1. Introduction
The stereotypic image of the Muslim holy warrior with a sword in one hand
and the Koran in the other would only be plausible if he was left handed, since
no devout Muslim should or would touch a Koran with his left hand which is
reserved for dirty chores. All Muslims revere the Koran with a reverence that
borders on bibliolatry and superstition. "It is," as
Guillaume remarked, "the holy of holies. It must never rest beneath
other books, but always on top of them, one must never drink or smoke when it is
being read aloud, and it must be listened to in silence. It is a talisman
against disease and disaster." In some Westerners it engenders
other emotions. For Gibbon it was an "incoherent rhapsody of
fable," for Carlyle an "insupportable stupidity,"
while here is what the German scholar Salomon Reinach thought: "From
the literary point of view, the Koran has little merit. Declamation, repetition,
puerility, a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader at every
turn. It is humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre
literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries, and that millions
of men are still wasting time absorbing it."
For us in studying the Koran it is necessary to distinguish the
historical from the theological attitude. Here we are only concerned with those
truths that are yielded by a process of rational enquiry, by scientific
examination. "Critical investigation of the text of the Qu’ran is a
study which is still in its infancy," wrote the Islamic
scholar Arthur Jeffery in 1937. In 1977 John Wansbrough noted that "as
a document susceptible of analysis by the instruments and techniques of Biblical
criticism [the Koran] is virtually unknown." By 1990, more than
fifty years after Jeffery’s lament, we still have the scandalous situation
described by Andrew Rippin: " I have often encountered individuals who come
to the study of Islam with a background in the historical study of the Hebrew
Bible or early Christianity, and who express surprise at the lack of critical
thought that appears in introductory textbooks on Islam. The notion that "Islam
was born in the clear light of history" still seems to be assumed
by a great many writers of such texts. While the need to reconcile varying
historical traditions is generally recognized, usually this seems to pose no
greater problem to the authors than having to determine "what makes
sense" in a given situation. To students acquainted with approaches
such as source criticism, oral formulaic compositions, literary analysis and
structuralism, all quite commonly employed in the study of Judaism and
Christianity, such naive historical study seems to suggest that Islam is being
approached with less than academic candor.
The questions any critical investigation of the Koran hopes to answer
are:
1. How did the Koran come to us.?-That is the compilation and the
transmission of the Koran.
2. When was it written, and who wrote it?
3. What are the sources of the Koran? Where were the stories, legends,
and principles that abound in the Koran acquired?
4. What is the Koran? Since there never was a textus receptus ne varietur
of the Koran, we need to decide its authenticity.
I shall begin with the traditional account that is more or less accepted
by most western scholars, and then move on to the views of a small but very
formidable, influential, and growing group of scholars inspired by the work of
John Wansbrough.
According to the traditional account the Koran was revealed to Mohammed,
usually by an angel, gradually over a period of years until his death in 632 C.E.
It is not clear how much of the Koran had been written down by the time of
Mohammed’s death, but it seems probable that there was no single manuscript in
which the Prophet himself had collected all the revelations. Nonetheless, there
are traditions which describe how the Prophet dictated this or that portion of
the Koran to his secretaries.
The Collection Under Abu Bakr
Henceforth the traditional account becomes more and more confused; in
fact 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 this or that part of 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 this daunting 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." Zayd
then copied out what he had collected on sheets or leaves (Arabic, suhuf). 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.
There are however different versions of this tradition; in some it is
suggested that it was Abu Bakr who first had the idea to make the collection; in
other versions the credit is given to Ali, the fourth caliph and the founder of
the Shias; other versions still completely exclude Abu Bakr. Then, it is argued
that such a difficult task could not have been accomplished in just two years.
Again, it is unlikely that those who died in the Battle of Yamama, being new
converts, knew any of the Koran by heart. But what is considered the most
telling point against this tradition of the first collection of the Koran under
Abu Bakr is that once the collection was made it was not treated as an official
codex, but almost as the private property of Hafsa. In other words, we find that
no authority is attributed to Abu Bakr’s Koran. It has been suggested that the
entire story was invented to take the credit of having made the first official
collection of the Koran away from ‘Uthman (Osman), the third caliph, who was
greatly disliked. Others have suggested that it was invented "to take
the collection of the Koran back as near as possible to Mohammed’s
death."
The Collection Under ‘Uthman (Kalipha Osman)
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, with the help of three
members of noble Meccan families, carefully revised the Koran comparing his
version with the "leaves" in the possession of Hafsa, ‘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 one was, of
course, kept in Medina. All other versions were ordered to be destroyed.
This version of events is also open to criticism. The Arabic found in the
Koran is not a dialect. In some versions the number of people working on the
commission with Zayd varies, and in some are included the names of persons who
were enemies of ‘Uthman, and the name of someone known to have died before
these events! This phase two of the story does not mention Zayd’s part in the
original collection of the Koran discussed in phase one.
Apart from Wansbrough and his disciples, whose work we shall look at in a
moment, most modern scholars seem to accept that the establishment of the text
of the Koran took place under ‘Uthman between 650 and 656, despite all the
criticisms mentioned above. They accept more or less the traditional account of
the ‘Uthmanic collection, it seems to me, without giving a single coherent
reason for accepting this second tradition as opposed to the first tradition of
the collection under Abu Bakr. There is a massive gap in their arguments, or
rather they offer no arguments at all. For instance, Charles Adams after
enumerating the difficulties with the ‘Uthmanic story, concludes with
breathtaking abruptness and break in logic, "Despite the difficulties with
the traditional accounts there can be no question of the importance of the codex
prepared under ‘Uthman." But nowhere has it yet been established that it
was indeed under ‘Uthman that the Koran as we know it was prepared. It is
simply assumed all along that it was under ‘Uthman that the Koran was
established in its final form, and all we have to do is to explain away some of
the difficulties. Indeed, we can apply the same arguments to dismiss the
‘Uthmanic story as were used to dismiss the Abu Bakr story. That is, we can
argue that the ‘Uthmanic story was invented by the enemies of Abu Bakr and the
friends of ‘Uthman; political polemics can equally be said to have played
their part in the fabrication of this later story. It also leaves unanswered so
many awkward questions. What were these "leaves" in the possession of
Hafsa? And if the Abu Bakr version is pure forgery where did Hafsa get hold of
them? Then what are those versions that seemed to be floating around in the
provinces? When were these alternative texts compiled, and by whom? Can we
really pick and choose, at our own will, from amongst the variants, from the
contradictory traditions? There are no compelling reasons for accepting the
‘Uthmanic story and not the Abu Bakr one; after all they are all gleaned from
the same sources, which are all exceedingly late, tendentious in the extreme,
and all later fabrications, as we shall see later.
But I have even more fundamental problems in accepting any of these
traditional accounts at their face value. When listening to these accounts, some
very common- sensical objections arise which no one seems to have dared to ask. First,
all these stories place an enormous burden on the memories of the early Muslims.
Indeed, scholars are compelled to exaggerate the putatively prodigious memories
of the Arabs. Mohammed could not read or write according to some traditions, and
therefore everything depends on him having perfectly memorized what God revealed
to him through His Angels. Some of the stories in the Koran are enormously long;
for instance, the story of Joseph takes up a whole chapter of 111 verses. Are we
really to believe that Mohammed remembered it exactly as it was revealed?
Similarly the Companions of the Prophet are said to have memorized many of his
utterances. Could their memories never have failed? Oral traditions have a
tendency to change over time, and they cannot be relied upon to construct a
reliable, scientific history. Second, we seem to assume that the
Companions of the Prophet heard and understood him perfectly. Variant Versions,
Verses Missing, Verses Added
Almost without exceptions Muslims consider that the Koran we now possess
goes back in its text and in the number and order of the chapters to the work of
the commission that ‘Uthman appointed. Muslim orthodoxy holds further that
‘Uthman’s Koran 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 Koran 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....
