Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (20 page)

With Ibn Ishaq and al-Waqidi, it does not seem that we are dealing with straightforward historical records. Raising doubts are the serious discrepancies from the non-Muslim historical accounts and the legendary character of al-Waqidi's story. (And here again, if Muhammad was such a miracle worker and seer, why do the critics of the prophet complain in the Qur'an that he has worked no wonders?) Add to this the report that the three commanders whom Muhammad designated died in the order in which he designated them; commanding generals can only wish that battles would unfold in such an orderly manner. There may have been a battle at Muta, but what actually happened there is lost in mists of time and cannot be reconstructed from Theophanes, Ibn Ishaq, or al-Waqidi.

Whether or not there was a battle between the Muslims and the Byzantines at Muta at some time in the late 620s or early 630s, the Muslim accounts of it that include the martyrdom of Zayd have no historical value. Like so many other elements of the canonical account of early Islam, they may have been invented to emphasize a political and theological point—in this case, that “Muhammad is not the father of any of your men” and hence is “the Seal of the Prophets.”

Muhammad Bewitched

Other tales that appear to show Muhammad in a less than flattering light have even less to recommend their historicity. Apparently difficult to explain is why anyone would have invented the hadiths in which Muhammad fell under the influence of magic spells. One spell made him think he had had sexual relations with his wives when he actually had not. In one such hadith, Aisha recalls Muhammad telling her about this spell:

O Aisha! Allah has instructed me regarding a matter about which I had asked Him. There came to me two men, one of them sat near my feet and the other near my head. The one near
my feet, asked the one near my head (pointing at me), “What is wrong with this man?” The latter replied, “He is under the effect of magic.” The first one asked, “Who had worked magic on him?” The other replied, “Lubaid bin Asam.” The first one asked, “What material (did he use)?” The other replied, “The skin of the pollen of a male date tree with a comb and the hair stuck to it, kept under a stone in the well of Dharwan.”

Muhammad then went to a well and found that it was “the same well which was shown to me in the dream”: “The tops of its date-palm trees look like the heads of the devils, and its water looks like the henna infusion.” He ordered that the date palm trees be cut down and that the brackish water be drained, which presumably ended the magic spell's power over him.

Aisha then asked him, “O Allah's Apostle! Won't you disclose (the magic object)?” Muhammad refused: “Allah has cured me and I hate to circulate the evil among the people.” The hadith ends with Aisha explaining that the magician who cast this spell on Muhammad, Lubaid bin Asam, “was a man from Bani Zuraiq, an ally of the Jews.”
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In another version of the story, one of Muhammad's companions explains that this magic, which was “worked on Allah's Apostle so that he used to think that he had sexual relations with his wives while he actually had not,” was in fact “the hardest kind of magic.”
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This version explains that Lubaid, or Labid, was not only “an ally of the Jews” but also a hypocrite.
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Upon a first reading, it may appear odd that Allah's prophet could fall under a magic spell, but the intentions of the story are clear: once again to demonize the Jews (who are the “strongest in enmity to the believer,” according to Qur'an 5:82) and to show that even the “hardest kind of magic” could not ultimately prevail over Muhammad, for Allah would give him the information he needed to defeat it. The atmosphere here is more redolent of folk tales than of soberly recounted history. Muhammad is cast as the victor over even the unseen forces of darkness that superstitious men of a prescientific era
feared and dreaded. In this, as in his warrior's might and sexual prowess, he is a worthy prophet, a strong man in a wild and untamed time.

Don't Bother Muhammad at Home

One passage of the Qur'an, however, reads like a plea from a star who is tired of his adoring but persistent followers:

O believers, enter not the houses of the Prophet, except leave is given you for a meal, without watching for its hour. But when you are invited, then enter; and when you have had the meal, disperse, neither lingering for idle talk; that is hurtful to the Prophet, and he is ashamed before you; but God is not ashamed before the truth. And when you ask his wives for any object, ask them from behind a curtain; that is cleaner for your hearts and theirs. It is not for you to hurt God's Messenger, neither to marry his wives after him, ever; surely that would be, in God's sight, a monstrous thing. (33:53)

Such a passage seems to reflect the experience of a leader whose followers were annoying him by barging into his home at inconvenient times—but that leader was not necessarily Muhammad. It could just as easily have originated with the annoyance of a later ruler; by means of this directive, this leader could have invoked the example of Muhammad to get petitioners and hangers-on out of his house.

