Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (7 page)

Islam's contempt for the idea of Christ crucified is evident, but once again, no Muhammad, no Qur'an, no Islam as such. Muawiya's call to Constantine to convert to the religion of “the God of our father Abraham” recalls the Qur'an's quasi-creedal formulation: “We believe in God, and in that which has been sent down on Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Tribes, and that which was given to Moses and Jesus and the Prophets, of their Lord; we make no division between any of them, and to Him we surrender” (2:136). But this Qur'an passage is itself noteworthy for not mentioning the new revelations purportedly delivered to the prophet who was reciting that very book, and who was supposed to confirm the message that the earlier prophets brought.

It is also odd that Sebeos makes no mention of the Ishmaelite merchant Mahmet in connection with Muawiya's letter; maybe this mysterious Arabian leader was not as central to this Abrahamic religion as he would later become.

And so the earliest accounts depict an Arabic monotheism, occasionally featuring a prophet named Muhammad who situated himself in some way within the religion of Abraham, but there is little else to go by. An anonymous non-Muslim chronicler writing around the year 680 identifies Muhammad as the leader of the “sons of Ishmael,” whom God sent against the Persians “like the sand of the sea-shores.” He specifies the Ka‘ba—the cubed-shaped shrine in Mecca—as the center of the Arabians' worship, identifying it with Abraham, “the father of the head of their race.” But he offers no details about Muhammad's particular teachings, and like all other early chroniclers, he never mentions the Qur'an or uses the words
Muslim
or
Islam.
²⁸

Writing ten years later, in 690, the Nestorian Christian chronicler John bar Penkaye writes of the authority of Muhammad and of the Arabians' brutality in enforcing that authority, but he still knows of no new holy book among the conquerors. He also paints a picture of a new religious practice that is far closer to Judaism and Christianity than Islam eventually became:

The Arabs…had a certain order from the one who was their leader, in favour of the Christian people and the monks; they held also, under his leadership, the worship of one God, according to the customs of the Old Covenant; at the outset they were so attached to the traditions of Muhammad who was their teacher, that they inflicted the pain of death upon any one who seemed to contradict his tradition…. Among them there were many Christians, some from the Heretics, and some from us.
²⁹

The First Use of the Term
Muslim
?

Also in the 690s, a Coptic Christian bishop, John of Nikiou, makes the first mention of Muslims:

And now many of the Egyptians who had been false Christians denied the holy orthodox faith and lifegiving baptism, and embraced the religion of the Muslims, the enemies of God, and accepted the detestable doctrine of the beast, that is, Mohammed, and they erred together with those idolaters, and took arms in their hands and fought against the Christians. And one of them…embraced the faith of Islam…and persecuted the Christians.
³⁰

There is, however, reason to believe that this text as it stands is not as John of Nikiou wrote it. It survives only in an Ethiopic translation from the Arabic, dating from 1602. The Arabic was itself a translation
from the original Greek or some other language. There is no other record of the terms
Muslim
and
Islam
being used either by the Arabians or by the conquered people in the 690s, outside of the inscription on the Dome of the Rock, which itself has numerous questionable features, as we shall see. Thus it seems likely that John of Nikiou used other terms—
Hagarian
?
Saracen
?
Ishmaelite
?—which a translator ultimately rendered as
Muslim.
³¹

If the term
Muslim
was used in the 690s, it wasn't in as widespread usage as
Hagarian, Saracen, Muhajirun
, and
Ishmaelite.
In 708 the Christian writer Jacob of Edessa is still referring to
Mahgrayé—
a Syriac rendering of
Muhajirun
, or “emigrants”:

That the Messiah is of Davidic descent, everyone professes, the Jews, the
Mahgrayé
and the Christians…. The
Mahgrayé
too, though they do not wish to say that this true Messiah, who came and is acknowledged by the Christians, is God and the Son of God, nevertheless confess firmly that he is the true Messiah who was to come…. On this they have no dispute with us, but rather with the Jews…. [But] they do not assent to call the Messiah God or the Son of God.
³²

Jacob's statement demonstrates that by the first decade of the eighth century, the Muhajirun were known to confess belief in Jesus but denied his divinity—echoing the depiction of Jesus in the Qur'an as a prophet of Islam but not as divine.

John of Damascus on the Hagarians, Ishmaelites, or Saracens

Around 730, the renowned Christian theologian John of Damascus published
On the Heresies
, a smorgasbord of nonmainstream Christianity from the perspective of Byzantine orthodoxy. He included a chapter on the strange new religion of the people he identified by three names: Hagarians, Ishmaelites, and Saracens. John writes of
a “false prophet” named Muhammad
(Mamed)
who, “having happened upon the Old and the New Testament and apparently having conversed, in like manner, with an Arian monk, put together his own heresy. And after ingratiating himself with the people by a pretence of piety, he spread rumours of a scripture
(graphe)
brought down to him from heaven. So, having drafted some ludicrous doctrines in his book, he handed over to them this form of worship.”
³³

John repeats some details of the Saracens' beliefs that correspond to Islamic doctrine—specifically, its critique of Christianity. “They call us,” he says, “associators
(hetairiastas)
because, they say, we introduce to God an associate by saying Christ is the Son of God and God…. They misrepresent us as idolaters because we prostrate ourselves before the cross, which they loathe.” In responding to this he also demonstrates some familiarity with Islamic practice: “And we say to them: ‘How then do you rub yourselves on a stone at your Ka‘ba
(Chabatha)
and hail the stone with fond kisses?’”
³⁴

Likewise John shows some familiarity with at least some of the contents of the Qur'an, although he never names it as such, referring instead to particular suras by their names. “Women” is the title of the fourth sura of the Qur'an, and John writes: “This Muhammad, as it has been mentioned, composed many frivolous tales, to each of which he assigned a name, like the text
(graphe)
of the Woman, in which he clearly prescribes the taking of four wives and one thousand concubines, if it is possible.” This sura does indeed allow a man four wives as well as the use of slave girls, “what your right hands own” (4:3), although it doesn't specify a thousand, or any number of these. That may simply be John indulging in a bit of polemical hyperbole or using a thousand to indicate a virtually unlimited number of concubines.

