Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (32 page)

Among the hadiths pointing to Hajjaj ibn Yusuf as a collector of the Qur'an, one cites a Muslim recalling: “I heard al-Hajjaj b. Yusuf say, in a speech delivered from the pulpit
(minbar)
, ‘compose the Qur'an as Gabriel composed it: the writings that include the mention of the cow, and the writings that include mention of women, and the writings that include mention of the family of ‘Imran.’”
²⁸
The Cow is sura 2 in the standard text of the Qur'an; Women is sura 4; and the Family
of Imran is sura 3. This hadith thus suggests that the Qur'an had not yet been collected at the time of Abd al-Malik and Hajjaj. The fact that Hajjaj mentioned the suras out of their canonical order adds to that impression, for one who knew Hajjaj well recalled: “When I heard al-Hajjaj reading, I realized that he had long studied the Qur'an.”
²⁹
Hajjaj is even said to have altered eleven words of the Qur'anic text.
³⁰

Hadiths show Hajjaj throwing himself into the work of collecting the Qur'an. One reports him as taking to the task with an incandescent ferocity; in the hadith, he pronounced that if he heard anyone reading from the Qur'an of Abdullah ibn Masud, “I will kill him, and I will even rub his
mushaf
with a side of pork.”
³¹
On occasion he even dared to boast about his work. When Muhammad died, the prophet's slave Umm Ayman (who had been his daughter-in-law, as the wife of his former adopted son, Zayd) cried disconsolately: “I know well that God's Messenger has left for something better than this lowly world. I am crying because the inspiration has stopped.” When Hajjaj heard about what Umm Ayman had said, he responded: “Umm Ayman lied: I only work by inspiration.”
³²
Such a statement is placed in the context of Hajjaj's work on the Qur'an. Of course, the Abbasids, who replaced the Umayyads, are known to have fabricated numerous hadiths portraying their rivals in a bad light. So this hadith may have been an invention of Hajjaj's enemies, along with Hajjaj's more famous, or notorious, statement to Abd al-Malik that Allah's caliph was more important to him than his prophet.
³³
Even if that is the case, however, it testifies to Hajjaj's fame as the editor of the Qur'an—if not its actual author.

Like Uthman, Hajjaj is said to have sent official copies of his revised Qur'an to all the Muslim provinces. The jurist Malik ibn Anas (d. 795) said that al-Hajjaj “sent the
mushaf
[the codex of the Qur'an] to the capitals. He sent a large one to Medina. He was the first to send the
mushaf
to the cities.”
³⁴
Also like Uthman in the canonical account, Hajjaj ordered all variants burned. The original copy that Uthman approved did not survive, even according to Islamic tradition. A hadith holds that when Hajjaj's
mushaf
arrived in Medina, Uthman's
family indignantly asked that it be compared with the Qur'an of their illustrious forbear, saying, “Get out the
mushaf
of Uthman b. Affan, so that we may read it.”
³⁵
Someone asked Malik ibn Anas what had happened to it; Malik answered, “It has disappeared.”
³⁶
It was said to have been destroyed on the same day Uthman was assassinated.
³⁷

Coming from hadiths, the information about Hajjaj and the collection of the Qur'an has no more presumption of authenticity than the reports in any other hadith. But it is easy to understand why Hajjaj and Abd al-Malik, if they were collecting and editing the Qur'an, would have ascribed their work to Uthman, so as to give it a patina of authority and authenticity. It is much harder to understand why any Muslim would have invented hadiths saying that Abd al-Malik and Hajjaj did this work if Uthman had already done it decades earlier and the standardized Qur'an had been available throughout the Islamic world all that time.

In any case, hadiths are not the only sources for the claim that Abd al-Malik and Hajjaj collected the Qur'an. Another indication appears in polemical letters that the iconoclastic Byzantine emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717–741) purportedly wrote to the caliph Umar II (717–720). No text of these letters survives that goes back earlier than the late eighth century, so it cannot be said with certainty that Leo III actually wrote them, at least in the form in which they have come down to us.
³⁸
Nonetheless, the letters offer evidence that the Qur'an was widely believed to be Hajjaj's work:

It was ‘Umar, Abu Turab and Salman the Persian who composed that (“your
P'ourkan”
[or
Furqan])
, even though the rumour has got around among you that God sent it down from the heavens…. As for your [Book], you have already given us examples of such falsifications and one knows among others of a certain Hajjaj, named by you as governor of Persia, who had men gather your ancient books, which he replaced by others composed by himself according to his taste and which he disseminated everywhere in your nation, because it was easier by
far to undertake such a task among a people speaking a single language. From this destruction, nonetheless, there escaped a few of the works of Abu Turab, for Hajjaj could not make them disappear completely.
³⁹

Abu Turab, “Father of the Soil,” was a title of Ali ibn Abi Talib—earned by his many prayers, which involved prostrations that resulted in a permanent mark on his forehead.

The Christian al-Kindi, who wrote between 813 and 833—well before the most authoritative Hadith collections came together—asserted that Hajjaj “gathered together every single copy” of the Qur'an he could find “and caused to be omitted from the text a great many passages. Among these, they say, were verses revealed concerning the House of Umayyah with names of certain persons, and concerning the House of Abbas also with names.” Then Hajjaj “called in and destroyed all the preceding copies, even as Uthman had done before him.”
⁴⁰

Al-Kindi contended that the text of the Qur'an had been altered, noting that “the enmity subsisting between Ali and Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman is well known; now each of these entered in the text whatever favored his own claims, and left out what was otherwise. How, then, can we distinguish between the genuine and the counterfeit?”
⁴¹
He continued: “And what about the losses caused by Hajjaj?…How can we make an arbiter as to the Book of God a man who never ceased to play into the hands of the Umayyads whenever he found opportunity?”
⁴²

How indeed? The answer to al-Kindi's question is not clear. What can be determined is that the dominant Qur'anic text today appears to derive from Hajjaj, not Uthman.

