Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (4 page)

John Wansbrough (1928–2002), an American historian who taught at the University of London, amplified the work of earlier scholars who doubted the historical value of the early Islamic texts. In his groundbreaking and complex work, Wansbrough postulated that the Qur'an was developed primarily to establish Islam's origins in Arabia and that the Hadith were fabricated in order to give the Arabian Empire a distinctive religion so as to foster its stability and unity.

Influenced by this, the historians Patricia Crone, a protégée of Wansbrough, and Michael Cook, a protégé of the eminent historian of the Middle East Bernard Lewis, published the wildly controversial book
Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World
(1977). Like their predecessors, Crone and Cook noted the lateness and unreliability of the bulk of the early Islamic sources about Muhammad and the origins of Islam. Their objective was to reconstruct the birth and early development of the religion by examining the available historical, archaeological, and philological records about early Islam, including coins minted in the region during the seventh and eighth centuries and official inscriptions dating from that period. “We have set out with a certain recklessness,” they wrote, “to create a coherent architectonic of ideas in a field over much of which scholarship has yet to dig the foundations.”
¹³

Crone and Cook posited that Islam arose as a movement within Judaism but centered on Abraham and his son Ishmael through his concubine Hagar—as many of the earliest non-Muslim sources refer to the Arabians not as “Muslims” but as “Hagarians” (or “Hagarenes”). This movement, for a variety of reasons, split from Judaism in the last
decade of the seventh century and began developing into what would ultimately become Islam.

In 1987 Crone published
Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam
, in which she demonstrated that one of the principal foundations of the canonical Islamic biography of Muhammad—its Arabian setting, with Mecca as a center for trade—was not supported by any contemporary records. The records indicate, she showed, that Mecca was not such a center at all. Crone, like Wansbrough, saw Islam's Arabian setting as read back into the religion's literature at a later date for political purposes.

Later, however, Crone asserted, “The evidence that a prophet was active among the Arabs in the early decades of the 7th century, on the eve of the Arab conquest of the middle east, must be said to be exceptionally good.” She added that “we can be reasonably sure that the Qur'an is a collection of utterances that [Muhammad] made in the belief that they had been revealed to him by God.” Although these statements represented a departure from her earlier position on Islam's origins, she offered no new findings or evidence to explain the change; instead, she left her earlier reasoning and the evidence presented standing untouched. Crone still acknowledged that “everything else about Mohammed is more uncertain,” pointing out that the earliest Islamic sources about his life date from “some four to five generations after his death,” and that in any case few scholars consider these sources “to be straightforward historical accounts.”
¹⁴
This uncertainty, along with the provocative evidence Crone herself presented in her earlier books, inspired a number of other scholars to continue investigations into the historicity of Muhammad.

Meanwhile, other modern-day scholars have undertaken a close critical examination of the Qur'anic text itself. The German theologian Günter Lüling maintains that the original Qur'an was not an Islamic text at all but a pre-Islamic Christian document. Close examination of textual oddities and anomalies in the Qur'an finds many signs of that Christian foundation. Lüling believes that the Qur'an reflects the theology of a non-Trinitarian Christian sect that
left traces on Islamic theology, notably in its picture of Christ and its uncompromising unitarianism.

The pseudonymous scholar Christoph Luxenberg, although he differs in many ways with Lüling's methods and conclusions, agrees that the Qur'an shows signs of containing a Christian substratum. Luxenberg argues that many of the Qur'an's puzzling words and phrases become clear only by reference to Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic that was the literary language of the region at the time the Qur'an was assembled. Through this method, he has come to numerous startling conclusions. Some of his findings have won international notoriety. Most notably, the famous Qur'anic passages promising virgins in Paradise to Islamic martyrs do not, in his reading, actually refer to virgins; the word usually translated as “virgins” is more accurately rendered as “raisins” or “grapes,” he argues.

For this book, I have relied primarily on the recent authors, particularly Crone's earlier work, Luxenberg, Lüling, Popp, and Powers, with frequent recourse to the work of older scholars as well, especially Goldziher.

Reaction from Muslims to the revisionist reconstruction of early Islamic history has varied. Some have attempted to refute the various findings of the revisionist historians.
¹⁵
For example, Professor Ahmad Ali al-Imam has published a book-length examination of the variants in the text of the Qur'an. He explains those variants by pointing to Islamic traditions that detail the Qur'an's seven styles of recitation; he concludes that “the Qur'an's completeness and trustworthiness has been shown.”
¹⁶
Meanwhile, Professor Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a German convert to Islam and the first professor of Islamic theology in Germany, examined the work of the historical critics of Islam and determined that Muhammad never existed in the form in which the Islamic texts depict him.
¹⁷
He subsequently left Islam.
¹⁸
In contrast, Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, has reacted to historical criticism of Islam with fury, calling it “bigotry.” Abou El Fadl terms Ibn Warraq a “pitiful figure,” as well as “an inanity, and an utter intellectual bore.” He accuses
scholar Daniel Pipes, in recounting the work of the critics approvingly, of “discharging the White Man's Burden.” He even claims that “revisionism, like all forms of incipient or established bigotry, rests on several peculiar assumptions. Assumption number one is that Muslims invariably lie…and can hardly distinguish fiction from fact.”
¹⁹

That is not actually the case at all. The scholarly inquiries into Islam's origins do not rest on the assumption that Muslims were unable to distinguish fiction from fact. The issue is whether legend supplemented a historical record to the extent that it was no longer possible to determine what was legend and what was history. That accretion of legendary detail is not a phenomenon peculiar to Muslims; it has taken place regarding the lives of numerous historical figures whose actual deeds are forgotten but who have become the heroes of legends that are told and retold to this day.

