Truth
The Higher Criticism of Islam
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 15 September 2008
Mohammed
From the 1970s, a group of academics, John Wansbrough, Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, Andrew Rippin and Gerald Hawting, initially of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, questioned Islam’s version of its origins and the lack of contemporary Islamic sources.
Moslem scholars insist that Mohammed existed, though the historical evidence is slim indeed. Little is certainly known about him. He did not appear on Arabic coins and inscriptions, and in the earliest documents until the 680s. The documentation about him, Arabic biographies and collections of his sayings and doings, date from a century and a half after his death, around 750-800 AD, at the earliest and are not historical. Indeed, the earliest extant life of Mohammed was written 350 years after he lived. Yet, the earlier sources on Mohammed’s life that do survive contradict his received biography.
Islamicist, Patricia Crone, recently a defender of Islamic orthodoxy, says he was known in Byzantium within two years of his death, apparently conclusive evidence!
This source gives us pretty irrefutable evidence that he was an historical figure.
Yet this evidence is a Greek text written when the Arabs were invading Syria (632-634 AD) which speaks, not of Mohammed, but vaguely of a false prophet who “appeared among the Saracens”. He was “false” because prophets do not come “with sword and chariot”, so the Greek author thought he was leading the invaders. He therefore could not have been the Mohammed of Islamic belief, unless his dates are wrong. The dates are therefore wrong, for Crone, and Mohammed died in 635 AD, presumably in battle. Crone mentions an Armenian text dated forty years later which certainly attests to a Mohammed and his teaching. If the two are the same man, then Mohammed, as well as a teacher, was the warrior who started the Arab conquests with the annexation of Syria from the failing Byzantine empire.
What happened in the first two centuries of Islamic history has been lost. They are an Islamic dark age. Obviously things were happening in the seventh and eighth centuries, but the texts that record it are not contemporary. They are from the late ninth and tenth centuries. In the consensus view of early Moslem history, the Arab tribes, united and inspired by Mohammed’s teachings, embarked on a military jihad that wrested Syria and Palestine from a weakened Byzantine Empire in the years after 630 AD, but, basing their arguments on archaeology, contemporary texts, linguistic analyses and coins, the late Israeli archaeologist Yehuda D Nevo and his co-worker, Judith Koren, say it is wrong. Byzantium voluntarily transferred her eastern provinces to Arab client states to continue an imperial policy stretching back for centuries.
The Arabs who took over the region after 630 AD were not Moslems, but traditionally were pagans. Some though were believers in a type of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, and it is this from which Islam evolved. Islamicists admit that the world in which Islam was born included Jews and Christians not only pagans. The pseudonymous Ibn Warraq reckons, “there was no Islam as we know it” until about 830 rather than 630. It was a hybrid bred from the interaction of Arab conquerors with subject peoples with more advanced religions. For 200 years, Arabs were a minority ruling a Christian majority. Islam was invented as a ruling class religion justifying Arab imperialism in the face of the ethical patriarchal religions. The success of the Arabs as conquerors explains Islam. Mohammed was not historical—though perhaps based on an early Arab leader—but a mythical figure who was invented in the seventh century as a prophet of a new Arab nationalism and religion.
No one doubts that the Arabs had charismatic leaders to build such a remarkable empire in short order, and one of them might as well have been a Mohammed, but that is different from asserting that Mohammed unquestionably lived. He is just like Jesus. The Jews had a leader who defied the Romans, and this leader became the core of the Christian myth. So too, the Arabs had great leaders who defied the Byzantine and Persian empires, and one of them has been practically deified. Islam is best understood as a heretical branch of rabbinical Judaism, an anti-Christian alliance between Arabs and Jews, and the rise of the religion was because of Islam’s message of jihad to Arab tribesmen.
Jihad is an imperialist war but allegedly undertaken to bring conversion. Moslems defend jihad as collectively necessary to organised religious life, as well as offering individual salvation. Collectively, it had to preserve order via behaviour morals, law, punishment and war, while individually, force was supposedly impossible. Rather like Zoroastrianism, the individual had a personal jihad against their own evil inclinations. The response to the call for collective jihad, something that is hard to refuse fanatical armed men, meant many of Mohammed’s immediate circle of of friends were killed, an excellent reason why transmission of his recollected recitations could not have been at all perfect.
Note, though, that recent western leaders like Bush and Blair were no less jihadic than Islamists. They felt a religious duty to intervene abroad, and had the power to do it. They would save Johnny foreigner against his will, force him to be free and adopt democracy, even if he did not want it. They were certain they were right, and convinced that the victims would be grateful. Besides that there would be multiple benefits at home and for their own administrations. Thus they convinced themselves that God could only approve of their actions, and ultimately they were obliged to do what they persuaded themseolves was necessary. By doing this, they were justifying a jihad just as any Islamist would have done.
