Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (17 page)

Muhammad: Arabian Prophet?

Muhammad was an Arab messenger, born in Mecca, speaking Arabic, and bringing the message of Allah to the Arabs (cf. Qur'an 41:44) and thence to the world at large.

Every element of that sentence is a commonplace that both Muslims and non-Muslims take for granted; yet every element, upon closer scrutiny, begins to dissolve. From the extant historical records, it is not at all clear that there was an Arab prophet named Muhammad anywhere near Mecca, who brought any kind of message to the world. Or at the very least, the records indicate that if there was a Muhammad, he was not in Mecca and didn't preach anything that closely resembles Islam—until long after his death, when his biography and holy book as we know them began to be constructed.

The centrality of Arabia and the Arabic language to the message of Islam cannot be overstated. Although Islam presents itself as a
universal religion for all people on earth, it has a decidedly Arabic character. Converts to Islam, whatever their nationality, usually take Arabic names. Wherever they are in the world, and whatever their native language, Muslims must pray in Arabic and recite the Qur'an in Arabic.

Many converts in non-Muslim countries adopt traditional Arabic dress. Arabic culture has a pride of place in the Islamic world that has frequently given rise to tensions between Arab and non-Arab Muslims. Arabic supremacists have in our own time made war against non-Arab Muslims in the Darfur region of the Sudan; such conflicts are a recurring feature of Islamic history.
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Central to Islam, therefore, is the traditional account of how Muhammad, an Arabian merchant, received the Qur'an through the angel Gabriel from Allah, first in Mecca and then in Medina. According to the canonical Islamic account, armed with its message, Muhammad had united the entire Arabian Peninsula under the banner of Islam by the time of his death in 632.

It was not an easy task, according to the standard Islamic sources. The prophet and his new religion faced stiff resistance from his own tribe, the Quraysh, who were pagans and polytheists. The Quraysh, according to the Islamic story of the religion's origins, lived in Mecca, which was a center for both trade and pilgrimage, such that people went there from all over Arabia and from outside Arabia as well. The Quraysh, say the Muslim sources, profited from those who made pilgrimages to the Ka‘ba (the cube-shaped shrine in Mecca) to worship its many idols. Mecca, according to Islamic tradition, was central to both the religion and the commerce of the area.

The canonical account of the origins of Islam holds that the Quraysh initially rejected Muhammad's prophetic claim for reasons that were economic more than spiritual. Watt notes that “by the end of the sixth century
A.D
.,” the Quraysh “had gained control of most of the trade from the Yemen to Syria—an important route by which the West got Indian luxury goods as well as South Arabian frankincense.”
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Much of this trade depended on the Arabs who came to
Mecca as pilgrims. With pagan Arabs traveling from all over the Arabian Peninsula to worship their gods at the Ka‘ba, a proclamation that all these gods did not exist or were demons—exactly what Muhammad preached with his uncompromising monotheism—would not only cost the Quraysh their pilgrimage business but also cut into their trade interests.

And so for the twelve years he remained in Mecca, Muhammad attracted few followers but aroused the antagonism of the Quraysh. That antagonism flared up regarding both the idols in the Ka‘ba and the Quraysh trading caravans. Ibn Ishaq tells us that when Muhammad migrated to Medina twelve years into his prophetic career, he ordered the Muslims to raid the Quraysh caravans that were returning from Syria laden with goods. The prophet himself led many of these raids, which kept the Muslim movement solvent. Though driven by economic need, the raids became the occasion for certain elements of Islamic theology to take hold, according to Islamic tradition. In one notorious incident, a band of Muslims raided a Quraysh caravan during one of the four sacred months of the pre-Islamic Arabic calendar. These were the months during which fighting was forbidden, meaning that the Muslim raiders had violated a sacred principle. But the Qur'an says that Allah permitted the Muslims to violate the sacred month if they were persecuted—in other words, to set aside the moral principle for the good of Islam: “They will question thee concerning the holy month, and fighting in it. Say: ‘Fighting in it is a heinous thing, but to bar from God's way, and disbelief in Him, and the Holy Mosque, and to expel its people from it—that is more heinous in God's sight; and persecution is more heinous than slaying’” (2:217). The “Holy Mosque” is, according to Islamic tradition, a reference to the Ka‘ba.

