Islam Perverted (The Islamists have got it wrong)

Western observers, both among the general public and the media, commonly make the mistake of thinking that Islamism is the same as traditional Islam. Even Western researchers describe Islamism as a resurgence of traditional Islam. In contrast, moderate Sunni Muslims are characterised as those whose faith is mitigated, influenced by syncretism, or diluted by a certain amount of secularisation and Westernisation.

But this turns reality upside-down. In fact, Islamists depart in important ways from the Islamic tradition. Indeed, some outstanding traditional Muslim scholars, such as Sheikh Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri and Sheikh Ahmad al-’Alawi, see Islamism as a symptom of secularisation and as a reshaping of their religion into a modern, ideological totalitarianism. It is this view that I myself share.

The distinction between traditional Islam and Islamism can be seen in many specifics. Tradition says that Islamic jurisprudence can today be practiced according to four legal schools, all of which are legitimate and authoritative; Islamists, by contrast, see the existence of these schools as an obstacle to their concept of lslamic unity. Tradition attributes to the ruler the right to appoint competent scholars as authorized interpreters of the Islamic law; Islamists do not recognise any authority apart from the leaders of their own groups. Tradition makes the authority of a scholar dependent on the possession of written documents of appointment (ijaza) signed by his predecessor; Islamists regularly install people bereft of any theological or legal education into positions of Islamic authority.

Another point: Sunnis do not conceive of Islam as an organisation dependent on a centralised leadership; Islamists, on the contrary, see their leading militants as the Islamic leadership, thereby cutting out the need to refer to traditional scholars for guidance. Perhaps most important of all is the Islamists’ subordination of religion to politics, our main topic here. Khalid Duran notes the distinction between traditional Islam and its political counterfeit by underlining their different understandings of the relationship between religion and politics:

"Whether Islamists like the term fundamentalist or not, their understanding of religion resembles that of fundamentalists in other religions. This is not to say that Islamists are more religious or more genuinely Islamic than other Muslims . . . Islamism is a late 20th century totalitarianism. It follows in the wake of fascism and communism, picking up from those and seeking to refine their methods of domination . . .

"Few Muslims would deny that political commitment is part of Islamic ethics, but most disagree with the Islamist insistence that there exists a clearly defined "Islamic system," different from all other political systems."

Islamists draw on modern European models that posit a scientific revolutionary movement, an elitist scheme of ruling society by means of secret cults that act behind the scenes, and a manufacture of consensus by means of propaganda. They reject those aspects of the Islamic tradition that do not fit with this political outlook.

Theirs is, in fact, an extremist ideology; they consider their organisations and militants as custodians of the projects for Islamising the world, and whoever criticizes them (be he a Muslim or a non-Muslim) is immediately accused of being anti-Islamic, "Islamophobic," and so forth. Unwilling to be ruled by non-Islamist Muslims, Islamists adopt an approach characterised by political supremacism.

Like other totalitarian ideologies, contemporary Islamism is blindly utopian. It implies a wholesale denial of history; the Islamists’ model of an ideal society is inspired by the idealised image of seventh-century Arabia and an ahistorical view of religion and human development. It is based on anachronistic thinking that rejects modern concepts of pluralism and tolerance. And it ignores a history of Islam that is rich in models of heterogeneous social organisation and adaptation to the times.

The traditional view understands the role of politics in terms of what the Qur’an teaches. It indicates that prophets were sent to humans to teach them truths about God, ethics, ways to achieve prosperity in this world, and beatitude in the hereafter, and to warn about the consequences of injustice and sinfulness. A prophet who is called to preach in a stateless milieu has to assume a role of political leadership; this mantle fell on Moses, as it did to Muhammad (peace be upon both of them). Islamic tradition teaches that when this happens, the two roles are combined by accident; political leadership is not a necessary element of the prophetic mission. By way of confirmation, note that the Qur’an uses different titles to describe the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) but none of them refers to his political function. Verses 33:45-46 say that he was sent as a witness (shahid), a bearer of glad tidings (mubashshir), one who warns (nadhir), as some one who calls to God (da ‘i ila Allah), and as a shining light (siraj munir). Nowhere does it say he was sent as a political leader or a head of state.

Islamists, however, have a very different interpretation. For them, building an Islamic state is the central achievement of the prophetic mission. Conflating the role of the Muslim scholar with that of a political leader, they hold that the spread of Islam cannot be separated from the creation of what they call the Islamic state.