The scholars who are investigating the origins of Islam are motivated not by hatred, bigotry, or racism but by a desire to discover the truth. These are the scholars who laid the foundations for the explorations in this book.

The Sources

O
ne may assume that the first and foremost source for information about Muhammad's life is the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam. Yet that book actually reveals little about the life of Islam's central figure. In it, Allah frequently addresses his prophet and tells him what to say to the believers and unbelievers. Commentators and readers generally assume that Muhammad is the one addressed in these cases, but that—like so much else in this field—is not certain.

The name
Muhammad
actually appears in the Qur'an only four times, and in three of those instances it could be used as a title—the “praised one” or “chosen one”—rather than as a proper name. By contrast, Moses is mentioned by name 136 times, and Abraham, 79 times. Even Pharaoh is mentioned 74 times. Meanwhile, “messenger of Allah”
(rasul Allah)
appears in various forms 300 times, and “prophet”
(nabi)
, 43 times.
¹
Are those all references to Muhammad, the seventh-century prophet of Arabia? Perhaps. Certainly they have been taken as such by readers of the Qur'an through the ages. But even if they are, they tell us little to nothing about the events and circumstances of his life.

Indeed, throughout the Qur'an there is essentially nothing about this messenger beyond insistent assertions of his status as an emissary
of Allah and calls for the believers to obey him. Three of the four times that the name
Muhammad
is mentioned, nothing at all is disclosed about his life.

The first of the four mentions of Muhammad by name appears in the third chapter, or sura, of the Qur'an: “Muhammad is nothing but a messenger; messengers have passed away before him” (3:144). The Qur'an later says that “the Messiah, the son of Mary, is nothing but a messenger; messengers have passed away before him” (5:75).
²
The identical language may indicate that in 3:144, Jesus is the figure being referred to as the “praised one”—that is, the
muhammad.

In sura 33 we read that “Muhammad is not the father of any one of your men, but the Messenger of God, and the Seal of the Prophets; God has knowledge of everything” (33:40).
³
This is almost certainly a specific reference to the prophet of Islam and not simply to a prophetic figure being accorded the epithet the “praised one.” It is also an extremely important verse for Islamic theology: Muslim scholars have interpreted Muhammad's status as “Seal of the Prophets” to mean that Muhammad is the last of the prophets of Allah and that anyone who pretends to the status of prophet after Muhammad is of necessity a false prophet. This doctrine accounts for the deep antipathy, often expressed in violence, that traditional Islam harbors toward later prophetic movements that arose within an Islamic milieu, such as the Baha'is and Qadiani Ahmadis.

Less specific is Qur'an 47:2: “But those who believe and do righteous deeds and believe in what is sent down to Muhammad—and it is the truth from their Lord—He will acquit them of their evil deeds, and dispose their minds aright.” In this verse, “Muhammad” is someone to whom Allah has given revelations, but this could apply to any of the Qur'an's designated prophets as well as to Muhammad in particular.

Qur'an 48:29, meanwhile, probably refers only to the prophet of Islam: “Muhammad is the Messenger of God, and those who are with him are hard against the unbelievers, merciful one to another.” Although the “praised one” here could conceivably refer to some other prophet, the language “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah”
(Muhammadun rasulu Allahi)
within the Islamic confession of faith makes it more likely that 48:29 refers specifically to the prophet of Islam.

That is all as far as Qur'anic mentions of Muhammad by name go. In the many other references to the messenger of Allah, this messenger is not named, and little is said about his specific actions. As a result, we can glean nothing from these passages about Muhammad's biography. Nor is it even certain, on the basis of the Qur'anic text alone, that these passages refer to Muhammad, or did so originally.

Abundant detail about Muhammad's words and deeds is contained in the Hadith, the dizzyingly voluminous collections of Islamic traditions that form the foundation for Islamic law. The Hadith detail the occasions for the revelation of every passage in the Qur'an. But (as we will see in the
next chapter
) there is considerable reason to believe that the bulk of the hadiths about Muhammad's words and deeds date from a period considerably after Muhammad's reported death in 632.

Then there is the Sira, the biography of the prophet of Islam. The earliest biography of Muhammad was written by Ibn Ishaq (d. 773), who wrote in the latter part of the eighth century, at least 125 years after the death of his protagonist, in a setting in which legendary material about Muhammad was proliferating. And Ibn Ishaq's biography doesn't even exist as such; it comes down to us only in the quite lengthy fragments reproduced by an even later chronicler, Ibn Hisham, who wrote in the first quarter of the ninth century, and by other historians who reproduced and thereby preserved additional sections. Other biographical material about Muhammad dates from even later.

This is chiefly the material that makes up the glare of the “full light of history” in which Ernest Renan said that Muhammad lived and worked. In fact, arguably none of the biographical details about Muhammad date to the century in which his prophetic career was said to unfold.

The Earliest Records of an Arabian Prophet

Yet surely there are abundant mentions of this man who lived and worked in the “full light of history” in contemporary records written by both friends and foes alike.

That is, at least, what one might expect. After all, he unified the hitherto ever-warring tribes of Arabia. He forged them into a fighting machine that, only a few years after his death, stunned and bloodied the two great powers of the day, the eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire and the Persian Empire, rapidly expanding into the territory of both. It would be entirely reasonable to expect that seventh-century chroniclers among the Byzantines and Persians, as well as the Muslims, would note the remarkable influence and achievements of this man.

But the earliest records offer more questions than answers. One of the earliest apparent mentions of Muhammad comes from a document known as the
Doctrina Jacobi
, which was probably written by a Christian in Palestine between 634 and 640—that is, at the time of the earliest Arabian conquests and just after Muhammad's reported death in 632. It is written in Greek from the perspective of a Jew who is coming to believe that the Messiah of the Christians is the true one and who hears about another prophet arisen in Arabia: