 750 C.E., in other words, a
hundred twenty years after Muhammad’s death. The question of
authenticity becomes even more critical, because the original form of
Ibn Ishaq’s work is lost and is only available in parts in a later
recension by Ibn Hisham who died in 834 C.E., two hundred years after
the death of the Prophet.
The
Hadith are a collection of sayings and doings attributed to the Prophet
and traced back to him through a series of putatively trustworthy
witnesses (any particular chain of transmitters is called an isnad).
These Hadith include the story of the compilation of the Koran, and the
sayings of the companions of the Prophet. There are said to be six
correct or authentic collections of traditions accepted by Sunni
Muslims, namely, the compilations of Bukhari, Muslim, Ibn Maja, Abu
Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, and al-Nisai. Again it is worth noting that all
these sources are very late indeed. Bukhari died 238 years after the
death of the Prophet, while al-Nisai died over 280 years after!
The
historical and biographical tradition concerning Muhammad and the early
years of Islam was submitted to a thorough examination at the end of
the nineteenth century. Up to then careful scholars were well aware of
the legendary and theological elements in these traditions, and that
there were traditions which originated from party motive and which
intended “to give an appearance of historical foundation to the
particular interests of certain persons or families; but it was thought
that after some sifting there yet remained enough to enable us to form a
much clearer sketch of Muhammad’s life than that of any other of the
founders of a universal religion.” This illusion was shattered by
Wellhausen, Caetani, and Lammens who called “one after another of the
data of Muslim tradition into question.”
Wellhausen
divided the old historical traditions as found in the ninth- and
tenth-century compilations in two: first, an authentic primitive
tradition, definitively recorded in the late eighth century, and second a
parallel version which was deliberately forged to rebut this. The
second version was full of tendentious fiction, and was to be found in
the work of historians such as Sayf b. ‘Umar (see above). Prince Caetani
and Father Lammens cast doubt even on data hitherto accepted as
“objective.” The biographers of Muhammad were too far removed from his
time to have true data or notions; far from being objective the data
rested on tendentious fiction; furthermore it was not their aim to know
these things as they really happened, but to construct an ideal vision
of the past, as it ought to have been. “Upon the bare canvas of verses
of the Koran that need explanation, the traditionists have embroidered
with great boldness scenes suitable to the desires or ideals of their
paricular group; or to use a favorite metaphor of Lammens, they fill the
empty spaces by a process of stereotyping which permits the critical
observer to recognize the origin of each picture.”
As
Lewis puts it, “Lammens went so far as to reject the entire biography
as no more than a conjectural and tendentious exegesis of a few passages
of biographical content in the Quran, devised and elaborated by later
generations of believers.”
Even
scholars who rejected the extreme skepticism of Caetani and Lammens
were forced to recognize that “of Muhammad’s life before his appearance
as the messenger of God, we know extremely little; compared to the
legendary biography as treasured by the faithful, practically nothing.”
The
ideas of the Positivist Caetani and the Jesuit Lammens were never
forgotten, and indeed they were taken up by a group of Soviet
Islamologists, and pushed to their extreme but logical conclusions. The
ideas of the Soviet scholars were in turn taken up in the 1970s, by
Cook, Crone, and other disciples of Wansbrough.
What
Caetani and Lammens did for historical biography, Ignaz Goldziher did
for the study of Hadith. Goldziher has had an enormous influence in the
field of Islamic studies, and it is no exaggeration to say that he is,
along with Hurgronje and Noldeke, one of the founding fathers of the
modern study of Islam. Practically everything he wrote between roughly
1870 and 1920 is still studied assiduously in universities throughout
the world. In his classic paper, “On the Development of Hadith,”
Goldziher “demonstrated that a vast number of Hadith accepted even in
the most rigorously critical Muslim collections were outright forgeries
from the late 8th and 9th centuries—and as a consequence, that the
meticulous isnads [chains of transmitters] which supported them were
utterly fictitious.”
Faced
with Goldziher’s impeccably documented arguments, historians began to
panic and devise spurious ways of keeping skepticism at bay, such as,
for instance, postulating ad hoc distinctions between legal and
historical traditions. But as Humphreys says, in their formal structure,
the Hadirh and historical traditions were very similar; furthermore
many eighth- and ninth-century Muslim scholars had worked on both kinds
of texts. “Altogether, if hadith isnads were suspect, so then should be
the isnads attached to historical reports.”
As
Goldziher puts it himself, “close acquaintance with the vast stock of
hadiths induces sceptical caution,” and he considers by far the greater
part of the Hadith “the result of the religious, historical and social
development of Islam during the first two centuries.” The Hadith is
useless as a basis for any scientific history, and can only serve as a
“reflection of the tendencies” of the early Muslim community.