While modern Muslims may be committed to an impossibly conservative
position, Muslim scholars of the early years of Islam were far more flexible,
realizing that parts of the Koran were lost, perverted, and that there were many
thousand variants which made it impossible to talk of the Koran. For example,
As-Suyuti (died 1505), one of the most famous and revered of the commentators of
the Koran, quotes Ibn ‘Umar al Khattab as saying: "Let no one of
you say that he has acquired the entire Koran, for how does he know that it is
all? Much of the Koran has been lost, thus let him say, ‘I have acquired of it
what is available’" (As-Suyuti, Itqan, part 3, page 72). A’isha,
the favorite wife of the Prophet, says, also according to a tradition recounted
by as-Suynti, "During the time of the Prophet, the chapter of the
Parties used to be two hundred verses when read. When ‘Uthman edited the
copies of the Koran, only the current (verses) were recorded" (73).
As-Suyuti also tells this story about Uba ibn Ka’b, one of the great
companions of Mohammed: This famous companion asked one of the Muslims,
"How many verses in the chapter of the Parties?" He said, "Seventy-three
verses." He (Uba) told him, "It used to be almost equal
to the chapter of the Cow (about 286 verses) and included the verse of the
stoning". The man asked, "What is the verse of the
stoning?" He (Uba) said, "If an old man or woman
committed adultery, stone them to death." As noted earlier, since
there was no single document collecting all the revelations, after Mohammed’s
death in 632 C.E., many of his followers tried to gather all the known
revelations and write them down in codex form. Soon we had the codices of
several scholars such as Ibn Masud, Uba ibn Ka’b, ‘Ali, Abu Bakr, al-Aswad,
and others (Jeffery, chapter 6, has listed fifteen primary codices, and a large
number of secondary ones). As Islam spread, we eventually had what became known
as the metropolitan codices in the centers of Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Kufa, and
Basra. As we saw earlier, ‘Uthman tried to bring order to this chaotic
situation by canonizing the Medinan Codex, copies of which were sent to all the
metropolitan centers, with orders to destroy all the other codices.
‘Uthman’s codex was supposed to standardize the consonantal text, yet we
find that many of the variant traditions of this consonantal text survived well
into the fourth Islamic century. The problem was aggravated by the fact that the
consonantal text was unpointed, that is to say, the dots that distinguish, for
example, a "b" from a "t" or a "th" were missing.
Several other letters (f and q; j, h, and kh; s and d; r and z; s and sh; d and
dh, t and z) were indistinguishable. In other words, the Koran was written in a
scripta defectiva. As a result, a great many variant readings were possible
according to the way the text was pointed (had the dots added).
Vowels presented an even worse problem. Originally, the Arabs had no
signs for the short vowels: the Arab script is consonantal. Although the short
vowels are sometimes omitted, they can be represented by orthographical signs
placed above or below the letters-three signs in all, taking the form of a
slightly slanting dash or a comma. After having settled the consonants, Muslims
still had to decide what vowels to employ: using different vowels, of course,
rendered different readings. The scripta plena, which allowed a fully voweled
and pointed text, was not perfected until the late ninth century.
The problems posed by the scripta defectiva inevitably led to the growth
of different centers with their own variant traditions of how the texts should
be pointed or vowelized. Despite ‘Uthman’s order to destroy all texts other
than his own, it is evident that the older codices survived. As Charles Adams
says, "It must be emphasized that far from there being a single text passed
down inviolate from the time of ‘Uthman’s commission, literally
thousands of variant readings of particular verses were known in the first three
(Muslim) centuries. These variants affected even the ‘Uthmanic codex, making
it difficult to know what its true form may have been." Some
Muslims preferred codices other than the ‘Uthmanic, for example, those of Ibn
Mas’ud, Uba ibn Ka’b, and Abu Musa.
