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From: The Origins of the Koran,
Classic Essays on Islam’s Holy Book
Ed. Ibn Warraq. Prometheus Books
I. 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.
Accordingly, Islam’s sacred book is always referred to by
its most recognizable form—Koran (even though Qur'an is preferred by
scholars and is closer to the actual Arabic pronunciation). The name of
Islam’s founder is consistently spelled Muhammad. Arabic names that used to
be transliterated with an o will be spelled with a u, e.g,
‘Uthman, ‘Umar (not Othman, Omar). The symbol ‘ is used to express Arabic
ain, the symbol ’ expresses Arabic hamca. Other diacritical marks
have been eliminated since they mean little or nothing to nonspecialists and
specialists already know the original Arabic to which the transliteration
refers. The term "Prophet" with a capital "p," when used by itself, refers
to Muhammad, in contrast to the same word with a lowercase "p," which refers
to prophets from other religions. |