The Faith Instinct (27 page)

Even if the coin does refer to Muhammad, its date is 70 years after the Islamic era began, according to the traditional account, with the migration or hegira of Muhammad and his followers to Medina in 622. “Before 71 A.H. [After the Hegira] he is not mentioned; after 72 A.H. he is an obligatory part of every official proclamation,” Nevo and Koren write, using the Islamic dating system.
²¹⁶

Mu‘awiyah, the first Arab ruler recorded by non-Islamic sources, and his eventual successor, Abd al-Malik, had created a large state, most of whose subjects were Monophysite or Nestorian Christians. Now they needed a unifying religion. All early documents about the formation of the Qur’an have disappeared. One very interesting text that reflects the emergence of Islam survives. It is made not of paper but of stone, and was complet
ed probably in 692, many decades before the earliest known copy of the Qur‘an. Constructed by ‘Abd al-Malik on the site of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock, like other early Islamic buildings, does not face toward Mecca. It has eight equal sides, which point if anywhere to itself as the center of worship.

The octagon’s outer inscription contains statements that are mostly in the Qur‘an and a few that are not, such as “There is no God but Allah alone, he has no associate (
lā ilāha ilā llāh wahdah, lā shar
k lahu
).” These phrases suggest that the text of the Qur’an had not yet been finalized. The inner inscription addresses the interminable Christian disputes as to whether Jesus’ nature was human, divine or some admixture of the two. Abd al-Malik takes what Nevo and Koren characterize as the Judeo-Christian position, that Jesus was a true prophet but merely human. His inscription expresses, in another non-Qur‘anic statement, the highest respect for Jesus: “Allah, incline unto your messenger and servant Jesus son of Mary and let peace be upon him the day he was born and the day he dies and the day he shall be raised alive.” The inscription continues, in mostly Qur’anic language, “The following is the truth about Jesus son of Mary, about whom you dispute: why should Allah acquire a son?”

The Dome of the Rock inscription had several purposes, Nevo and Koren write. “It called for an end to dissension, and for the population to unite into one community under their caliph, now firmly in control after several years of civil war. As the reason and justification—and framework—for this communal consensus, it presented an official religion: a form of Judaeo-Christianity, with particular emphases. To this end it took issue with, and rejected, the tenets of Trinitarian Christianity. And finally, it set within this framework an element which became the focal point of that religio
n—the Arab prophet.”
²¹⁷

Nevo and Koren raise the possibility that the Arab prophet did not in fact exist, based on their speculation that the word
muhammad
—which is used only 4 times in the Qur’an, compared with 79 mentions of Abraham, 136 of Moses and 24 of Jesus—could have meant “the chosen one” and was not in this context a proper name. Their inference is that the corpus of Islamic literature consists of layer upon layer of stories each of which builds further detail about the life and sayings of the chosen one, developing a personality, biography and whole salvation history from a single word.

There is indeed an accretionary process evident in Islamic writings, whereby a later writer is somehow able to supply the interesting historical details which an earlier writer had neglected to include. “If one storyteller should happen to mention a raid, the next storyteller would know the date of this raid, while the third would know everything that an audience might wish to hear about it,” writes Crone. Thus the Islamic historian Al-Waqidi, born in 748, relates far more copious information about Muhammad’s life than does the earlier historian Ibn Ishaq, born in 704. “No wonder that
scholars are fond of al-Waqidi,” Crone writes: “Where else does one fin
d such wonderfully precise information about everything one wi
shes to know? But given that this information was all unknown t
o Ibn Ishaq, its value is doubtful in the extreme. And if spurious information accum
ulated at this rate in the two generations between Ibn Ishaq an
d al-Waqidi, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that even more must have accumulated
in the three generations between the Prophet and Ibn Ishaq.”
²¹⁸