To resume—the weakness in the Nevo-Koren hypothesis is the supposition that the Byzantine state deliberately fomented heresies to persecute them, fomented hatred of the emperor himself and left its territories open to military incursions by rival powers, just to reconcile the easterners to their abandonment planned by the empire. But perhaps the weakness of Byzantium was sufficient without this precise elaboration.
The Quran
The Quran (Recitation) was also written in its present form much later than Mohammed’s death. Some of the verses include the command “Recite!”, supposedly the angel commanding Mohammed to repeat what had been said. It is more likely that here we have extracts from a pupil’s exercise book. Angelika Neuwirth thinks the Quran reflects oral communication, discourses, between a charismatic speaker and his congregation over a period of two decades. If this was Mohammed then originally he was telling his congregation to repeat what he had told them.
The Quran says more about the Jewish patriarchs than about Mohammed, who is mentioned as the chosen prophet only four times. Traditionally, Mohammed was illiterate, so, when the archangel Gabriel appeared to him with the command “Recite!”, how did his revelations get recorded? Allegedly, he reported these revelations verbatim to family members and friends, who memorized them or wrote them down. In the Moslem myth, Mohammed was accompanied by 45 scribes writing down whatever he said and did. Does that seem likely? Is it convincing? These scribes were recording it all on bones, pieces of rock, parchment and papyrus. Later, they were all collected together as the Hadith, a supplement to the Quran. Islamic believers therefore think everything is known about Mohammed. In fact, all of this is from Moslems after Mohammed had died, if he ever lived.
Scholars have accepted Moslem apologetic claims of the eighth and ninth centuries that in Mohammed’s day ignorance (al jãhiliyyah) reigned and Arabs worshipped idols. Greek, Syriac, and Arabic Christian texts do not mention much about Islam before the early eighth century. Patriarch Ishôyabh III, the Great, (580-659) mentions Moslems briefly, writing to his correspondent Simeon of Rewardashir around the year 650:
As for the Arabs, to whom God has at this time given rule (shultãnâ) over the world, you know well how they act toward us. Not only do they not oppose Christianity, but they praise our faith, honour the priests and saints of our Lord, and give aid to the churches and monasteries.
Jacob of Edessa (633-708) discussing the genealogy of the Virgin Mary in some correspondence mentions them too, but the first mention of a sira or life of Mohammed came at the end of the 700s, almost 200 years after Mohammed’s alleged first revelation by the archangel Gabriel.
What sense can we make of all this? Mohammed is clearly an individual who changed the course of history, but how was it possible for him to do so? Unfortunately, we do not know how much of the Islamic tradition about him is true.Patricia Crone, Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World
The first Caliph Abu Bakr (632 to 634 AD) allegedly began compiling the collection because many Moslems who had committed the Quran to memory were killed in the battle of Yamama, and the tradition was endangered. Caliph Uthman (644-656 AD), the third Islamic ruler after Mohammed, convened a committee to supervise the collecting of scripture memorized or written out by Mohammed’s companions, and this compilation was allegedly the official Quran. Yet Mohammed’s wife Aisha is said to have reported Uthman’s edition as incomplete, and Moslems happily accepted it. Uthman ordered all incomplete and imperfect collections of the Quran to be destroyed, and thus the standard “perfect” version was all that remained. Uthman wanted Moslems in the newly conquered lands to be reading from the same book. That was the political intent of ensuring there was only one rendition, and why others were destroyed. This tradition, if true, explains why early variants of the Quran are few and slight—though they do exist—yet their absence is always taken as proof that the Quran is exactly as Mohammed received it.
While restoring the Great Mosque of Sana’a in Yemen in 1972, labourers discovered a hoard of fragments of Arabic texts. In 1979, a German scholar persuaded the German government to fund a project which soon showed the hoard was a sort of Arab geniza, a store of books too sacred to destroy. It contained tens of thousands of fragments from almost a thousand different parchment codices of the Quran, among the oldest in the world. Crucially the scholars found manuscripts which diverged from the accepted version, even though it is considered the perfect word of God. Textual aberrations are quite to be expected, especially in the days when books were hand written, but religious fundamentalists, unreasonable as ever, always think they have the true and perfect revelation. Christian fundamentalists think the bible is perfectly inerrant.
Quranic Critical Study
Professor John Wansbrough at the University of London examined the Quran using methods like those of the higher criticism of the Christian bible, comparing it with comparable contemporary devotional works, seeking clues about its origin. Critical study of the Quran today requires familiarity with Wansbrough’s two main works, Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (1978). He applied the instruments and techniques of biblical criticism—form criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism, and much more—to the Quran.