Eventually, under the influence of the great Koranic scholar Ibn Mujahid
(died 935), there was a definite canonization of one system of consonants and a
limit placed on the variations of vowels used in the text that resulted in
acceptance of seven systems. But other scholars accepted ten readings, and still
others accepted fourteen readings. Even Ibn Mujahid’s seven provided fourteen
possibilities since each of the seven was traced through two different
transmitters, viz,
1. Nafi of Medina according to Warsh and Qalun
2. Ibn Kathir of Mecca according to al-Bazzi and Qunbul
3. Ibn Amir of Damascus according to Hisham and Ibn Dakwan
4. Abu Amr of Basra according to al-Duri and al-Susi
5. Asim of Kufa according to Hafs and Abu Bakr
6. Hamza of Kuga according to Khalaf and Khallad
7. Al-Kisai of Kufa according to al Duri and Abul Harith
In the end three systems prevailed, those of Warsh (d. 812) from Nafi of
Medina, Hafs (d. 805) from Asim of Kufa, and al-Duri (d. 860) from Abu Amr of
Basra. At present in modern Islam, two versions seem to be in use: that of Asim
of Kufa through Hafs, which was given a kind of official seal of approval by
being adopted in the Egyptian edition of the Koran in 1924; and that of Nafi
through Warsh, which is used in parts of Africa other than Egypt. As Charles
Adams reminds us: It is of some importance to call attention to a possible
source of misunderstanding with regard to the variant readings of the Koran. The
seven (versions) refer to actual written and oral text, to distinct versions of
Koranic verses, whose differences, though they may not be great, are nonetheless
substantial. Since the very existence of variant readings and versions of the
Koran goes against the doctrinal
position toward the Holy Book held by many modern Muslims, it is not uncommon in
an apologetic context to hear the seven (versions) explained as modes of
recitation; in fact the manner and technique of recitation are an entirely
different matter. Guillaume also refers to the variants as "not
always trifling in significance." For example, the last two verses
of sura LXXXV, Al Buraj, read: (21) hawa qur’anun majidun; (22) fi lawhin
mahfuzun/in. The last syllable is in doubt. If it is in the genitive -in, it
gives the meaning "It is a glorious Koran on a preserved tablet"-a
reference to the Muslim doctrine of the Preserved Tablet. If it is the
nominative ending -un, we get "It is a glorious Koran preserved on a
tablet." There are other passages with similar difficulties dealing
with social legislation.
If we allow that there were omissions, then why not additions? The
authenticity of many verses in the Koran has been called into question by
Muslims themselves. Many Kharijites, who were followers of ‘Ali in the early
history of Islam, found the sura recounting the story of Joseph offensive, an
erotic tale that did not belong in the Koran. Hirschfeld questioned the
authenticity of the verses in which the name Mohammed occurs, there being
something rather suspicious in such a name, meaning ‘Praised’, being borne
by the Prophet. The name was certainly not very common. However the Prophet’s
name does occur in documents that have been accepted as genuine, such as the
Constitution of Medina. Most scholars believe that there are interpolations in
the Koran; these interpolations can be seen as interpretative glosses on certain
rare words in need of explanation. More serious are the interpolations of a
dogmatic or political character, which seem to have been added to justify the
elevation of ‘Uthman as caliph to the detriment of ‘Ali. Then there are
other verses that have been added in the interest of rhyme, or to join together
two short passages that on their own lack any connection.
Bell and Watt carefully go through many of the amendments and revisions
and point to the unevenness of the Koranic style as evidence for a great many
alterations in the Koran: "There are indeed many roughness of this
kind, and these, it is here claimed, are fundamental evidence for revision.