Here
I need to interpose a historical digression, if we are to have a proper
understanding of Goldziher’s arguments. After the death of the Prophet,
four of his companions succeeded him as leaders of the Muslim
community; the last of the four was ‘Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and
son-in-law. ‘Ali was unable to impose his authority in Syria where the
governor was Mu’awiya who adopted the war cry of “Vengeance for ‘Uthman”
against ‘Ali (Mu’awiya and ‘Uthman were related and both belonged to
the Meccan clan of Umayya). The forces of the two met in an indecisive
battle at Siffin. After ‘Ali’s murder in 661, Mu’awiya became the first
caliph of the dynasty we know as the Umayyad, which endured until 750
C.E. The Umayyads were deposed by the ‘Abbasids, who lasted in Iraq and
Baghdad until the thirteenth century.
During
the early years of the Umayyad dynasty, many Muslims were totally
ignorant in regard to ritual and doctrine. The rulers themselves had
little enthusiasm for religion, and generally despised the pious and the
ascetic. The result was that there arose a group of pious men who
shamelessly fabricated traditions for the good of the community, and
traced them back to the authority of the Prophet. They opposed the
godless Umayyads but dared not say so openly, so they invented further
traditions dedicated to praising the Prophet’s family, hence indirectly
giving their allegiance to the party of ‘Ali supporters. As Goldziher
puts it, “The ruling power itself was not idle. If it wished an opinion
to be generally recognized and the opposition of pious circles silenced;
it too had to know how to discover a hadith to suit its purpose. They
had to do what their opponents did: invent and have invented, hadiths in
their turn. And that is in effect what they did.” Goldziher continues:
Official influences on the invention, dissemination and suppression of
traditions started early. An instruction given to his obedient governor
al Mughira by Muawiya is in the spirit of the Umayyads: “Do not tire of
abusing and insulting Ali and calling for God’s mercifulness for
‘Uthman, defaming the companions of Ali, removing them and omitting to
listen to them (i.e., to what they tell and propagate as hadiths);
praising in contrast, the clan of ‘Uthman, drawing them near to you and
listening to them.” This is an official encouragement to foster the rise
and spread of hadiths directed against Ali and to hold back and
suppress hadiths favoring Ali. The Umayyads and their political
followers had no scruples in promoting tendentious lies in a sacred
religious form, and they were only concerned to find pious authorities
who would be prepared to cover such falsifications with their undoubted
authority. There was never any lack of these.
Hadiths
were liable to be fabricated even for the most trivial ritualistic
details. Tendentiousness included the suppression of existing utterances
friendly to the rival party or dynasty. Under the ‘Abbasids, the
fabrications of hadiths greatly multiplied, with the express purpose of
proving the legitimacy of their own clan against the ‘Alids. For
example, the Prophet was made to say that Abu Talib, father of ‘Ali, was
sitting deep in hell: “Perhaps my intercession will be of use to him on
the day of resurrection so that he may be transferred into a pool of
fire which reaches only up to the ankles but which is still hot enough
to burn the brain.” Naturally enough this was countered by the
theologians of the ‘Alias by devising numerous traditions concerning the
glorification of Abu Talib, all sayings of the prophet. “In fact,” as
Goldziher shows, amongst the opposing factions, “the mischievous use of
tendentious traditions was even more common than the official party.”
Eventually
storytellers made a good living inventing entertaining Hadiths, which
the credulous masses lapped up eagerly. To draw the crowds the
storytellers shrank from nothing. “The handling down of hadiths sank to
the level of a business very early. Journeys (in search of hadiths)
favored the greed of those who succeeded in pretending to be a source of
the hadith, and with increasing demand sprang up an even increasing
desire to be paid in cash for the hadiths supplied.”
Of
course many Muslims were aware that forgeries abounded. But even the
so-called six authentic collections of hadiths compiled by Bukhari and
others were not as rigorous as might have been hoped. The six had
varying criteria for including a Hadith as genuine or not—some were
rather liberal in their choice, others rather arbitrary. Then there was
the problem of the authenticity of the texts of these compilers. For
example, at one point there were a dozen different Bukhari texts; and
apart from these variants, there were deliberate interpolations. As
Goldziher warns us, “It would be wrong to think that the canonical
authority of the two [collections of Bukhari and Muslim] is due to the
undisputed correctness of their contents and is the result of scholarly
investigations.” Even a tenth century critic pointed out the weaknesses
of two hundred traditions incorporated in the works of Muslim and
Bukhari.
