Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (8 page)

Muawiya is the “Commander of the Faithful,” but the nature of the faith, besides being faith in Allah, is left undefined. There is no hint of the Islamic religious culture that would soon and ever after be all-pervasive in inscriptions like this one and other official proclamations.
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Exactly what Muawiya did believe in is unclear, but if he believed that Muhammad was the prophet of Allah and the Qur'an was Allah's book delivered to mankind by means of that prophet, he gave no indication of it.

Likewise the official inscription on a canal bridge in Fustat in Egypt, dating from the year 688, reads: “This is the arch which Abd al-Aziz bn Marwan, the Emir, ordered to be built. Allah! Bless him in all his deeds, confirm his authority as You please, and make him very satisfied in himself and his household, Amen! Sa'd Abu Uthman built it and Abd ar-Rahman wrote it in the month Safar of the year 69.”
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Here again, no Muhammad, no Qur'an, no Islam.

One of the best records of the worldview of the conquerors is found in the coins they struck. Coins carry official sanction and bear inscriptions that generally reflect the foundational principles of the polity that struck them. In the Islamic world today it is difficult to go very long through any given day without encountering some mention of Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur'an. The
shahada
, the Islamic confession of faith, is featured on the Saudi flag. Coins all over the Islamic world carry inscriptions containing some Islamic element. The most obvious and proudly held aspect of the Islamic world is that it is
Islamic.
But in the earliest days of Islam, that is the one element most conspicuously lacking.

The earliest known coins that the conquerors produced bore the
inscription
bism Allah
, “in the name of Allah.”
Allah
is simply the Arabic word for God, used by Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians as well as by Muslims. Yet coins minted in the 650s and possibly as late as the 670s bore this inscription alone, without making any reference to Muhammad as Allah's prophet or to any other distinctive element of Islam. This is the period of the first flush of Arabian conquest, when one would most expect the Arabians to stress the particular features of their religion, which they considered to have been made victorious over other, competing religions in the region.

Other coins dating from the same period feature inscriptions such as
bism Allah rabbi
(“In the name of Allah my Lord”),
rabbi Allah
(“my Lord is Allah”), and
bism Allah al-malik
(“in the name of Allah the King”).
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Conspicuously absent is coinage bearing any reference to
Muhammad rasul Allah
(“Muhammad is the messenger of Allah”).

One coin that the Arabian conquerors apparently struck in Palestine between 647 and 658 does bear the inscription
muhammad.
And yet there is no way it can be taken as a product of pious, informed, believing Muslims: It depicts a figure, apparently of a ruler—in violation of Islam's prohibition of images. Even odder is the fact that the figure is carrying a cross, a symbol that is anathema to Islam.
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Numismatist Clive Foss explains this coin's obverse (shown at left) as depicting a “crude standing figure with detached crown, flanked by long cross r.,
,
muh[ammad].”
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Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, is supposed to have been the principal agent of a new civilizational order based on a holy book
that admonished Christians that Jesus was neither killed nor crucified: “They did not slay him, neither crucified him” (Qur'an 4:157). Would the caliph, the leader of a religious group that claimed it a blasphemy for a rival religion to regard Jesus as the Son of God, really place the crowning symbol of that rival religion on his public inscriptions? Would the leader of a religious group whose founding prophet claimed that Jesus would return at the end of the world and “break all crosses”—as an insult to himself and a testament to the transcendent majesty of Allah—really allow a cross to be featured on any inscription carved anywhere in his domains?
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Would the followers of this new prophet, whose new religious and political order was defiantly at odds with that of the “cross worshippers,” have placed any figure bearing a cross on any of their coinage? Perhaps this can be interpreted as a gesture of Islam's tolerance, given that Christians overwhelmingly populated the domains of the new Arabian Empire. Yet Islamic law as codified in the ninth and tenth centuries forbade Christians to display the cross openly—even on the outside of churches—and there is no indication that the imposition of this law was a reversal of an earlier practice.
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So it is exceedingly curious that Muslim conquerors of Christians would strike a coin bearing the central image of the very religion and political order they despised, defeated, and were determined to supplant.
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Other coins from this period also bear the cross and the word
Muhammad.
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A Syrian coin that dates from 686 or 687, at the earliest, features what numismatist Volker Popp describes as “the
muhammad
motto” on the reverse side (right).
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The obverse depicts a ruler crowned with a cross and holding another cross.
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The most obvious explanation is that the “muhammad” to whom the coin refers is not the prophet of Islam. Alternatively, the figure on the coin could have evolved into the Muhammad of Islam but was not much like him at the time the coin was issued. Or it may be that the word
muhammad
is not a name at all but a title, meaning the “praised one” or the “chosen one.” Popp, noting that some of these seventh-century cross-bearing coins also bear the legend
bismillah
—“in the name of God”—as well as
muhammad
, suggests that the coins are saying of the depicted ruler, “He is chosen in the name of God,” or “Let him be praised in the name of God.”
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This could be a derivative of the common Christian liturgical phrase referring to the coming of Christ: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” In that case, the
muhammad
, the praised or blessed one, would be Jesus himself.

