3

The Problem of Sources

In our sceptical times there is very little that is above criticism, and one day or other we may expect to hear that Muhammad never existed.

—Snouck Hurgronje¹⁵⁸

The traditional Muslim account of the life of Muhammad and the story of the origin and rise of Islam are based exclusively on Muslim sources, namely, (1) the Koran (2); the Muslim biographies of Muhammad; and (3) the Hadith, that is, the Muslim traditions.

1. The Koran. Not only do Muslims make extraordinary claims for the Koran, but there also are traditional Muslim accounts of the history of the formation of the Koran texts. As we shall see, all the claims are false, and the traditional accounts are “a mass of confusion, contradiction and inconsistencies.”¹⁵⁹ Serious scholars have called into question the authenticity of the Koran itself, and we shall look at their powerful arguments. Here we shall simply note the names of the most revered Muslim commentators on the Koran, as we shall need to refer to their work later in the chapter:

Muhammad ibn-Jarir al-Tabari (d. A.D. 923)

Al-Baghawi (d. 1117 or 1122)

Al-Zamakhshari (d. 1143)

Al-Baydawi (d. 1286 or 1291)

Fakhr-al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210)

Jalal-al-Din al-Mahalli (d. 1459)

Jalal-al-Din al-Suyuti (d.1505)

2. Muslim Biographies. The Prophet Muhammad died in A.D. 632. The earliest material on his life that we possess was written by Ibn Ishaq in A.D. 750, in other words, a hundred twenty years after Muhammad’s death. The question of authenticity becomes even more critical, because the original form of Ibn Ishaq’s work is lost and is only available in parts in a later recension by Ibn Hisham who died in A.D. 834, two hundred years after the death of the Prophet. Other sources include the Annals of Al-Tabari who also quotes from Ibn Ishaq. These are the principal sources of information on Muhammad’s life: a.

a. IbnIshaq (d. 768). Apart from the biography of Muhammad, he also wrote a history of the caliphs that is cited by al-Tabari.

b. Ibn Hisham (d. 834) wrote the Sirah or Life of Muhammad, or perhaps, to speak more accurately, edited Ibn Ishaq’s work.

c. Sayf b. ‘Umar (d. ca. 796) was al-Tabari’s principal source for the early years of Islam.

d. Al-Waqidi (d. 823) also wrote a biography of the Prophet and his campaigns; extensively used by al-Tabari and al-Baladhuri (d. 829)

e. Muhammad ibn Sa’d (d. 843) was the chief editor of al-Waqidi and the compiler of a biographical dictionary.

f. Al-Tabari (d. 923) was a polymath who wrote on many subjects (including a commentary on the Koran), but is perhaps most famous for his History of the World, which extends to July 915.

g. Ali b. Muhammad al-Madaini (d. 840)—important for the Arab conquests of Persia

3. The Hadith. The Hadith or the Books of tradition are a collection of sayings and doings attributed to the Prophet and traced back to him through a series of putatively trustworthy witnesses (any particular chain of transmitters is called an “isnad,” while the text or the real substance of the report is called matn”). Apart from what Muhammad did and enjoined, these traditions include what was done in his presence that he did not forbid, and even the authoritative sayings and doings of the companions of the Prophet. Another term used in this context is “sunna,” which means custom, use, and wont. Thus the Prophet’s sunna comprises his deeds, utterances, and tacit approval. As Wensinck said, “Observance of the Sunna might be in a way called ‘Imitatio Muhammadis.’ ” The two terms should be kept carefully distinct from one another. The hadith is an oral communication derived from the Prophet, whereas the sunna is the traditional norm in the rites and laws that govern the practical conduct of life; the sunna refers to a religious or legal point without there necessarily being an oral tradition for it. In other words, something can be taken to be sunna without there being a hadith relating to it.

Perhaps nonspecialists and non-Muslims do not sufficiently appreciate how greatly the hadith is revered in the Islamic world. “The Hadith is held in great reverence next to the Koran throughout the whole [Islamic] world.... In some cases it is even believed that the actual word of God is to be found in the Hadith as well as in the Koran.” These books of tradition serve as the theoretical basis for Islamic law and hence Islam itself.

There are said to be six correct or authentic collections of traditions accepted by Sunni Muslims, namely, the compilations of (a) al-Bukhari (d. 870), (b) Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 875), (c) Ibn Maja (d. 887), (d) Abu Dawud (d. 889), (e) al-Tirmidhi (d. 892), and (f) al-Nisai (d. 915).

One usually adds to this list the name of Ahmed ibn Hanbal (d. 855), whose great encyclopedia of traditions called Musnad contains nearly 29,000 traditions and has “been the subject of pious reading.”

Skepticism and Doubts

The historical and biographical tradition concerning Muhammad and the early years of Islam were submitted to a thorough examination at the end of the nineteenth century. Up to then, scholars were well aware of the legendary and theological elements in these traditions, and that there were traditions that originated from party motive and that intended “to give an appearance of historical foundation to the particular interests of certain persons or families; but it was thought that after some sifting there yet remained enough to enable us to form a much clearer sketch of Muhammad’s life than that of any other of the founders of a universal religion.”¹⁶⁰ This illusion was shattered by Wellhausen, Caetani, and Lammens who called “one after another of the data of Muslim tradition into question.”

Wellhausen¹⁶¹ divided the old historical tradition as found in the ninth- and tenth-century compilations into two: first, an authentic primitive tradition, definitively recorded in the late eighth century, and second, a parallel version that was deliberately forged to rebut this. The second version was full of tendentious fiction and was to be found in the work of historians such as Sayf b. Umar. Prince Caetani and Father Lammens even cast doubt on data hitherto accepted as “objective.” The biographers of Muhammad were too far removed from his time to have true data or notions; far from being objective the data rested on tendentious fiction. Furthermore, the biographers’ aim was not to know things as they really happened, but to construct an ideal vision of the past, as it ought to have been. “Upon the bare canvas of verses of the Koran that need explanation, the traditionists have embroidered with great boldness scenes suitable to the desires or ideals of their particular group: or to use a favorite metaphor of Lammens, they fill the empty spaces by a process of stereotyping which permits the critical observer to recognize the origin of each picture.”¹⁶²As Lewis puts it, “Lammens went so far as to reject the entire biography as no more than a conjectural and tendentious exegesis of a few passages of biographical content in the Quran, devised and elaborated by later generations of believers. [Lewis (4), p. 94] ”Even scholars who rejected the extreme skepticism of Caetani and Lammens were forced to recognize that “of Muhammad’s life before his appearance as the messenger of God, we know extremely little; compared to the legendary biography as treasured by the faithful, practically nothing.”¹⁶³