They argue that "Islam is both religion and government" (al-lslam din wa dawla); and this serves the basic description of their creed. They neglect to mention, however, that this expression is found in neither the Qur’an, the Hadith (sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad), or in any other of the authoritative Islamic sources.

In similar fashion, the Islamists deform the meaning of jihad. In traditional Islam, military jihad and all other forms of material jihad constitute only the external aspect of jihad, while the inner dimension of jihad is the struggle that a Muslim undertakes to purify his soul from mundane desires, defects, and egotism. Jihad is not limited to the military arena but denotes striving hard toward a worthy goal. According to some sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), "the best jihad for women is performing a valid pilgrimage,’’ while "the jihad for someone who has old parents is taking care of them.’’ According to a well-known tradition, after coming back from a military expedition, the Prophet Muhammad said, "We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad" (raja’na min jihad al-asghar ila jihad al-akbar). The Prophet was asked, "O, Messenger of Allah, what is the greater jihad?" He answered, "It is the jihad against one’s soul.’’

The traditional understanding also includes a military meaning but military jihad is strictly regulated by rules concerning its purpose, means, and resolution.

Purpose: Qur’anic verses permitting military jihad (22:39-40) indicate that it is not a vehicle to expand Islam but to defend the rights of those who are persecuted because of their religion.

"To those against whom war is made, permission is given [to defend themselves], because they are wronged. And verily God is most powerful for their aid. [They are] those who have been expelled from their homes in defiance of right [for no cause] except that they say, "Our Lord is God." Did not God check one people by means of another, there would surely have been pulled down monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, in which the name of God is commemorated in abundant measure."

Note the inclusion here of not just mosques, but "monasteries, churches, synagogues" as places where God’s name is frequently mentioned and places that must be protected, if necessary by recourse to war. These lines indicate a militant defence of the right to religious freedom.

Self-defence: The term "self-defence" means just that and must not be stretched. The Qur’an (2:190) says, "And fight in the way of God against those who fight against you, but do not exaggerate. Verily, God does not love those who exaggerate." The typical example of this is the story of Moses and the Egyptian, as narrated in the Qur’ an (28 :1 5- 1 6). To defend an Israelite being beaten by an Egyptian, Moses killed the Egyptian. No doubt, the Israelite was a member of the oppressed people, one of those who were persecuted because of their religion and enslaved, while the Egyptian was one of the oppressors. The event could even have been described as a legitimate form of jihad. The Qur’an, however, does not support this opinion, and condemns Moses’ reaction as exaggerated. Moses himself asks forgiveness for his excess.

Means: Military jihad must be waged by a regular Muslim army against another army. Terrorist acts against civilian populations are not included in the definition of jihad.

Peaceful solution: When a former enemy is ready to stop hostilities and is looking for an opportunity for peace, Muslims must stop fighting and also look for a peaceful solution. The Qur’an (8:60-61) says: "if they incline towards peace, incline thou also towards it, and put thy trust in God."

This traditional understanding of jihad as warfare to defend the weak, using armies, and open to reaching an accord has been replaced by an aggressive, guerrilla-style warfare that rejects anything less than total victory and a total defeat of the one who is perceived as the enemy (whether non-Muslim or non-Islamist Muslim). The Islamist version of jihad includes and legitimises terrorism against civilian targets such as churches, synagogues, and cemeteries and even against elderly people, women, and babies. Not withstanding the clear Islamic prohibition on suicide, it also includes suicide operations. A recent fatwa by Mufti Farit Salman, deputy president of the Council of Muftis of the European States of Russia, eloquently condemned such behaviour in the aftermath of the sacking of Joseph’s Tomb, a Jewish shrine in Nablus:

"There are many fanatics in the Holy Land who with their intelligence swayed by Satan wrecked the tomb of the Man of Allah, Joseph, peace be upon him; wrecked the tomb of the man whom the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad (blessings and peace upon him), met and conversed with in his ascension to the throne of Allah; wrecked the tomb of one of the dear prophets whom the Holy Qur’an disclosed as a model of physical and spiritual splendour and of humility . . .How could Muslims do such a thing? No! Those who gave hand to destroy a sanctuary of ours are not of us!... Woe unto those who desecrate the name of names, who demolish tombs of the prophets, synagogues, churches, mosques!"

The origins of modern Islamism trace back to the beginnings of the Wahhabi movement in the early eighteenth century.

