The Faith Instinct (26 page)

Christianity is a complex set of beliefs and practices. There i
s little reason to think that all are necessarily drawn from a
single religious tradition. The date of Easter coincides with Passover, itself adapt
ed from a spring agricultural festival. The birth of Jesus is celebrated at the wint
er solstice, the date when devotees of the Roman sun god, Sol I
nvictus, celebrated the sun’s rebirth.
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Sunday is a day of r
est in Christian countries because in 321 the emperor Constanti
ne himself declared it should be so—in honor of Sol Invictus. It seems likely that the early church
, with the aim of attracting new followers, may have appropriat
ed some of the beliefs as well as the symbols and ceremonial dates of other religio
ns. The Christian Holy Week and Easter resembled the Attis cult
’s Day of Blood and the Hilaria, days marking the death and the resurrection o
f Attis. Both festivals had an all-night vigil with lights and
were so similar that pagan critics of the fourth century accused the church of plagiarism.
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Judaism is a religion that generates an extraordinary degree of cohesion. But it was and is confined by its practices to a single ethnic group. The framers of Christianity saw how a mystery cult adaptation of the Jewish religious tradition could be made to transcend Judaism’s tribal boundaries. They succeeded so well that they captured an empire and defined a civilization.

Two centuries of scholarship have uncovered much of the historical background of Judaism and Christianity. As described above, the steps by which Judaism was molded from a Canaanite agricultural cult into a state religion are reasonably clear. So too is how Paul fused Judaism with elements of the mystery cults to create a powerful new faith, one so attractive that Roman emperors eventually embraced it as a unifying imperial creed.

Islam, the third great monotheism, has long resisted such analysis. The Qur‘an is presented as a revelation that is not to be doubted. Islamic history includes an explanation of why the Qur’an has no history—the caliph who compiled the canonical version is said to have ordered all earlier manuscripts to be destroyed. Most scholars believe that the corpus of Islamic historical writings, though of varying reliability, holds the essential facts of Islam. Only recently have a few resea
rchers started from the position that all Islamic writings are suspect as historical accounts and that the historical origins of Islam first must be sought in non-Islamic sources.

The documentary evidence for the origins of Islam consists of the Qur’an; the interpretations of it, known as Tafsir; the Sirah, or lives of Muhammad that also record the development of the Islamic state; and the Sunna, statements that justify points of Islamic law, together with the Hadith, or sayings attributed to Muhammad. Textual analysis of these documents has lagged behind that of the Old and New Testaments, and Western scholars have differing views on the degree of historical weight that should be accorded to the corpus of Islamic writings.

Traditionalists believe that the collection of Islamic document
s, although full of internal inconsistencies, contains essential historical truths,
which can be extracted by diligent study. A small number of rev
isionists, also known as rejectionists, view the documents as “salvation history,”
or nonhistorical literature designed to wrap a theological mes
sage in historical trappings; they see non-Islamic sources and archaeology as more r
eliable evidence of the period. “It is not generally appreciated,” write
s the Islamic historian Patricia Crone, “how much of our information on the rise of
Islam, including that on Meccan trade, is derived from exegesis of the Qur’an
, nor is it generally admitted that such information is of dubi
ous historical value.”
²⁰⁴
According to another historian of the Isl
amic world, Jonathan Berkey, “The reader should at least understand that the u
sual accounts of the origins of Islam are based on sources of dubious historical value.”
²⁰⁵

Here, for instance, is a recent account, based on the traditionalist method, of the battle of Yarmuk of A.D. 636. Islamic sources hold the battle to have been a turning point in the Arab conquest of the Byzantine empire’s holdings in the Near East. “The battle of Yarmuk is, along with the battle of Qadisiya in Iraq, one of the major conflicts that has come to symbolize the Muslim victories in the Fertile Crescent,” writes the historian Hugh Kennedy. “As with Qadisiya, the Arab accounts are extensive and confused and it is difficult to be clear about exactly what happened. There is no contemporary or reliable account from the Byzantine point of view.”
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The revisionist view of the event is this: there is confusion among the Arab accounts of this allegedly crucial battle, and no Byzantine account, for a simple reason—there was no battle of Yarmuk, nor indeed an Arab conquest.

The revisionist view of early Islamic history is described in more detail below because, if true, it furnishes a case study of how a religion can be adapted with great success to a state’s purposes. The conclusions of this minority view may not yet be widely accepted, but its methodology of giving serious weight to archaeology, and to non-Islamic texts, seems a reasonable approach.

According to traditional Islamic history, Muhammad converted his followers to Islam before his death in 632. The first caliph Abu Bakr, ruling from Mecca in the Hijaz, the western region of the Arabian peninsul
a, directed Muslim armies northward to conquer the Near Eastern provinces of the Byzantine empire in the name of Islam. Many have noticed the parallel between this account and that of the Hebrew Bible; Muhammad, like Moses, died in the desert without seeing the Promised Land, and Abu Bakr, like Joshua, was the trusted general who implemented the prophet’s design.

The revisionist view is different. Arabs didn’t invade Syria and Palestine because they were already there, say Yehuda Nevo, an archaeologist at the Negev Archaeological Project, and his colleague Judith Koren of the University of Haifa. And the Arabs could not have been Muslims at that time; the word
Islam
does not appear in history until inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, built in 692, and its meaning even there is disputed.
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The policy of the Byzantine empire was to settle Arab tribes in border areas of Syria and Palestine, both to prevent them from raiding and to rely on them for defense. Eventually the Byzantines decided to withdraw altogether from their Near Eastern provinces, establishing their line of defense just south of Antioch in northern Syria. In 632 they even stopped payments to their Arab allies. Syria and Palestine were on their own.

The Arabs who had been settled in those provinces found that they had only to push and one territory after another fell into their hands. There was a struggle for dominance between rival Arab tribes until one ruler, Mu‘awiyah, defeated all the others. Coins suggest he was the first Arab ruler, reigning from Damascus from 661 to 680. No caliph’s name before Mu’awiyah is mentioned in non-Islamic manuscripts, meaning that there is no independent evidence of their existence. And if there was a great invasion “it would seem that, at the time, nobody noticed,” Nevo and Koren assert.

A similar conclusion has been reached by Peter Pentz, an archae
ologist at the National Museum of Denmark, who describes the Arab takeover as “
the invisible conquest” because of the lack of historical
or archaeological evidence to support the Muslim accounts of invasion.
²⁰⁸

The proposal that the Arab takeover came about through an uprising in place, not an invasion from Mecca, would ease several geographical problems in the traditional account. Archaeological and literary evidence shows that some early mosques in Iraq and Egypt were oriented to an unknown sanctuary in northwest Arabia, not toward Mecca.
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The Hijaz was very sparsely populated during the period. Though the traditional account portrays Mecca as a thriving trade center, the historian Patricia Crone has shown it did not lie on the trade routes from Yemen and is not mentioned by the classical geographers.

The Qur’an itself has several details that point to its composition in a setting farther north. Muhammad’s opponents are said to have grown grain, olives, grapes and dates, but Mecca is unsuitable for any kind of agriculture. The pagans are invited to reflect on the destroyed cities of Lot’s peop
le, given that “you pass by them in the morning and in the
evening,” suggesting a location near the Dead Sea.
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A broader point is that the Qur’an assumes its readers are familiar with the Pentateuch and the Psalms. It contains many polemical passages, which give the impression of having been developed within a rich environment of Christian-Jewish theological discourse. The Hijazi desert seems less likely as the locale for this development than somewhere in the more populous regions of Palestine, Syria or Iraq. “Islam is obviously part of the Semitic monotheistic tradition and must have arisen within its matrix, and it is not futile to attempt to define rather more precisely how that happened,” writes G. R. Hawting, a historian at the London School of Oriental and African studies.
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The canons of both the Old and New Testaments took shape over several centuries before being frozen in their present forms. It would be no surprise if the same were to be true of the Qur‘an. But the traditional account allows little leeway for such a process. In traditional belief, the Qur’an was dictated by an angel to Muhammad, preserved on palm leaves, flat stones and in people’s memories, and assembled from these disparate sources within a few decades of Muhammad’s death in 632; whereupon the Caliph ‘Uthman, who had directed that a standard text be prepared, “gave orders to burn every leaf or codex which differed from it.”
²¹²
In the revisionist view, the process took much longer, and at least in part in the setting of sectarian religious communities somewhere in Palestine, Syria or Iraq.