This was a key incident for the development of Islamic ethics, establishing that good was what benefited Islam, and evil anything that harmed it. It also set the relations between the Muslims and the Quraysh on war mode. Their battles, according to the standard Islamic account of the origins of Islam, became the occasion for Allah
to reveal to Muhammad many of the Qur'an's key passages regarding warfare against unbelievers.

Therefore, the Arabian setting of the Qur'an and the antagonism of the Quraysh to Muhammad's message are crucial for both Islamic history and theology. This was the context in which some of the most important Islamic doctrines unfolded. Islamic tradition establishes that at root, the Quraysh opposed Muhammad's prophetic message because it could end pilgrimages to Mecca and disrupt trade.

Just as Arab identity is central to Islam, the holiest city in Islam, Mecca, is central to Islam's Arab identity. Yet for all its centrality to Islam, Mecca is mentioned by name only once in the Qur'an: “It is He who restrained their hands from you, and your hands from them, in the hollow of Mecca, after that He made you victors over them. God sees the things you do” (48:24).

What incident this refers to is—as is so often the case in the Qur'an—completely unclear. The medieval Qur'an commentator Ibn Kathir explains the verse this way: “Imam Ahmad recorded that Anas bin Malik said, ‘On the day of Hudaibiya, eighty armed men from Makkah went down the valley coming from Mount At-Tan‘im to ambush the Messenger of Allah. The Messenger invoked Allah against them, and they were taken prisoners.’ Affan added, ‘The Messenger pardoned them, and this Ayah [“sign,” or Qur’anic verse] was later on revealed.’”
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But the Qur'an itself says nothing about Hudaibiya in the verse in question. What's more, as foundational as the Treaty of Hudaibiya became for the Islamic doctrine regarding treaties and truces with non-Muslim forces, no record outside of the Islamic sources verifies that the treaty was ever concluded at all.

As is true of so much about early Islamic history, the closer one looks at the relevant sources about Mecca's importance in the Arabia of Muhammad's time, the less there is to see. If Watt were correct that the Meccans controlled a pivotal trading empire that included the route from Europe to India, one would reasonably expect some indication of it in the contemporary literature. As Crone puts it, “It is obvious that if the Meccans had been middlemen in a long-distance
trade of the kind described in the secondary literature”—that is, works by Watt and other historians who take for granted the canonical Islamic account—“there ought to have been some mention of them in the writings of their customers. Greek and Latin authors had, after all, written extensively about the south Arabians who supplied them with aromatics in the past, offering information about their cities, tribes, political organization, and caravan trade.”
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But in all such sources, there is silence. No mention of Mecca. Nothing about its appearance, the nature of the business conducted there, the demeanor of the Quraysh—the usual kind of details one finds in chronicles of travelers and tradesmen from classical times into the Middle Ages. Instead, there is a yawning gap. Muslim writers make much of the mathematician and astrologer Ptolemy's mention of a place in Arabia called Macoraba, but even if this does refer to Mecca (which Crone disputes), Ptolemy died in
A.D
. 168.
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Just as no one would take the account of a traveler in Constantinople in 1400 as evidence that the city was a thriving center of Christianity in the mid-nineteenth century, so would one be ill advised to take Ptolemy's writing about Mecca as proof that it was a thriving center for trade nearly five centuries after his death.

In contrast, Procopius of Caesarea (d. 565), the leading historian of the sixth century, does not mention Mecca—which is strange indeed if it were really the center of trade in Arabia and between the West and India during the time of Muhammad, who allegedly was born only five years after Procopius's death.
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Centers of trade do not spring up instantaneously.