Wahhabism was a puritanical uprising based on reinterpreting written Qur’anic law without the enlightened support of expertise embodied in the Qur’an and the Hadiths, known as the Sunna. Wahhabis pay lip service to adherence to the Sunna, but in reality reshape it according to their ideology. Many prophetic sayings which constitute the immediate source of Sunna are rejected by means of captious arguments, as soon as they result in tenets incompatible with Wahhabism. When Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al Wahhab (the eponym of Wahhabism) started preaching, the mufti of Medina declared Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s belief a heresy and formally excommunicated him by issuing a fatwa, the text of which said:

"This man is leading the ignoramuses of the present age to a heretical path. He is trying to extinguish Allah’s light, but Allah will not permit His light to be extinguished, in spite of the opposition of polytheists, and will enlighten every place with the light of the followers of Sunna."

Sheikh Hisham Kabbani, chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, describes the rise and the development of Wahhabism as follows:

"The premise of this new, narrow ideology was to reject traditional scholars, scholarship, and practices under the guise of "reviving the true tenets of Islam" and protecting the concept of monotheism."

Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab encouraged a new interpretation of Islamic law and permitted his acolytes to apply it in light of their own understanding, regardless of their level of expertise in juridical matters. Whoever did not agree with this revolutionary approach he considered outside of the fold of Islam – an apostate, disbeliever, or idolater – and thus someone whose blood could be shed, whose women could be raped, and whose wealth could be confiscated.

The dismantling of the Ottoman Empire after World War I gave the Wahhabis an opportunity to impose their beliefs and their rule on Muslims of the Arabian Peninsula, which they did not lose. The Wahhabis first conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, transforming these two sanctuaries from centres for the transmission of the Sunni heritage into places for propagating a primitive and literalist cult to Muslims coming from every part of the world. Second, the Wahhabis set up the Saudi state.

Third, expansionist Wahhabism, like other forms of totalitarian ideology, seeks not just to take possession of the whole Muslim world by replacing Sunni Islam with the so-called Salafi school but even to expand its influence beyond it. Dogmatic uniformity has since then begun to suffocate the humane and enlightened Islamic tradition. Since the 1950s, the Muslim Brethren (al-lkhwan al-Muslimun), an organisation founded in Egypt in 1929, has been the main instrument for propagating Wahhabi influence internationally.

After Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in the mid-1950s, the Saudis needed allies against his secular revolutionary policies. So the Saudi leaders supplied financial support to the Brethren. From then on, the vast majority of Muslim Brethren adopted Wahhabi doctrines.

The governments of some Muslim countries, knowing that human and civil rights, democracy, and equality between men and women could represent the end of their power, support Islamism. They work against peace between Israel and its neighbours, fearing that a pacified Middle East could create serious problems for autocratic and feudal systems. Not surprisingly, the Palestinian Hamas is one of the important Muslim Brethren-controlled organisations in the Middle East.

These problems are not limited to the Muslim world but are now also found in the West. Local branches of the radical organisations that promote terrorism in the Middle East are taking root in Western countries. They represent not more that 10 percent of the total Muslim population in those countries but they control the main Muslim organisations and most of the mosques in western Europe and North America. They are a worldwide, organised network, using acronyms, but always ensuring that the Muslim Brethren is the inner circle behind the scenes. They claim to represent all Muslims and get a respectful reception from non-Muslims, who know no better.

This situation has many causes, but the principal one is that while traditional Islam is multifaceted and spontaneous, Islamism is forwarded by a worldwide network of activists funded by the Saudi and some other Gulf governments. Those looking for ways to prevent Muslim minorities in Europe and North America from turning to Islamism find that the Gulf countries represent the main obstacles. Ironically, then, the structure of the Muslim Brethren is supported, in other words, mainly by those countries that are regarded as friends of the West. Muslim Brethren are often appointed as imams of important mosques, especially in democratic countries where there is no ministry of religious affairs to check their orientation, and where imams with the expected permission to teach (ijaza shar’i) are the exception.

The West is both loved and feared by Islamists. They cannot hope to defeat it militarily so instead they aim to influence it from within. In part, this means that Islamists divide their work between militants and more moderate-sounding types. Militants execrate the US government and call for its destruction, while the more moderate Islamists are honoured guests at the White House.

The danger is that radical groups could become the official representatives of Muslim immigrants in the West. Let us review the situation in the United States.

Sheikh Kabbani, of the Islamic Supreme Council of America and a disciple of Nazim ‘Adil al-Qubrusi, declared at the US State Department:

"We would like to advise our government, our congressmen, that there is something big going on and people do not understand it. You have many mosques around the United States.... So the most dangerous things are going on in these mosques that have self appointed leaders throughout the United States. The extremist ideology makes them very active.

