Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (6 page)

This “Pact of Umar,” however, is of doubtful historical authenticity.
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The earliest reference to it comes in the work of the Muslim historian Tabari, who died nearly three centuries later, in 923. According to Tabari, Umar wrote to the neighboring provinces about how he was treating the newly conquered people in Jerusalem:

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. This is the assurance of safety
(aman)
which the servant of God, Umar, the Commander of the Faithful, has granted to the people of Jerusalem. He has given them an assurance of safety for themselves, for their property, their churches, their crosses, the sick and the healthy of the city, and for all the rituals that belong to their religion. Their churches will not be inhabited [by Muslims] and will not be destroyed. Neither they, nor the land on which they stand, nor their cross, nor their property will be damaged. They will not be forcibly converted. No Jew will live with them in Jerusalem. The people of Jerusalem must pay the poll tax
(jizya)
like the people of the [other] cities, and they must expel the Byzantines and the robbers. As for those who leave the city, their lives and property will be safe until they reach their place of safety;
and as for those who remain, they will be safe. They will have to pay the poll tax like the people of Jerusalem. Those of the people of Jerusalem who want to leave with the Byzantines, take their property, and abandon their churches and their crosses will be safe until they reach their place of safety…. If they pay the poll tax according to their obligations, then the contents of this letter are under the covenant of God, are the responsibility of His Prophet, of the caliphs, and of the faithful.
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The atmosphere of this purported letter from Umar and the writings of Sophronius couldn't be more different. Umar promises to preserve the churches and to allow the Christians to travel freely and even take their property and leave his domains, although he is not wholly tolerant, saying he will restrict the Jews from Jerusalem. Sophronius, on the other hand, laments the destruction of the churches and the restrictions on the Christians' ability to travel. The most striking difference is that the caliph's letter is unmistakably written within the Islamic milieu; it begins with the familiar Islamic invocation of Allah the compassionate and merciful, and refers matter-of-factly to “His Prophet.” By contrast, Sophronius, writing at the time that Umar actually conquered Jerusalem, shows no awareness that the Arabians had a prophet at all or were even Muslims.

Pagan Arabians?

Arabia before Muhammad was pagan; the Arabians were polytheists. Islam, of course, is supposed to have ended all that. Muhammad, according to the standard account, united and Islamized Arabia. Shortly after his death, some of the Arabians rebelled, leading to the Wars of Apostasy in 632 and 633, but the Muslims won these. Arabian polytheism and paganism quickly became relics of history.

Here again, however, contemporary accounts paint a significantly different picture. In 676, a Nestorian synod declared in Syriac of the
Christians in the “islands of the south”—that is, Arabia—that “women who once believed in Christ and wish to live a Christian life must keep themselves with all their might from a union with the pagans [hanpê]…. Christian women must absolutely avoid living with pagans.”
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Many later Christian writers referred to Muslims as pagans, and some historians have taken this as an early example of such usage. There are telling indications, however, that when seventh-century Christian writers referred to “pagans,” they meant exactly that and not Muslims. The Nestorian synod stipulated that “those who are listed among the ranks of the faithful must distance themselves from the pagan custom of taking two wives.” Islam, of course, allows a man to take as many as four wives, as well as slave girls as concubines (Qur'an 4:3). This synodal instruction may therefore be an imprecise reference to Islamic polygamy—or a precise reference to a pagan custom. In addition, the synod directs that “the Christian dead must be buried in a Christian manner, not after the manner of the pagans. Now, it is a pagan custom to wrap the dead in rich and precious clothing, and to make…loud lamentations regarding them…. Christians are not permitted to bury their dead in silk cloth or in precious clothing.”
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None of this has anything to do with Islam as we know it, which does not allow for burial in rich clothing, eschews silk, and frowns on loud lamentations for the dead.

It appears, therefore, that the Nestorian synod was talking about real pagans, forty years after they were supposedly cleared from Arabia.

