Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (10 page)

Given the seamlessly mixed Qur'anic / non-Qur'anic nature of the inscription and the way the Qur'an passages are pulled together from all over the book, some scholars, including Christoph Luxenberg, have posited that whoever wrote this inscription was not quoting from a Qur'an that already existed. Rather, they suggest, most of this material was added to the Qur'an only later, as the book was compiled.

Not everyone agrees, of course. Estelle Whelan, writing in the
Journal of the American Oriental Society
in 1998, argues that if the Dome of the Rock inscriptions now found in the Qur'an actually predated the Qur'an, they would have gone into the Qur'an the way they appear on the famous mosque: “It seems particularly unlikely that the combination of phrases from 64:1 and 57:2, repeated twice, could originally have been a unitary statement that was then ‘deconstructed’ and incorporated into different parts of the Qur'an.” She thus argues that the Qur'an must have predated the inscription and served as its source.
²⁸

Although the two verses do go together very well in the Dome of the Rock inscriptions, they are not notably out of place in their contexts in the Qur'an as it stands—unlike other verses that appear to be fairly obvious interpolations (as we will see in
chapter 8
). It may be that both the Dome of the Rock and the Qur'an incorporated material from earlier sources that contained similar material in different forms. After all, if anything is a characteristic of early Islamic literature, it is repetition: Even the Qur'an itself, as brief as it is (shorter than the New Testament), tells numerous stories more than once and frequently repeats phrases. Yet all its repetitions of the same story, whether that of Moses and Pharaoh, or of Satan's refusal to bow down to Adam, contain minor variations. This is what one might expect if
this material was held in the minds of poets, prophets, and orators rather than committed to writing.

It is thus possible that the Dome of the Rock inscriptions predated the Qur'an but did not serve as its source, or at least its sole source. Qur'an 64:1 and 57:2 may simply have come from different sources, not from someone deciding to divide what appears in the Dome of the Rock inscriptions as a unified passage.

What is most unusual about the Dome of the Rock inscriptions, however, is that they may not refer to Islamic theology at all. This may seem to be an outrageous statement at first glance: After all, when the inscription warns the “People of the Book”—primarily Jews and Christians, and in this context, Christians only—not to “exaggerate in your religion” by claiming that Jesus is the Son of God, it is articulating a staple of Islamic theology and an oft-repeated assertion of the Qur'an.

But there is a grammatical difficulty with the traditional explanation of the first inscription above.
Muhammad
, remember, means “praised one” in Arabic—and, accordingly, could be a title as well as a proper name.
Al-muhammad
would be precisely the “praised one,” but the word
muhammad
here without the definite article
al-
could be a gerundive meaning “praising” or “being praised,” and hence also “the one who is being praised.” Christoph Luxenberg, a philologist, explains that in the context of the Dome of the Rock inscription, the phrase commonly translated as “Muhammad is the servant of God and His messenger” is more correctly understood as reading “praised be the servant of God and His messenger.” Luxenberg elaborates with reference to Arabic grammar: “Therefore, by using this gerundive, the text here is not speaking of a person named
Muhammad
, which was made only later metaphorically into a personal name attributed analogically to the prophet of Islam.”
²⁹

A compelling case can be made that this inscription refers not to the prophet of Arabia at all but to Jesus himself, whom the inscription clearly calls “a messenger of God,” “a servant unto God,” and finally “Your messenger and Your servant.”
³⁰

In fact, the entire inscription makes much more sense as a literary and theological statement if one understands
muhammad
as referring to Jesus. Then the whole passage is about Jesus being but a messenger of God rather than his son. By the standard Islamic interpretation, the inscription mentions Muhammad essentially in passing, identifying him as a messenger from God and his servant; then, without explanation, it turns away from Muhammad to Jesus, calling him also a messenger from and a servant of God, and spends the bulk of its time correcting Christian Christology.

If the inscription does not speak of Muhammad or reflect Islamic theology, why would it challenge the divinity of Christ? It may well offer a version of
Christian
theology differing from that of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire and the great church in Constantinople.

At the time the Dome of the Rock was constructed, the Church of Constantinople was still in the throes of a centuries-long battle to determine the exact nature of Jesus Christ. Five ecumenical councils had been held to discuss aspects of this; those who believed that Jesus was a created being, albeit a demigod, were anathematized at the first of these, held across the Bosphorus from Constantinople in Nicaea in 325. Because of the institutionalized discrimination that these heretical groups then faced, many of them left the Byzantine Empire and headed for points east. It is therefore possible that the Dome of the Rock inscription is a surviving expression of the theology of a heretical Christian group that viewed Jesus solely as a divine messenger, not as the Son of God or Savior of the world.
³¹

The specific theology of such a group has not come down to us in the many denunciations of heresies that orthodox theologians produced in these centuries. But that may be due to other factors: It could have been a politically driven attempt at theological compromise, much like Monothelitism in Christianity; such a compromise would not have corresponded exactly to the theology of any particular group. Or the silence could be due simply to the remoteness of this group from the imperial centers by the time such works were being produced, or to the group's gradual coalescing with non-Christian
monotheistic communities to the extent that most of what was distinctively Christian about the group was effaced.

The Dome of the Rock inscription, then, could be an expression of a theologically uncomplicated Arab monotheism that is deeply concerned with Christ and Christianity—to the point of polemicizing against claims of Christ's divinity. This preoccupation with Christ leaves us far short of Islam in any clearly recognizable form as the religion of Muhammad and the Qur'an. By that point in history, the specifics of that religion still had been nowhere elaborated.

Abd al-Malik and Hajjaj ibn Yusuf Introduce Islam

Seen in this light, an official inscription from 693 (or possibly 702), found on a road near Tiberias, does not necessarily refer to a fully formed Islam, with its prophet Muhammad:

In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate[.]

