Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (3 page)

The higher criticism clearly transformed the Christian world, changing the course of several major Christian communions and radically altering how others presented the faith. Similarly, investigations into the origins of Judaism and the historical material contained within the Hebrew scriptures have affected the Jewish tradition. In Judaism as in Christianity, traditions developed that rejected literalism and reevaluated numerous elements of traditional orthodoxy. Reform Judaism, like the liberal Protestant denominations, generally rejected traditional understandings and the literalism that underlay them.

Yet Judaism and Christianity still live, and in many areas they thrive. They have survived the challenge. Can Islam survive the same historical-critical challenge?

No one knows, for it has never received this treatment on nearly the same scale.

Why should Islam and its leading figure be exempt from the scrutiny that has been applied to other religions?

The Power of Legend

As a personality, Muhammad fairly leaps from the pages of the earliest available Islamic texts. What mortal hand or eye could frame this fearsome man? Who would dare to create such an outsize character, so immense in his claims, his loves, his hates?

In addition, there is little doubt that the political unification of Arabia took place around the time Muhammad is assumed to have lived. Scholars generally agree that the Arabian warriors swept out of Arabia beginning in the second quarter of the seventh century and within a hundred years had subdued much of the Middle East, North Africa, and Persia and had entered India and Spain.

Finally, of course, Muhammad has undeniably made a lasting impact as teacher and example to the Islamic world.

Given these three points—the richly detailed portrait of Muhammad found in the Islamic literature, the way he seemingly inspired his successors to found a vast empire, and his enduring legacy as founder of a religion that today claims more than a billion adherents—few have thought to question Muhammad's existence. Muslims and non-Muslims alike take it for granted that he did live and that he originated the faith we know as Islam. I understand the influence the traditional account has, for I spent more than two decades studying Islamic theology, law, and history in depth before seriously considering the historical reliability of what the early Islamic sources say the prophet of Islam said and did.

But the more I examined the evidence gathered by scholars who had bothered to apply the historical-critical method to Islam's origins, the more I recognized how little there was to confirm the canonical story. In my 2006 book,
The Truth about Muhammad
, a biography based on the earliest available Muslim sources, I pointed out “the
paucity of early, reliable sources” and observed that “from a strictly historical standpoint, it is impossible to state with certainty even that a man named Muhammad actually existed, or if he did, that he did much or any of what is ascribed to him.” Even, then, however, I said for a variety of reasons that “in all likelihood he did exist.”
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That may have been an overly optimistic assessment. Even the pillars used to support the traditional account begin to crumble upon close scrutiny. True enough, beginning in the seventh century, Arabian conquerors went out and created an immense empire. But as this book will show, historical and archaeological records cast serious doubt on the claim that they did so under the sway of what was already a fully formed religion with a revealed book as its centerpiece and a revered prophet as its model for conduct.

Likewise, Muhammad's tremendous impact on history does not in itself provide irrefutable evidence of the accuracy of the portrait that the earliest available Islamic sources paint of him. Many legendary or semilegendary figures have inspired magnificent achievements by real people. One need only consider, for example, the Crusader literature, such as
The Song of Roland
and
The Poem of El Cid
, which romanticized historical figures and presented them as larger-than-life heroes, and which in turn inspired other warriors to new feats of bravery and heroism. Muhammad's great influence in providing the impetus for a remarkably resilient culture need not depend on his having been a historical figure; a historical legend, believed fervently, could account for the same effect.

The vividness of the picture of Muhammad that emerges from the Islamic sources is no guarantee of his reality, either. Literature is full of compelling, believable portraits of men who never existed but whose personalities are fully formed on the page, such that if the fictional narratives were mistaken for historical accounts, no one would take it amiss. Macbeth, the king of Scotland, is in Shakespeare's play easily as coherent and compelling a character as Islam's prophet. Macbeth was a real king, but the available historical records depict a figure far different from Shakespeare's troubled antihero. Sir Walter
Scott's historical novel
Ivanhoe
depicts many historical events accurately, but the primary story it tells is fictional. Robin Hood may have been an actual person, but his real exploits are shrouded in the mists of folklore. Take away Robin's robbing of the rich and giving to the poor, and consider his merry men, Friar Tuck, Sherwood Forest, and the rest as legendary accretions, and what is left? Perhaps some kernel of what gave rise to these legends, or perhaps nothing much at all. We will probably never know.

A careful look at the available historical evidence suggests, or at least opens up the possibility, that the case of Muhammad may be similar. Some early accounts do assert that a man named Muhammad existed, but what they say about him bears little resemblance to the Muslim prophet, the guiding light and inspiration of the army of Arabian nomads that stormed out of Arabia in the 630s and embarked on a stunningly successful string of conquests. The oldest records that tell us anything about this man, if they're definitely talking about him in the first place, differ sharply from the story told by the earliest Islamic texts, which date from many decades after Muhammad's reported death.

What's more, the available historical records contain a surprising number of puzzles and anomalies that strongly suggest that the standard Muslim story about Muhammad is more legend than fact. Muhammad, it appears, was much different from the perfect man of Islamic hagiography—if he existed at all.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

In writing this book, I do not intend to break new ground. Instead, I aim to bring to wider public attention the work of a small band of scholars who have dared, often at great personal and professional risk, to examine what the available historical data reveals about the canonical account of Islam's origins.

This book is the fruit of my researches into the writings of scholars
of earlier generations, including, among others, Ignaz Goldziher, Arthur Jeffery, Henri Lammens, David S. Margoliouth, Alphonse Mingana, Theodor Nöldeke, Aloys Sprenger, Joseph Schacht, and Julius Wellhausen, as well as modern-day scholars such as Suliman Bashear, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, Ibn Warraq, Judith Koren, Christoph Luxenberg, Günter Lüling, Yehuda Nevo, Volker Popp, Ibn Rawandi, David S. Powers, and John Wansbrough.