The founder of the revisionist school was John Wansbrough, a hi
storian at the London School of Oriental and African Studies wh
ose principal works were published in the late 1970s. After a t
extual analysis of the Qur‘an, Islamic interpretations of the Qur’an, and the Sirah, he concl
uded that all belong to the genre of “salvation history,” meaning that the wri
ting is a literary description of religious events, not a historical account. Withou
t independent corroboration, a historian simply could not asses
s how much of the Islamic corpus corresponded to fact. “With neither artifact
nor archive, the student of Islamic origins could quite easily become victim of a li
terary and linguistic conspiracy,” Wansbrough wrote.
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Wansbrough concluded that the Qur‘an was assembled over a
long period of time and probably did not take final form until
around 800, more than 150 years after Muhammad’s death. The interpretations o
f the Qur’an, called Tafsir, and other Islamic documents were shaped with a sp
ecific purpose, in his view:
“Tafsir
traditions, like traditions in every othe
r field, reflect a single impulse: to demonstrate the Hijazi origins of Islam.”
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The insistence that Islam originated in the Hijaz, in Wansbrough’s view, suggested there had been an internal debate, now lost, as to whether or not that was the case.

Why should the Qur‘an and Muhammad’s life have been located in the Hijaz if in fact the origin of both was elsewhere? The revisionists’ proposal is that the shapers of the Qur’anic canon, who were
perhaps scholars working under the caliphs, believed the prophet of the new religion
would fittingly have had an Arabian identity and needed to hav
e lived in a place that clearly distanced Islam from both Judaism and Christianity.

Wansbrough’s work is not widely known, in part because of
the obscurity with which he wrote. One scholar has accused him of “relentless
opacity,” a charge against which even his admirers may b
e reluctant to defend him.
²¹⁵
His ideas are known mostly through the wr
itings of his students and others. Following up on his work, the historians Patricia Crone and Michael Cook reviewed all the non-Islamic sources they could find and tried on that evidence to reconstruct early Islamic history.

Accounts from the 640s in Syriac, the version of Aramaic spoken in Syria, refer to the Arabs as
Mahgraye,
which can be rendered as Hagarenes—descendants of Hagar—in English, and the equivalent word
Magaritai
appears in Greek sources. Crone and Cook suggested the roots of Islam lay in Hagarism, a Jewish-Arab movement to repossess Jerusalem from the Byzantines, whom both peoples had reason to resent. But after Jerusalem was captured, the Arabs broke with their Jewish allies and entertained an alliance with Christianity instead. The rapprochement was temporary but is vividly captured in the surprisingly pro-Christian inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The rulers of the new Arab empire then decided they needed to develop a faith of their own, independent of both Judaism and Christianity.

Nevo and Koren have developed a different perspective on Islamic origins. From study of coins and inscriptions on rocks and buildings, they have defined a period of Arab monotheism during which writings often included the
tawhid,
the assertion that Allah is the one god, which was intended to contradict the Christian belief in the Trinity. Strangely, the earliest
tawhid
inscriptions make no reference to Muhammad. The first known historical reference to Muhammad may occur on an Arab-Sassanian coin minted in Damascus in 690/691, depending on how the coin’s legend—
muhammad rasul allah
—is translated. “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah” is the obvious translation but another, to be considered later, is “The messenger of God is to be praised.”