Muhammad, the founder of the third and youngest of the great three monotheistic faiths and by profession a merchant, was born in what is now the Hijaz province of Saudi Arabia in around 570 AD. Although the Arabian Peninsula was not the centre of any major civilization, as much of it is desert in which large-scale living has been impossible until recent times, it was a major trading region, visited by merchants and others from all around the region and beyond. Goods would have come from Europe, Africa, South Asia, and possibly from as far afield as East Asia.
However, a number of the early Arab civilizations, especially those not too distant from the sea, were not without significance. Many peoples, especially the Ethiopians, have claimed links to the Queen of Sheba, from whom Hailie Selassie, the last Emperor of Ethiopia, maintained he was descended. But the story of that Queen (known as Bilqis in Arabic) probably derived from centuries-old Ethiopian-Arab trading connections before Arabia turned to Islam. In all likelihood she was the ruler of the ancient Sheba, or Saba, now in Yemen, a civilization that went back to the eighth century BC or even earlier, and whose splendid artefacts were on show at the British Museum in 2002. In the Helleno-Roman period, the Nabataeans, an Arab tribe from present-day Jordan, rose to prominence. Their city of Petra, now in south-west Jordan, is a world-famous archaeological site and even appears in Western popular culture, in stories from Tintin in the Land of Black Gold to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Arabia, therefore, was no backwater.
By Muhammad’s time, the two great monotheistic faiths of the Middle East were already well represented in the region by significant Christian and Jewish minorities. Yet most Arabs were still polytheists of some kind or another, with a number of local pagan cults centred on Mecca, where goddess worship had existed for a long time. (The names of three of these – al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat – have come down to us in what are called the Satanic Verses of the Quran.) As the Cambridge and Princeton academic Michael Cook has written, had a sixth-century commentator been forecasting how the Arabian Peninsula would have turned out in the seventh, they might have predicted a conversion to some form of Christianity rather than the dramatic emergence of a new faith and global superpower.
Not all the Arabian Christians were Orthodox, however, and this might have had an impact on the formation of later Islamic doctrine. The Ethiopian Church, for example, has remained what is called Monophysite, which means that it does not fully recognize the simultaneous full humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ as does mainstream Christianity in all persuasions. So Muhammad might have been more familiar with these minorities rather than the majority Catholic or Greek Orthodox forms of the faith. Not only that, but Judaism was very keen to insist that God is one – thereby rejecting the Christian doctrine of the Trinity – and since Islam does the same, it is also quite possible that this too influenced Muhammad as he picked up monotheistic beliefs.
As already mentioned, around AD 600, the centuries-long war between the Roman/Byzantine Empire, and that of Persia, was slowly petering out, with both societies exhausted by so prolonged a conflict. The Byzantines were actively persecuting minority Christian groups, many of which lived in the Middle East. Various client states ringed the edges of Arabia, one loyal to the Byzantines, the other to their Sassanid rivals.
According to Muslim history, the first of the revelations to Muhammad came in AD 610 in the form of a request delivered via Jabril (known as the Archangel Gabriel to Jews and Christians) to recite a message from God. Muhammad continued to have such messages for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. As with the early Christian church, the number of disciples grew by word of mouth, a loyal band of followers began to emerge, and by 615, five years after his early revelations, Muhammad had built up a steady flow of followers. But this alienated some of the more powerful members of the Quraysh tribe, from which he came. Some of his followers were forced to flee as far away as Ethiopia, and from 620 onwards, Muhammad was in negotiations with a nearby town then called Yathrib about taking refuge in it. In 622 they agreed to receive him, and he fled there with his followers, in what we now call the hegira or hijra, and it is from this epochal event that the Islamic calendar begins. Yathrib would soon become Medina (the city of the Prophet), where Muhammad established himself as the secular, military and religious leader of the new Islamic community or umma. The early Muslims were also to raise funds by attacking enemy caravans.
Unfortunately for Muhammad, his kinsmen in Mecca still resented his growing power, and the effect that the new religion inevitably had in reducing the numbers of adherents to the old religion in Mecca, and the profits that leading townspeople made from its worshippers. This resulted in regular military conflict between Medina and Mecca, with a major battle narrowly won at Badr in the Arabian Peninsula in 624 by the nascent Islamic community. However, by the end of 629 the rulers of Mecca had given up the struggle, and Muhammad was able to spend the last two years of his life in charge of the holy city of Mecca as well as of Medina. Eventually all of Arabia, including Mecca itself, came under Muhammad’s rule.
Muhammad had no sons, only a daughter, Fatima, married to his (and her) cousin, Ali. No one could succeed him as Prophet. There were other capacities in which a successor could take the leadership of the new Islamic umma, as the Golden Age of the Islamic conquests and expansion later shows, but it was the four caliphs (literally ‘successor’ in the singular in Arabic) who succeeded Muhammad via the consensus. They became known as the Rashidun, or Rightly Guided Caliphs by the reckoning of the 85 per cent Sunni majority of Muslims today.
The first Caliph, Abu Bakr, reigned for only two years, until 634, and was the only one to die peacefully, since internal disputes became evident early on. He in turn was succeeded by Omar, under whom the rapid expansion began, first with the conquest of Egypt (following the Battle of Yarmuk in 636), then Palestine and present-day Iran after the Battle of Qadisayah in 637. He was murdered in 644, and was succeeded by Uthman under whom the Caliphate extended further to the easternmost part of today’s Iran and to the borders of Central Asia in the East and northern Africa in the West.
These successes saw a permanent withdrawal of the Byzantines from what was then the Holy Land; after Yarmuk, the Byzantine Emperors were never able to regain the lost territory, and by 751 the Iranian Empire had been vanquished. Uthman, in turn, was murdered in 656, when he was succeeded by Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali. Under Ali there was a civil war, with Ali being assassinated in 661.
The Quran remains the main source of inspiration and instructions for Muslims today, of whatever variety. Islamic scholars divide it into those passages delivered to Muhammad in Mecca, which are often more poetic or spiritual, and those when he was a ruler in Medina, and which are more down to earth. From it derives God-given law, or sharia, which is still today the official law code of Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia. Man-made justice, fiqh, exists, but does not carry the same weight.
As to the Quran’s evolution, since the text was finalized after Muhammad’s death in the reigns of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, it is not possible to know for sure what revelation came when. The Quran is a completely different book from the Jewish and Christian parts of the Bible. Taking Islamic chronology as correct (which ‘revisionist’ authors such as Michael Cook and the Cambridge academic Patricia Crone would not), the whole corpus was written over the course of just those twenty-two years. The Bible, however, was composed, by both conservative and liberal accounts, over centuries. It has sixty-six books, almost as many authors, and was put together in many languages. It is consecutive, and gives, for example, the lives of Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus sequentially, from their beginning to their end. There are different genres – historical narrative, poetry, prophecy, and teaching – often with particular books specializing in one form or another.
None of this is true of the Quran. One cannot, for example, deduce anything about Muhammad’s life from it, since he scarcely appears. The different genres are all interwoven, with themes appearing in different places. (The index in the Penguin Classic Quran is very helpful here for those for whom the text is unfamiliar, although no translation is ever valid in Islamic eyes.) The only acceptable version is the Arabic original, with the diacritical marks finalized some years after Muhammad’s death.
Inevitably non-Muslims will find there are parts of the Quran they cannnot accept. However, this should not preclude accepting a large part of Islamic tradition as historically true; furthermore the substantial amount that is persuasive in the works of revisionists, such as Cook and Crone, is no reason to upturn centuries of deeply held Islamic traditions on what happened and when. This is regardless of whether or not we believe Islam to be spiritually true, which is an altogether different matter beyond the scope of this book.
The faithful, of all kinds, will of course have their own views. I have in the past been in trouble from Christian scholars who, in rejecting Islam, also reject that, for example, Muhammad really was born in 570. Yet there is nothing to suggest that the Islamic tradition on Muhammad’s dates is wrong. Where Crone and Cook have a good case is that very few documents from the dawn of Islam actually survive. This is indeed so, but as to the historicity of when the Quran was written, there is no reason to prevent an early date unless evidence appears to the contrary.
The Quran is only canonical in its original language, Arabic, and is thus not written in the language of most Muslims today, who speak a much later and more popular form of Arabic that is often a local variety of the classical original. Classic Arabic is much older, for example, than the language of the King James (or Authorized) Version of the Bible, but because of the insistence in the Muslim world that only the original version is canonical, its style of classic Arabic has become the accepted version throughout the Arab world. To the non-Arab Muslim majority – we need to remember that most Muslims live in countries such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Central Asia – the Quran is in a foreign language.
The Quran’s structure – the largest suras, or groups of verses, first and the shortest ones last (a problem that a good index can help solve) – means it is not easy to read straight through, although extended study does provide a fairly basic knowledge of Islamic doctrine by the time the end is reached.
However, to many Muslims its directness is an advantage – the doctrines in it are clear and presented in a way that still appeals to increasing millions of people worldwide as Islam, like Christianity, remains firmly in expansion mode. In Islam the great debates have historically been around issues such as whether or not the Quran always pre-existed in eternity with Allah, or whether there was a moment at which it was created.
Next to the Quran itself are the Hadith, or recorded non-Quranic sayings of the Prophet. Here, the two main varieties of Islam possess different Hadith, depending upon whom they regard as authoritative in passing them on. All Hadith always give their source, which, writers such as Michael Cook explain, indicate their original oral history. Finally comes the sunna, or the example of the life of Muhammad – and it is from this word that the 85 per cent majority of today’s Muslims, the Sunni, derive their name.
(This percentage of 85 per cent Sunni and 15 per cent Shiite is also the one quoted in most newspapers and scholarly journals. The reasons for this split will be examined later.)
Notwithstanding the various schools of Islamic interpretation, the main thing to remember is that Muhammad was, unlike Jesus and Abraham, creating a state as well as a religious belief system, and that Islam therefore reflects that. Christians often live in countries where they are not in charge, or are actively persecuted, but, as Bernard Lewis points out, that has not been the case with most Muslims until very recent times.
(It is true that the Children of Israel became a state, many centuries after they began, and that books of the Bible such as Deuteronomy demonstrate that. But statehood was not instantaneous, as it was in Islam – and most Jews have not lived in a Jewish state for millennia. The Torah is not the law of Israel, nor the Ten Commandments of any country, however Christian.)
Muhammad did not think he was founding a new religion. For him, Islam (which literally means ‘submission’) was the final revelation of God, and he, Muhammad, was the final Prophet. Certainly the idea of the oneness and unity of God is as strong in Islam as it is in Judaism, although the Quran does not understand the Christian Trinity. It holds that the Trinity is God the Father, God the Son and Mary, whereas Christians hold that it is the first two, with God the Holy Sprit as the third member.
Patricia Crone has speculated in The Cambridge History of the Islamic World that early Islam was deeply influenced by Judaism. Many leading characters in the Hebrew Scriptures appear in the Quran, with Arabic names, such as Adam, Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (who was from the Arabian Peninsula) to name just a few. The well-known Arab Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, of 1001 Nights fame, has the same name in Arabic as Moses’ brother, Aaron in the Hebrew Scriptures when translated into Arabic, namely Aaron the Wise. Suleiman the Magnificent, the illustrious Ottoman Sultan, is Solomon when translated from the Arabic back into the original Hebrew.
However, the stories are often different in the Quran from the earlier version in the Hebrew Scriptures; for example in the former, Abraham nearly sacrifices Ishmael, from whom Arabs claim descent, rather than Isaac. Muslims would argue that the Jews (and later on the Christians) got the details wrong, and, needless to say, Jews and Christians would argue to the contrary.
At this distance the exact legacy of one faith to another is hard to prove, even though Patricia Crone has considerable validity in what she is writing. Paul Johnson, for example, in his A History of the Jews also sees Islam as an offshoot of Judaism, and there remains a very good case for this as a workable hypothesis.
In more recent years another theory of the origins of Islam and of the Quran has gained academic credence, notably through the work of American academic Fred Donner, of the University of Chicago (and his 2010 book Muhammad and the Believers at the Origins of Islam). In his fascinating ‘believers’ theory, Donner suggests that Islam originally (certainly in Muhammad’s lifetime) was not as exclusive as it later became. Initially believers of Islam consisted of monotheists, including the group that later became known as those who ‘submitted’ (from which the word Islam derives). However, Donner contends that Jews and Christians, some of whom might even have fought in the early armies of the Caliphate and several of whom we know held high office (most notably the Christian writer later called John of Damascus), were also included in this group.
It was not until well into the Ummayad Caliphate, this theory states, and in particular the rule of Caliph Abd al-Malik (685–705), that Islam became the exclusive religion that we recognize today. Now Jews and Christians are viewed as ‘peoples of the Book’ but exist outside of the umma or community of believers. Donner’s thesis argues that because of the early lack of distinction during the early conquests, non-Muslim peoples, overrun by the armies of the Caliphate, would have been less likely to resist since they would not have seen Islam as a foreign or oppressive religion at that time.
In considering other scholarship about this early Islamic period, Donner states that there is a major ‘problem of sources’ since none dates from the foundations of Islam itself, but from much later. However, unlike other scholars, Donner suggests a much shorter timeframe (thirty-plus years rather than, for example, a whole century and more) between the foundation of Islam and its earliest sources. It follows, according to Donner’s theory, that though the early sayings and stories of Islam might not have been contemporary to Muhammad, they are certainly not as far away from his lifetime, and from those who would remember him, as others have suggested.
Donner’s thesis is certainly appealing. Among other things, it describes Muslims, Jews and Christians as far closer together at the dawn of Islam than both the traditional story and scholarship to this date, which posit Islam against Christianity from the outset. If Donner is right, his theory should benefit the civil relations and human rights of Christian minorities in Islamic countries. But, like David Rohl’s equally attractive thesis on Egyptian chronology that we saw earlier, Donner’s theory is also very hard to prove given the lack of concrete evidence either way. Needless to say, his is not a proposition that will find supporters in strict Islamic circles and maybe not even outside of the Western academic community. But it is an interesting angle to consider nonetheless.
Islam has five pillars upon which all Muslims agree. The first is the statement made upon conversion, the second is prayer, the third is alms-giving, the fourth is fasting (particularly during the holy month of Ramadan) and the fifth is the pilgrimage to Mecca.
However, from the seventh-century Kharijites – a group who felt that any doctrinal compromise was wrong – to twenty-first-century fanatics, there is a controversial sixth pillar, that such people would add. This is jihad.
Jihad means different things to different Muslims, and has also, some would argue, changed meaning over time. Like Muhammad himself and as with the Crusades, the concept of jihad has become a political football in the debate on what Islam is really like. Those who would defend Islam as a genuine religion of peace take one interpretation, and those who would declare war on the infidel West, and those Muslims not of their own opinion, would interpret this term very differently: with violence.
According to an early Hadith, Muhammad distinguished between the Greater Jihad, namely the internal struggle for a Muslim to lead a more holy life (akin to the Christian concept of sanctification) and the Lesser Jihad, or holy war, taken in the name of God against infidels.
Bernard Lewis and others are surely right to say that the original concept of the word – warfare in God’s name – was the prevalent early meaning. Not only was Muhammad a conqueror but his successors, the Caliphs, embarked on a massive campaign of global conquest after his death. Furthermore, interpreters such as Ibn Taymiyya in the fourteenth century also took this view. However, over the course of time many Muslims clearly decided that the Greater Jihad – non-violent inner struggle – was the essential real meaning of the term.
This is what Akbar Ahmed argues in his books Islam Today and Discovering Islam, and American academic John Esposito in Islam: The Straight Path. Some commentators such as David Pryce-Jones and Daniel Pipes will not accept this, and neither of course do those radical Muslims for whom the first century of Islam remains an inviolate role model. Nor, as Pipes pointed out in 2002, is there any academic consensus on the matter. It is a shame that in many books there is no via media, or area of grey, with religious belief being seen either as perfect or as perfidious. Once more, readers will have to judge for themselves.
With Muhammad, as with Abraham the original Jew, and Jesus Christ the founder of Christianity, the same issue presents itself – no independent narratives of his life exist outside of the texts of the religion that he inspired. In Muhammad’s case the difficulty is greater, because, unlike the Hebrew Scriptures or the Christian New Testament, the Quran does not refer directly to the life of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Piecing together his life is thus problematic, since not even Muslim sources tell us a great deal about his life before he began receiving what he believed to be revelations from God. As Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair say in their book (and acclaimed TV series of the same name in the USA), Islam: A Thousand Years of Faith and Power, ‘Little is known about the early life of Muhammad, and most of it has been embellished by later retellings.’
Speculation about Muhammad can even be dangerous. With Christianity, the Church has not persecuted for centuries. In Judaism, the modern Reform version has existed equally peacefully with the more conservative Orthodox varieties. But Islam is still, in many parts of the world, a state-linked faith where heterodox opinions can lead to death, persecution or exile in some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, even today.
As a result, many of the critics of traditional Islam have been outsiders, such as Patricia Crone. Her book, Hagarism, jointly written with Michael Cook, takes the same view of the origins of Islam as a myth that many similar commentators do of the existence of characters such as Abraham or Moses. It is however a minority view, as the book admits. The best-known internal critic, Ibn Warraq, the author of commentaries on the text of the Quran, has had to write under a pseudonym for fear of what would happen to him and his family if his true identity became known.