Crone, however, rejects Nevo and Koren’s suggestion that the
entire life of Muhammad has sprouted from a mere title, saying
Muhammad’s existence is well attested by several early texts, including an Ar
menian chronicle written in 660 and ascribed to a Bishop Sebeos
. “Most importantly,” she adds, “we can be reasonably sure that th
e Qur’an is a collection of utterances that he made in the belief that they ha
d been revealed to him by God.”
²¹⁹
Nevo and Koren, on t
he other hand, say the reference to Muhammad in Sebeos’s history is probably “a later explanation added by a copyist who saw that Sebeos did not know what he was talking about.”
²²⁰

Estelle Whelan, a critic of Wansbrough and the rejectionist school, argues that the Dome of the Rock’s inscriptions that appear to be non-Qur’anic are abbreviations of the canonical text, made to fit the limited architectural space. Nevo’s failure to find any mention of Muhammad in early Arabic inscriptions in the Negev simply reflects the fact
that Islam was developing far away in the Hijaz, Whelan argues.
²²¹

The Arab prophet may have lived, as Hawting suggests, somewhere within the matrix of Judeo-Christian monotheism, but if so the locale of his ministry, at some stage during the development of the Qur’an, was transferred from Palestine or Syria or Iraq to the purely Arab background of the Hijaz.

The Islamic era began in 622, a date held to mark Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina. But why is this era dated to a mere shift of residence rather than to the prophet’s date of birth, for instance? The year 622 was indeed of the greatest significance in the Arab world, but for a reason that has been allowed to recede from historians’ sight: it was the date on which Arab independence began.

For a century beforehand the Byzantine empire had been locked in a generally losing struggle with the Sassanid rulers of Iran. The Arab populations of Syria, Mesopotamia and Iran were caught in the middle of these rival power centers, both of which set up and manipulated vassal Arab buffer states. The Byzantines controlled the Ghassanids in Syria while the Sassanids were allied with the Lakhmid dynasty based in south
ern Iraq. In terms of the complicated Christian politics at the time, the Ghassanids were Monophysite Christians (Christ has only one nature-divine) whereas their Byzantine patrons were Chalcedonian (Christ has two natures, one divine, one human). The Lakhmids, on the other hand, were Nestorian Christians (Christ has not two natures in one person but two persons, one human, one divine).

What happened in 622 was that the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, a superb commander, decisively defeated the Sassanid army under its great general Shahrvaraz, who seven years earlier had captured and sacked Jerusalem. The defeat was so devastating that the Sassanid empire collapsed a few years later. But the Byzantine empire also had systemic weaknesses and Heraclius, rather than taking possession of the captured buffer states, simply withdrew from them. For the first time, the Arab peoples in the region were on their own. Their first ruler, who was naturally a Christian like his people, certainly recognized the importance of 622: he measured his reign from this foundational date, and a Greek inscription in his name at Gadara (in present-day Jordan) records the year in terms of kata
Arabas
—Greek for “according to the Arabians.”

All this is by way of historical background to a new statement of the revisionists’ thesis which takes their position much farther than before and directly contradicts traditional accounts of the first century of Islamic history.

The revisionists, it should be noted, constitute a small minority of the scholars in this field, and their arguments have not yet been seriously addressed or subjected to the academic cut and thrust through which new ideas are tested. If extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, the revisionists have so far provided more of the first than the second. Their position should probably at this stage be regarded as no more than a hypothesis. But their approach of testing Islamic literature against independent historical evidence is perfectly reasonable and justices a hearing for their views from both Muslim and Western scholars.

In a new book, The Hidden Origins of Islam, a collection of essays edited by Karl-Heinz Ohlig, a historian of religion, and Gerd Puin, an expert on Qur’anic paleography, the revisionists substantially extend the position described in the previous section. The Umayyad dynasty, in their view, were the first Arab rulers, there being no non-Islamic historical evidence for the existence of earlier ones. And the Umayyads, the revisionists say, were Arab Christian rulers who asserted, as against the Byzantines’ doctrine of the Trinity, that there was only one God and that Jesus, a mere human, was his messenger.