"We can say that they took over 80 percent of the mosques in the United States….This means that the ideology of extremism has been spread to 80 percent of the Muslim population, mostly the youth and the new generation."

Sheikh Kabbani is trying to show Westerners the reality behind the deceptive facade. The great majority of all mosques in democratic countries–not only in North America, but in most of western Europe as well–are controlled by extremists.

Looking at two organisations in specific, the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a Muslim Brethren front organisation in the United States that lobbies against journalists and scholars who dare to write anything about Islam at variance with the Brethren’s Islamist agenda, such as advocating diversity in Islam. Notwithstanding CAIR’s evident connection to Hamas, it is accepted by the US government as a legitimate representative of the Muslim American community. Likewise, the American Muslim Council (AMC) is another branch of the Muslim Brethren. According to Khalid Duran, "The AMC’s most remarkable feat was to obtain the monopoly on the training of Muslim chaplains for the US Army (which is like Teheran entrusting the training of its Revolutionary Guards to the US Institute of Peace)." Thus, while non-Islamist Islamic organisations like the Association for Islamic Charitable Projects are more or less ignored by the US government, Muslim American soldiers receive spiritual assistance from Islamist chaplains.

The best means to limit the influence of Islamist factions is by supporting the teachings of traditional, moderate Islam.

In the former Soviet republics the muftis are starting to understand that Wahhabi infiltrations threaten to change the face of their society; they seem to be willing to join forces in a common project of prevention. The president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, has recently founded a new Islamic University in Tashkent which has among its main goals the education of moderate imams specially trained to refute Wahhabism and to promote dialogue between Muslims and other monotheists. In September 2000, the mufti of Russia, Sheikh Ravil Gainutdin, in cooperation with the muftis of Chechnya, Daghestan, Ingushetia, Bashkiria, and Siberia, established in Kazan the first Islamic university in Russia; the goal of this university is also to fight extremist influences coming from abroad. This can be understood as a sign that the diffusion of Wahhabism is no longer understood by Sunnis as ineluctable, and that the followers of traditional Islam are starting to realize how such a global menace necessarily calls for a coordinated self-defence.

Non-Muslims also have a role to play. They must overcome their tendency to assume that real Islam is the one propagandized by the Wahhabis and their Islamist network. They need to understand that Islamism is a menace not just for Muslims but for all humans. They should increase their dialogue and work with those traditional Muslims who join them in seeing radicalism as a disease, and who have ideas for an appropriate therapy to heal those afflicted by it.

I can explain to you where I saw us as differing. I wrote that -

"a single man organized a new state centered on Medina and from it conquered Mecca, and imposed a monotheism on the pagans of Arabia"

and said that this account - "is not disputed by any serious historian."

You replied with statements claiming nothing is actually known from contemporary documents of Muhammad, and added -

"Islam probably did not originate in Medina and Mecca but in Syria"

Which I consider to be historically false, as a matter of the well known political history, as I thought I made quite clear. You gave as a rationale (with the proviso that you are not an historian) that Syria -

"was far more advanced culturally and had much greater contact with Judaic and Christian ideas."

Thus implying, in effect, that it was implausible that anyone named Muhammad off in the Hijaz had actually come up with anything so scriptual and revelationee, and it must have actually been founded by Christian ideas in Syria.

The reason this is historical nonsense is easy enough to state. There wouldn't have been a new dynasty with a new doctrine in Syria if there hadn't already been an organized and successful military and religious movement riding out of Arabia under Omar. Syria did not invent Islam and backdate its origins to the Hijaz a century prior.

Syria was a Byzantine province, governed from Antioch while answering to Constantinople, speaking Greek, and practicing Christianity not Islam. Then a bunch of Arabs rode in under this Omar dude and beat the hell out of them, imposed taxes on them, and settled down to rule the place. They were already monotheists - they had imposed monotheism on the whole Arabian penisula already. Christian Syria would not have changed its doctrine at all, absent the political, military, and religious movement known as "Islam". Which therefore already existed (! - I thought that part was obvious).

Now, you can say in matters of doctrinal detail, there were Christian influences stemming from Syria, certainly. Also from Egypt, when Alexandria was taken e.g. There were later ones stemming from Zorastrians in Persia, and under the Abassids from court ordered translations of greek philosophy, Indian religious texts, Sabean astrology, yada yada. Jews had influenced the movement even back in its days in Medina, according to Muslim report anyway (we have little outside info).