Goldziher’s
arguments were followed up, nearly sixty years later, by another great
Islamicist, Joseph Schacht, whose works on Islamic law are considered
classics in the field of Islamic studies. Schacht’s conclusions were
even more radical and perturbing, and the full implications of these
conclusions have not yet sunk in.
Humphreys
sums up Schacht’s theses as: (1) that isnads [the chain of
transmitters] going all the way back to the Prophet only began to be
widely used around the time of the Abbasid Revolution—i.e., the mid-8th
century; (2) that ironically, the more elaborate and formally correct an
isnad appeared to be, the more likely it was to be spurious. In
general, he concluded, “NO existing hadith could be reliably ascribed to
the prophet, though some of them might ultimately be rooted in his
teaching. And though [Schacht] devoted only a few pages to historical
reports about the early Caliphate, he explicitly asserted that the same
strictures should apply to them.” Schacht’s arguments were backed up by a
formidable list of references, and they could not be dismissed easily.
Here is how Schacht himself sums up his own thesis: It is generally
conceded that the criticism of traditions as practiced by the Muhammadan
scholars is inadequate and that, however many forgeries may have been
eliminated by it, even the classical corpus contains a great many
traditions which cannot possibly be authentic. All efforts to extract
from this often self-contradictory mass an authentic core by “historic
intuition”… have failed. Goldziher, in another of his fundamental works,
has not only voiced his “sceptical reserve” with regard to the
traditions contained even in the classical collections [i.e., the
collections of Bukhari, Muslim, et al.], but shown positively that the
great majority of traditions from the Prophet are documents not of the
time to which they claim to belong, but of the successive stages of
development of doctrines during the first centuries of Islam. This
brilliant discovery became the corner-stone of all serious
investigation…
This
book [i.e., Schacht’s own book] will be found to confirm Goldziher’s
results, and go beyond them in the following respects: a great many
traditions in the classical and other collections were put into
circulation only after Shafi‘i’s time [Shafi‘i was the founder of the
very important school of law which bears his name; he died in 820 C.E.];
the first considerable body of legal traditions from the Prophet
originated towards the middle of the second [Muslim] century [i.e.,
eighth century C.E.], in opposition to slightly earlier traditions from
the Companions and other authorities, and to the living tradition of the
ancient schools of law; traditions from Companions and other
authorities underwent the same process of growth, and are to be
considered in the same light, as traditions from the Prophet; the study
of isnads show a tendency to grow backwards and to claim higher and
higher authority until they arrive at the Prophet; the evidence of legal
traditions carries back to about the year 100 A.H. [718 C.E.]… Schacht
proves that, for example, a tradition did not exist at a particular
time by showing that it was not used as a legal argument in a discussion
which would have made reference to it imperative, if it had existed.
For Schacht every legal tradition from the Prophet must be taken as
inauthentic and the fictitious expression of a legal doctrine formulated
at a later date: “We shall not meet any legal tradition from the
Prophet which can positively be considered authentic.”
Traditions
were formulated polemically in order to rebut a contrary doctrine or
practice; Schacht calls these traditions “counter traditions.”
Doctrines, in this polemical atmosphere, were frequently projected back
to higher authorities: “traditions from Successors [to the Prophet]
become traditions from Companions [of the Prophet], and traditions from
Companions become traditions from the Prophet.” Details from the life of
the Prophet were invented to support legal doctrines.
Schacht
then criticizes isnads which “were often put together very carelessly.
Any typical representative of the group whose doctrine was to be
projected back on to an ancient authority, could be chosen at random and
put into the isnad. We find therefore a number of alternative names in
otherwise identical isnads.”
Shacht
“showed that the beginnings of Islamic law cannot be traced further
back than to about a century after the Prophet’s death.” Islamic law did
not directly derive from the Koran but developed out of popular and
administrative practice under the Ummayads, and this “practice often
diverged from the intentions and even the explicit wording of the
Koran.” Norms derived from the Koran were introduced into Islamic law at
a secondary stage.
A
group of scholars was convinced of the essential soundness of Schacht’s
analysis, and proceeded to work out in full detail the implications of
Schacht’s arguments. The first of these scholars was John Wansbrough,
who in two important though formidably difficult books, Quaranic
Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977) and The
Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History
(1978), showed that the Koran and Hadith grew out of sectarian
controversies over a long period, perhaps as long as two centuries, and
then was projected back onto an invented Arabian point of origin. He
further argued that Islam emerged only w hen it came into contact with
and under the influence of Rabbinic Judaism—”that Islamic doctrine
generally, and even the figure of Muhammad, were molded on Rabbinic
Jewish prototypes.” “Proceeding from these conclusions, The Sectarian
Milieu analyses early Islamic historiography—or rather the interpretive
myths underlying this historiography—as a late manifestation of Old
Testament ‘salvation history.’”