There is no God but Allah alone, He has no
sharik
[partner in receiving worship]

Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.

The Servant of God Abd al-Malik, Commander of the Faithful, ordered

the straightening of this mountain road.

It was made by Yahya bn al-…

In Muharram of the year three [and 70
or
and 80].
³²

Here it may seem that we finally breathe in the full atmosphere of Islam, with the denunciation of
shirk
—that is, placing partners alongside Allah—and the proclamation of Muhammad as Allah's prophet. But this inscription actually gets no more specific than those on the Dome of the Rock, which is to say that it is just as compatible with Muawiya's vague Abrahamic monotheism as with traditional Islam.

It was not until 696, five years after the Dome of the Rock was dedicated, that the caliph Abd al-Malik began to have coins minted without images of a sovereign (in line with Islam's prohibition of images) and bearing the
shahada
, the Islamic confession of faith.
³³

Thus it was Abd al-Malik who proclaimed Islam as the state religion of the empire of the Umayyads—an oddly late proclamation for an empire that was supposed to have been inspired by and founded upon Islam six decades earlier.
³⁴
The historian Robert G. Hoyland concludes that “it was pressure from rebel factions” that induced Abd al-Malik and his successors “to proclaim Islam publicly as the ideological basis of the Arab state.”
³⁵

Indeed, Abd al-Malik's rival Abdullah ibn Az-Zubair, who had revolted against the Umayyad caliphate and now controlled Arabia, Iraq, and Iran, had started minting coins that proclaimed Muhammad as the prophet of Allah as early as 685—the first such official proclamation.
³⁶
The coins carried the inscription “In the name of God, Muhammad is the messenger of God
(bismillah Muhammad rasul Allah).”
³⁷
Hoyland remarks that this “would mean that the earliest attested Islamic profession comes from an opposition party. This is not implausible. That the revolt of Abdullah ibn Az-Zubair had religious implications is confirmed by a contemporary Christian source, which says of him that ‘he had come out of zeal for the house of God and he was full of threats against the Westerners, claiming that they were transgressors of the law.’”
³⁸

Abd al-Malik emulated Ibn Az-Zubair in minting coins bearing the inscription
Muhammad rasul Allah
—“Muhammad is the messenger of God.” In 696 Abd al-Malik's associate Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (d. 714), who served as governor of Iraq after the defeat of Ibn Az-Zubair, had coins minted that contained the full text of the Islamic confession of faith:
bism Allah la ilah ila Allah wahdahu Muhammad rasul Allah
(“In the name of God, there is no deity but God on His own; Muhammad is the messenger of God”).
³⁹
(This text is different from the common phrasing of the
shahada
in some ways—for example, in placing the
bismallah
at the start.)

Even as these proclamations appeared on coins, the situation remained in considerable flux: Some coins minted in this era bore the confession of faith but still pictured rulers; one depicted rulers with crosses on their crowns.
⁴⁰

Regardless, the reign of Abd al-Malik marked an all-important turning point. His reign also witnessed the first references by non-Muslims to “Muslims,” as opposed to “Hagarians,” “Ishmaelites,” “Muhajirun,” and “Saracens,” and to the Qur'an itself. Nothing of this sort was recorded for sixty or seventy years after the Arab conquests began.

Did Abd al-Malik essentially invent Islam, or begin investing it with details about Muhammad and his teaching, to unify and strengthen his empire? The Muhammad coin that Ibn Az-Zubair minted make it unlikely that Abd al-Malik originated the idea of the Islamic prophet, but it is possible that he expropriated and greatly expanded on the nascent Muhammad myth for his own political purposes.

There are hints of this. Much of what we know of Islam may be traced to Abd al-Malik's reign. According to a hadith reported by the respected Islamic scholar as-Suyuti (d. 1505) and others, the caliph himself claimed, “I have collected the Qur'an
(jama'tul-Qur'ana).”
⁴¹
This report emerged very late, and it contradicted well-established traditions holding that the caliph Uthman, who reigned from 644 to 656, collected and standardized the text of the Qur'an. But it is hard to explain why this hadith would have been invented at such a late date unless it contained some kernel of authenticity. Other hadiths back the claim that the Qur'an came together during the reign of Abd al-Malik. Some traditions record that Hajjaj ibn Yusuf collected and edited the Qur'an. And several hadiths affirm that Hajjaj added the bulk of the diacritical marks to the core text of the Qur'an, making it possible for the first time to read it without confusion—and, not incidentally, fixing the Islamic character of the text.
⁴²
According to one hadith, the jurist Malik ibn Anas (d. 795) recalled that “reading from the
mushaf
”—that is, a codex of the Qur'an—“at the Mosque was not done by people in the past. It was Hajjaj b. Yusuf who first instituted it.”
⁴³

Intriguingly, the fifteenth-century Hadith scholar Ibn Hajar (1372–1448) notes that Hajjaj “had a pure Arabic language, he was eloquent and well-versed in the law,” and he said that “obedience to the Caliph in his every demand was compulsory for the population.”
⁴⁴
It is striking that, six centuries after Hajjaj's life, his “pure Arabic language” would persist in the memory of the Islamic community. A pure Arabic language would be useful for writing or editing Arabic scripture out of concern for obedience to the caliph and the political unity of his empire. And, for reasons we will explore later in this book, it may well have been the case that the Qur'an
needed
to be Arabicized.

The Umayyad court of Abd al-Malik and those of his successors began to expand on the hadiths about Muhammad and edit and augment the Qur'anic text to buttress their own practices and political position—a practice that the enemies of the Umayyads, the Abbasids, skillfully employed when they supplanted the Umayyads in 750.