Another telling indication comes from Athanasius II, the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch (683–686), the Syrian city that was at that time the fourth most important see in Christendom. Athanasius laments that Christians “take part unrestrainedly with the pagans in their festivals,” and “some unfortunate women unite themselves with the pagans.” He describes practices that sound more genuinely pagan than Islamic: “In short they all eat, making no distinction, any of the pagans' [sacrificial] victims, forgetting thus…the orders and exhortations of the Apostles…to shun fornication, the [flesh of] strangled [animals], blood, and food from pagan sacrifices.”
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This is a reference to the apostles' instructions to Gentile converts from paganism to “abstain from the pollutions of idols and from unchastity and from what is strangled and from blood” (Acts 15:20), but Athanasius doesn't seem to be simply repeating this as a formulaic prohibition. The pagans he is concerned about seem to be engaging in at least some of these practices, as Athanasius continues: “Exhort them, reprimand them, warn them, and especially the women united with such men, to keep themselves from food [derived] from their sacrifices, from strangled [meat], and from their forbidden congregations.”
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Muslims do sacrifice animals once a year, on the feast of Eid ul-Adha, marking the end of the time of the hajj, the great pilgrimage to Mecca; they do not, however, strangle the animals thus sacrificed. It is thus extremely unlikely that Athanasius had Islam or Eid ul-Adha in mind, and much more probable that there were actual pagans in the precise areas from which Islam is supposed to have eradicated paganism fifty years earlier.

It may be that the conquerors themselves were more pagan than Muslim—not because they had recently converted to Islam and retained some of their old practices, but because Islam itself, as we know it today, did not exist.
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In any case, whether it existed or not, neither the Arabians nor the people they conquered mentioned the fact.

No Muslims

In 639 the Monophysite Christian patriarch John I of Antioch held a colloquy with the Arabian commander Amr ibn al-As; it survives in a manuscript dating from 874.
²²
In it the author refers to the Arabians not as Muslims but as “Hagarians”
(mhaggraye)
—that is, the people of Hagar, Abraham's concubine and the mother of Ishmael. The Arabic interlocutor denies the divinity of Christ, in accord with Islamic teaching, but neither side makes any mention of the Qur'an, Islam, or Muhammad.
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Similarly, in 647 Ishoyahb III, the patriarch of Seleucia, wrote in a letter about the “Tayyaye” and “Arab Hagarians” who “do not help those who attribute sufferings and death to God, the Lord of everything.”
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In other words, the Hagarians reject the divinity of Christ. Here again, there is no mention of Muslims, Islam, the Qur'an, or Muhammad the Islamic prophet. Ishoyahb's account agrees with the disputation from eight years earlier in saying that the Arabian conquerors denied Christ's divinity, but it says nothing about any new doctrines they might have been bringing to their newly conquered lands.

When the early non-Muslim sources do mention Muhammad, their accounts, like the
Doctrina Jacobi
, diverge in important ways from the standard Islamic story. A chronicle attributed to the Armenian bishop Sebeos and written in the 660s or 670s portrays a “Mahmet” as a merchant and preacher from among the Ishmaelites who taught his followers to worship the only true God, the God of Abraham. So far, so good: That sounds exactly like the prophet of Islam. But other elements of Sebeos's account have no trace in Islamic tradition. The bishop's chronicle begins with the story of a meeting between Jewish refugees and the Ishmaelites in Arabia, after the Byzantine reconquest of Edessa in 628:

They set out into the desert and came to Arabia, among the children of Ishmael; they sought their help, and explained to them that they were kinsmen according to the Bible. Although they [the Ishmaelites] were ready to accept this close kinship, they [the Jews] nevertheless could not convince the mass of the people, because their cults were different.