Wansbrough
shows that far from being fixed in the seventh century, the definitive
text of the Koran had still not been achieved as late as the ninth
century. An Arabian origin for Islam is highly unlikely: the Arabs
gradually formulated their creed as they came into contact with Rabbinic
Judaism outside the Hijaz (Central Arabia, containing the cities of
Mecca and Medina). “Quranic allusion presupposes familiarity with the
narrative material of Judaeo-Christian scripture, which was not so much
reformulated as merely referred to…. Taken together, the quantity of
reference, the mechanically repetitious employment of rhetorical
convention, and the stridently polemical style, all suggest a strongly
sectarian atmosphere in which a corpus of familiar scripture was being
pressed into the service of as yet unfamiliar doctrine.” Elsewhere
Wansbrough says, “[The] challenge to produce an identical or superior
scripture (or portion thereof), expressed five times in the Quranic text
can be explained only within a context of Jewish polemic.”
Earlier
scholars such as Torrey, recognizing the genuine borrowings in the
Koran from Rabbinic literature, had jumped to conclusions about the
Jewish population in the Hijaz (i.e., Central Arabia). But as Wansbrough
puts it, “References in Rabbinic literature to Arabia are of remarkably
little worth for purposes of historical reconstruction, and especially
for the Hijaz in the sixth and seventh centuries.
Much
influenced by the Rabbinic accounts, the early Muslim community took
Moses as an exemplum, and then a portrait of Muhammad emerged, but only
gradually and in response to the needs of a religious community. This
community was anxious to establish Muhammad’s credentials as a prophet
on the Mosaic model; this evidently meant there had to be a Holy
Scripture, which would be seen as testimony to his prophethood. Another
gradual development was the emergence of the idea of the Arabian origins
of Islam. To this end, there was elaborated the concept of a sacred
language, Arabic. The Koran was said to be handed down by God in pure
Arabic. It is significant that the ninth century also saw the first
collections of the ancient poetry of the Arabs: “The manner in which
this material was manipulated by its collectors to support almost any
argument appears never to have been very successfully concealed.” Thus
Muslim philologists were able to give, for instance, an early date to a
poem ascribed to Nabigha Jadi, a pre-Islamic poet, in order to “provide a
pre-Islamic proof text for a common Quranic construction.” The aim in
appealing to the authority of pre-Islamic poetry was twofold: first to
give ancient authority to their own Holy Scripture, to push back this
sacred text into an earlier period, and thus give their text greater
authenticity, a text which in reality had been fabricated in the later
ninth century, along with all the supporting traditions. Second, it gave
a specifically Arabian flavor, an Arabian setting to their religion,
something distinct from Judaism and Christianity. Exegetical traditions
were equally fictitious and had but one aim, to demonstrate the Hijazi
origins of Islam. Wansbrough gives some negative evidence to show that
the Koran had not achieved any definitive form before the ninth century:
Schacht’s studies of the early development of legal doctrine within the
community demonstrate that with very few exceptions, Muslim
jurisprudence was not derived from the contents of the Quran. It may be
added that those few exceptions are themselves hardly evidence for the
existence of the canon, and further observed that even where doctrine
was alleged to draw upon scripture, such is nor necessarily proof of the
earlier existence of the scriptural source. Derivation of law from
scripture… was a phenomenon of the ninth century….A similar kind of
negative evidence is absence of any reference to the Quran in the Fiqh
Akbar I…. The latter is a document, dated to the middle of the eighth
century, which was a kind of statement of the Muslim creed in face of
sects. Thus the Fiqh Akbar I represents the views of the orthodoxy on
the then prominent dogmatic questions. It seems unthinkable had the
Koran existed that no reference would have been made to it.
Wansbrough
submits the Koran to a highly technical analysis with the aim of
showing that it cannot have been deliberately edited by a few men, but
“rather the product of an organic development from originally
independent traditions during a long period of transmission.”
Wansbrough
was to throw cold water on the idea that the Koran was the only hope
for genuine historical information regarding the Prophet; an idea summed
up by Jeffery, “The dominant note in this advanced criticism is ‘back
to the Koran.’ As a basis for critical biography the Traditions are
practically worthless; in the Koran alone can we be said to have firm
ground under our feet.” But as Wansbrough was to show: “The role of the
Quran in the delineation of an Arabian prophet was peripheral: evidence
of a divine communication but not a report of its circumstances…. The
very notion of biographical data in the Quran depends on exegetical
principles derived from material external to the canon.”
A
group of scholars influenced by Wansbrough took an even more radical
approach; they rejected wholesale the entire Islamic version of early
Islamic history. Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, and Martin Hinds writing
between 1977 and 1987 regard the whole established version of Islamic
history down at least to the time of Abd al-Malik (685-705) as a later
fabrication, and reconstruct the Arab Conquests and the formation of the
Caliphate as a movement of peninsular Arabs who had been inspired by
Jewish messianism to try to reclaim the Promised Land. In this
interpretation, Islam emerged as an autonomous religion and culture only
within the process of a long struggle for identity among the disparate
peoples yoked together by the Conquests: Jacobite Syrians, Nestorian
Aramaeans in Iraq, Copts, Jews, and (finally) peninsular Arabs.
The
traditional account of the life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam is no
longer accepted by Cook, Crone, and Hinds. In the shore but pithy
monograph on Muhammad in the Oxford Past Masters series, Cook gives his
reasons for rejecting the biographical traditions:
False
ascription was rife among the eighth-century scholars, and…in any case
Ibn Ishaq and his contemporaries were drawing on oral tradition. Neither
of these propositions is as arbitrary as it sounds. We have reason to
believe that numerous traditions on questions of dogma and law were
provided with spuriousus chains of authorities by those who put them
into circulation; and at the same time we have much evidence of
controversy in the eighth century as to whether it was permissible to
reduce oral tradition to writing. The implications of this view for the
reliability of our sources are clearly rather negative. If we cannot
trust the chains of authorities, we can no longer claim to know that we
have before us the separately transmitted accounts of independent
witnesses; and if knowledge of the life of Muhammad was transmitted
orally for a century before it was reduced to writing, then the chances
are that the material will have undergone considerable alteration in the
process.
Cook
then looks at the non-Muslim sources: Greek, Syriac, and Armenian. Here
a totally unexpected picture emerges. Though there is no doubt that
someone called Muhammad existed, that he was a merchant, that something
significant happened in 622, that Abraham was central to his teaching,
there is no indication that Muhammad’s career unfolded in inner Arabia,
there is no mention of Mecca, and the Koran makes no appearance until
the last years of the seventh century. Further, it emerges from this
evidence that the Muslims prayed in a direction much further north than
Mecca, hence their sanctuary cannot have been in Mecca. “Equally, when
the first Koranic quotations appear on coins and inscriptions towards
the end of the seventh century, they show divergences from the canonical
text. These are trivial from the point of view of content, but the fact
that they appear in such formal contexts as these goes badly with the
notion that the text had already been frozen.”
The
earliest Greek source speaks of Muhammad being alive in 634, two years
after his death according to Muslim tradition. Where the Muslim accounts
talk of Muhammad’s break with the Jews, the Armenian version differs
strikingly:
The
Armenian chronicler of the 660s describes Muhammad as establishing a
community which comprised both Ishmaelites (i.e., Arabs) and Jews, with
Abrahamic descent as their common platform; these allies then set off to
conquer Palestine. The oldest Greek source makes the sensational
statement that the prophet who had appeared among the Saracens (i.e.,
Arabs) was proclaiming the coming of the (Jewish) messiah, and speaks of
the Jews who mix with the Saracens, and of the danger to life and limb
of falling into the hands of these Jews and Saracens. We cannot easily
dismiss the evidence as the product of Christian prejudice, since it
finds confirmation in the Hebrew apocalypse [an eighth-century document,
in which is embedded an earlier apocalypse that seems to be
contemporary with the conquests]. The break with the Jews is then placed
by the Armenian chronicler immediately after the Arab conquest of
Jerusalem.
Although
Palestine does play some sort of role in Muslim traditions, it is
already demoted in favor of Mecca in the second year of the Hegira, when
Muhammad changed the direction of prayer for Muslims from Jerusalem to
Mecca. Thereafter it is Mecca which holds center stage for his
activities. But in the non-Muslim sources, it is Palestine which is the
focus of his movement, and provides the religious motive for its
conquest. The Armenian chronicler further gives a rationale for this
attachment: Muhammad told the Arabs that, as descendants of Abraham
through Ishmael, they too had a claim to the land which God had promised
to Abraham and his seed. The religion of Abraham is in fact as central
in the Armenian account of Muhammad’s preaching as it is in the Muslim
sources; but it is given a quite different geographical twist.
If
the external sources are in any significant degree right on such
points, it would follow that tradition is seriously misleading on
important aspects of the life of Muhammad, and that even the integrity
of the Koran as his message is in some doubt. In view of what was said
above about the nature of the Muslim sources, such a conclusion would
seem to me legitimate; but is fair to add that it is not usually drawn.
Cook
points out the similarity of certain Muslim beliefs and practices to
those of the Samaritans (discussed below). He also points out that the
fundamental idea developed by Muhammad of the religion of Abraham was
already present in the Jewish apocryphal work called the Book of
Jubilees (dated to c. 140-100 B.C;), and which may well have influenced
the formation of Islamic ideas. We also have the evidence of Sozomenus, a
Christian writer of the fifth century who “reconstructs a primitive
Ishmaelite monotheism identical with that possessed by the Hebrews up to
the time of Moses; and he goes on to argue from present conditions that
Ishmael’s laws must have been corrupted by the passage of time and the
influence of pagan neighbors.”
Sozomenus
goes on to describe certain Arab tribes who, on learning of their
Ishmaelite origins from Jews, adopted Jewish observances. Again there
may have been some influence on the Muslim community from this source.
Cook also points out the similarity of the story of Moses (exodus, etc.)
and the Muslim hijra. In Jewish messianism, “the career of the messiah
was seen as a re-enactment of that of Moses; a key event in the drama
was an exodus, or flight, from oppression into the desert, whence the
messiah was to lead a holy war to reconquer Palestine. Given the early
evidence connecting Muhammad with Jews and Jewish messianism at the time
when the conquest of Palestine was initiated, it is natural to see in
Jewish apocalyptic thought a point of departure for his political
ideas.”
Cook
and Patricia Crone had developed these ideas in their intellectually
exhilarating work Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977).
Unfortunately, they adopted the rather difficult style of their “master”
Wansbrough, which may well put off all but the most dedicated readers;
as Humphreys says, “their argument is conveyed through a dizzying and
unrelenting array of allusions, metaphors, and analogies.” The summary
already given above of Cook’s conclusions in Muhammad will help
non-specialists to have a better grasp of Cook and Crone’s (henceforth
CC) arguments in Hagarism.
It
would be appropriate to begin with an explanation of CC’s frequent use
of the terms “Hagar,” “Hagarism,” and “Hagarene.” Since a part of their
thesis is that Islam only emerged later than hitherto thought, after the
first contacts with the older civilizations in Palestine, the Near
East, and the Middle East, it would have been inappropriate to use the
traditional terms “Muslim,” “Islamic,” and “Islam” for the early Arabs
and their creed. It seems probable that the early Arab community, while
it was developing its own religious identity, did not call itself
“Muslim.” On the other hand, Greek and Syriac documents refer to this
community as Magaritai, and Mahgre (or Mahgraye) respectively. The
Mahgraye are the descendants of Abraham by Hagar, hence the term
“Hagarism.” But there is another dimension to this term; for the
corresponding Arabic term is muhajirun; the muhajirun are those who take
part in a hijra, an exodus. “The ‘Mahgraye’ may thus be seen as
Hagarene participants in a hijra to the Promised Land; in this pun lies
the earliest identity of the faith which was in the fullness of time to
become Islam.”
Relying
on hitherto neglected non-Muslim sources, CC give a new account of the
rise of Islam: an account, on their admission, unacceptable to any
Muslim. The Muslim sources are too late, and unreliable, and there are
no cogent external grounds for accepting the Islamic tradition. CC begin
with a Greek text (dated ca. 634-636), in which the core of the
Prophet’s message appears as Judaic messianism. There is evidence that
the Jews themselves, far from being the enemies of Muslims, as
traditionally recounted, welcomed and interpreted the Arab conquest in
messianic terms. The evidence “of Judeo-Arab intimacy is complemented by
indications of a marked hostility towards Christianity.” An Armenian
chronicle written in the 660s also contradicts the traditional Muslim
insistence that Mecca was the religious metropolis of the Arabs at the
time of the conquest; in contrast, it points out the Palestinian
orientation of the movement. The same chronicle helps us understand how
the Prophet “provided a rationale for Arab involvement in the enactment
of Judaic messianism. This rationale consists in a dual invocation of
the Abrahamic descent of the Arabs as Ishmaelites: on the one hand to
endow them with a birthright to the Holy Land, and on the other to
provide them with a monotheist genealogy.” Similarly, we can see the
Muslim hijra not as an exodus from Mecca to Medina (for no early source
attests to the historicity of this event), but as an emigration of the
Ishmaelites (Arabs) from Arabia to the Promised Land.