Unresolved questions about how the book reached its present form include severe textual problems that Moslem believers utterly ignore. Thus the earliest versions of the Quran are entirely consonantal, like ancient Hebrew. No vowels or diacritical marks are indicated, so the consonantal text can be read in different ways. Frankly, it is ambiguous in much of its significant content.
It evolved slowly in the seventh and eighth centuries, among a long period when Jewish and Christian sects were arguing with each other to the north of Mecca and Medina, in Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Iraq. No Islamic source material from the first century or so of Islam has survived, because it never existed. The Islamic tradition is a “salvation history”, an evangelically motivated story of a religion’s origins invented and then projected back in time. The Quran is:
several, partially overlapping, collections of logia (exhibiting a distinctly Mosaic imprint) to the image of a Biblical prophet (modified by the material of the Mohammedan evangelium into an Arabian man of God) with a traditional message of salvation (modified by the influence of Rabbinic Judaism into the unmediated and finally immutable word of God).
The Jewish Talmud was particularly influential. Whoever wrote the Quran were strongly influenced by Jewish scholars. A Soviet historian, N A Morozov, even argued that “until the Crusades Islam was indistinguishable from Judaism and… only then did it receive its independent character, while Mohammed and the first Caliphs are mythical figures”. It is a fringe view in the lateness of the date, but in its early decades Islam will have been more plainly kin to Judaism.
The dependence of Mohammed upon his Jewish teachers or upon what he heard of the Jewish Haggadah and Jewish practises is now generally conceded.Wikipedia citing the Jewish Encyclopedia
The Analysis of Crone and Cook
Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, also working at SOAS at the time, provided a seminal analysis by looking at the only surviving contemporary accounts of the Islamic invasion, written in Armenian, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac by Middle Eastern witnesses to the rise of Islam. In Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977), they challenged the Islamic belief of the Quran being revealed in Mecca and Medina to Mohammed from 610 to 632 AD. They found from sources critical of Islam at the time, that it was an Arabic conspiracy against the Byzantine and Persian empires, having deep roots in Judaism. The Arabs and Jews were allies in a plot to conquer these rich but ancient empires.
There is no hard evidence for the existence of the Quran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century.
The evidence presented is that the Quran was composed as a pseudepigraph of the Moslem prophet fifty years after his death, in the reign of Caliph Abdul Malik (685-705 AD), who sought a divine excuse for his newly conquered empire:
The Jewish messianic fantasy was enacted in the form of an Arab conquest of the Holy Land.
Mohammed is said to have died in 632 AD, and in little more than ten years Arabs had invaded Syria, Iraq, Persia, and Egypt. So, the Arab conquests preceded the institutionalization of Islam:
Mohammed’s God endorsed a policy of conquest, instructing his believers to fight against unbelievers wherever they might be found. In short, Mohammed had to conquer, his followers liked to conquer, and his deity told him to conquer.Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987)
Crone showed the incense route from Yemen to Syria bypassed Mecca by over 100 miles. Nor was Mecca the first Islamic sanctuary:
[The evidence] points unambiguously to a sanctuary in north-west Arabia… Mecca was secondary.
In tradition, Meccans persecuted Mohammed and his followers, who rejected their paganism. In 622 AD, they all moved 200 miles away northwards to Yathrib, a town which later was called Medinat al-Nabi, City of the Prophet, shortened to Medina. It was the hijra, the birth of the Islamic community, and so 622 AD is the first year of the Islamic calendar. Crone and Cook say the myth of the hijra emerged only after Mohammed died:
No seventh century source identifies the Arab era as that of the hijra.
The word “Moslem” was not used early in Islam.
There is no good reason to suppose that the bearers of this primitive identity called themselves “Moslems”… An earlier designation of the community appears in Greek as Magaritai in a papyrus of 642 AD, and in Syriac as Mahgre or Mahgraye from as early as the 640s.
So, “Moslem”, as a neologism, was invented in the eighth century instead of “muhajirun” (“migrants”), the Arabs that conquered Palestine and built the Dome of the Rock. Moslems claim it was Mohammed who told them to pray towards Mecca instead of Jerusalem once he had split with the Jews to build his faith among the Arabs. Yet, archaeological evidence from eighth century AD mosques show many prayer niches aligned north towards Palestine, not towards Mecca.
Quranic Problems
The Quran is hard to understand even by specialists in Arabic. It is often obscure, using expressions that were unknown even to the earliest exegetes, and words that do not fit in context, or suggestions of lost contexts. The style is often allusive which makes it hard to get what is going on.