In other words, I saw you are too easily conflating the time the Koran was written down with the origin of Islam, and insinuating from that that Islam is basically a Syrian Christian innovation. Which struck me as wildly implausible, and as putting a little theological detail caboose way in front of a giant military-political "whole point" engine.

The basic doctrine they were fighting for (simplified monotheism, aka "Arianism squared" if you like) was set long before they got to Syria, and for good or ill created the political unity that, along with Omar's military leadership, made that conquest happen.

It is, incidentally, rather easy to see why that particular doctrine was attractive to any ambitious potentate in Arabia. Arabia was neutral ground between the contending great powers, exhausted at the time but financially and culturally much larger powers, Parthian Persia and Greek Byzantium.

The doctrine of the Parthians was a dualist derivative of Zorastrianism, meaning big cosmic fight between the good creator God and the evil devil, everyone choose a side, and a big day of judgment. The doctrine of Byzantium was Christianity, which was just getting through the Arian heresy period - which had been particularly popular in the army. The Arian heresy, of course, was denial of the full divinity of Christ, aka a tendency to reduce Jesus almost to just a wise teacher, by over-emphasizing the absolute transcendence of God the Father.

Split the difference with a "syncretic" compromise, dropping elements only found in one but not found in the other. Big cosmic fight, absolute God the Father, only a teacher - prophet not an incarnation, day of judgment. Drop all the complications and subtle aspects of either teaching.

It was a stripped down syncretic compromise, meant to be freed from accretions of this and that, and meant to eliminate anything distinctively the property of only one of the two. It was meant to appeal to Arians within Byzantium and ethical monotheists within Parthia, on the basis of simplicity. Thus to the soldiers, rather than to priests of either.

So there is no great mystery about where the basic content of the doctrine comes from. As for filling in details about predestination this or free will that, God's knowledge of this and grace about that, sure that all probably came from Syrian theologians, skewed by which doctrines seemed useful to the Umayyads or fit the temperment of Arab soldiers, etc. But that is details.

But millions are not going to actively engage in terrorism. Armies will fight wars, particularly against the weak - Islamic armies have a limited and pathetically inglorious record against opponents that are fully armed. All powerful they most certainly are not.

There is no need for millions (hundreds of millions is more like it) of Muslims to actively engage. All they need do to ensure the success of Jihad terrorism is that at which humans are best: nothing. That is what the mass of Muslims is doing right now. But from what I have personally observed, many do somwhat more than precisely nothing: e.g., many, perhaps most, of the mosques in the United States are places in which hatred of Christians, Jews, and the West is actively encouraged.

Sheik Palazzi wants a paradigm shift within his religion from the maddening passivity Muslims demonstrate in their own homelands, to an activity of Reform. He wants to shift the only human activity for which Muslims have ever shown any enthusiasm, the Jihad, away from 14 Centuries of Islamic conquest, toward the conquest of the individual Muslim soul. Bravo Palazzi. Have at it. Perhaps Sheik Palazzi will be the San Francesco d'Asissi of Islam.
What the Hell does that have to do with me, except that the more enthusiastic and efficient of the unreformed Jihadists which infest his creed and the World, wish my death, enslavement, or conversion? Naturally, I would like Sheik Palazzi to achieve his objective, before the multitudinous and rapidly multiplying unreformed bastards achieve theirs. But all I ask is that he begin his holy quest in an Islamic land. After all, St. Francis did not start his in Mecca.

In regard to Christian tolerance: the most intolerant episodes of Christian history were inspired by the armed conquest of the once-Christian Eastern and Southern Mediterranean Lands, by Muslims. How can I tolerate Islam, when Islam, as the good candid Sheik so cheerfully admits, tolerates and supports the terror of the armed Jihad? My answer as a Christian, is that I tolerate Islam perfectly well in Islamic lands. My God, man, one could not even bring a dog or horse into the British Isles without quarantine to make sure it was not carrying some devastating virus. Does it not make perfect sense to at least treat Muslims, so many of whom carry this Jihad Virus, the same way? Keep them out until they, following the good Sheik Palazzi perhaps, sort it out themselves.

Furthermore, good Jason, if I parse correctly, you seem to espouse the quaint belief that what the Muslims need right now is a crushing armed defeat, whereupon we shall spring Sheik Palazzi amongst them to begin the great reform.

How about this instead? IMHO, modernist, "democratic" Turkey would be a perfect place for Sheik Palazzi to HQ his altogether commendable effort to introduce that most Christian of ideas to Islam: Reform. Then, if doesn't take, we can still meet them again, without a Muslim 5th column infesting our major cities, at Omdurman, at the gates of Vienna, or even Lepanto.
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Omar took power in 634, usually reckoned as 2 years after the death of Muhammad. He reigned 10 years, before being assassinated by a Persian captive in Medina. During those ten years, Arab armies conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the Sassanid empire.