Some of the bold scholars who have investigated the history of early Islam have even received death threats. As a result, some publish under pseudonyms, including scholars of the first rank, such as those who go by the names Christoph Luxenberg and Ibn Warraq. Such intimidation is an impediment to scholarly research that even the most radical New Testament scholar never had to deal with.

The investigation of Islam's origins, despite the obscurity in which the endeavor has been shrouded, is actually almost as old as the comparable investigations of Judaism and Christianity. The German scholar Gustav Weil (1808–1889) first attempted a historical-critical evaluation of the earliest Islamic sources in
Mohammed der prophet, sein Leben und sein Lehre (Muhammad the Prophet, His Life and His Teaching)
(1843), but he had only limited access to those sources. Weil noted in another work on Islam that “reliance upon oral traditions, at a time when they were transmitted by memory alone, and every day produced new divisions among the professors of Islam, opened up a wide field for fabrication and distortion.”
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Ernest Renan, for all his enthusiasm about the historicity of Muhammad, actually approached the Islamic sources with something of a critical eye. Writing of the Qur'an, he pointed out that “the integrity of a work committed to memory for a long time is unlikely to be well preserved; could not interpolations and alterations have slipped in during the successive revisions?” But Renan himself did not investigate that possibility. He retreated into the unsupported assertion that “the veritable monument of the early history of Islam, the Koran, remains absolutely impregnable, and suffices in itself, independently of any historical accounts, to reveal to us Muhammad.”
⁶

The Scottish historian William Muir (1819–1905) published his massive work A
Life of Mahomet and History of Islam to the Era of the Hegira
in four volumes between 1858 and 1862. Muir expressed skepticism about some of the material about Muhammad in Islamic tradition, asserting that “even respectably derived traditions often contained much that was exaggerated and fabulous.”
⁷
Nonetheless, in his huge biography of Muhammad he took the early Islamic sources essentially at face value, discarding little or nothing as “exaggerated and fabulous.”

More skeptical was Wellhausen (1844–1918), whose studies of the five books of Moses led him to posit that those books were the product not of a single hand but of four separate sources that had been combined by later editors. He applied the same analysis to the sources of Islamic hadith. The Hadith, literally “reports,” are the collections of Muhammad's words and deeds that form the foundation of Islamic law and practice. Wellhausen attempted to distinguish reliable transmitters of hadiths from those who were less reliable.
⁸

The Austrian scholar Aloys Sprenger (1813–1893) contributed mightily to the study of Islam's origins by unearthing Islamic texts long thought to have been lost, including Ibn Hisham's ninth-century biography of Muhammad. Sprenger likewise doubted the historical accuracy of some of the hadiths.

The pioneering Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) took such investigations even further. He determined that the lateness of the Hadith collections relative to the time Muhammad was supposed to have lived, together with the widespread Muslim tendency to forge stories about Muhammad that supported a political position or religious practice, made it virtually impossible to regard the Hadith, which fill many volumes, as historically reliable.

It is noteworthy that Goldziher, although he never converted to Islam, had a deep and abiding love for the Islamic faith. As a young man he sojourned to Damascus and Cairo, and he came to admire Islam so fervently that he wrote in his diary: “I became inwardly convinced that I myself was a Muslim.” In Cairo he entered a mosque and prayed as
a Muslim: “In the midst of the thousands of the pious, I rubbed my forehead against the floor of the mosque. Never in my life was I more devout, more truly devout, than on that exalted Friday.”
⁹

It may seem strange, then, that Goldziher would cast scholarly doubt on the historicity of the entire corpus of the Hadith. But he did not intend his conclusions to be corrosive of Islamic faith. Instead, he hoped that they would lead to a critical evaluation of the Hadith as what they actually were: not sources of historical information, which they had been always assumed to be, but indications of how Islamic law and ritual practice developed. He hoped, in other words, that his scholarly findings would lead to a fuller understanding of Islam's origins and thereby positively affect its present character.

Likewise dubious about the historical legitimacy of the early Islamic texts was the Italian scholar of the Middle East Prince Leone Caetani, Duke of Sermoneta (1869–1935). Caetani concluded that “we can find almost nothing true on Muhammad in the Traditions [i.e., hadiths], we can discount as apocryphal all the traditional material that we possess.”
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His contemporary Henri Lammens (1862–1937), a Flemish Jesuit, made a critical study of the Islamic traditions about Muhammad, casting doubt on, among other things, the traditional dates of Muhammad's birth and death. Lammens noted “the artificial character and absence of critical sense” in the compilation of the earliest biographies of the prophet of Islam, although he warned that “there can be no question of rejecting the whole en bloc.”
¹¹

Joseph Schacht (1902–1969), the foremost scholar of Islamic law in the Western world, wrote a study of the origins of Islamic law in which he observed that “even the classical corpus” of Hadith “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,’ as it has been called, have failed.” He backed up Goldziher's finding 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.” But Schacht went beyond even
Goldziher's arguments, concluding, for instance, that “a great many traditions in the classical and other collections were put into circulation only after Shafii's time [the Islamic jurist ash-Shafii died in 820]; the first considerable body of legal traditions from the Prophet originated towards the middle of the second century”; and “the evidence of legal traditions carries us back to about the year 100 A.H. only”—that is, to the first decade of the eighth century, not any closer to the time Muhammad is supposed to have lived.
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