Besides the points already noticed-hidden rhymes, and rhyme phrases not woven
into the texture of the passage-there are the following abrupt changes of rhyme;
repetition of the same rhyme word or rhyme phrase in adjoining verses; the
intrusion of an extraneous subject into a passage otherwise homogeneous; a
differing treatment of the same subject in neighboring verses, often with
repetition of words and phrases; breaks in grammatical construction which raise
difficulties in exegesis; abrupt changes in length of verse; sudden changes of
the dramatic situation, with changes of pronoun from singular to plural, from
second to third person, and so on; the juxtaposition of
apparently contrary statements; the juxtaposition of passages of
different date, with intrusion of fare phrases into early verses. In many cases
a passage has alternative continuations which follow one another in the present
text. The second of the alternatives is marked by a break in sense and by a
break in grammatical construction, since the connection is not with what
immediately precedes, but with what stands some distance back.
The Christian al-Kindi (not to be confused with the Arab, Muslim
philosopher) writing around 830 C.E., criticized the Koran in similar terms: The
result of all this (process by which the Koran came into being) is patent to you
who have read the scriptures and see how, in your book, histories are jumbled
together and intermingled; an evidence that many different hands have been at
work therein, and caused discrepancies, adding or cutting out
whatever they liked or disliked. Are such, now, the conditions of a
revelation sent down from heaven? Skepticism of the Sources, the traditional
accounts of the life of Mohammed and the story of the origin and rise of Islam,
including the compilation of the Koran, are based exclusively on Muslim sources,
particularly the Muslim biographies of Mohammed, and the Hadith, that is the
Muslim traditions.
The Prophet Mohammed died in 632 C.E. The earliest material on his life
that we possess was written by Ibn Ishaq in 750 C.E., in other words, a hundred
twenty years after Mohammed’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 834 C.E.,
two hundred years after the death of the Prophet. The Hadith 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). These Hadith include the story of the compilation of the
Koran, and the sayings of the companions of the Prophet. There are said to be
six correct or authentic collections of traditions accepted by Sunni Muslims,
namely, the compilations of Bukhari, Muslim, Ibn Maja, Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi,
and al-Nisai. Again it is worth noting that all these sources are very late
indeed. Bukhari died 238 years after the death of the Prophet, while al-Nisai
died over 280 years after! The historical and biographical tradition concerning
Mohammed and the early years of Islam was submitted to a thorough examination at
the end of the nineteenth century. Up to then careful scholars were well aware
of the legendary and theological elements in these traditions, and that there
were traditions which originated from party motive and which 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 Mohammed’s
life than that of any other of the founders of a universal religion."
This illusion was shattered by Wellhausen, Caetani, and Lammens who called
"one after another of the data of Muslim tradition into question."
Wellhausen divided the old historical traditions as found in the ninth-
and tenth-century compilations in two: first, an authentic primitive
tradition, definitively recorded in the late eighth century, and second a
parallel version which 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 (see above). Prince Caetani and Father Lammens cast
doubt even on data hitherto accepted as "objective." The biographers
of Mohammed were too far removed from his time to have true data or notions; far
from being objective the data rested on tendentious fiction; furthermore it was
not their aim to know these 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 patricular 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."
As 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 Koran, devised and elaborated by later
generations of believers." Even scholars who rejected the extreme
skepticism of Caetani and Lammens were forced to recognize that "of
Mohammed’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."
The ideas of the Positivist Caetani and the Jesuit Lammens were never
forgotten, and 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, by Cook, Crone, and other disciples
of Wansbrough. 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 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."
Faced with Goldziher’s impeccably documented arguments, historians
began to panic and devise spurious ways of keeping skepticism at bay, such as,
for instance, postulating ad hoc distinctions between legal and historical
traditions. But as Humphreys says, 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, "close
acquaintance with the vast stock of hadiths induces sceptical caution,"
and he considers by far the greater part of the Hadith "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 was Mu’awiya who
adopted the war cry of "Vengeance for ‘Uthman" against ‘Ali (Mu’awiya
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, Mu’awiya became the first caliph of the dynasty we know as the
Umayyad, which endured until 750 C.E. 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, "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." Goldziher continues: "Official
influences 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.