The
Arabs soon quarreled with the Jews, and their attitude to Christians
softened; the Christians posed less of a political threat. There still
remained a need to develop a positive religious identity, which they
proceeded to do by elaborating a full-scale religion of Abraham,
incorporating many pagan practices but under a new Abrahamic aegis. But
they still lacked the basic religious structures to be able to stand on
their two feet, as an independent religious community. Here they were
enormously influenced by the Samaritans.
The
origins of the Samaritans are rather obscure. They are Israelites of
central Palestine, generally considered the descendants of those who
were planted in Samaria by the Assyrian kings, in about 722 B.C.E. The
faith of the Samaritans was Jewish monotheism, but they had shaken off
the influence of Judaism by developing their own religious identity,
rather in the way the Arabs were to do later on. The Samaritan canon
included only the Pentateuch, which was considered the sole source and
standard for faith and conduct.
The
formula “There is no God but the One” is an ever-recurring refrain in
Samaritan liturgies. A constant theme in their literature is the unity
of God and His absolute holiness and righteousness. We can immediately
notice the similarity of the Muslim proclamation of faith: “There is no
God but Allah.” And, of course, the unity of God is a fundamental
principle in Islam. The Muslim formula “In the name of God” (bismillah)
is found in Samaritan scripture as beshem. The opening chapter of the
Koran is known as the Fatiha, opening or gate, often considered as a
succinct confession of faith. A Samaritan prayer, which can also be
considered a confession of faith, begins with the words: Amadti kamekha
al fatah rahmeka, “I stand before Thee at the gate of Thy mercy.” Fatah
is the Fatiha, opening or gate.
The
sacred book of the Samaritans was the Pentateuch, which embodied the
supreme revelation of the divine will, and was accordingly highly
venerated. Muhammad also seems to know the Pentateuch and Psalms only,
and shows no knowledge of the prophetic or historical writings.
The
Samaritans held Moses in high regard, Moses being the prophet through
whom the Law was revealed. For the Samaritans, Mt. Gerizim was the
rightful center for the worship of Yahweh; and it was further associated
with Adam, Seth, and Noah, and Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. The
expectation of a coming Messiah was also an article of faith; the name
given to their Messiah was the Restorer. Here we can also notice the
similarity of the Muslim notion of the Mahdi.
We can tabulate the close parallels between the doctrines of the Samaritans and the Muslims in this way:
MOSES
|
EXODUS
|
PENTATEUCH
|
MT. SINAI/GERIZIM
|
SHECHEM
|
Muhammad
|
Hijra
|
Koran
|
Mt. Hira
|
Mecca
|
Under
the influence of the Samaritans, the Arabs proceeded to cast Muhammad
in the role of Moses as the leader of an exodus (hijra), as the bearer
of a new revelation (Koran) received on an appropriate (Arabian) sacred
mountain, Mt. Hira. It remained for them to compose a sacred book. CC
point to the tradition that the Koran had been many books but of which
‘Uthman (the third caliph after Muhammad) had left only one. We have the
further testimony of a Christian monk who distinguishes between the
Koran and the Surat al-baqara as sources of law. In other documents, we
are told that Hajjaj (661-714), the governor of Iraq, had collected and
destroyed all the writings of the early Muslims. Then, following
Wansbrough, CC conclude that the Koran, “is strikingly lacking in
overall structure, frequently obscure and inconsequential in both
language and content, perfunctory in its linking of disparate materials
and given to the repetition of whole passages in variant versions. On
this basis it can be plausibly argued that the book [Koran] is the
product of the belated and imperfect editing of materials from a
plurality of traditions.”
The
Samaritans had rejected the sanctity of Jerusalem, and had replaced it
by the older Israelite sanctuary of Shechem. When the early Muslims
disengaged from Jerusalem, Shechem provided an appropriate model for the
creation of a sanctuary of their own.
The
parallelism is striking. Each presents the same binary structure of a
sacred city closely associated with a nearby holy mountain, and in each
case the fundamental rite is a pilgrimage from the city to the mountain.
In each case the sanctuary is an Abrahamic foundation, the pillar on
which Abraham sacrificed in Shechem finding its equivalent in the rukn
[the Yamai corner of the Ka'ba] of the Meccan sanctuary. Finally, the
urban sanctuary is in each case closely associated with the grave of the
appropriate patriarch: Joseph (as opposed to Judah in the Samaritan
case, Ishmael (as opposed to Isaac) in the Meccan.