The ideas of the positivist Caetani and the Jesuit Lammens were never forgotten; indeed, they were taken up by a group of Soviet Islamologists and pushed to their extreme but logical conclusions. The ideas of the Soviet scholars were in turn taken up in the 1970s and pose a serious challenge to the orthodox, whether the true believers or the conservative infidel researchers. N. A. Morozov propounded a theory that Islam was indistinguishable from Judaism until the Crusades and that only then did Islam receive its independent character, while Muhammad and the first caliphs were mythical figures. Morozov’s arguments, which were put forward in his book Christ in 1930, are summarized by Smirnov:

In the Middle Ages Islam was merely an off-shoot of Arianism evoked by a meteorological event in the Red Sea area near Mecca; it was akin to Byzantine iconoclasm. The Koran bears traces of late composition, up to the eleventh century. The Arabian peninsula is incapable of giving birth to any religion—it is too far from the normal areas of civilization. The Arian Islamites, who passed in the Middle Ages as Agars, Ishmaelites, and Saracens, were indistinguishable from the Jews until the impact of the Crusades made them assume a separate identity. All the lives of Muhammad and his immediate successors are as apocryphal as the accounts of Christ and the Apostles.¹⁶⁴

As we shall discuss later, Morozov’s ideas have a remarkable similarity to some devastating views put forward by a group of Cambridge Islamicists in the 1970s. Under the influence of Morozov, Klimovich published an article called “Did Muhammad Exist?” (1930), in which he makes the valid point that all the sources of our information on the life of Muhammad are late. Muhammad was a necessary fiction since it is always assumed that every religion must have a founder. Tolstov compares the myth of Muhammad to the “deified shamans” of the Yakuts, the Buryats, and the Altays: “The social purpose of this myth was to check the disintegration of the political block of traders, nomads, and peasants, which had brought to power the new, feudal aristocracy.” Vinnikov also compares the myth of Muhammad to “shamanism,” pointing to the primitive magic aspects of such rituals as Muhammad having water poured on him.¹⁶⁵

What Caetani and Lammens did for historical biography, Ignaz Goldziher did for the study of hadith. Goldziher has had an enormous influence in the field of Islamic studies, and it is no exaggeration to say that he is, along with Hurgronje and Noldeke, one of the founding fathers of the modern study of Islam. Practically everything he wrote between roughly 1870 and 1920 is still studied assiduously in universities throughout the world. In his classic paper, “On the Development of the Hadith,” Goldziher “demonstrated that a vast number of hadith accepted even in the most rigorously critical Muslim collections were outright forgeries from the late 8th and 9th centuries—and as a consequence, that the meticulous isnads [chains of transmitters] which supported them were utterly fictitious.”¹⁶⁶

Faced with Goldziher’s impeccably documented arguments, historians began to panic and devised spurious ways of keeping skepticism at bay, by, for instance, postulating ad hoc distinctions between legal and historical traditions. But as Humphreys says,¹⁶⁷ in their formal structure, the hadith and historical traditions were very similar; furthermore, many eighth- and ninth-century Muslim scholars had worked on both kinds of texts. “Altogether, if hadith isnads were suspect, so then should be the isnads attached to historical reports.”

As Goldziher puts it himself,¹⁶⁸ “closer acquaintance with the vast stock of hadiths induces skeptical caution”; and he considers by far the greater part of the hadith “as the result of the religious, historical and social development of Islam during the first two centuries.” The hadith is useless as a basis for any scientific history and can only serve as a “reflection of the tendencies” of the early Muslim community.

Here I need to interpose a historical digression, if we are to have a proper understanding of Goldziher’s arguments. After the death of the Prophet, four of his companions succeeded him as leaders of the Muslim community; the last of the four was Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law. Ali was unable to impose his authority in Syria where the governor Muawiya adopted the the war cry of “Vengeance for Uthman” against Ali. (Muawiya and Uthman were related and both belonged to the Meccan clan of Umayya.) The forces of the two met in an indecisive battle at Siffin. After Ali’s murder in 661, Muawiya became the first caliph of the dynasty we know as the Umayyad, which endured until A.D. 750. The Umayyads were deposed by the Abbasids, who lasted in Iraq and Baghdad until the thirteenth century.

During the early years of the Umayyad dynasty, many Muslims were totally ignorant in regard to ritual and doctrine. The rulers themselves had little enthusiasm for religion and generally despised the pious and the ascetic. The result was that there arose a group of pious men who shamelessly fabricated traditions for the good of the community and traced them back to the authority of the Prophet. They opposed the godless Umayyads but dared not say so openly, so they invented further traditions dedicated to praising the Prophet’s family, hence indirectly giving their allegiance to the party of Ali supporters. As Goldziher puts it,¹⁶⁹ “the ruling power itself was not idle. If it wished an opinion to be generally recognized and the opposition of pious circles silenced, it too had to know how to discover a hadith to suit its purpose. They had to do what their opponents did: invent and have invented, hadiths in their turn. And that is in effect what they did.” “Official influence,” continues Goldziher,

on the invention, dissemination and suppression of traditions started early. An instruction given to his obedient governor al-Mughira by Muawiya is in the spirit of the Umayyads: “Do not tire of abusing and insulting Ali and calling for God’s mercifulness for Uthman, defaming the companions of Ali, removing them and omitting to listen to them (i.e., to what they tell and propagate as hadiths); praising in contrast, the clan of Uthman, drawing them near to you and listening to them.” This is an official encouragement to foster the rise and spread of hadiths directed against Ali and to hold back and suppress hadiths favoring Ali.... The Umayyads and their political followers had no scruples in promoting tendentious lies in a sacred religious form, and they were only concerned to find pious authorities who would be prepared to cover such falsifications with their undoubted authority.There was never any lack of these.¹⁷⁰