Hadiths were liable to be fabricated even for 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 ‘Alias by devising numerous
traditions concerning the glorification of Abu Talib, all sayings of the
prophet. "In fact," as Goldziher shows, amongst the opposing factions,
"the mischievous use of tendentious traditions was even more common than
the official party." 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 handling 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 even increasing desire to
be paid in cash for the hadiths supplied."
Of course many Muslims were aware that forgeries abounded. But even the
so-called six authentic collections of hadiths compiled by 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 choice,
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] is due to the
undisputed correctness of their contents and is the result of scholarly
investigations." Even a tenth century critic pointed out the
weaknesses of two hundred traditions incorporated in the works of Muslim and
Bukhari.
Goldziher’s arguments were followed up, nearly sixty years later, by
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. Humphreys 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-8th 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 were backed up by a formidable list of references, and
they could not be dismissed easily. Here is how Schacht himself sums up his own
thesis: It is generally conceded that the criticism of traditions as practiced
by the Mohammedan 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, Muslim, 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 which bears his name; he died in 820 C.E.]; the first considerable body of
legal traditions from the Prophet originated towards the middle of the second
[Muslim] century [i.e., eighth century C.E.], in opposition to slightly earlier
traditions from the Companions and other authorities, and to the living
tradition of the ancient schools of law; traditions from Companions and other
authorities underwent the same process of growth, and are to be considered in
the same light, as traditions from the Prophet; the study of 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 back to about
the year 100 A.H. [718 C.E.]...
Schacht proves that, for example, a tradition did not exist at a
particular time by showing that it was not used as a legal argument in a
discussion which 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."
Traditions were formulated polemically in order 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 which "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."
Shacht "showed that the beginnings of Islamic law cannot be traced further
back than to about a century after the Prophet’s death." 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, Quaranic 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 Hadith grew out of sectarian controversies over a long period, perhaps
as long as two centuries, and then was projected back onto an invented Arabian
point of origin. 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 Mohammed, 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.’"
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). "Koranic
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."
Elsewhere Wansbrough says, "[The] challenge to produce an identical
or superior scripture (or portion thereof), expressed five times in the Koranic
text can be explained only within a
context of Jewish polemic."
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. Much influenced by the Rabbinic accounts, the early
Muslim community took Moses as an exemplum, and then a portrait of Mohammed
emerged, but only gradually and in response to the needs of a religious
community. This community was anxious to establish Mohammed’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, 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." Thus Muslim philologists were able to give, for instance, an
early date to a poem ascribed to Nabigha Jadi, a pre-Islamic poet, in order to
"provide a pre-Islamic proof text for a common Koranic 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 back this sacred
text into an earlier period, and thus give their text greater
authenticity, a text which in reality had been fabricated in the later ninth
century, along with all the supporting traditions. Second, it gave a
specifically Arabian flavor, an Arabian setting to their religion, 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 Koran. 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 nor 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 Koran in the Fiqh Akbar I…. 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 nthinkable had the Koran existed that 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, "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 Koran 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 Koran depends
on exegetical principles derived from material external to the canon."
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. The traditional
account of the life of Mohammed and the rise of Islam is no longer accepted by
Cook, Crone, and Hinds. In the shore but pithy monograph on Mohammed 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...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 accounts of independent witnesses; and
if knowledge of the life of Mohammed 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.
Cook then looks at the non-Muslim sources: Greek, Syriac, and Armenian.
Here a totally unexpected picture emerges. Though there is no doubt that someone
called Mohammed existed, that he was a merchant, that something significant
happened in 622, that Abraham was central to his teaching, there is no
indication that Mohammed’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."
