Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (11 page)

If Abd al-Malik built up the Islamic religion for political purposes, then the earlier silence from all quarters about Muhammad, Islam, and the Qur'an can be explained very simply: There was no reference to these things because Muhammad, Islam, and the Qur'an did not exist yet, or did so only in an inchoate state.

Further evidence that Islam was newly developing during the reign of Abd al-Malik can be seen in the fact that the ideas did not take root immediately. Even after Abd al-Malik and Hajjaj ibn Yusuf did their work, the official statements that the Umayyads left behind are not unanimously or unambiguously Islamic. Qasr Kharana, a desert castle that Abd al-Malik's successor, Walid I (705–715), built in eastern Jordan, bears this inscription:

Allahumma have mercy on Abd al-Malik ibn Umar [not Abd al-Malik the caliph, who was the son of Marwan, but rather the son of Umar] and forgive him his transgressions, the earlier and the later ones, the hidden and the disclosed;

No one of himself draws nigh unto Thee but that Thou forgivest him and hast mercy upon him

if he believes. I believe in my Lord. Therefore bestow on me Thy benefits,

for Thou art the Benefactor, and have mercy

upon me, for Thou art the Merciful. Oh God, I beg of Thee to

accept from him his prayer and his donation. Amen Lord of Creation,

Lord of

Moses and Aaron. May God have mercy on him who reads it and says

Amen, Amen, Lord of Creation,

the Mighty, the Wise! Abd al-Malik bn [sic] Umar wrote [it] on

Monday, three [nights] remaining from Muharram of the year two and ninety [A.D. 710].

[Witnessed by] Lam bn [sic] Harun.

And lead us so we meet with my prophet and his prophet

in this world and the next.
⁴⁵

The Lord is the Lord of Moses and Aaron. No mention is made of Muhammad. It is an odd omission, unless this newly created prophet Muhammad was not yet established enough in the popular mind to figure in such an invocation alongside the likes of Moses and Aaron.

But fame would soon come to the warrior prophet of Arabia. In the year 735 another inscription betrayed a very different popular religious sensibility:

In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

Allah! forgive! Hasan bn [sic] Maysarah

and his two parents and their offspring

Amen Lord of Muhammad and Ibrahim

Allah! consider my deeds great exertion
(jihad)

and accept my compassion as martyrdom in Your cause

and Hasan wrote (it) on Tuesday

the 22th [sic] of the month of Rabiy‘ al-Awwal, in which

passed away

Banu Ha[t]im may God have mercy on all of them

And this in the year 117 [735]
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By this time, accounts of the heroic life and exemplary deeds of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, had begun to circulate widely. He had become a figure with whom the faithful could identify—someone they felt they knew.

This familiarity was the product of a remarkable court industry, first among the Umayyads and then among the Abbasids, of unabashedly manufacturing material about what Muhammad said and did.

If Muhammad Did Not Exist, It Was Necessary to Invent Him

F
rom the foregoing it is clear that when it comes to the history of early Islam, the records, both of the Arab conquerors and of the conquered people, are sketchy in the extreme. Instead of what we might expect—depictions of Muslim warriors shouting “Allahu akbar,” invoking Muhammad, and quoting the Qur'an—we see hardly any presence of the Qur'an, Muhammad, or Islam at all. The early Arab rulers, while styling themselves as “servant of God” or “agent of God”
(khalifat allah)
and “commander of the faithful,” are vague at best about the content of their creed and make no mention whatsoever of the putative founder of their religion or his holy book for decades after beginning to conquer and transform huge expanses of territory across the Middle East and North Africa.

Compounding this curiosity are the shaky historical foundations of the Hadith, the voluminous accounts of Muhammad's words and deeds. The importance of the Hadith in Islam cannot be overstated. They are, when Islamic scholars deem the accounts authentic, second in authority only to the Qur'an itself. Along with the Qur'an that they elucidate, the Hadith form the basis for Islamic law and practice regarding both individual religious observance and the governance of the Islamic state. And in fact, so much of the Qur'an is obscure and opaque, and explained only in the Hadith, that functionally, if not officially, the Hadith are the primary authority in Islam.