The first major battle was Tel Buwayb in 635, breaking into Sassanid territory. In 636 comes Ghadasia, in southern Mesopotamia. In 637 comes Al-Qadisiya near present-day Baghdad, and in the same year the defeat of the Byzantine army at the battle of Yarmuk, which leads to the fall of Damascus. In 638 Jerusalem is beseiged and surrenders. In 639 the conquest of the Sassanid empire continues, with the fall of Edessa and Haran. In 641, the Byzantines are driven out of Alexandria, and in 642 Cyrus, the Alexandrine patriarch, surrenders all of Egypt and pays tribute in return for a promise of toleration. Also in 642, off in the heartland of the Sassanid empire (modern Iran), the Muslims win the battle of Nehawad. In just seven years, Omar leads them from a modest Arabian state to the dominant power in the near east. Two years later he is dead himself, assassinated in Medina by a slave of the Muslim provincial governor of Syria, a figure in the Omayyad house that a generation later founds the dynasty.

The Sassanid empire had been weakened before all of this by its defeat by the Byzantines in the battle of Ninevah in 627. That was a reversal, following up the reconquest of Syria and Palestine, which the Sassanids took just before, in an earlier campaign, still in the 600s, that brought them to the outskirts of Constantinople before being driven back. So what you have to understand is the area conquered was in a whiplash between east and west, with now the Sassanids, now the Byzantines, blitzing the same general area. Omar came in first against the temporarily weaker party, the Sassanids, gained territory by doing so, and turned on the other party within 2 years of setting out, beating both, conquering the temporarily weaker party outright, and tearing away large provinces from the other in a very short space of time.

There is no way such events can be hidden, minimized, obfuscated, or recast. The Sassanid empire was flourishing two decades earlier and threatening Constantinople, and in the blink of an eye it is just gone, caput, nada, disappears from history. Byzantine rulers were campaigning in central Iraq and Byzantine theologians were worrying over enforcing orthodoxy against Nestorian and monophysite heresies in Syria and Egypt one minute, and the next minute they have been ejected from the near east entirely, never to return.

Understand, the -early- period of Islam, the time of Muhammad himself, is obscure in details. The reason is nobody else outside gave a hoot before it turned into something so big (reason one), and all the stories from the Arabs themselves have been embellished and recast for their own later motives of legitimacy, to make such-and-such legal by some precedent for it in the time of Muhammad. But the basic fact that an armed monotheism rode out of the Arabian desert and conquered the near east like lightning, is not disputable. It upsets every existing historical process in the whole area.

Who was the Prophet Muhammad?

By Daniel Pipes The Jerusalem Post Friday, May 12 2000

In a well-known and oft-repeated statement, the French scholar Ernest Renan wrote in 1851 that, unlike the other founders of major religions, the Prophet Muhammad "was born in the full light of history."

Indeed, look up Muhammad in any reference book and the outlines of his life are confidently on display: birth in CE 570 in Mecca, career as a successful merchant, first revelation in 610, flight to Medina in 622, triumphant return to Mecca in 630, death in 632.

Better yet, read the 610-page standard account of Muhammad's life in English, by W.Montgomery Watt, and find a richly detailed biography.

There are, however, two major problems with this standard biography, as explained in a fascinating new study, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, edited by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus Books).

First, the massive documentation about Muhammad derives in every instance from Arabic written sources - biographies, collections of the prophet's sayings and doings, and so on - the earliest of which date from a century and a half after his death.

Not only does this long lapse of time cast doubt on their accuracy, but internal evidence strongly suggests the Arabic sources were composed in the context of intense partisan quarrels over the prophet's life.

To draw an American analogy: It's as though the first accounts of the US Constitutional Convention of 1787 were only recently written down, and this in the context of polemical debates over interpretation of the Constitution.

Second, the earlier sources on the prophet's life that do survive dramatically contradict the standard biography.

In part, these are literary sources in languages other than Arabic (such as Armenian, Greek, or Syriac); in part, they are material remains (such as papyri, inscriptions, and coins).

Although the unreliability of the Arabic literary sources has been understood for a century, only recently have scholars begun to explore its full implications, thanks largely to the ground-breaking work of the British academic John Wansbrough.