The Quran claims for itself that it is mubeen, or “clear”, but if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense. Many Moslems, and Orientalists, will tell you otherwise, but a fifth of the Quranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Quran is not comprehensible—if it can’t even be understood in Arabic—then it’s not translatable. People fear that. And since the Quran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not—as even speakers of Arabic will tell you—there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on.Professor Gerd-Rüdiger Puin
Its obvious shifts in style, person, voice, audience, situation and subject show it to be patched together. Events are mentioned but not narrated, polemics are debated from one point of view only, people and places appear but are left hanging, or maybe appear named elsewhere without it being clear who they are. The audience varies from Mohammed himself through his wives and disciples to the whole Moslem community. God can be addressed in the first person and the third in the same sentence. Different repeats of stories occur. Sometimes the speaker is God swearing an oath by God (Sura 75:1-2; 90:1), surely an unlikely habit for a God. Other verses seem to be the words of angels. Vocabulary, events and narratives that no longer exist are assumed, just as any text transmitted so imperfectly would be! Divine rulings contradict so obviously it is recognized in that God can do just as He choses! An explanation is that here are extracts of ancient liturgies, hymns, recitations, commentaries and prayers, translated or adapted from other languages.
Christoph Luxenberg, The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran, proposed that the modern Quran is a misreading. Early manuscripts up until the orthography reform of Al Hajjâj bin Yûsuf (694-714 AD) differed from the modern one. At the time of Mohammed, Arabic was not sophisticated enough for scriptural composition, and Quranic Arabic is not Arabic at all. It is an Arabic dialect strongly influenced by Aramaic (Syriac), and the Arabic alphabet can be traced to an Aramaic script fitted to the needs of Arabic. Anyone learning Arabic where Syriac was also in wide use inevitably mixed up the two related Semitic languages. If Mohammed was living in a city with Christians reading and singing their scripture, liturgical terms, salat (prayer), zakat (religious charity) would merge into Arabic from Syriac:
Contemporary dialects of Arabic have many Aramaic substrata. But the languages are so close that the borrowings are unconscious.Michael Marx, Free University of Berlin
Even the word “quran” looks Syriac, from qeryana, a term in Syriac Christian liturgy meaning a “lectionary”, a set of liturgical readings. So, the original Quran was largely a Christian lectionary written in a language hybridized of Aramaic and Arabic. By the time Moslem commentators began interpreting the texts, two centuries later, Aramaic loan words were thought to have been Arabic, and this error often radically changes the meaning. In sura 19 (
A call came from beneath her: Grieve not. Thy Lord hath placed beneath thee a rivulet.
Read as having Aramaic loan words, the sentence would mean:
A call came to her straight after her laying down (giving birth): Grieve not. Thy Lord has made your laying down legitimate.
In the famous verses promising men virgins, the black eyed houris, in heaven—the incentive for sexually frustrated male suicide bombers—the Quranic passage actually used a word for white raisins. The word “hur” does not mean virgins but grapes or raisins, specifically white grapes, thought then to have been a great delicacy. So, we get:
We will let them (the blessed in Paradise) be refreshed with white (grapes), (like) jewels (of crystal).
The passage taken to be an instruction to women to wear headscarves actually tells them to wear a belt or an apron around their loins—the girdle worn by Christians originally—an adaptation of the Persian kushti. More seriously, he says Mohammed’s title “seal of the prophets”, supposedly signifying that he is the last of them, really only says he confirmed what the earlier prophets had said. This thesis also challenges the tradition that the Quran was dictated in Arabic to Mohammed by the Angel Gabriel. Unless Gabriel was getting his Aramaic and Arabic confused, the Quran cannot be the actual and unchangeable words of God. No one but fundamentalists can possibly belief it is, and more sensible Moslems from a millennium ago did not.
Luxenberg’s analysis is linguistic, not theological.
My work does not question the Quran, only the traditional exegesis of the Quran—what men have read into it.
It does question traditions and dogmas of Moslems, so it is dangerous, and Luxenburg is a pseudonym meant to protect the author from Moslem madmen. Salman Rusdie was threatened by Moslems with fatwa in 1989 for writing a novel called The Satanic Verses, and Theo van Gogh was murdered for making films criticizing the Moslem treatment of women. In the 1990s in Egypt, the writer, Faraq Foda, was shot for criticising fundamentalists, and Cairo University professor, Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, was made to divorce his wife and flee abroad for scholarly examining the Quran. In Islamic thought, many arguments raised by modern scholars have been raised by Moslem scholars many centuries ago. The trouble is that no fundamentalist, the Moslem any more than the Christian, will listen to reason. None of them have justifiable beliefs, only pious wishes and hopes they cannot bear to be wrong, and so they will not consider rational argument about them. Instead they would rather kill.