The first Arab leader who began to seize the reins of power in
the void between the two exhausted regional superpowers was Mu‘
awiyah, the founder of the Umayyad dynasty. The sign of the cro
ss appears on one of his inscriptions and on his coins, according to the Oriental nu
mismatist Volker Popp.
²²²
He based his capital at Damascus in order
to proclaim himself protector of the shrine of John the Baptist, said to be buried there. Given that in the traditional Islamic account Mu’awiyah is the fifth caliph, the difference between the revisionist and Islamic positions is evident.

The remarkable quiescence with which the populations of Syria, Palestine and Egypt yielded to Arab rule, and the strange absence of evidence for an Arab conquest, become much easier to account for under the premise that Mu’awiyah and his eventual successor Abd al-Malik were Christians. These peoples would have been yielding to Christian Arab rule, not to Muslim Arab conquest, and had no particular reason to fear that Christian Arabs would be worse masters than the widely resented Byzantines.

Mu’awiyah was a vigorous leader who launched a sustained though ultimately unsuccessful attack on Constantinople, which was beaten back with the first use of the Byzantine naval weapon known as Greek fire. Internally, the principal political problem that faced him and his successor, Abd al-Malik, was that of how to unite the Arab populations under their rule. As noted, those in the eastern parts of their domains were Nestorian Christians, and those in the west were either Monophysites or Melkites (adherents of the Byzantines’ Chalcedonian rite).

Looking for a unifying creed that all could subscribe to, ‘Abd al-Malik chose a generic phrase that in essence meant no more than “Praise Jesus!” The exact wording of this phrase in Arabic is of great significance but the theological context in which ‘Abd al-Malik placed it needs first to be outlined.

Since around 1000 B.C., the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean had been the Semitic language known as Aramaic and later as Syriac. Displacing Hebrew, Aramaic became the language of Jesus and of the Jews. Aramaic/Syriac was also the language of the early church in Syria. It long remained the liturgical language of the region and was so used by the Arabs under Abd al-Malik’s rule, even though in daily life they spoke Arabic.

Because the early Christians of Syria spoke the same language as the Jews, they were particularly open to Jewish influence and to the belief of some Jews that Jesus was no god but just another in the honored line of Jewish prophets. Syriac-speaking Christians thus had little sympathy for the trend being developed in Hellenistic Christianity to endow Jesus with divine as well as human aspects. They had no enthusiasm for the concept of the Trinity, first made official by the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, or for the interminable debates about the nature of Christ that followed from this strange, unbiblical doctrine.

In defining a unitary creed for Arab Christianity, ‘Abd al-Malik seems to have reached back to this early Syriac tradition of Jesus as a plain human prophet and used it to oppose the Trinitarian approach of Hellenistic Christianity. In the “Praise Jesus” motto he put on his coins and iin his great building, the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem, he referred to Jesus, the revisionists say, as the “messenger of God.”

Thus in Arabic, ‘Abd al-Malik’s unifying motto about Jesus was rendered as
muhammadun rasūl allāh—“
The messenger of God is to be praised.”
Muhammadun
is a gerundive, meaning “one who should be praised,”
rasūl
is “messenger” and
allāh
is “God.”

To anyone with a passing knowledge of Islam, this is a central phrase of the faith and has an entirely different meaning—“Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

What proof is there that ‘Abd al-Malik meant
rasūl allāh
to refer to Jesus? The proof, say the revisionists, is unambiguous and is provided by the inscriptions that ‘Abd al-Malik had written inside the Dome of the Rock.
“Allāhum sallī
alā rasūlika wa ‘abdika isa ibn maryam
—God bless your messenger and servant, Jesus son of Mary” states the text on the inner northwest-north face of the octagonal arcade. The inner, east-southeast face includes the words,
“Inma l-masīh
‘īsā ibn
maryam
rasūlu llāh—
For the Messiah Jesus, son of Mary, is the messenger of God.”