Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (33 page)

• Multiple hadiths report that Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, governor of Iraq during the reign of Abd al-Malik, edited the Qur'an and distributed his new edition to the various Arab-controlled provinces—again, something Uthman is supposed to have done decades earlier.

• Even some Islamic traditions maintain that certain common Islamic practices, such as the recitation of the Qur'an during mosque prayers, date from orders of Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, not to the earliest period of Islamic history.

• In the middle of the eighth century, the Abbasid dynasty supplanted the Umayyad line of Abd al-Malik. The Abbasids charged the Umayyads with impiety on a large scale. In the Abbasid period, biographical material about Muhammad began to proliferate. The first complete biography of the prophet of Islam finally appeared during this era—at least 125 years after the traditional date of his death.

• The biographical material that emerged situates Muhammad in an area of Arabia that never was the center for trade and pilgrimage that the canonical Islamic account of Islam's origins depends on it to be.

In short, the lack of confirming detail in the historical record, the late development of biographical material about the Islamic prophet, the atmosphere of political and religious factionalism in which that material developed, and much more suggest that the Muhammad of Islamic tradition did not exist, or if he did, he was substantially different from how that tradition portrays him.

How to make sense of all this? If the Arab forces who conquered so much territory beginning in the 630s were not energized by the teachings of a new prophet and the divine word he delivered, how did the Islamic character of their empire arise at all? If Muhammad did not exist, why was it ever considered necessary to invent him?

Any answer to these questions will of necessity be conjectural—but in light of the facts above, so is the canonical account of Islam's origins.

The Creation of the Hero

The immutable fact in this entire discussion is the Arab Empire. The Arab conquests (whatever may have precipitated them) and the empire they produced are a matter of historical record. Some historians have minimized the martial aspect of the Arab conquests, contending that the Byzantines were exhausted after their protracted wars with the Persians and simply withdrew from the area, leaving a vacuum that the Arabs filled.
²
That may be true to a degree,
³
but in any case, the result was the same: The Arabs built a mighty empire.

Every empire of the day was anchored in a political theology. The Romans conquered many nations and unified them by means of the worship of the Greco-Roman gods. This Greco-Roman paganism was later supplanted by Christianity. The Christological controversies of the early Church threatened to tear the empire asunder, so much so that the newly Christian emperors felt compelled to get involved in ecclesiastical affairs. They called the first ecumenical councils primarily to secure unity within the empire, and the Christology of the
first four councils became so closely identified with the empire in the East that to oppose one was essentially to oppose the other. Many of the Christian groups whom the ecumenical councils deemed heretical left the empire.

The realm of political theology, then, offers the most plausible explanation for the creation of Islam, Muhammad, and the Qur'an. The Arab Empire controlled and needed to unify huge expanses of territory where different religions predominated. Arabia, Syria, and other lands the Arabs first conquered were home to many of the Christian groups, such as Nestorians and Jacobites, that had fled the Byzantine Empire after the ecumenical councils judged their views heretical. Persia, meanwhile, was home to Zoroastrians. These monotheists had an imperial theology—that is, a conviction that a common religion would unify an empire of diverse nationalities—akin to that of the Romans and to some degree even based on it. This influence was understandable, given that the Persian emperor Chosroes had spent time in Constantinople and was married to two Christian women.
⁴

But at first, the Arab Empire did not have a compelling political theology to compete with those it supplanted and to solidify its conquests. The earliest Arab rulers appear to have been adherents of Hagarism, a monotheistic religion centered around Abraham and Ishmael.
⁵
They frowned upon the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ—hence Muawiya's letter to the Byzantine emperor Constantine, calling on him to “renounce this Jesus and convert to the great God whom I serve, the God of our father Abraham.”

This umbrella monotheistic movement saw itself as encompassing the true forms of the two great previous monotheistic movements, Judaism and Christianity. Traces of this perspective appear in the Qur'an, such as when Allah scolds the Jews and Christians for fighting over Abraham, who was neither a Jew nor a Christian but a Muslim
hanif
—in the Qur'anic usage, a pre-Islamic monotheist (3:64–67). In its earliest form, Islam was probably much more positive toward both Christianity and Judaism than it later came to be. Evidence of this
openness can be found in the crosses on the early Arab coinage and caliphs' inscriptions, and also in the indications from adversarial literature that the Arabian prophet was making common cause with the Jews. An early Islam that counted Jews and Christians as within the fold could help account for the Qur'an passage promising salvation to various groups: “Lo! Those who believe, and those who are Jews, and Christians, and Sabaeans—whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day and does right—surely their reward is with their Lord, and there shall no fear come upon them neither shall they grieve” (2:62).
⁶

From Monotheism to Muhammad

This Abrahamic monotheism, conceiving of Christ as the servant of Allah and his messenger, probably reached its apotheosis in 691 in Abd al-Malik's Dome of the Rock inscriptions, which could well refer to Jesus. During the same period, the nascent religion began to take shape as an entity in its own right—a forthrightly, even defiantly, Arabic one. The specific features that emerged revolved around the person of the “praised one,”
Muhammad
, an Arabian prophet who may have lived decades before and whose words and works were already shrouded in the mists of history.

The historical data about this Muhammad was sparse and contradictory, but there were certain raw materials around which a legend could be constructed. There was the mysterious Arabian prophet to whom the
Doctrina Jacobi
refers, whose words and deeds somewhat resemble those of the prophet of Islam and differ sharply from them in important ways. There was the
Mhmt
to whom Thomas the Christian priest refers in the 640s, whose
Taiyaye
were doing battle with the Byzantines. There was the Muhammad of the cross-bearing coins struck in the early years of the Arab conquests. Did this “Muhammad” refer to an actual person bearing that name, whose deeds are lost, or was it a title for Jesus, or did it refer to someone or something else altogether? The answer to that is not known.