Hadiths were liable to be fabricated for even the most trivial ritualistic details. Tendentiousness included the suppression of existing utterances friendly to the rival party or dynasty. Under the Abbasids, the fabrications of hadiths greatly multiplied, with the express purpose of proving the legitimacy of their own clan against the Alids. For example, the Prophet was made to say that Abu Talib, father of Ali, was sitting deep in hell: “Perhaps my intercession will be of use to him on the day of resurrection so that he may be transferred into a pool of fire which reaches only up to the ankles but which is still hot enough to burn the brain.” Naturally enough this was countered by the theologians of the Alids by devising numerous traditions concerning the glorification of Abu Talib, all sayings of the Prophet. In fact, as Goldziher shows, among the opposing factions “the mischievous use of tendentious traditions was even more common than with the official partly.”¹⁷¹

Eventually storytellers made a good living inventing entertaining hadiths, which the credulous masses lapped up eagerly. To draw the crowds the storytellers shrank from nothing. “The handing down of hadiths sank to the level of a business very early.... Journeys [in search of hadiths] favored the greed of those who succeeded in pretending to be a source of the hadith, and with increasing demand sprang up an ever increasing desire to be paid in cash for the hadiths supplied.”¹⁷²

Of course many Muslims were aware that forgeries abounded. But even the so-called six authentic collections of hadiths compiled by al-Bukhari and others were not as rigorous as might have been hoped. The six had varying criteria for including a hadith as genuine or not: some were rather liberal in their choices, others rather arbitrary. Then there was the problem of the authenticity of the texts of these compilers. For example, at one point there were a dozen different Bukhari texts, and apart from these variants, there were deliberate interpolations. As Goldziher warns us, “it would be wrong to think that the canonical authority of the two [collections of Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj] is due to the undisputed correctness of their contents and is the result of scholarly investigations.”¹⁷³ Even a tenth-century critic pointed out the weaknesses of two hundred traditions incorporated in the works of Hajjaj and Bukhari.

Goldziher’s arguments were followed up, nearly sixty years later, by those of another great Islamicist, Joseph Schacht, whose works on Islamic law are considered classics in the field of Islamic studies. Schacht’s conclusions were even more radical and perturbing, and the full implications of these conclusions have not yet sunk in.

Humphreys¹⁷⁴ sums up Schacht’s theses as: (1) that isnads [the chain of transmitters] going all the way back to the Prophet only began to be widely used around the time of the Abbasid Revolution—i.e., the mid-eighth century; (2) that ironically, the more elaborate and formally correct an isnad appeared to be, the more likely it was to be spurious. In general he concluded, no existing hadith could be reliably ascribed to the Prophet, though some of them might ultimately be rooted in his teaching. And though [Schacht] devoted only a few pages to historical reports about the early caliphate, he explicitly asserted that the “same strictures should apply to them.” Schacht’s arguments, backed up by a formidable list of references, could not be easily dismissed.

Schacht himself¹⁷⁵ sums up his own thesis thus:

It is generally conceded that the criticism of traditions as practiced by the Muhammadan scholars is inadequate and that, however many forgeries may have been eliminated by it, even the classical corpus 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” ... have failed. Goldziher, in another of his fundamental works, has not only voiced his “sceptical reserve” with regard to the traditions contained even in the classical collections [i.e., the collections of Bukhari, Hajjaj, et al.], but shown positively 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. This brilliant discovery became the corner-stone of all serious investigation.

This book [i.e., Schacht’s own book] will be found to confirm Goldziher’s results, and go beyond them in the following respects: a great many traditions in the classical and other collections were put into circulation only after Shafi’i’s time [Shafi’i was the founder of the very important school of law that bears his name; he died in A.D. 820]; the first considerable body of legal traditions from the Prophet originated towards the middle of the second [Muslim] century [i.e., eighth century], in opposition to slightly earlier traditions from Companions and other authorities, and to the living tradition of the ancient schools of law; traditions from Companions and other authorites underwent the same process of growth, and are to be considered in the same light, as traditions from the Prophet; the isnads show a tendency to grow backwards and to claim higher and higher authority until they arrive at the Prophet; the evidence of legal traditions carries us back to about the year 100 A.H. [A.D. 718] only.

Schacht proves that a tradition did not exist at a particular time, for example, by showing that it was not used as a legal argument in a discussion that would have made reference to it imperative, if it had existed. For Schacht every legal tradition from the Prophet must be taken as inauthentic and the fictitious expression of a legal doctrine formulated at a later date: “We shall not meet any legal tradition from the Prophet which can positively be considered authentic.”¹⁷⁶

Traditions were formulated polemically to rebut a contrary doctrine or practice; Schacht calls these traditions “counter traditions.” Doctrines in this polemical atmosphere were frequently projected back to higher authorities: “traditions from Successors [to the Prophet] become traditions from Companions [of the Prophet], and traditions from Companions become traditions from the Prophet.” Details from the life of the Prophet were invented to support legal doctrines.

Schacht then criticizes isnads that “were often put together very carelessly. Any typical representative of the group whose doctrine was to be projected back on to an ancient authority, could be chosen at random and put into the isnad. We find therefore a number of alternative names in otherwise identical isnads.”

Schacht “showed that the beginnings of Islamic law cannot be traced further back in the Islamic tradition, than to about a century after the Prophet’s death.”¹⁷⁷ Islamic law did not directly derive from the Koran but developed out of popular and administrative practice under the Ummayads, and this “practice often diverged from the intentions and even the explicit wording of the Koran.” Norms derived from the Koran were introduced into Islamic law at a secondary stage.

A group of scholars was convinced of the essential soundness of Schacht’s analysis and proceeded to work out in full detail the implications of Schacht’s arguments. The first of these scholars was John Wansbrough, who in two important, though formidably difficult books, Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (1978), showed that the Koran and the hadith grew out of sectarian controversies over a long period—perhaps as long as two centuries—and then were projected back onto an invented Arabian point of origins.¹⁷⁸ He further argued that Islam emerged only when it came into contact with and under the influence of rabbinic Judaism, “that Islamic doctrine generally, and even the figure of Muhammad, were molded on Rabbinic Jewish prototypes.” “Proceeding from these conclusions, The Sectarian Milieu analyses early Islamic historiography—or rather the interpretive myths underlying this historiography—as a late manifestation of Old Testament ‘salvation history.’ ”

Once again, to appreciate Wansbrough’s arguments, we need to look at the traditional account of the collection of the Koran. The problem is that there is no one tradition but several incompatible ones. According to one tradition, during Abu Bakr’s brief caliphate (632-634), Umar, who himself was to succeed to the caliphate in 634, became worried at the fact that so many Muslims who had known the Koran by heart were killed during the battle of Yamama, in Central Arabia. There was a real danger that parts of the Koran would be irretrievably lost unless a collection of the Koran was made before more of those who knew the Koran by heart were killed. Abu Bakr eventually gave his consent to such a project, and asked Zayd ibn Thabit, the former secretary of the Prophet, to undertake the task. So Zayd proceeded to collect the Koran “from pieces of papyrus, flat stones, palm leaves, shoulder blades and ribs of animals, pieces of leather and wooden boards, as well as from the hearts of men.” Once complete, the Koran was handed over to Abu Bakr, and on his death passed to Umar, and upon his death passed to Umar’s daughter, Hafsa. However, there are different versions of this tradition—in some it is Umar who gets the credit for first collecting the Koran, in others it is Ali, the fourth caliph. Further, there is no conclusive evidence that those who died did know the Koran by heart. It is also unlikely that in so short a time (two years) such an important task could have been completed. One would also expect such a collection to have some sort of authority, but we find no such authority attributed to Abu Bakr’s Koran. Indeed, in the different provinces, other collections of the Koran were considered authoritative. It seems unlikely that an official Koran would have been given to Umar’s daughter for safekeeping. It is highly probable that the story of the collection of the Koran under Abu Bakr was fabricated and circulated by the enemies of the third caliph, Uthman, to take away from him some of the glory attendant on being credited with having made the first collection.

According to tradition, the next step was taken under Uthman (644-656). One of Uthman’s generals asked the caliph to make such a collection because serious disputes had broken out among his troops from different provinces in regard to the correct readings of the Koran. Uthman chose Zayd ibn Thabit to prepare the official text. Zayd carefully revised the Koran, comparing his version with the “leaves” in the possession of Umar’s daughter; and as instructed, in case of difficulty as to the reading, Zayd followed the dialect of the Quraysh, the Prophet’s tribe. The copies of the new version, which must have been completed between 650 and Uthman’s death in 656, were sent to Kufa, Basra, Damascus, and perhaps Mecca; and of course one was kept in Medina. All other versions were ordered to be destroyed. This version of events is also open to criticism. We are not sure of the nature of the “leaves”that Hafsa, Umar’s daughter, possessed. The number of persons working on this project also varies; the Arabic found in the Koran is not a dialect; and so on.

Nonetheless, this last tradition has prevailed, but as Michael Cook has put it, “the choice is a somewhat arbitrary one; the truth may lie anywhere within the limits of the discordant traditions, or altogether outside them” [my emphasis].¹⁷⁹

For orthodox Muslims of today, the Koran we have is the one that was established under Uthman in the seventh century. “Muslim orthodoxy holds further that Uthman’s Quran contains all of the revelation delivered to the community faithfully preserved without change or variation of any kind and that the acceptance of the Uthmanic Quran was all but universal from the day of its distribution. The orthodox position is motivated by dogmatic factors; it cannot be supported by the historical evidence.”¹⁸⁰

This brings us to Wansbrough’s dismissal of the previous traditions. Wansbrough shows that far from being fixed in the seventh century, the definitive text of the Koran had still not been achieved as late as the ninth century. An Arabian origin for Islam is highly unlikely; the Arabs gradually formulated their creed as they came into contact with rabbinic Judaism outside the Hijaz (Central Arabia, containing the cities of Mecca and Medina).

Quranic allusion presupposes familiarity with the narrative material of Judaeo-Christian scripture, which was not so much reformulated as merely referred to.... Taken together, the quantity of reference, the mechanically repetitious employment of rhetorical convention, and the stridently polemical style, all suggest a strongly sectarian atmosphere in which a corpus of familiar scripture was being pressed into the service of as yet unfamiliar doctrine.¹⁸¹

Elsewhere Wansbrough says, “[The] challenge to produce an identical or superior scripture (or portion thereof), expressed five times in the Quranic text can be explained only within a context of Jewish polemic.”¹⁸²

Earlier scholars such as Torrey, recognizing the genuine borrowings in the Koran from rabbinic literature, had jumped to conclusions about the Jewish population in the Hijaz (i.e., Central Arabia). But as Wansbrough puts it, “References in Rabbinic literature to Arabia are of remarkably little worth for purposes of historical reconstruction, and especially for the Hijaz in the sixth and seventh centuries.”¹⁸³

Much influenced by the rabbinic accounts, the early Muslim community took Moses as an exemplar, and then a portrait of Muhammad emerged—but only gradually and in response to the needs of a religious community. It was anxious to establish Muhammad’s credentials as a prophet on the Mosaic model; this evidently meant there had to be a Holy Scripture, which would be seen as testimony to his prophethood. Another gradual development was the emergence of the idea of the Arabian origins of Islam. To this end, there was elaborated the concept of a sacred language, lingua sacra, Arabic. The Koran was said to be handed down by God in pure Arabic. It is significant that the ninth century also saw the first collections of the ancient poetry of the Arabs: “The manner in which this material was manipulated by its collectors to support almost any argument appears never to have been very successfully concealed.” ¹⁸⁴ Thus Muslim philologists were able to give an early date, for instance, to a poem ascribed to Nabigha Jadi, a pre-Islamic poet, in order to “provide a pre-Islamic proof text for a common Quranic construction.” The aim in appealing to the authority of pre-Islamic poetry was twofold: first, to give ancient authority to their own Holy Scripture, to push this sacred text back into an earlier period, and thus, give their text greater authenticity, a text that in reality had been fabricated, along with all the supporting traditions, in the later ninth century. Second, it gave a specifically Arabian flavor, an Arabian setting to their religion, making it something distinct from Judaism and Christianity. Exegetical traditions were equally fictitious and had but one aim, to demonstrate the Hijazi origins of Islam. Wansbrough gives some negative evidence to show that the Koran had not achieved any definitive form before the ninth century:

Schacht’s studies of the early development of legal doctrine within the community demonstrate that with very few exceptions, Muslim jurisprudence was not derived from the contents of the Quran. It may be added that those few exceptions are themselves hardly evidence for the existence of the canon, and further observed that even where doctrine was alleged to draw upon scripture, such is not necessarily proof of the earlier existence of the scriptural source. Derivation of law from scripture . . . was a phenomenon of the ninth century.... A similar kind of negative evidence is absence of any reference to the Quran in the Fiqh Akbar I.¹⁸⁵

The latter is a document, dated to the middle of the eighth century, which was a kind of statement of the Muslim creed in face of sects. Thus the Fiqh Akbar I represents the views of the orthodoxy on the then-prominent dogmatic questions. It seems unthinkable that had the Koran existed no reference would have been made to it.

Wansbrough submits the Koran to a highly technical analysis with the aim of showing that it cannot have been deliberately edited by a few men, but “rather the product of an organic development from originally independent traditions during a long period of transmission.”

Wansbrough was to throw cold water on the idea that the Koran was the only hope for genuine historical information regarding the Prophet, an idea summed up by Jeffery:¹⁸⁶ “The dominant note in this advanced criticism is ‘back to the Koran.’ As a basis for critical biography the Traditions are practically worthless; in the Koran alone can we be said to have firm ground under our feet.”

But as Wansbrough was to show: “The role of the Quran in the delineation of an Arabian prophet was peripheral: evidence of a divine communication but not a report of its circumstances.... The very notion of biographical data in the Quran depends upon exegetical principles derived from material external to the canon.”¹⁸⁷

A group of scholars influenced by Wansbrough took an even more radical approach; they rejected wholesale the entire Islamic version of early Islamic history. Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, and Martin Hinds, writing between 1977 and 1987,

regard the whole established version of Islamic history down at least to the time of Abd al-Malik (685-705) as a later fabrication, and reconstruct the Arab Conquests and the formation of the Caliphate as a movement of peninsular Arabs who had been inspired by Jewish messianism to try to reclaim the Promised Land. In this interpretation, Islam emerged as an autonomous religion and culture only within the process of a long struggle for identity among the disparate peoples yoked together by the Conquests: Jacobite Syrians, Nestorian Aramaeans in Iraq, Copts, Jews, and (finally) Peninsular Arabs.¹⁸⁸

Before looking at their arguments in detail, we once again need to have the traditional account of the life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam, before we can assess its plausibility. Muhammad was born, probably in A.D. 570, in Mecca to a family that once had been powerful and much respected, but that had fallen on hard times: the Hashim, who belonged to the Arab tribe of Quraysh. Muhammad grew up an orphan and was brought up by his uncle, Abu Talib, with whom Muhammad is said to have gone on trading journeys to Syria. He began working as the commercial agent for a rich widow, Khadija. The enterprise prospered and he eventually married her.

While sojourning on Mount Hira, as was his wont, Muhammad experienced visions, as a result of which he eventually became convinced that God had specially commissioned him to be his messenger. In A.D. 610, he told his relatives and close friends of his experiences and three years later was commanded by God to speak more publicly. The pagan Meccans tolerated him until he began attacking their gods. Mecca at that time was a thriving commercial center, having won control of many trade routes. Thus, opposition to Muhammad came from prosperous merchants who feared his success and resented his criticism of their way of life. Muhammad seems to have even compromised his monotheism, at first, to make peace with the Meccans. This is the incident retold in The Satanic Verses, and since the story comes from impeccable Muslim sources (al-Tabari, Ibn Sa’d), Muslims are not justified in blaming infidels for its fabrication. While Muhammad was still hoping to compromise with the Meccan merchants, he received a revelation that the favorite deities of the Meccans—al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat—might be regarded as divine beings whose intercession was effectual with God. But Muhammad soon recognized these verses as interpolations of Satan and received further revelations abrogating the Satanic verses, but retaining the names of the goddesses, and adding that it was unfair that God should have daughters while humans had sons (sura 53.19-23). During this period the powerful merchants may have been boycotted by Muhammad and his entire family. After the death of his uncle, Abu Talib, and his wife Khadija, Muhammad’s position become more and more unsupportable, and he sought to establish himself in Taif without success.

The Hijra or Emigration to Medina, AD. 622

Muhammad met a group of people from the oases of Yathrib (or Medina, as it later came to be known), who realized that Muhammad might help them with their domestic political problems. They absorbed Islam from Muhammad and returned to Medina to preach the new religion. In 622, a larger group of Medinese pledged their support and agreed to grant him protection. Muhammad urged his Meccan supporters to emigrate to Medina, while he himself became the last to leave the town. This migration (the Hijra) of the Prophet was later taken as the starting point of Muslim chronology. (According to tradition, the Hijra took place in September 622; however, the Muslim era starts at the beginning of the Arab year in which the Hijra took place, i.e., 16 July 622.)

Medina at the time of Muhammad’s arrival was inhabited by eight large clans of Arabs and three major clans of Jews. For years there had been feuding between the clans, culminating in a great battle in 618, in which many were slaughtered. With the aim of creating political stability, Muhammad established a community or people (umma) made up of his followers from Mecca and the people of Medina. All important problems were to be laid before him and God. All the new arrangements are contained in a document called the Constitution of Medina, and as Cook puts it, “[one of the major interests] of the parties of the document is the waging of war.”

After six months in Medina, Muhammad began sending out raiding parties to attack and capture Meccan caravans on their way to Syria. Unsuccessful at first, Muhammad’s men finally managed to capture a Meccan caravan by attacking during the pagan sacred month. Muhammad took a fifth of the booty. Initially, the Medinans were shocked at the profanation of the sacred month, but eventually one of their leading men gave him support to the extent of taking part in the raids.

At about this time, Muhammad’s relations with the Jews became more and more strained. At first, he had hoped to be accepted as a prophet, because he had always emphasized that the message that he was preaching was no different from that preached by Moses; besides, he had adopted many of the Jews’ practices. But as the Jews refused to recognize him as a true prophet, Muhammad began developing the idea of the religion of Abraham and broke free from Judaism and Christianity. Islam was an independent religion far superior to both these monotheistic creeds. In the end, the Jews were either banished from Medina or exterminated.

Muhammad learned that a rich Meccan caravan was to pass nearby and decided to attack it at Badr. The Meccans had learned of Muhammad’s plans and accordingly gathered a vastly superior army to teach the Muslims a lesson. Although the Muslims were obviously surprised to find themselves confronting an immense army instead of a mere caravan, they were inspired by Allah and their Prophet and won a resounding battle in 624. Several prisoners were taken, two were executed on Muhammad’s order—one of the two was none other than al-Nadr, he who had pinched the Prophet’s audience in Mecca by telling more entertaining stories. The following year, the Meccans, led by Abu Sufyan, had their revenge when they inflicted a heavy defeat on the Muslims at the battle of Uhud. Muhammad continued his raids for two years, while the Meccans prepared for an all-out attack. In 627, the Meccans besieged the Muslims for a fortnight but withdrew, unable to penetrate the barrier of a trench dug by the Muslims on the suggestion of Salman the Persian. When the Meccans withdrew, Muhammad decided to attack the remaining Jewish group, the Qurayza, who eventually surrendered. The men of this clan were all executed, and the women and children sold.

The following year, 628, Muhammad signed a treaty at al-Hudaybiya, by which the Muslims were to be allowed to make a pilgrimage to Mecca the following year. By now Muhammad was powerful enough to try and take Mecca itself, which he did in 630, with very little bloodshed. He consolidated his power in Central Arabia, and eventually most of the Arab tribes threw in their lot with him.

It is clear from the traditional accounts that just before his death in 632, Muhammad had visions of extending his power and influence beyond Arabia. In 631, he is said to have gathered an enormous army (thirty thousand men, ten thousand horses) to attack the Romans at Tabuk, a city between Medina and Damascus, but nothing came of this expedition. A portion of this force was sent to Dumah, where the Muslim commander Khalid received the submission of Jewish and Christian tribes. Muhammad had also planned to send his army into Roman territory in Palestine, but the plan was never realized because of his death in 632.

Throughout the twenty-three years of his prophetic mission Muhammad received revelations directly from God, whereby “the basic rituals and duties of Islam were established or further refined: washing, prayer, alms-giving, fasting, pilgrimage.” The revelations also concerned practical matters, religious law, inheritance, marriage, divorce, and so on.

Such is the tradition that is no longer accepted by Cook, Crone, and Hinds. In the short but pithy monograph on Muhammad in the Oxford Past Masters series, Cook gives his reasons for rejecting the biographical traditions:

False ascription was rife among the eighth-century scholars, and that in any case Ibn Ishaq and his contemporaries were drawing on oral tradition. Neither of these propositions is as arbitrary as it sounds. We have reason to believe that numerous traditions on questions of dogma and law were provided with spurious chains of authorities by those who put them into circulation; and at the same time we have much evidence of controversy in the eighth century as to whether it was permissible to reduce oral tradition to writing. The implications of this view for the reliability of our sources are clearly rather negative. If we cannot trust the chains of authorities, we can no longer claim to know that we have before us the separately transmitted acounts of independent witnesses; and if knowledge of the life of Muhammad was transmitted orally for a century before it was reduced to writing, then the chances are that the material will have undergone considerable alteration in the process.¹⁸⁹

Cook then looks at the non-Muslim sources: Greek, Syriac, and Armenian. Here a totally unexpected picture emerges. Although there is no doubt that someone called Muhammad existed, that he was a merchant, that something significant happened in 622, and that Abraham was central to his teaching, there is no indication that Muhammad’s career unfolded in inner Arabia, there is no mention of Mecca, and the Koran makes no appearance until the last years of the seventh century. Further, it emerges from this evidence that the Muslims prayed in a direction much further north than Mecca; hence their sanctuary cannot have been in Mecca. “Equally, when the first Koranic quotations appear on coins and inscriptions towards the end of the seventh century, they show divergences from the canonical text. These are trivial from the point of view of content, but the fact that they appear in such formal contexts as these goes badly with the notion that the text had already been frozen.”¹⁹⁰ The earliest Greek source speaks of Muhammad being alive in 634, two years after his death according to Muslim tradition. Where the Muslim accounts talk of Muhammad’s break with the Jews,

the Armenian chronicler of the 660s describes Muhammad as establishing a community which comprised both Ishmaelites (i.e., Arabs) and Jews, with Abrahamic descent as their common platform; these allies then set off to conquer Palestine. The oldest Greek source makes the sensational statement that the prophet who had appeared among the Saracens (i.e., Arabs) was proclaiming the coming of the (Jewish) messiah, and speaks of the Jews who mix with the Saracens’, and of the danger to life and limb of falling into the hands of these Jews and Saracens. We cannot easily dismiss this evidence as the product of Christian prejudice, since it finds confirmation in the Hebrew apocalypse. [An eighth-century document in which is embedded an earlier apocalypse that seems to be contemporary with the conquests.] The break with the Jews is then placed by the Armenian chronicler immediately after the Arab conquest of Jerusalem.¹⁹¹

Although Palestine does play some sort of role in Muslim traditions, it is already demoted in favor of Mecca in the second year of the Hijra, when Muhammad changed the direction of prayer for Muslims from Jerusalem to Mecca. Thereafter it is Mecca that holds center stage for his activities. But in the non-Muslim sources, Palestine is the focus of his movement and provides the religious motive for its conquest. The Armenian chronicler gives a further rationale for this attachment: Muhammad told the Arabs that, as descendants of Abraham through Ishmael, they too had a claim to the land that God had promised to Abraham and his seed. The religion of Abraham is in fact as central in the Armenian account of Muhammad’s preaching as it is in the Muslim sources, but it is given a quite different geographical twist.

If the external sources are in any significant degree right on such points, it would follow that tradition is seriously misleading on important aspects of the life of Muhammad, and that even the integrity of the Koran as his message is in some doubt. In view of what was said above about the nature of the Muslim sources, such a conclusion would seem to me legitimate; but is only fair to add that it is not usually drawn. ¹⁹²

Cook points out the similarity of certain Muslim beliefs and practices to those of the Samaritans (discussed below). He also points out that the fundamental idea Muhammad developed of the religion of Abraham was already present in the Jewish apocryphal work (dated to ca. 140-100 B.C.) called the Book of Jubilees and may well have influenced the formation of Islamic ideas. We also have the evidence of Sozomenus, a Christian writer of the fifth century, who “reconstructs a primitive Ishmaelite monotheism identical with that possessed by the Hebrews up to the time of Moses”; and he goes on to argue from present conditions that Ishmael’s laws must have been “corrupted by the passage of time and the influence of pagan neighbours.”

Sozomenus goes on to describe how certain Arab tribes that learned of their Ishmaelite origins from Jews adopted Jewish observances. Again, there may have been some influence on the Muslim community from this source. Cook also points out the similarity of the story of Moses (exodus, etc.) and the Muslim hijra (or exodus from Mecca). In Jewish messianism,

the career of the messiah was seen as a re-enactment of that of Moses; a key event in the drama was an exodus, or flight, from oppression into the desert, whence the messiah was to lead a holy war to reconquer Palestine. Given the early evidence connecting Muhammad with Jews and Jewish messianism at the time when the conquest of Palestine was initiated, it is natural to see in Jewish apocalyptic thought a point of departure for his political ideas.

Cook and Patricia Crone had developed these ideas in their intellectually exhilarating work, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977). Unfortunately, they adopted the rather difficult style of their “master” Wansbrough, which may well put off all but the most dedicated readers; as Humphreys says, “their argument is conveyed through a dizzying and unrelenting array of allusions, metaphors, and analogies.”¹⁹³ The summary already given of Cook’s conclusions in “Muhammad” will help nonspecialists to have a better grasp of Cook and Crone’s (CC, henceforth) arguments in “Hagarism.” We might further tabulate the steps in their arguments thus:

1. Skepticism of Historicity of Islamic Tradition

2. The Use of Non-Muslim Sources

3. Judeo-Arab Solidarity and Hostility toward Christians

4. Early Muslim Conquests

5. Shedding of Judaism

6. Softening of Attitude toward Christians

7. Doctrinal Literacy: the Influence of Samaritans

8. Creation of Arab Prophet on the Model of Moses

9. Creation of Holy Sanctuary

10. Creation of Holy Capital

It would be appropriate to begin with an explanation of CC’s frequent use of the terms “Hagar,” “Hagarism,” and “Hagarene.” Since a part of their thesis is that Islam only emerged later than hitherto thought, after the first contacts with the older civilizations in Palestine, the Near East, and the Middle East, it would have been inappropriate to use the traditional terms “Muslim,” “Islamic,” and “Islam” for the early Arabs and their creed. It seems probable that the early Arab community did not call itself “Muslim” while it was developing its own religious identity. On the other hand, Greek and Syriac documents refer to this community as “Magaritai,” and “Mahgre” (or “Mahgraye”), respectively. The Mahgraye are the descendants of Abraham by Hagar, hence the term “Hagarism.” But there is another dimension to this term; for the corresponding Arabic term is “muhajirun”—the muhajirun are those who take part in a hijra, an exodus. “The ‘Mahgraye’ may thus be seen as Hagarene participants in a hijra to the Promised Land; in this pun lies the earliest identity of the faith which was in the fullness of time to become Islam.”¹⁹⁴

Relying on hitherto neglected non-Muslim sources, CC give a new account of the rise of Islam, an account, on their admission, unacceptable to any Muslim. The Muslim sources are too late, unreliable; and there are no cogent external grounds for accepting the Islamic tradition. CC begin with a Greek text (dated ca. 634-636), in which the core of the Prophet’s message appears as Judaic messianism. There is evidence that the Jews themselves, far from being the enemies of Muslims as traditionally recounted, welcomed and interpreted the Arab conquest in messianic terms. The evidence “of Judeo-Arab intimacy is complemented by indications of a marked hostility towards Christianity.” An Armenian chronicle written in the 660s also contradicts the traditional Muslim insistence that Mecca was the religious metropolis of the Arabs at the time of the conquest; in contrast, it points out the Palestinian orientation of the movement. The same chronicle helps us understand how the Prophet “provided a rationale for Arab involvement in the enactment of Judaic messianism. This rationale consists in a dual invocation of the Abrahamic descent of the Arabs as Ishmaelites: on the one hand to endow them with a birthright to the Holy Land, and on the other to provide them with a monotheist genealogy.”¹⁹⁵ Similarly, we can see the Muslim hijra, not as an exodus from Mecca to Medina (for no early source attests to the historicity of this event), but as an emigration of the Ishmaelites (Arabs) from Arabia to the Promised Land.

The Arabs soon quarreled with the Jews, and their attitude to Christians softened—the Christians posed less of a political threat. There still remained a need to develop a positive religious identity, which they proceeded to do by elaborating a full-scale religion of Abraham, incorporating many pagan practices but under a new Abrahamic aegis. But they still lacked the basic religious structures to be able to stand on their two feet as an independent religious community. Here they were enormously influenced by the Samaritans.

The origins of the Samaritans are rather obscure. They are Israelites of Central Palestine, generally considered the descendents of those who were planted in Samaria by the Assyrian kings in about 722 B.C. The faith of the Samaritans was Jewish monotheism, but they had shaken off the influence of Judaism by developing their own religious identity, rather in the way the Arabs were to do later on. The Samaritan canon included only the Pentateuch, which was considered the sole source and standard for faith and conduct.

The formula “There is no God but the One” is an ever-recurring refrain in Samaritan liturgies. A constant theme in their literature is the unity of God and His absolute holiness and righteousness. We can immediately notice the similarity of the Muslim proclamation of faith, “There is no God but Allah.” And of course, the unity of God is a fundamental principle in Islam. The Muslim formula “In the name of God” (Bismillah) is found in Samaritan scripture as “beshem.” The opening chapter of the Koran is known as the Fatiha, opening or gate, often considered as a succinct confession of faith. A Samaritan prayer that can also be considered a confession of faith begins with the words: Amadti kamekha alfatah rahmekha, “I stand before Thee at the gate of Thy mercy.” Fatah is the Fatiha, the opening or grate.¹⁹⁶

The sacred book of the Samaritans, the Pentateuch, embodied the supreme revelation of the divine will and was accordingly highly venerated. Muhammad also seems to know only the Pentateuch and Psalms and shows no knowledge of the prophetic or historical writings.

The Samaritans held Moses in high regard, Moses being the prophet through whom the law was revealed. For the Samaritans, Mt. Gerizim was the righful center for the worship of Jahweh; and it was further associated with Adam, Seth, and Noah, and Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. The expectation of a coming Messiah was also an article of faith—the name given to their Messiah was the Restorer. Here we can also notice the similarity of the Muslim notion of the Mahdi.

MOSES, EXODUS, PENTATEUCH, MT. SINAI/MT. GERIZIM, AND SHECHEM

Muhammad, Hijra, Koran, Mt. Hira, and Mecca

Under the influence of the Samaritans, the Arabs proceeded to cast Muhammad in the role of Moses as the leader of an exodus (hijra), as the bearer of a new revelation (Koran) received on an appropriate (Arabian) sacred mountain, Mt. Hira. It remained for them to compose a sacred book. CC point to the tradition that the Koran had been many books, of which Uthman (the third caliph after Muhammad) had left only one. We have the further testimony of a Christian monk who distinguishes between the Koran and the Surat al-baqara as source of law. In other documents, we are told that Hajjaj (661-714), the governor of Iraq, had collected and destroyed all the writings of the early Muslims. Then, following Wansbrough, CC conclude that the Koran “is strikingly lacking in overall structure, frequently obscure and inconsequential in both language and content, perfunctory in its linking of disparate materials and given to the repetition of whole passages in variant versions. On this basis it can be plausibly argued that the book [Koran] is the product of the belated and imperfect editing of materials from a plurality of traditions.”¹⁹⁷

The Samaritans had rejected the sanctity of Jerusalem and had replaced it with the older Israelite sanctuary of Shechem. When the early Muslims disengaged from Jerusalem, Shechem provided an appropriate model for the creation of a sanctuary of their own.

The parallelism is striking. Each presents the same binary structure of a sacred city closely associated with a nearby holy mountain, and in each case the fundamental rite is a pilgrimage from the city to the mountain. In each case the sanctuary is an Abrahamic foundation, the pillar on which Abraham sacrificed in Shechem finding its equivalent in the rukn [the Yamani corner of the Kaaba, see this volume, page 41] of the Meccan sanctuary. Finally, the urban sanctuary is in each case closely associated with the grave of the appropriate patriarch: Joseph (as opposed to Judah) in the Samaritan case, Ishmael (as opposed to Isaac) in the Meccan.¹⁹⁸

CC go on to argue that the town we now know as Mecca in Central Arabia (Hijaz) could not have been the theater of the momentous events so beloved of Muslim tradition. Apart from the lack of any early non-Muslim references to Mecca, we do have the startling fact that the direction in which the early Muslims prayed (the qiblah) was northwest Arabia. The evidence comes from the alignment of certain early mosques and the literary evidence of Christian sources. In other words, Mecca was only chosen as the Muslim sanctuary much later by the Muslims, in order to relocate their early history within Arabia, to complete their break with Judaism, and finally to establish their separate religious identity.

In the rest of their fascinating book, CC go on to show how Islam assimilated all the foreign influences that came under it in consequence of their rapid conquests; how Islam acquired its particular identity on encountering the older civilizations of antiquity, through its contacts with rabbinic Judaism, Christianity (Jacobite and Nestorian), Hellenism, and Persian ideas (rabbinic law, Greek philosophy, neoplatonism, Roman law, and Byzantine art and architecture). But they also point out that all this was achieved at great cultural cost. “The Arab conquests rapidly destroyed one empire, and permanently detached large territories of another. This was, for the states in question, an appalling catastrophe.”¹⁹⁹

In Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (1980), Patricia Crone dismisses the Muslim traditions concerning the early caliphate (down to the 680s) as useless fictions. In Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987), she argues that many so-called historical reports are “fanciful elaborations on difficult Koranic passages.”²⁰⁰ In Meccan Trade, Crone convincingly shows how the Koran “generated masses of spurious information.” The numerous historical events that are supposed to have been the the causes of certain revelations (for example, the battle of Badr, see p. 93),” are likely to owe at least some of their features, occasionally their very existence, to the Quran.” Clearly storytellers were the first to invent historical contexts for particular verses of the Koran. But much of their information is contradictory (for example, we are told that when Muhammad arrived in Medina for the first time, the city was torn by feuds, and yet at the same time we are asked to believe that the people of Medina were united under their undisputed leader Ibn Ubayy); and there was a tendency “for apparently independent accounts to collapse into variations on a common theme” (for example, the large number of stories around the theme of “Muhammad’s encounter with the representatives of non-Islamic religions who recognise him as a future prophet”). Finally, there was a tendency for the information to grow the farther away one went from the events described; for example, if one storyteller should happen to mention a raid, the next one would tell you the exact date of this raid, and the third one would furnish you with even more details. Waqidi (d. 823) who wrote several decades after Ibn Ishaq (d. 768), “will always give precise dates, locations, names, where Ibn Ishaq has none, accounts of what triggered the expedition, miscellaneous information to lend colour to the event, as well as reasons why, as was usually the case, no fighting took place. No wonder that scholars are fond of Waqidi: where else does one find such wonderfully precise information about everything one wishes to know? But given that this information was all unknown to Ibn Ishaq, its value is doubtful in the extreme. And if spurious information accumulated at this rate in the two generations between Ibn Ishaq and Waqidi, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that even more must have accumulated in the three generations between the Prophet and Ibn Ishaq.” It is obvious that these early Muslim historians drew on a common pool of material fabricated by the storytellers. Crone takes to task certain conservative modem historians, such as Watt, for being unjustifiably optimistic about the historical worth of the Muslim sources on the rise of Islam. And we shall end this chapter on the sources with Crone’s conclusions regarding all these Muslim sources:

[Watt’s methodology rests] on a misjudgement of these sources. The problem is the very mode of origin of the tradition, not some minor distortions subsequently introduced. Allowing for distortions arising from various allegiances within Islam such as those to a particular area, tribe, sect, or school does nothing to correct the tendentiousness arising from allegiance to Islam itself. The entire tradition is tendentious, its aim being the elaboration of an Arabian Heilgeschichte, and this tendentiousness has shaped the facts as we have them, not merely added “some partisan statements we can deduct.”²⁰¹