In the spirit of "interesting if true," they look skeptically at the Arabic written sources and conclude that these are a form of "salvation history" - self-serving, unreliable accounts by the faithful.

The huge body of detail, revisionist scholars find, is almost completely spurious.

So unreliable do the revisionists find the traditional account, Patricia Crone has memorably written, that "one could, were one so inclined, rewrite most of Montgomery Watt's biography of Muhammad in reverse."

For example, an inscription and a Greek account leads Lawrence Conrad to fix Muhammad's birth in 552, not 570.

Crone finds that Muhammad's career took place not in Mecca but hundreds of kilometers to the north.

Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren find that the classical Arabic language was developed not in today's Saudi Arabia but in the Levant, and that it reached Arabia only through the colonizing efforts of one of the early caliphs.

Startling conclusions follow from this.

The Arab tribesmen who conquered great swathes of territory in the seventh century were not Moslems, perhaps they were pagans.

The Koran is a not "a product of Muhammad or even of Arabia," but a collection of earlier Judeo-Christian liturgical materials stitched together to meet the needs of a later age.

Most broadly, "there was no Islam as we know it" until two or three hundred years after the traditional version has it (more like CE 830 than 630); it developed not in the distant deserts of Arabia but through the interaction of Arab conquerors and their more civilized subject peoples.

A few scholars go even further, doubting even the existence of Muhammad.

Though undertaken in a purely scholarly quest, the research made available in Quest for the Historical Muhammad raises basic questions for Moslems concerning the prophet's role as a moral paragon; the sources of Islamic law; and the God-given nature of the Koran.

Still, it comes as little surprise to learn that pious Moslems prefer to avoid these issues.

Their main strategy until now has been one of neglect - hoping that revisionism, like a toothache, will just go away .

But toothaches don't spontaneously disappear, and neither will revisionism.

Moslems one day are likely to be consumed by efforts to respond to its challenges, just as happened to Jews and Christians in the nineteenth century, when they faced comparable scholarly inquiries.

Those two faiths survived the experience - though they changed profoundly in the process - and so will Islam.

(The writer is director of the Philadelphia Middle East Forum and wrote his first book on early Islamic history.)

On Wednesday 26/6/2002

John Wansbrough remembered

Summary:

A tribute to John Wansbrough, the religious historian who caused a furore in the 1970s when he argued that the Koran was put together from various sources - and heavily influenced by Christianity and Judaism - some 200 years after the Prophet Mohammed's death.

Details or Transcript:

Stephen Crittenden: One of the leading figures in the study of early Islam and the Koran, Professor John Wansbrough, died earlier this month.

John Wansbrough was born in Illinois, studied languages at Harvard, and spent the whole of his academic career teaching at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

He hypothesised that the Koran was actually compiled over a much longer period than had previously been thought.

Dr Gerald Hawting was his colleague at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and he spoke to me about Wansbrough’s ideas and how they have been taken up.

Gerald Hawting: He’s best known for his work on the Koran, but that has to be seen in the context of his work on early Islam in general. He developed a sort of model of the emergence of Islam, and he sees the Koran as part and parcel of that emergence of Islam.

Stephen Crittenden: Was he essentially bringing to bear the techniques that have been used in modern Bible scholarship for a very long time? Is that the most important thing he was doing?

Gerald Hawting: Yes, this is one of the features of his work. He was very much aware of what’s been done in the study of the Bible, and indeed of early Christianity and early Christian text, and he argued that those approaches could be applied to the Koran as well.

Stephen Crittenden: What did he end up arguing about the Koran? I gather the key thing was that it wasn’t produced I guess all of a piece, if you like, and lowered down from heaven to the prophet Mohammed.

Gerald Hawting: Yes, well of course Western scholars never really accepted that anyway. Non-believers of course have never seen the Koran as a revelation from God, although they could in a sense identify to the Revelation, but that would be stretching the idea of Revelation somewhat, and certainly it wouldn’t be the same as what Muslims understand by Revelation of the Koran.

Stephen Crittenden: And so where was Wansbrough’s work new?

Gerald Hawting: Well even Western scholars who don’t talk of Revelation nevertheless have always associated the Koran with Mohammed, following Muslim tradition, they’ve agreed that the Koran was not put together in the lifetime of Mohammed, that they see it as being put into the form in which we know it and its being the most important Islamic text from about 30 years after Mohammed’s death. And the materials in it have always been seen by Western scholars and by Muslims as originating in the lifetime of Mohammed, and very closely associated with the events of Mohammed’s life. Now Wansbrough tried to break that link between Mohammed and the Koranic materials.