In all these apparent difficulties, we do not see indications of authentic historical material about Muhammad. In every case we encounter material that appears designed to reinforce Muhammad's status as a prophet and an altogether exceptional human being. Moreover, the hadiths that detail Muhammad's personal habits reflect the interest of one party or another in portraying such behavior as exemplary; as we have seen, such stories could easily be—and often were—invented. Nothing in these accounts is inconsistent with
the possibility that Muhammad was fashioned as a hero and prophet beginning toward the end of the seventh century and with increasing industry during the eighth and ninth centuries.

We have already reviewed some of the many reasons to question the veracity of the canonical account of Islam's origins and Muhammad's life. But perhaps no evidence is more important to consider than the numerous curious facts about the perfect book, the pure Arabic Scripture, the book that Muslims believe Allah delivered to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel in pristine form, and that contains everything a human being needs to understand this world and his place in it: the Qur'an.

The Qur'an: Muhammad's Book?

T
he Qur'an is Muhammad's foremost legacy and the primary source for knowledge of Islamic doctrine and (to a lesser degree) history.

According to the Qur'an, the sole author of the Muslim holy book is Allah, who delivered the book piecemeal but in perfect form through the angel Gabriel to Muhammad: “It is We Who have sent down the Qur'an to thee by stages” (76:23).
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Allah taunts the unbelievers with this fact: “It is surely a noble Koran in a hidden Book none but the purified shall touch, a sending down from the Lord of all Being. What, do you hold this discourse in disdain, and do you make it your living to cry lies?” (56:77–82).

Those who do not accept this claim generally assume that it was Muhammad who wrote the Qur'an. Certainly the book gives an immediate impression of originating from a single author, what with its repetitions, its stylistic tics (such as ending verses with a tagline such as “Allah is Mighty, Wise,” which appears with slight variations forty times in the Qur'an), and its overall unity of message (despite numerous contradictions on particulars).

For many, both Muslim and non-Muslim, the Qur'an itself is the principal indication that the canonical story of Islam's origins is essentially true. After all, if Muhammad never existed, or did little
or nothing of what he is thought to have done, then where did the Qur'an come from? If Muhammad was not its author or conduit, then someone else must have been, for it speaks with a unified voice and bears the imprint of a singular personality—or so it is generally assumed.

For Muslims, the Qur'an is a perfect copy of the perfect, eternal book—the Mother of the Book
(umm al-kitab)
—that has existed forever with Allah in Paradise. The Qur'an testifies this of itself: “By the Clear Book, behold, We have made it an Arabic Koran; haply you will understand; and behold, it is in the Essence of the Book [umm
al-kitab]
, with Us; sublime indeed, wise” (43:2–4). It contains, quite simply, the truth: “These are the signs
[ayats
, “signs” or “verses”] of the Book; and that which has been sent down to thee from thy Lord is the truth, but most men do not believe” (13:1). Muslims throughout history have regarded the Qur'an as the unquestioned, unquestionable word of Allah, the supreme guide to human behavior, the inexhaustible fount of knowledge, wisdom, and insight into the inner workings of this world and the next.

What's more, Muslims believe that the Qur'an's text as it stands today is the same as it was when the caliph Uthman compiled and published the standard canonical text. Nothing has been changed, nothing has been added, nothing has been lost. “The text of the Qur'an is entirely reliable,” says the modern-day Turkish Muslim political and educational leader Fethullah Gülen. “It has been as it is, unaltered, unedited, not tampered with in any way, since the time of its revelation.”
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This view has been the standard in the Islamic world since at least the tenth century. The Mutazilites, alone among Muslims, believed the Qur'an to be a human creation, not a perfect copy of an eternal divine book. But by the tenth century, this idea was generally regarded as a heresy. The Mutazilites, facing persecution, eventually died out, along with the idea that the text of the Qur'an was ever subject to human vagaries.