Much of the Muslim holy book—not only its Arabic neologisms and turns of phrase—would be incomprehensible without the Hadith. The Qur'an is prohibitively uninviting to those unschooled in its particularities; reading much of it is like walking into a conversation between two people one doesn't know who are talking about incidents in which one was not involved—and they aren't bothering to explain matters.

Thus the Hadith become a necessity. They are the prism through which the vast majority of Muslims understand the Qur'an. According to Islamic tradition, these accounts clarify the import of cryptic Qur'an verses by providing the
asbab an-nuzul
, or occasions of revelation. These are stories about when, where, and why Muhammad was given a certain verse—usually in order to settle a question in dispute among Muslims, or to answer a query that one of the believers posed to the Islamic prophet.

Some of the hadiths are fairly straightforward. In one, Ibn Abbas, forefather of the Abbasids and a companion of Muhammad, recalls that the Qur'anic command to “obey Allah, and obey the Messenger, and those charged with authority among you” (4:59) was revealed to Muhammad “in connection with Abdullah bin Hudhafa bin Qais bin Adi when the Prophet appointed him as the commander of a
Sariya
(army unit).”
¹
That is as plausible an explanation for the verse as any, but the context and setting are entirely imposed from without: Nothing in the Qur'anic verse itself refers to this particular appointment by Muhammad; it could just as easily refer to any number of similar incidents.

The same can be said of an explanation of a Qur'an verse excoriating hypocrites: “Will you bid others to piety, and forget yourselves while you recite the Book? Do you not understand?” (2:44). According to one hadith, Ibn Abbas explains, “This was revealed about the Jews of Medina,” who would “enjoin people to follow Islam while abstaining themselves from doing so.”
²
This verse certainly
could
refer to the Jews of Medina who pretended allegiance to Muhammad while plotting against him, but there is no internal indication of that.

A more elaborate explanation can be found for Qur'an 5:67: “O Messenger, deliver that which has been sent down to thee from thy Lord, for if thou dost not, thou wilt not have delivered His Message. God will protect thee from men. God guides not the people of the unbelievers.”

The eleventh-century Qur'anic scholar al-Wahidi (d. 1075), who collected the occasions of revelation and published them together in a book,
Asbab an-Nuzul
, quotes a hadith asserting that this verse was revealed because of apprehensions that Muhammad felt. The hadith tells us that al-Hasan, one of Muhammad's companions, reported: “The Prophet, Allah bless him and give him peace, said:‘When Allah, exalted is He, sent me His message, I felt oppressed by it, for I knew that some people will give me the lie.’ The Messenger of Allah, Allah bless him and give him peace, was apprehensive of the Quraysh, Jews and Christians, and so Allah, exalted is He, revealed this verse.”

Al-Wahidi also reports, however, that another Muslim, Abu Said al-Khudri, recounted a different story, saying that the verse “was revealed on the day of ‘Ghadir Khumm’ about Ali ibn Abi Talib, may Allah be well pleased with him.” The Shiites contend that in the last year of his life, Muhammad, while on his way to Medina, stopped at “Ghadir Khumm,” the pond of Khumm, near the town of al-Juhfah in Arabia, and delivered a sermon in which he appointed his son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib his successor—or indicated, by taking his hand, that he wanted Ali to succeed him.