Günther Lüling thought the Quran was based on rearrangements of Judaeo-Christian strophic songs, which were modified again later in Islam. Al Hayyat at tayyiba, a journal of Shiite theology in Lebanon, was skeptical, but agreed that an Aramaic influence was feasible. Some incomprehensible Quranic expressions could have been Aramaic.
The Quran is arranged in suras of descending length, a curious principle, but one which proves that the arrangement is an arbitrary collection of mixed up traditions, and anything but divinely inspired. Moreover, it draws heavily on the beliefs and narratives of the bible without being citations from it. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Mary and Jesus all appear in their appropriate contexts but in paraphrases of the biblical stories.
References in the Quran to Christian and Jewish traditions are much more aposite to the period after the Arab conquests than to remote and even unknown tribes before them. The Quran must have grown from extended discussion between the ruling class of Arabs and the intelligentsia of the Jews and Christians whom they ruled. The earliest Islamic creed, the Fiqh Akbar I (c 750 AD) knows of no Quran, and Wansbrough notes the Quran was not used as the basis of law, or the subject of scholarly commentaries, until the ninth century.
It is in truth a randomly collected and compiled set of comments on the Judaeo-Christian bible rendered pertinent to a new imperial religion, declared authoritative by Uthman and supposedly not changed since, though its separate components were assiduously destroyed. Even Islamicists cannot agree about whether conversion by conquest is commanded, permitted or condemned. Despite all this, Quranic scholars persist in claiming it is “uniform” and therefore the genuine work of one man! One could make the same claim with better justification about the authorized version of the bible. It would still be wrong.
Sitz im Leben?
Information on the religious life of pre-Islamic South Arabia and of the Arabian borders of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires comes from archaeology, inscriptions, and other sources. Why and under what circumstances did the religion of Islam emerge in a remote part of Arabia at the beginning of the seventh century? For central Arabia, sources are mainly Arabic literary sources on Islam, and Islamic tradition maintains that Islam developed in opposition to the idolatrous and polytheistic religion of the Arabs of Mecca and the surrounding regions. Islam emphasises the paganism of the prophet’s enemies rather than their different view of monotheism, and textbooks say Arabs were pagans and worshipped idols in seventh century Mecca.
G R Hawting, from a comparative religious perspective, in The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam disagrees. A combination of Judaeo-Christian monotheism and Arabian paganism appears in the Quran, and even the polytheists believed in one creator God who ruled the world and to whom one prayed and offered worship! The Quraysh tribe were believers in the God of Abraham, but their Jewish monotheism had been corrupted by polytheism. Hawting thinks the Quran records a split among monotheists in Arabia. By examining the various bodies of evidence which survive from this period, the Quran and the vast resources of the Islamic tradition, he argues that Islam arose out of conflict with other Arabian monotheists, whose beliefs and practices were judged to fall short of true monotheism and were, in consequence, attacked polemically as idolatry.
There is a gap between the Quran and the early Moslem tradition. Ignoring Moslem tradition, the Quran is a polemic against enemies called mushrikun or “associators”, who are not idolaters in the Quran, but deviant monotheists. The mushrikun of the Quran was a euphemism for Christians. So, Quranic polemics have common monotheist themes, but the Moslem literary tradition shows the Moslems as emerging in a pagan environment, involving polemics with idol worshippers. The authors of the tradition took the Quranic arguments literally, inventing a historical context for them, when the references were really thinly veiled criticisms of Christians and Jews.
The two main issues in the Quran are worshipping beings other than God, and resurrection. The polytheists are like the Christians—meant to be the Christians—in worshipping idols—lesser beings than God. Polytheists treated angels as intercessors with God, then made them into gods, and considered some, at least, of them to be female, so they had reintroduced goddesses, calling these angels sons and daughters of God. Christians made Jesus, whether a man or an angel, into a god, and made the Virgin Mary and saints into intercessors, a type of divine being, like angels thus keeping pre-Christian gods and goddesses to be worshipped. Christians beatified ancient gods like Dionysus as Saint Denys and goddesses like the Great Mother or Isis as the Mother of God. Mohammed repeatedly insists that God is One.
Concerning the resurrection, so called polytheists were local Christians, but some of them doubted it, or rejected it, or did not accept an afterlife, many such disagreements having appeared in the Roman world before its fall. Mohammed believed that people would be resurrected, or revived from death, for a Judgement that was emphatically to be soon, just as Christian fundamentalists always think. At first, the enemies of Mohammed taunted him over this, but warfare followed, and Moslems escaped elsewhere in the hijra, an event that the Quran does not adequately describe.