The earliest Greek source speaks of Mohammed being alive in 634, two
years after his death according to Muslim tradition. Where the Muslim accounts
talk of Mohammed’s break with the Jews, the Armenian version differs
strikingly: The Armenian chronicler of the 660s describes Mohammed 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 the 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.
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 Hegira, when
Mohammed changed the direction of prayer for Muslims from Jerusalem to Mecca.
Thereafter it is Mecca which holds center stage for his activities. But in the
non-Muslim sources, it is Palestine which is the focus of his movement, and
provides the religious motive for its conquest.
The Armenian chronicler further gives a rationale for this attachment:
Mohammed told the Arabs that, as descendants of
Abraham through Ishmael, they too had a claim to the land which God had
promised to Abraham and his seed. The religion of Abraham is in fact as central
in the Armenian account of Mohammed’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
Mohammed, 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 fair to add that
it is not usually drawn.
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 developed by Mohammed of the religion of Abraham
was already present in the Jewish apocryphal work called the
Book of Jubilees (dated to c. 140-100 B.C;), and which 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
neighbors." Sozomenus goes on to describe certain Arab tribes who,
on learning 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. 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 Mohammed 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." The
summary already given
above of Cook’s conclusions in Mohammed will help non-specialists to
have a better grasp of Cook and Crone’s (henceforth CC) arguments in Hagarism.
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, while it was developing its own religious identity,
did not call itself "Muslim." 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."
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, and 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."
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 sraelites of
central Palestine, generally considered the descendants of those who were
planted in Samaria by the Assyrian kings, in about 722 B.C.E. 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, which can also be considered a
confession of faith, begins with the words: Amadti
kamekha
al fatah rahmeka, "I stand before Thee at the gate of Thy
mercy." Fatah is the Fatiha, opening or gate.
The sacred book of the Samaritans was the Pentateuch, which embodied the
supreme revelation of the divine will, and was accordingly highly venerated.
Mohammed also seems to know the Pentateuch and Psalms only, 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 rightful
center for the worship of Yahweh; 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.
We can tabulate the close parallels between the doctrines of the
Samaritans and the Muslims in this way:
MOSES/EXODUS/PENTATEUCHMT.
SINAI/GERIZIMSHECHEM
MohammedHijraKoran Mt. HiraMecca
Under the influence of the Samaritans, the Arabs proceeded to cast
Mohammed 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 but of which ‘Uthman (the
third caliph after Mohammed) had left only one. We have the further testimony of
a Christian monk who distinguishes between the Koran and the Surat al-baqara as
sources 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."
The Samaritans had rejected the sanctity of
Jerusalem, and had replaced it by 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 Yamai corner of the Ka'ba] 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.
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 qibla) was northwest Arabia. The evidence comes from the
alignment of certain early mosques, and the literary evidence of Christian
sources. In other words, Mecca, as the Muslim sanctuary, was only chosen much
later by the Muslims, in order to relocate their early history within Arabia, to
complete their break with Judaism, and finally 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 it came under 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."
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." In the latter work, Crone convincingly
shows how the Koran "generated masses of spurious information."
The numerous historical events which are supposed to have been the causes of
certain revelations (for example, the battle of Badr, see above), "are
likely to owe at least some of their features, occasionally their very
existence, to the Koran." 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 Mohammed
arrived in Medina for the first time it 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 Ubayyl), and there was a tendency "for
apparently independent accounts to collapse into variations on a common
theme" (for example, the large number of stories which exist around
the theme of "Mohammed’s encounter with the representatives of
non-Islamic religions who recognize him as a future prophet"). Finally,
there was a tendency for the information to grow the further 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 even more details.
Waqidi (d. 823), who wrote years 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 color 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 modern 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 misjudgment 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.
*From: The Origins of the Koran, Classic Essays on Islam’s Holy Book
Ed. Ibn Warraq. Prometheus Books
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