At this time there was an Ishmaelite called Mahmet, a merchant; he presented himself to them as though at God's command, as a preacher, as the way of truth, and taught them to know the God of Abraham, for he was very well-informed, and very well-acquainted with the story of Moses. As the command came from on high, they all united under the authority of a single man, under a single law, and, abandoning vain cults,
returned to the living God who had revealed Himself to their father Abraham. Mahmet forbade them to eat the flesh of any dead animal, to drink wine, to lie or to fornicate. He added: “God has promised this land to Abraham and his posterity after him forever; he acted according to His promise while he loved Israel. Now you, you are the sons of Abraham and God fulfills in you the promise made to Abraham and his posterity. Only love the God of Abraham, go and take possession of your country which God gave to your father Abraham, and none will be able to resist you in the struggle, for God is with you.”

Then they all gathered together from Havilah unto Shur and before Egypt [Genesis 25:18]; they came out of the desert of Pharan divided into twelve tribes according to the lineages of their patriarchs. They divided among their tribes the twelve thousand Israelites, a thousand per tribe, to guide them into the land of Israel. They set out, camp by camp, in the order of their patriarchs: Nebajoth, Kedar, Abdeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Dumah, Massa, Hadar, Tema, Jetur, Naphish and Kedemah [Genesis 25:13-15]. These are the tribes of Ishmael…. All that remained of the peoples of the children of Israel came to join them, and they constituted a mighty army. Then they sent an embassy to the emperor of the Greeks, saying: “God has given this land as a heritage to our father Abraham and his posterity after him; we are the children of Abraham; you have held our country long enough; give it up peacefully, and we will not invade your territory; otherwise we will retake with interest what you have taken.”
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It is extraordinary that one of the earliest accounts of Muhammad as a prophet that contains any detail at all depicts him as insisting on the Jews' right to the Holy Land—even if in the context of claiming that land for the Ishmaelites, acting in conjunction with the Jews. Many elements in Islamic tradition do show Muhammad proclaiming himself as a prophet in the line of the Jewish prophets and enjoining
various observances adapted from Jewish law upon his new community. He even originally had the Muslims praying toward the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, before the revelation came from Allah that they should face Mecca instead. It is odd, however, that this account gives no hint of any of the antagonism toward the Jews that came to characterize Muhammad and the Muslims' posture toward them; the Qur'an characterizes Jews as the worst enemies of the Muslims (5:82).

Of course, Sebeos's account here is wildly unhistorical. There is no record of twelve thousand Jews partnering with Arabians to invade Byzantine holdings. Nonetheless, the mention of Muhammad is one of the earliest on record, and it corresponds with Islamic tradition both in depicting Muhammad as a merchant and in recording that, at least at one point in his career, he fostered an alliance with the Jews. Yet from Sebeos's account, one gets the impression that as late as the 660s, the Muslims and the Jews were spiritual kin and political allies. This doesn't correspond to anything in Islamic tradition or the conventional account.

If this does reflect, even in a radically distorted way, an actual historical incident, it is certain that the Jews who entered into this alliance did not think of it as what modern-day ecumenists term “Muslim-Jewish engagement.” There is still no mention of Muslims or Islam. As we have seen, the contemporary chroniclers from the lands they invaded called them “Hagarians,” “Saracens,” or “Taiyaye.” The invaders referred to themselves as
Muhajirun
, “emigrants”—a term that would eventually take on a particular significance within Islam but that at this time preceded any clear mention of Islam as such. Greek-speaking writers would sometimes term the invaders “Magaritai,” which appears to be derived from
Muhajirun.
But conspicuously absent from the stock of terms that invaded and conquered people used to name the conquering Arabians was “Muslims.”
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Sebeos also records that Muawiya, governor of Syria and later caliph, sent a letter to the Byzantine emperor Constantine “the Bearded” in 651. The letter calls on Constantine to renounce Christianity—in favor not of Islam but of a much vaguer Abrahamic monotheism:

If you wish to live in peace…renounce your vain religion, in which you have been brought up since infancy. Renounce this Jesus and convert to the great God whom I serve, the God of our father Abraham…. If not, how will this Jesus whom you call Christ, who was not even able to save himself from the Jews, be able to save you from my hands?
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