All of this in the Quran is taken as evidence for the actuality of Mohammed, though such arguments could have occurred widely and simply attributed to a mythical Mohammed once the myth of a prophet was seen as useful. The sources, other than the Quran, offer no context for Mohammed. Indeed, Moslem exegetes usually ignored the Quranic context of any verse, and instead they explain it in terms of the extra-Quranic traditions of Mohammed’s life. The many biblical references were assumed to have been “foreign borrowings”, picked up in travel or from the odd Jewish or Christian sage. Now these references have to be read as intimately connected with the whole project—the authors of the Quran were participating in discussions about monotheism.
Barbara Finster showed, from archaeology, evidence of a Christian presence in all parts of pre-Islamic Arabia. Even the Kaaba in Mecca is typologically linked with Ethiopian temples that often were churches. Some Islamic sources have descriptions of a picture of the Virgin Mary in the Kaaba. Ancient Arabic cults sometimes took up Christian elements, suggesting that Christianity did penetrate deep into the Arabian peninsula. Francois de Blois (London) says the nasâra of the Quran are not traditional Christians but Judeo-Christians, Ebionim, who still existed in Arabia in late antiquity. Eusebius says some Ebionim had accepted the virgin birth, though the original ones cannot have. Ernst-Axel Knauf has argued that secondary heathen cults appeared at originally monotheistic sanctuaries.
The Quran describes the polytheists as cultivators of wheat, grapes, olives—typical of Mediterranean regions like Palestine—and date palms. Mecca was too arid for any of this, except perhaps for dates. Crone notes that polytheists are described twice in the Quran as living near the site of a vanished nation, a place destroyed by God. While there were many such places in northern Arabia close to the ancient civilizations, there were none in the center. The Quran Has Mohammed telling his enemies to think of their significance, remarking, “you pass by them in the morning and in the evening”, and mentioning Lot. It seems to be a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, but, though Arab merchants might have known the traditional sites of these ruined cities, they could not have lived near enough to them to pass them every morning and evening.
No source outside Arabia mentions Mecca before the conquests, or recognizes it when it did appear. It could have been a pagan sanctuary brought into focus, but no one knows. Its obscurity was a good reason for placing the myth there. The revelations could not, they figured, have depended on Judaism or Christianity in such a remote and pagan spot.
Imperialist Machinations
There was no singular person called “The Prophet” in Arabia, as modern Moslems seem to think. Being a prophet was a career, and the Persian dominated regions had their own prophets with messages similar to the one that ultimately emerged. They were not advocating paganism as the Quran weakly suggests, but monotheism, and in these districts, they directed it at the essentially monotheistic Persians. P Crone mentions Sajah, Musaylima and Aswad as being active against the Persians, calling them imitators of Mohammed in propounding monotheism.
Islam became a world religion in the sphere of Syriac speaking eastern Christianity. It began as a reaction to foreign imperial power. Persian influence in Arabia had lasted for a thousand years, and extended from the Syrian desert to the Hijaz. Persia had colonized much of eastern Arabia, the Najd and the Yemen. The Byzantines had had an overlapping sphere of influence for hundreds of years in western Arabia from their puppet kings in the Syrian desert to their Ethiopian allies in Yemen, until the Persians evicted them.
A profound influence of empire on neighbouring countries is the imitation of their material culture and ideas. Alongside it is a resentment at their dominance and often arrogance. One influence is the pressure to statehood, the equivalent of the influence of Assyria on the Aramaean states in Palestine and the Lebanon leading to the formation of Damascus, Samaria, Edom and Ammon. Religion is often a powerful uniting factor in this growth towards statehood. Arabia was peculiar in being so inhospitable at its core, and so such pressures took longer than one might have expected—a millennium—but the explosion of Arab power in the seventh century, allegedly driven by religious fervour shows it was building.
Rather like the Mongols, statehood came by a direct fusion of tribes, not by tribal disintegration by a prior settlement into city states as it had done elsewhere. People at the margins of empires are comparatively unsophisticated. They are considered as primitive, as barbarians, by the sophisticates of the empire. They have had no need for intricate political organizations or ideology, and rather, as the ancients did, they merge politics and religion together as part of culture. Consequently, resentment takes a religious form.
Demagogues arise to move the people to action under the guise of being a prophet of God, or even in ancient times a deity themselves. At the edge of empire, they copy much of the religious style of the successful imperialists, formulating their message in the religious style of the hated foreigners themselves, while affirming parochial identity and values. The political opposition movement arises from religion, and demands the expulsion of the colonials. Christ was a new Moses. Muhammad was another new Moses. Abraham was the father of both Jews and Arabs. Gabriel brought the religious message to the parents of Christ. Gabriel brought the same message to Mohammed. In each case, God would seek vengeance on His enemies, the occupying force. The coming of the messiah meant the Romans would be expelled from Gods country of Judaea. Mohammed saw the Byzantines expelled from Syria. Muhammad mobilized Jewish monotheism against the dominant monotheism of Christianity, and from it came Arab unity, and thence an imperialism of its own.