(Michael Cook has written two popular works on the origins of Islam – Muhammad and The Koran: A Very Short Introduction. The books by writer Karen Armstrong, such as A History of God, would be more representative of Western thinking. But to be fair, as Cook points out, heterodox opinion in the Islamic world can lead to death threats. This has occurred recently, when the Egyptian scholar Abu Zayd had to flee for his life for expressing views on the Quran that would be considered normal if applied to the Bible in Divinity faculties in the West. The same became notoriously true in the West when the novelist Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses, a work considered highly blasphemous across the entire Islamic world and which led the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to sentence Rushdie to death.)
Ironically, conservative Muslims often quote from theologically liberal Western New Testament scholars to attack Christianity, while not allowing that kind of dissent about the Quran. However equally theologically traditional Christian scholars will quote from Abu Zayd and Ibn Warraq on the Quran, while disliking redaction criticism of the Bible.
Even a well-known apologist for moderate but theologically conservative Islam, like Akbar Ahmed, has come under far more attack from hard-liners on his own side, despite his defence of the Muslim faith to worldwide audiences in the West. (Ahmed also points out in Islam Under Siege that to refer to Muslim fundamentalists is misleading. In a theological sense, most Muslims are fundamentalist, but equally the majority is also strongly opposed to both violence and fanaticism.)
Unfortunately, discussion on Islam has also become embroiled in the culture wars in the USA, with the neoconservatives now attacking Muhammad in a very personal way. This is particularly unhelpful, since civilized discussion is highly desirable in an era in which religious terrorism has sadly become a major issue of our time. Mutual understanding is surely preferable to trading insults.
A classic example of this is the success of a recent book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), whose title reveals a great deal. Such polemics only increase heat between Muslims and the rest of the world, with the unfortunate consequences that are all around us. As will be argued later, the Crusades were a complete disaster from a Western, let alone an Islamic, point of view, and to defend such past activities only stokes the fires of discord.
Islam, an unknown commentator once remarked, is the only major global religion founded by a businessman. While that is a good description of Muhammad’s career as a successful merchant before the new faith began, that is not how Muslims would see it.
Like Abraham, Muhammad never proclaimed himself to be divine. Also like Abraham, he found himself a monotheist in a society in which polytheism was the tribal norm. In both cases each man felt God speaking to him, revealing a direct message that was not just to an individual, but with major consequences down the centuries.
Unlike Abraham, however, the revelations were not just to Muhammad and his descendants, but to all those who would listen, regardless of their ethnic origins. This is similar to Christianity and the message of Jesus. Here too Islam starts to diverge radically from both Christianity and Judaism, as several writers have pointed out. Neither Judaism nor Christianity has political or military origins. The first 400 years of Judaism saw the children of Israel as slaves in Egypt. For its first three centuries, Christianity was an illegal, persecuted faith. Islam however was both a political entity and military force right from the beginning.
The implications of this radically different origin of Islam have had consequences down to our own times. Judaism was finally separated, for all intents and purposes, from its original kingdom in the first century ad, although the process had started long before that. It therefore developed as a religion quite independent of state power and continued so to do until the creation of the Israeli State in 1948. Yet even now, most Jews continue to live outside Israel, and some parts of the faith – notably the ultra-conservative Hasidic Jews – reject the very concept of a Jewish state until the Messiah has returned.
There are still countries where Christianity remains the state religion. But as we shall see, from the seventeenth century onwards the links between Church and State became looser, with toleration given firstly to Christians who did not belong to the official Church, and, later on, to those of other beliefs and none at all. This is a split that has yet to take place in many Muslim countries, and the origins of this issue go right back to the creation of Islam itself.
It is the combination of religion and political power, and the role that the state plays in relation to religion and religious practice, that demarks Islam from Christianity and Judaism. Jews were under alien rule from the eighth century bc onwards and the Christians, as we saw, were persecuted for their first 300 years, and have, in the West, long ceased to make religious adherence compulsory. But it is not the same with Islam, and this key differential today makes it hard for Muslims, principally those in the West, to be under the rule of those who do not accept the Islamic faith.
Western writers usually put it in terms of there being no Church–State distinction in Islam. While true of the Jewish kingdoms and of Christianity in much of its history, such a lack of distinction is a result of history in these two faiths rather than being inbuilt from the very beginning. Islam has, in that sense, always been a religion of state power, with no political/ religious divide. This is why the loss of such power to the Europeans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been so traumatic, as the final chapter will show. (The same applies too to Muslims living in the West, outside of the domain of Islamic law.)