No non-Muslim historian mentions Mecca in any accounts of trade in the sixth and seventh centuries. (Nor, for that matter, do Muslim historians: There are no surviving Islamic records regarding this trade earlier than the eighth century.) Crone notes: “The political and ecclesiastical importance of Arabia in the sixth century was such that considerable attention was paid to Arabian affairs, too; but of Quraysh and their trading center there is no mention at all, be it in the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic, or other literature composed
outside Arabia before the conquests. This silence is striking and significant.”
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Specifically, she says, “Nowhere is it stated that Quraysh, or the ‘Arab kings,’ were the people who used to supply such-and-such regions with such-and-such goods: it was only Muhammad himself who was known to have been a trader.”
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And that is known only from sources written long after his death.

There is more, too. The location of Mecca is wrong if it was to have served as a center for trade. It is located in western Arabia, such that, in the words of historian Richard Bulliet, “only by the most tortured map reading can it be described as a natural crossroads between a north-south route and an east-west one.”
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Travelers along the route Watt envisions, between Yemen and Syria, might have reason to stop at Mecca, but his contention that Mecca was central to an “important route by which the West got Indian luxury goods as well as South Arabian frankincense” is both unsupported by the contemporary evidence and unlikely geographically.

The same thing goes for the idea of Mecca as a major pilgrimage site in the early seventh century. Contemporary evidence indicates that pilgrimages were conducted to at least three other sites in Arabia—Ukaz, Dhu'l-Majaz, and Majanna—but not to Mecca.
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Crone also notes that Mecca differed from these other sites in being a populated city, whereas the established places for Arabian pilgrimage were uninhabited except during the times of the pilgrimage. She adds, “The pilgrimage was a ritual performed at times and places in which everybody downed arms and nobody was in control: a sanctuary owned by a specific tribe”—that is, the Quraysh—“does not belong in this complex.”
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The significance of this is enormous. If Mecca was a center only for local, small-scale trade and pilgrimage in the early seventh century, then the entire canonical story of the origins of Islam is cast into doubt. If the Quraysh did not object to Muhammad's message on the grounds that it would harm their trade and pilgrimage business, on what grounds did they object to it? If Muhammad did not encounter stiff resistance from the Quraysh during the first twelve years of his
prophetic career, as he preached his message of monotheism to an unreceptive Meccan audience, then what
did
happen?

Without Mecca as a trading and pilgrimage center, there is no foundation for the accounts of antagonism between Muhammad and the Quraysh in Mecca. Nor is there any foundation for accounts of Muhammad's subsequent migration to Medina and warfare against the Quraysh. Likewise unsupported are stories of how he defeated the Quraysh, returned to Mecca toward the end of his life, and converted the Ka‘ba into a Muslim shrine, the centerpiece of what would forever after be a site of Islamic, rather than pagan, pilgrimage.

Today, Muslim pilgrims flock to Mecca for the hajj, as they have done for many centuries. But the entire account of the Meccan origins of Islam stands on shaky foundations. Although there is evidence that a shrine of some kind existed at Mecca, it does not appear to have been a major one.
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Either Muhammad or later Muslims transformed the shrine into the center for Islamic pilgrimage that it is today. In doing so, they elevated Mecca to an importance it did not have, if we scrutinize the record, even at the time Muhammad is supposed to have lived.

Islam thus grows less Arabic and Arabian by the minute. The Arabic holy book, as we have seen, contains significant non-Arabic elements. Now it turns out that one of the key pieces anchoring Islam's origins in Arabia—Muhammad's increasingly antagonistic interaction with a Quraysh tribe jealous of its economic and religious prerogatives—turns out to be historically unsupported.

If that is the case, how did the stories of Muhammad arise at all, and for what reason? Why were they apparently cast back into an Arabia that was not home to his pagan tribe or a thriving trade and pilgrimage business, so meticulously recounted in the Islamic texts?

Muhammad: Resourceful and Opportunistic

One chief objection to the idea that Muhammad is either wholly or in large part a fictional character is the fact that the canonical Islamic texts contain a significant amount of material that portrays him in a negative light.