Whatever the case, the records make clear that toward the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the eighth, the Umayyads began to speak much more specifically about Islam, its prophet, and eventually its book. The Dome of the Rock's insistent assertion that the “praised one” was only Allah's messenger and not divine lent itself well to the creation of a whole new figure distinct from Jesus: a human prophet who came with the definitive message from the supreme God.

Muhammad, if he did not exist, or if his actual deeds were not known, would certainly have been politically useful to the new Arab Empire as a legendary hero. The empire was growing quickly, soon rivaling the Byzantine and Persian Empires in size and power. It needed a common religion—a political theology that would provide the foundation for the empire's unity and would secure allegiance to the state.

This new prophet needed to be an Arab, living deep within Arabia. If he had come from anywhere else within the new empire's territory, that place could have made claims to special status and pushed to gain political power on that basis. Muhammad, significantly, is said to have come from the empire's central region, not from borderlands.

He had to be a warrior prophet, for the new empire was aggressively expansionistic. To give those conquests a theological justification—as Muhammad's teachings and example do—would place them beyond criticism.

This prophet would also need a sacred scripture to lend him authority. Much of the Qur'an shows signs of having been borrowed from the Jewish and Christian traditions, suggesting that the founders of Islam fashioned its scripture from existing material. As Arabians, the conquerors wanted to establish their empire with Arabic elements at its center: an Arabian prophet and an Arabic revelation. The new scripture thus needed to be in Arabic in order to serve as the foundation for an Arabic Empire. But it did not have an extensive Arabic literary tradition to draw on. Abd al-Malik and his fellow Umayyad caliphs were not even centered in Arabia at that point; their
conquest had brought them to Damascus. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Qur'an betrays many Syriac influences. This Arabic scripture contains numerous non-Arabic elements and outright incoherencies.

Demonizing the Umayyads

Although the Qur'an issues furious warnings of judgment and divine exhortations to warfare and martyrdom that would have been useful for an expanding empire, it leaves the figure of Muhammad, the “praised one,” sketchy at best. By investing Muhammad with prophetic status and holding him up as the “excellent example” of conduct for the Muslims (33:21), the Qur'an sparked a hunger to know what he actually said and did. Thus a larger body of traditions painting the picture of this prophet would have been necessary, not only as a matter of pious interest but also to formulate Islamic law.

The real proliferation of material about Muhammad's words and deeds apparently began in the late Umayyad period but reached its apex during the Abbasid caliphate. The Abbasids replaced the Umayyads in 750; the great canonical Hadith collections were all compiled early in the ninth century.

Hadiths about Muhammad, as we have seen, were minted by the dozen in order to support one political position or another. The Umayyads created hadiths of Muhammad saying negative things about the Abbasids; the Abbasids developed hadiths in which Muhammad said exactly the opposite. The Shiites wrote hadiths of their own to support their champion, Ali ibn Abi Talib.

The Abbasids emerged as the dominant party, and not surprisingly the bulk of the traditions that survive to the present day reflect favorably on them. Many hadiths denounce the Umayyads for their irreligion. But the desire to portray their rivals in a bad light would not have been the only motivation for the Abbasids. They also needed to convince the people that these stories about the prophet of Islam and his new religion were actually not new at all. How to explain the
sudden appearance of accounts of what had supposedly taken place in Arabia well over a century earlier? How to explain the fact that fathers and fathers' fathers had not passed down the stories of this great warrior prophet and his wondrous divine book?

The answer was to blame the Umayyads. They were impious. They were irreligious. Although they were the sons and immediate heirs of those who had known Muhammad, they were indifferent to this legacy and let the great message of the Seal of the Prophets fall by the wayside. Now the Abbasids had come along and—Muhammad emerged! His teachings would be taught throughout the empire. His Qur'an would sound from every mosque. His faithful would be called to prayer from every minaret.

The late appearance of the biographical material about Muhammad, the fact that no one had heard of or spoken of Muhammad for decades after the Arab conquests began, the changes in the religion of the Arab Empire, the inconsistencies in the Qur'an—all of this needed to be explained. The hadiths pinning blame on the Umayyads helped, but other explanations would have been necessary, too. A common justification emerged in the hadiths: It was all part of the divine plan. Allah caused even Muhammad to forget portions of the Qur'an. He left the collection of that divine book up to people who lost parts of it—hence its late editing and the existence of variants. It was all in his plan and thus should not disturb the faith of the pious.

Explaining a Political Religion

This reconstruction of events has a good deal to recommend it. It explains the curious silence of the early Arab conquerors, and of those whom they conquered, about Muhammad and the Qur'an. It explains why the earliest extant records of an Arab prophet speak of a figure who displayed some kinship with both Judaism and Christianity, contrary to the portrayal of Muhammad in the canonical Islamic texts. It explains why Islamic tradition speaks of the Qur'an as the
perfect and eternal book of Allah while simultaneously depicting the almost casual loss of significant portions of the holy book. It explains why Islam, the supposed impetus for the Arab conquests, is such a late arrival on the scene.

This scenario also explains why Islam developed as such a profoundly political religion. By its nature, Islam is a political faith: The divine kingdom is very much of this world, with God's wrath and judgment to be expected not only in the next life but also in this one, to be delivered by believers. In considering its adherents as the instruments of divine justice on earth, Islam departs from its Abrahamic forerunners. This departure could reflect the circumstances of Islam's origins: Whereas Christianity began as a primarily spiritual construct and gained worldly power only much later (forcing its adherents to grapple with the relationship between the spiritual and temporal realms), Islam was unapologetically worldly and political from the beginning.