The impact of Byzantium and Persia on Arabia ought to be at the forefront of research on the rise of the new religion, according to Crone. Qatada, contrasting the sorry state of the Arabs in the Jahiliyya with the grandeur of Islam, said Arabs were caught between the lions of Persia and Byzantium:
Other men trampled us beneath their feet while we trampled no one. Then God sent a prophet from among us… and one of his promises was that we should conquer and overcome these lands.Attributed to Mughira b Shuba
The Arabs were impressed by the imperialist monotheisms, and counted Jews as their brothers and allies, but Byzantine Christians as aliens and enemies. The Christians of Byzantium persecuted Jews, whereas Persians had been more inclined to favour them. Moreover, the Christians of Persia and Arabia were considered heretics by the Orthodox Christians of Byzantium, and on the principle of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, these Christian heretics were favoured. So Persians, though not considered by Arabs more favourably as imperialists than the Byzantines, could play politics with the disgust of Arabian Jews and Christians with the Byzantine Christians, perhaps promoting an alliance against Byzantium that backfired. The outcome was that the Arabs picked on Byzantium first, then surprised the Sassanids by turning on them.
Quranic Alterations
Moslems are more easily offended by the truth than all but the craziest Christians. They claim objective scholarship is…
…born of spite, bred in frustration and nourished by vengeance: the spite of the powerful for the powerless, the frustration of the “rational” towards the “superstitious” and the vengeance of the “orthodox” against the “non-conformist”… Moslem consciousness must be made to despair of the cognitive certainty of the Divine message revealed to the Prophet.S Parvez Mansoor
Yet such irrational and unscholarly rage cannot disguise that some of the Quranic text had obviously replaced erased passages. Some sheets were written in the early Hijazi Arabic script, and were palimpsests—written over even earlier, erased versions. It proved there was no “cognitive certainty of the divine message” and the modern Quran was not delivered perfectly to Mohammed, just as Wansbrough and his school had theorized. The Sana’a manuscripts were evolving, just as everything does in reality. They were…
…part of the process of filling in the holes in our knowledge of what might have happened… Their variant readings and verse orders are all very significant. Everybody agrees on that. These manuscripts say that the early history of the Quranic text is much more of an open question than many have suspected—the text was less stable, and therefore had less authority, than has always been claimed.Andrew Rippin, a Canadian professor of Islamic history
My idea is that the Quran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Mohammed. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate. one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants.Scholar Gerd-Rüdiger Puin
The first compilers of the Quran were not redactors, but collectors of debris whose works are strikingly devoid of overall unity; and no particular illuminations ensue from their comparison.P Crone, Slaves on Horses
Enlightened Moslem scholars agree, but they are getting scarcer. As long ago as the late eighth century, under the Caliph al-Ma’mun (813-833), Islamic scholars accepted that the Quran, like anything that isn’t God himself, was indeed created at some particular period. For a century or so, it was Islamic orthodoxy. But others believed it to be the uncreated and eternal, “inimitable” Word of God, and they prevailed in the tenth century, and have done ever since.
Until quite recently, everyone took it for granted that everything the Moslems claim to remember about the origin and meaning of the Quran is correct. If you drop that assumption, you have to start afresh.Patricia Crone
Most Moslems do not appreciate that different conceptions of the Quran exist within their own historical tradition. Yet some do, and to their own cost in these fundamentalist times, like the Egyptian government minister, university professor, and writer Taha Hussein. In the early 1920s, Hussein devoted himself to the study of pre-Islamic Arabian poetry, concluding that much of it had been fabricated after the establishment of Islam to support Quranic mythology. A tenth century religious leader, Ibn Karram, was said to have been worthier of prophethood than Mohammed, because he lived an ascetic life and did not conduct war, and some Moslems rejected Islam and other religions because all prophets—not just Mohammed—were tricksters who used religion to start wars and accumulate worldly power. An Iranian journalist and diplomat, Ali Dashti, in Twenty Three Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammed (1985) begged his fellow Moslems to question the traditional accounts of the “myth making and miracle mongering” of Mohammed’s life.