According to hadiths, Muhammad's favorite wife, Aisha, and Ali had been at odds ever since Ali treated her dismissively when she was accused of adultery; decades later, their forces actually clashed during the Battle of the Camel. And so after relating the Shiite explanation of the verse, al-Wahidi quotes Aisha offering an explanation of this verse that has nothing to do with Ali: “The Messenger of Allah, Allah bless him and give him peace, stayed up one night and so I said: ‘What's the matter, O Messenger of Allah?’ He said: ‘Is there not any righteous man who would stand to watch over us tonight?’ Then we heard commotion caused by arms and the Messenger of Allah asked: ‘Who's there?’ ‘It is Sa‘d and Hudhayfa, we have come to keep watch over you,’ came
the response. The Messenger of Allah, Allah bless him and give him peace, went to sleep, and he slept so deeply that I heard his snoring; this verse was then revealed. The Messenger of Allah, Allah bless him and give him peace, then popped his head out of the collar of his garment and said: ‘O people, you can leave, for Allah has protected me.’”

Finally, al-Wahidi quotes Ibn Abbas, who gives a similar explanation: “The Messenger of Allah, Allah bless him and give him peace, used to be guarded. Abu Talib used to send every day men from the Banu Hashim to guard him until this verse was revealed (O Messenger! Make known that which hath been revealed unto thee from thy Lord) up to His words (Allah will protect thee from mankind). And so when his uncle wanted to send with him people to protect him, he said: ‘O uncle! Indeed Allah has protected me from the jinn and humans.’”
³

The multiplicity of explanations suggests the authenticity of none of them. If one of these four explanations of the verse was the true one, and was therefore as old as the verse itself, it is hard to see how the others would have arisen or, if they were formulated for political reasons, how they would have gained widespread credence. It is evident that no one really knew the circumstances of the verse, and so stories were constructed to explain it.

The accounts of the circumstances of the Qur'anic revelations generally emerged late, with the Hadith dating from the ninth century. There is no evidence contemporary with the Qur'an explaining its origins. In light of that, it could be that these accounts were invented in order to explain Qur'an verses, rather than actually presenting the historical circumstances of revelations to Muhammad.

The Centrality of the Hadith

However questionable many hadiths may be, they form the basis for the standard Islamic understanding of Qur'anic verses that are less than clear on their surface (and the number of those is considerable).
The Hadith are also pivotal because of the tremendous importance that Islamic theology and tradition attaches to Muhammad, whom the Qur'an terms a “good example…for whosoever hopes for God and the Last Day” (33:21).

It may seem curious that Muhammad is made so important when the Qur'an itself says so little specific about him, but that is precisely why the biographical material elaborated in the Hadith was so urgently needed. The Qur'an tells believers that Muhammad is “upon a mighty morality” (68:4), and “whosoever obeys God, and the Messenger—they are with those whom God has blessed” (4:80). Exhortations to obey Allah's messenger, who is assumed to be Muhammad, occur frequently in the Qur'an (3:32, 3:132, 4:13, 4:59, 4:69, 5:92, 8:1, 8:20, 8:46, 9:71, 24:47, 24:51, 24:52, 24:54, 24:56, 33:33, 47:33, 49:14, 58:13, 64:12). What does it mean to obey Muhammad? To answer that, one must know what he said and did.

Muhammad himself, according to one hadith, asserted the centrality of his words and deeds: “I have given orders, exhortations and interdictions which count as much as the Koran if not more.”
⁴
They became in Islamic tradition the guideposts for even the most minute aspects of individual behavior. The modern-day Islamic apologist Muqtedar Khan of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy explains that “the words, deeds and silences (that which he saw and did not forbid) of Muhammad became an independent source of Islamic law. Muslims, as a part of religious observance, not only obey, but also seek to emulate and imitate their Prophet in every aspect of life. Thus Muhammad is the medium as well as a source of the divine law.”
⁵
In Islam the centrality of Muhammad allows no room whatsoever for innovation
(bida):
What the prophet approved is approved, and what he rejected is rejected, for all time. Thus the fifteenth-century Islamic scholar al-Qastallani rejected “anything that is practiced without a relevant example from olden times and, more especially in religion, anything that was not practiced in the time of the Prophet.”
⁶