Shaky Foundations

Even if the Dome of the Rock inscriptions are taken at face value as a declaration of the Islamic faith as we know it today, it is exceedingly
strange that they are the first clear declaration of Islamic faith. Dating from 691, they were written six decades after the Arab conquests began. Meanwhile, the textual variants in the Qur'an are striking enough simply for existing; after all, if the Qur'an was standardized and distributed early on, and the alternate copies burned, variants should not have emerged. Similarly, if it was well established that Uthman collected the Qur'an, and if a common Qur'an was in widespread use among the early Arab conquerors, there is no clear reason why alternative explanations for the origins of the book would have been invented.

All this and, as we have seen, much more demonstrates that the canonical account of the origins of Islam is far shakier than most people realize.

The Canonical Story

I
n broad outline, the accepted story of Islam's origins is well known. It begins with an Arabian merchant of the Quraysh tribe of Mecca, known to the world as Muhammad, a name that means the “praised one.” He rejected the polytheism of his tribe and was given to frequent prayer in the hills and caves outside Mecca. In the year 610, when he was forty, he was praying in a cave on Mount Hira, about two miles from Mecca, when he was suddenly confronted by the angel Gabriel, who commanded him to
recite.

For the next twenty-three years, until his death in 632, Muhammad did just that: He recited the messages he received from Gabriel, presenting them to his followers as the pure and unadulterated word of the supreme and only God. Many of his followers memorized portions. The Arabia in which Islam was born was an oral culture that respected poetic achievement, and thus the prodigious feats of memory required to memorize lengthy suras were not so unusual. After Muhammad's death, the revelations he had received were collected together into the Qur'an, or “Recitation,” from the accounts of those who had memorized them or written them down.

Muhammad began his career simply as a preacher of religious ideas. But his uncompromising monotheism cut directly against the entrenched polytheism of the Quraysh—and against their lucrative
business in the Ka‘ba, the shrine that attracted pilgrims from all over Arabia. The Quraysh scoffed at the preacher, his words of Allah, and his prophetic pretensions. Tensions steadily increased until finally Muhammad fled from Mecca after learning of a plot afoot to assassinate him. In 622 he and the Muslims left Mecca and settled in the city of Yathrib. This was the
hijra
, or flight, which marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar (years are given as “
A.H
.,” after the Hijra). Because of this momentous migration, Yathrib came to be known as the
Madinat an-Nabi
, or the City of the Prophet—Medina.

Once the Muslims were in Medina, the revelations Muhammad received began to change in character. In addition to warning of the impending judgment of Allah, he called the believers to take up arms in the defense of the new community and ultimately to fight offensive wars against nonbelievers. Muhammad himself led the Muslims into battle against the Quraysh and other pagan Arab tribes. This series of battles forms the backbone of Islamic salvation history, illustrating the core point that obedience to Allah brings success in this world as well as the next, and that the converse is also true: Disobedience will bring earthly disaster as well as hellfire.

After Muhammad died, his teachings lived on. Muslim warriors, energized by the prophet's exhortations to jihad and his example in unifying Arabia, embarked on a series of conquests unprecedented in their breadth and swiftness: Syria and the Holy Land by 637, Armenia and Egypt in 639, Cyprus in 654, and North Africa in the 650s and 660s. By 674 the Muslims were besieging Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. A century after the death of their warrior prophet, they controlled a vast empire stretching across the Middle East and North Africa. Even as the Islamic Empire's political fortunes waned, its cultural and religious grip did not loosen: Now fourteen hundred years after its birth, Islam has receded from only a handful of areas it conquered.

And it all depends on the words and example of Muhammad, the last prophet.

Muslims around the globe, who number more than a billion,
are not the only ones who take this account for granted; even non-Muslims generally accept the broad contours of this narrative, which has been told and retold for centuries.

By now, however, it is clear that, aside from the Arab conquests themselves, virtually none of the standard account could have happened as stated.

A Revisionist Scenario

After the investigations of the preceding chapters, here is what we know about the traditional account of Muhammad's life and the early days of Islam:

• No record of Muhammad's reported death in 632 appears until more than a century after that date.

• A Christian account apparently dating from the mid-630s speaks of an Arab prophet “armed with a sword” who seems to be still alive.

• The early accounts written by the people the Arabs conquered never mention Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur'an. They call the conquerors “Ishmaelites,” “Saracens,” “Muhajirun,” and “Hagarians,” but never “Muslims.”
¹

• The Arab conquerors, in their coins and inscriptions, don't mention Islam or the Qur'an for the first six decades of their conquests. Mentions of “Muhammad” are nonspecific and on at least two occasions are accompanied by a cross. The word can be used not only as a proper name but also as an honorific.

• The Qur'an, even by the canonical Muslim account, was not distributed in its present form until the 650s. Contradicting that standard account is the fact that neither the Arabians nor the Christians and Jews in the region mention the Qur'an until the early eighth century.

• During the reign of the caliph Muawiya (661–680), the Arabs constructed at least one public building whose inscription was headed by a cross.

• We begin hearing about Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, and about Islam itself in the 690s, during the reign of the caliph Abd al-Malik. Coins and inscriptions reflecting Islamic beliefs begin to appear at this time also.

• Around the same time, Arabic became the predominant written language of the Arabian Empire, supplanting Syriac and Greek.

• Abd al-Malik claimed, in a passing remark in one hadith, to have collected the Qur'an, contradicting Islamic tradition that the collection was the work of the caliph Uthman forty years earlier.