And so the nineteenth-century non-Muslim historian William Muir asserted that the Qur'anic text had been preserved so carefully
that “there are no variations of importance—we might almost say no variations at all—to be found in the innumerable copies scattered throughout the vast bounds of the Empire of Islam.”
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The twentieth-century Qur'an commentator and politician Syed Abul Ala Maududi said that the Qur'an “exists exactly as it had been revealed to the Prophet; not a word—nay, not a dot of it—has been changed. It is available in its original text and the Word of God has now been preserved for all times to come.”
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This claim is a commonplace of Muslim apologetic literature. Yet today's Qur'ans are based on a text that can be traced back to medieval Islamic tradition but no further. The standard text, published in Cairo in 1924, is based on Islamic traditions about the text of the Qur'an that date at their earliest from more than a century after Muhammad is supposed to have lived.
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The lack of variation to which Gülen and so many other Islamic spokesmen refer reflects the fact that most Qur'ans today depend on the same medieval sources, not on anything close to an original seventh-century manuscript. And even that consistency breaks down on closer inspection. So, too, does the claim that the Qur'anic text has never been changed since the various suras were delivered to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. Even Islamic tradition shows this contention to be highly questionable, with indications that some of the Qur'an was lost and other parts were added to or otherwise changed.

There is little dispute, however, about the Islamic account that the Qur'an originated with Muhammad. For most people who consider the question at all, what is at issue is whether Muhammad was really reciting revelations from Allah or passing off warmed-over biblical stories and other material as the divine voice. But an examination of the records—including early Islamic tradition itself—indicates that the canonical text of the Qur'an cannot be attributed to Muhammad alone.

Flexible Revelations

Even the canonical Islamic accounts of how Muhammad received revelations suggest a less-than-heavenly origin to many Qur'anic verses. The hadiths concerning the circumstances of Qur'anic revelations sometimes betray a certain improvisational quality. Since, as we have seen, these stories are almost certainly not actual historical accounts, the question must be raised as to why they may have been invented. The answer to this lies in the evolving nature of Islamic tradition itself: These stories were developed as the particular characteristics of Islam were coming to the fore. Islam began to take shape as a religion different from—indeed, opposed to—Judaism and Christianity. Central to it was the figure of the prophet Muhammad, and tales of his exploits began to be circulated among the subjects of the Arabian Empire.

But if the founding figure of the new religion was to have received a perfect new scripture from the supreme God, why not have the stories of its delivery emphasize its perfection and flawless transmission? To be sure, many hadiths emphasize just those things. If, however, Islam and the Qur'an were evolving during the eighth and ninth centuries, as it appears from the historical evidence, that ongoing evolution had to be explained somehow. The hadiths would thus need to convince the faithful that although they had never heard of these sayings of Muhammad before, they were authentic and ancient tradition.

The best way to explain and justify this considerable theological flux would have been to make revision, and even forgetfulness, part of the new divine revelations from the beginning. And so it was done.

One hadith, for example, relates how Muhammad revised a revelation he had just received from Allah because of a question a blind man posed to him. The revelation concerned the value of fighting jihad: “Such believers as sit at home are not the equals of those who struggle in the path of God
[mujahidun fi sabil Allah]
with their possessions and their selves.” According to the hadith, Muhammad called for one of his scribes, Zayd ibn Thabit, so he could dictate
the revelation. But when the prophet began to dictate, a blind man, Amr bin Umm Maktum, interrupted him, calling out, “O Allah's apostle! What is your order for me, as I am a blind man?” Would Amr be considered a lesser Muslim for being unable to participate in jihad warfare because of his disability? Hearing the question, Muhammad dictated the new revelation with a caveat: “Such believers as sit at home—unless they have an injury—are not the equals of those who struggle in the path of God with their possessions and their selves” (Qur'an 4:95).
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