Stephen Crittenden: And argue that the Koran had been compiled over a very long period, and that in fact it even possibly wasn’t known to the first generation of Muslims?

Gerald Hawting: Yes, sure. There is evidence from about 70 years after Mohammed’s death in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, of some of the texts that are a part of the Koran, but Wansbrough’s view is that the Koran as we know it was gradually pieced together, and as I said at the beginning, he saw this process of piecing it together, the formation of a Muslim Scripture, of part and parcel of the emergence of Islam, the growing up of a new religion with its own identity.

Stephen Crittenden: And the importance of Jewish and Christian sources was one of the issues that he embraced?

Gerald Hawting: Oh yes. I mean anybody who reads the Koran is immediately aware of this, that the Koran contains references to individuals and stories which Jews and Christians maybe not today, but probably Jews and Christians of the time, would have known about. The significant thing that he picked out was that the Koran seems to assume that the readers know these stories, it doesn’t tell these stories as if it’s talking to people who are ignorant of them, it’s using these stories to make moral and religious points, and assuming that the people already know the details of the stories.

Stephen Crittenden: Another important book he wrote was The Sectarian Milieu in 1978, and there he really looks at the way that Islam develops after the Arab conquests of the Holy Land in the mid-7th century and so on, and emerged in a period as sort of intense debates over religion between Christians and Jews. Does that actually in the end leave him to conclude that the whole early traditional history of Islam is perhaps fabricated in some way? Does he go that far?

Gerald Hawting: No, he wouldn’t say fabricated, that’s not a word that he would have used. But all religions, all communities have their own myths, their own ways of looking at history, and he saw Muslim accounts of Islam’s origins as reflecting the way that later Muslims understood the origins of their religion and their tradition.

Stephen Crittenden: Is one of the problems that we’re dealing with a period where sources other than traditional Islamic sources are very, very sketchy indeed?

Gerald Hawting: Well yes, but also traditional Islamic sources, and this is one of Wansbrough’s fundamental starting points. We don’t really have any Islamic literature that you can really date much before about 800 AD. OK, those sources are drawing on earlier reports and earlier traditions, but Wansbrough was always saying you start from when you have the text in a datable form, and they’re very late.

Stephen Crittenden: Gerald, did he have a particular picture of the prophet Mohammed himself as a result of his work on the Koran?

Gerald Hawting: No, he never as far as I know, commented on the historical Mohammed. I mean he would draw the line in saying that all we can know is the images of Mohammed that Islam itself created.

Stephen Crittenden: That would be actually very close to the situation that Christians have with Jesus.

Gerald Hawting: Yes of course, yes.

Stephen Crittenden: You would expect his views to be controversial amongst Muslims, but are they in fact controversial amongst Western academics as well?

Gerald Hawting: Yes, they are. It’s difficult to see quite why they are controversial, because they’re so much in the mainstream of religious studies I suppose in the ways that people have studied Judaism and Christianity. You have the feeling that sometimes scholars of Islam are very loath to take Islam seriously, and to study it in the same way that they study the other monotheistic religions. I’m not quite sure why that is, maybe something psychological, I don’t know.

Stephen Crittenden: Perhaps because it’s dangerous?

Gerald Hawting: I don’t think many of them are worried in any sort of physical sense. It’s just that I suppose a desire not to offend, a sympathy for Muslims in the modern world, the predicaments that they say from things like that. So you find a lot of drawing back I think in academic approaches to Islam. Wansbrough always insisted that if you take Islam seriously then you’ve got to study it seriously as well.

Stephen Crittenden: Has his kind of historical critical method been taken up anywhere in the Islamic world?

Gerald Hawting: There are one or two scholars who I don’t think have been influenced directly by Wansbrough, but there are certainly some scholars who are prepared to talk of the Koran as they would talk of other texts. The famous case is Nasser Abu Zaid, the Egyptian, who had to leave Egypt because of his views about the Koran.

Stephen Crittenden: Just finally then, what will his lasting impact be on Islamic studies do you think?

Gerald Hawting: It depends of course. In all academic fields it takes time for models and ideas to establish themselves, and we can’t really tell. Looking at the history of Islam, the way people have studied the history of Islam over the past 150 years, you see a sort of to-ing and fro-ing, an ebbing and flowing if you like, of the tide. Someone will come up with ideas and make a big breakthrough, and then over time people fall back into old ways until somebody else comes and says, Hang on a minute, shouldn’t we be starting from this previous position? Now I suspect that’s going to happen here as well.

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