CC
go on to argue that the town we now know as Mecca in central Arabia
(Hijaz) could not have been the theater of the momentous events so
beloved of Muslim tradition. Apart from the lack of any early non-Muslim
references to Mecca, we do have the startling fact that the direction
in which the early Muslims prayed (the qibla) was northwest Arabia. The
evidence comes from the alignment of certain early mosques, and the
literary evidence of Christian sources. In other words, Mecca, as the
Muslim sanctuary, was only chosen much later by the Muslims, in order to
relocate their early history within Arabia, to complete their break
with Judaism, and finally establish their separate religious identity.
In
the rest of their fascinating book, CC go on to show how Islam
assimilated all the foreign influences that it came under in consequence
of their rapid conquests; how Islam acquired its particular identity on
encountering the older civilizations of antiquity, through its contacts
with rabbinic Judaism, Christianity (Jacobite and Nestorian), Hellenism
and Persian ideas (Rabbinic Law, Greek philosophy, Neoplatonism, Roman
Law, and Byzantine art and architecture). But they also point out that
all this was achieved at great cultural cost: “The Arab conquests
rapidly destroyed one empire, and permanently detached large territories
of another. This was, for the states in question, an appalling
catastrophe.”
In
Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (1980), Patricia
Crone dismisses the Muslim traditions concerning the early caliphate
(down to the 680s) as useless fictions. In Meccan Trade and the Rise of
Islam (1987), she argues that many so-called historical reports are
“fanciful elaborations on difficult Koranic passages.” In the latter
work, Crone convincingly shows how the Koran “generated masses of
spurious information.” The numerous historical events which are supposed
to have been the causes of certain revelations (for example, the battle
of Badr, see above), “are likely to owe at least some of their
features, occasionally their very existence, to the Quran.” Clearly
storytellers were the first to invent historical contexts for particular
verses of the Koran. But much of their information is contradictory
(for example, we are told that when Muhammad arrived in Medina for the
first time it was torn by feuds, and yet at the same time we are asked
to believe that the people of Medina were united under their undisputed
leader Ibn Ubayyl), and there was a tendency “for apparently independent
accounts to collapse into variations on a common theme” (for example,
the large number of stories which exist around the theme of “Muhammad’s
encounter with the representatives of non-Islamic religions who
recognize him as a future prophet”). Finally, there was a tendency for
the information to grow the further away one went from the events
described; for example, if one storyteller should happen to mention a
raid, the next one would tell you the exact date of this raid, and the
third one would furnish you even more details. Waqidi (d. 823), who
wrote years after Ibn Ishaq (d. 768), will always give precise dates,
locations, names, where Ibn Ishaq has none, accounts of what triggered
the expedition, miscellaneous information to lend color to the event, as
well as reasons why, as was usually the case, no fighting took place.
No wonder that scholars are fond of Waqidi: where else does one find
such wonderfully precise information about everything one wishes to
know? But given that this information was all unknown to Ibn Ishaq, its
value is doubtful in the extreme. And if spurious information
accumulated at this rate in the two generations between Ibn Ishaq and
Waqidi, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that even more must have
accumulated in the three generations between the Prophet and Ibn Ishaq.
It is obvious that these early Muslim historians drew on a common pool
of material fabricated by the storytellers.
Crone
takes to task certain conservative modern historians, such as Watt, for
being unjustifiably optimistic about the historical worth of the Muslim
sources on the rise of Islam. And we shall end this chapter on the
sources with Crone’s conclusions regarding all these Muslim sources:
[Watt’s
methodology rests] on a misjudgment of these sources. The problem is
the very mode of origin of the tradition, not some minor distortions
subsequently introduced. Allowing for distortions arising from various
allegiances within Islam such as those to a particular area, tribe, sect
or school does nothing to correct the tendentiousness arising from
allegiance to Islam itself. The entire tradition is tendentious, its aim
being the elaboration of an Arabian Heilgeschichte, and this
tendentiousness has shaped the facts as we have them, not merely added
some partisan statements we can deduct.
Editorial Note
Most
of the articles in this collection were originally published more than
fifty years ago (and a couple dare to the nineteenth century), when
there was little consistency in the way Arabic terms were transliterated
into English. Thus, the name of Islam’s holy book was variously written
as Kortan, Kur’an, Quran, Qur’an, Coran, etc., and the name of Islam’s
Prophet was transliterated as Mahomet, Mohammed, Muhammad, etc. To leave
the diverse forms of these names, and many other Arabic terms, would
confuse the reader; in some cases it might even obscure the fact that
two authors are discussing the same person or text. Therefore, the
original spellings have been changed where necessary to make them
conform to modern usage and to ensure that a consistent spelling is used
in every article.
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