It is time to assume, along with all of the great cultural traditions, the modern risks of scientific knowledge.Mohammed Arkoun, Algerian professor
The Yemeni authorities keep the cleaned and studiable Sana’a manuscripts free from prying eyes. The Quran is perfect, and it will remain perfect even if it is by suppressing the evidence. Christians have done the same in the past, and have even forged it, so they are no less culpable. These believers have to lie by omission or commission to preserved their faith. In fact, the German scholars have taken 35,000 microfil images and so can study the texts if they are brave enough to do it.
Fear of Moslem Madness
Since 9/11, western historians, like these, critical of the myths of Islam have kept their heads below the parapet, scared of Moslem madness, but Cook and Crone never publicaly disowned their book despite their fears. Both hold distinguished academic positions in famous eastern seabord universities. The publication of a controversial history of Islam by another Quranic higher critic, Professor Gerald Hawting, has reportedly been dropped, though Hawting denies it was ever commissioned. John Wansbrough, who founded the SOAS Quranic critical school at the SOAS, now dead, lived quietly in rural France after his retirement in 1992 fearful of Moslem reprisals.
The Quran is a scripture with a history like any other—except that we don’t know this history and tend to provoke howls of protest when we study it. Nobody would mind the howls if they came from westerners, but westerners feel more deferential when the howls come from other people: who are you to tamper with their legacy. We Islamicists are not trying to destroy anyone’s faith.Patricia Crone
Francis Robinson, who edited the Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World, says we should “not let sensitivities for Moslem feelings override all other considerations”. There should not be a law for Moslems different from the law for westerners. These pages criticize patriarchal religions as being false and dangerous. Islam is the third of the patriarchal religions, and whatever its origins, it is plainly dependent on the Jewish scriptures for its inspiration, and is therefore just as wrong as they are. Now we find that science is being suppressed to avoid mutual embarrassment between Jews and Moslems, the children of sarah and Hagar murdering each other over the legacy of their mythical father, Abraham!
A scientific paper on the common genetic roots of Jews and Palestinians has been suppressed by learned journals because of the political sensitivity of its conclusions… The censorship that plagues the Middle East seeps into every corner of intellectual life.Martyn Bright, New Statesman
New Statesman Letters
Moslems need not be outraged by anything Patricia Crone has written. In a letter to the New Statesman in reply to the article by Martin Bright, to which this essay is indebted, she makes the amazing declaration:
As everyone knows—or used to know—modern historians are not interested in the truth or falsehood of the religion they study at all.
If this is really her attitude and not an attempt to minimize any offence she has given to Moslem terrorists, then she is a disgrace who cuts away the entire basis of her own work. She must be a postmodernist who believes she can write just what she likes, and it can mean anything the reader likes, so Moslems have no need to be offended. She needs reminding that history is concerned with truth not with inventing new myths, even if it sometimes inadvertantly does that. Her justification for writing myth seems to be that:
Very few Jews and Christians make their beliefs conditional on the historicity of such claims any more.
But “the vast majority of Moslems still do”. She adds that:
It is, however, precisely such claims that historians tend to find factually wrong or, in the case of the angel, that they begin by striking out—no appeals to the supernatural are allowed in modern scholarship or science.
Is she suggesting that historians should hesitate to find religious matters factually wrong, that the supernatural has a role to play in history and that angels actually appear to sane people to give them messages from God? Presumably she supports the view of a Moslem correspondent:
If the Quran was not revealed by Allah, then there would be many errors and contradictions in it. Also, there would be many erroneous statements, myths and superstitions regarding nature and science, as the author could use only the information available at the time. But no one has been able to find any error or contradiction in the Quran, even in the verses regarding nature—embryology, geology, and so on.Dr Hamza Alam
The affinity of this Moslem nutter, doctor or no doctor, is with the Christian fundamentalist nutters, and Crone identifies herself with them in her put down of history. Even, if she is a believer herself, as a PhD she must recognize surely that God has more effective ways of intervening than trying to persuade people by angelic messengers. Or has not God caught on yet to the symptoms of human lunacy? I report on Crone’s work here in the belief that she meant it before the fundamentalist Moslems showed that they are just as insane as fundamentalist Christians, that she is not a postmodernist but simply an unprincipled coward. Readers must judge.
We get more sense from an ordained Christian:
In spite of huge advances in biblical scholarship, Ann Widdecombe can still assert… that St John’s Gospel is an eyewitness account of the life of Christ. Most scholars reject such a view. Martin Bright’s report is welcome evidence that scholarly investigation of the origins of Islam is beginning the long and painful path trodden by Christian theologians’ inquiry into our own sacred texts. Widdecombe’s acceptance of a literalist view of the gospels is still widely held by many sitting in church pews, even though the clergy have been taught otherwise for 50 years or more.Rev Richard Craig
The honest Christian might be a rarity but it is a species preferable to dishonest historians and scientists.