John also refers to “the text of the Camel of God, about which he [that is, Muhammad] says that there was a camel from God”—a story that appears twice in the Qur'an, albeit told elliptically both times (7:77, 91:11–14). Moreover, John notes that “Muhammad mentions the text of the Table,” a vestigial account of the Christian Eucharist
found in Qur'an 5:112–115, and “the text of the Cow,” which is the title of the Qur'an's second sura, “and several other foolish and ludicrous things which, because of their number, I think I should pass over.”
³⁵

John demonstrates a detailed knowledge of the Qur'an's teaching about Jesus Christ, ascribing them to Muhammad. Note that the material in brackets below has been added by the translator, generally referring to Qur'an verses; it does not appear in John's original. John writes:

He [that is, Muhammad] says that Christ is the Word of God and His Spirit [cf. Qur'an 9:171], created [3:59] and a servant [4:172, 9:30, 43:59], and that he was born from Mary [3:45 and cf. Isa ibn Maryam], the sister of Moses and Aaron [19:28], without seed [3:47, 19:20, 21:91, 66:12]. For, he says, the Word of God and His Spirit entered Mary [19:17, 21:91, 66:12], and she gave birth to Jesus, a prophet [9:30, 33:7] and a servant of God. And [he says] that the Jews, acting unlawfully, wanted to crucify him, but, on seizing [him], they crucified [only] his shadow; Christ himself was not crucified, he says, nor did he die [4:157]. For God took him up to heaven to Himself…. And God questioned him saying: “Jesus, did you say that ‘I am son of God and God’?” And, he says, Jesus answered, “Mercy me, Lord, you know that I did not say so” [5:116].
³⁶

This is an impressive summary of the Qur'an's teaching on Jesus, but note again that the verse citations have been added by the translator into English; John does not cite sura and verse, and his summary contains small but significant departures from the actual Qur'anic text. In Qur'an 5:116, for example, Allah does not ask Jesus whether he called himself the Son of God and God, but rather: “Didst thou say unto men, ‘Take me and my mother as gods, apart from God?’” And Jesus does not respond, “Mercy me, Lord, you know that I did not say so,” but instead: “To Thee be glory! It is not mine to say what I have no right to. If I indeed said it, Thou knowest it, knowing what is
within my soul, and I know not what is within Thy soul; Thou knowest the things unseen.”

These discrepancies, as well as the fact that John leaves out of his summary significant things the Qur'an says about Jesus that would have been of interest to him as a Christian theologian (particularly Jesus' apparent prophecy of the coming of Muhammad in 61:6), give rise to the possibility that John was working not from an actual copy of the Qur'an but from oral tradition or some text that was later adapted as part of the Qur'an.

Another reason to suggest that John was not summarizing from a Qur'an that he had open in front of him is the fact that he never refers to the book by name. Instead he gives the impression that the “text of the Woman” and the “text of the Camel of God” and the “text of the Cow” are all separate documents rather than parts of a single collection. “Women” (not the singular “Woman,” as John has it) and “The Cow” are titles of two Qur'anic suras (4 and 2, respectively); “Camel of God” is not. It seems more likely that John is working from what the Hagarians or those who had contact with them may have told him, and not from a written text, or at least not a written text exactly like the Qur'an as we know it.

It is also possible that this manner of citation is simply an idiosyncrasy of John's, with no larger significance. In any case, John betrays considerably more knowledge, and more accurate knowledge, of actual Islamic teaching than did earlier non-Muslim writers who took up the subject of the beliefs of their Arabian conquerors. But note that he is writing a century after the purported revelation of the Qur'an and establishment of Islam.

And even at this point, nearly a hundred years after the reported death of Muhammad, the image of the prophet of Islam remained fuzzy. Indeed, a full-blown picture of Muhammad, recipient through the angel Gabriel of Allah's revelations of the Qur'an, living and working in the “full light of history,” would not appear for several more decades.

Muhammad: A Late Arrival on the Scene

N
on-Muslim chroniclers who were writing at the time of the early Arabian conquests made no mention of the Qur'an, no mention of Islam, no mention of Muslims, and scant mention of Muhammad.

The situation is no different when one turns to the contemporary Muslim artifacts of the time. The Arabian invaders who swept into North Africa in the 650s and 660s and besieged Constantinople in the 670s were energized, in the traditional view, by the Qur'an and Muhammad's teaching and example. But they made no mention of what was supposed to be their primary inspiration. References to Qur'anic passages and Islam do not appear until near the end of the seventh century, and when the Arabian invaders mentioned Muhammad, they did so in ways that departed significantly from the canonical Islamic account.

For example, in 677 or 678, during the reign of the first Umayyad caliph, Muawiya (661–680), a dam was dedicated near Ta'if in Arabia. (The Umayyads were the dynasty that ruled the Near East from the middle of the seventh century to the middle of the eighth.) The official inscription reads:

This is the dam [belonging] to the Servant of God Muawiya

Commander of the Faithful. Abdullah bn Saxr
¹
built it

with God's permission in the year 58.

Allah! Forgive the Servant of God Muawiya,

Commander of the Faithful, confirm him in his position and help him and

let the faithful

rejoice in him. Amr bn Habbab/Jnab wrote it.
²