Supporting this possibility is the fact that the few times the Qur'an mentions Muhammad by name, the references are not clearly to the prophet of Islam but work equally well as general exhortations to obey that which was revealed to the “praised one,” who could be someone else. Jesus is the most likely candidate, because, as we have seen, the Qur'an tells believers that “Muhammad is nothing but a messenger; messengers have passed away before him” (3:144), using language identical to that it later uses of Jesus: “the Messiah, the son of Mary, is nothing but a messenger; messengers have passed away before him” (5:75).
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This opens the possibility that here, as elsewhere, Jesus is the one being referred to as the “praised one,” the
muhammad.

The first biographer of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq, lends additional support to this possibility. Recall that in Qur'an 61:6, Jesus is depicted as prophesying the coming of a new “Messenger of God,” “whose name shall be Ahmad.” Because
Ahmad
—the “praised one”—is a variant of
Muhammad
, Islamic scholars take this passage to be a reference to the prophet of Islam. Ibn Ishaq amplifies this view in his biography of Muhammad, quoting “the Gospel,” the New Testament, where Jesus says that “when the Comforter
[Munahhemana]
has come whom God will send to you from the Lord's presence, and the spirit of truth which
will have gone forth from the Lord's presence, he (shall bear) witness of me and ye also, because ye have been with me from the beginning. I have spoken unto you about this that ye should not be in doubt.” Ibn Ishaq then explains: “the
Munahhemana
(God bless and preserve him!) in Syriac is Muhammad; in Greek he is the paraclete.”
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Ibn Ishaq's English translator Alfred Guillaume notes that the word
Munahhemana
“in the Eastern patristic literature…is applied to our Lord Himself”—that is, not to Muhammad but to Jesus. The original bearer of the title “praised one” was Jesus, and this title and the accompanying prophecy were “skillfully manipulated to provide the reading we have” in Ibn Ishaq's biography of Muhammad—and, for that matter, in the Qur'an itself.
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Whichever of these possibilities is correct, the weakest hypothesis is that these
muhammad
coins refer to the prophet of the new religion as he is depicted in the Qur'an and the Hadith.
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For there are no contemporary references to Muhammad, the Islamic prophet who received the Qur'an and preached its message to unify Arabia (often by force) and whose followers then carried his jihad far beyond Arabia; the first clear records of the Muhammad of Islam far postdate these coins.

The Cross and the Crescent Together

Equally curious is a coin that was to all appearances minted officially in northern Palestine or Jordan during the reign of Muawiya. The sovereign depicted on it (it is unclear whether it is Muawiya himself or someone else) is shown not with the cross topping a globe, which
was a feature of Byzantine coinage of the period, but with a cross that features a crescent at the top of its vertical bar.
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The crescent appears at the top of the cross on the obverse, at the right of the image of the sovereign. Could this unusual design be a remnant of a long-forgotten synthesis? Or was it struck at a time when the distinction between Christianity and Arabic / Islamic monotheism was not as sharp as it eventually became? Whatever the case may be, it is hard to imagine that such a coin would have been minted at all had the dogmatic Islamic abhorrence of the cross been in place at the time, as one would expect if Islam had really burst from Arabia fully formed.
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