Posted on 11/15/2002 8:52:56 PM PST by Angelus Errare
"Koran as we know it was gradually pieced together,"
True, known by all serious scholars
"he saw this process of piecing it together, the formation of a Muslim Scripture, of part and parcel of the emergence of Islam"
False, and even absurd as a matter of history, sociology, politics, etc. It conflates writing with religion and theological minutae (the content of this or that minor point of doctrine settled later) with massive political facts.
Islam existed as the creed of an army, as "regimental orders", long before any literate culture existed among its members. It is ridiculous to maintain that it did not exist until there was one accepted and bound Koran. Religions are not books.
It is far sillier even than saying Christianity began in 200 AD, because in that case at least its adherents were literate from an early period, and as a sect it had no political existence until much later. Whereas Islam was first of all one of the states on the map - an area dominated by an army, which obeyed one line of rulers.
It is crazy to say it "didn't yet exist" when it conquered the whole near east. Only a book about it didn't yet exist. Non-existent things do not destroy whole empires. "But it wasn't yet Islam" - sophistical nonsense, a verbal slight of hand, pretending that Islam is defined as a book. Of course it was Islam. Otherwise you are reduced to saying, "it was instead 'gefnord', which strangely enough looks exactly like Islam in every historical particular, but we just don't call it that until there is a Koran".
Incidentally, an English translation of Seobos' history, written in classical Armenian in the 7th century, only came out in 1979. Anyone without any knowledge of Armenian might easily have missed it as evidence, in these revisionists' heyday in the 1970s. Their model of what was going on would have predicted no such passage, nor any mention of Muhammad. It is a forced, tendentious idea pushed to the breaking point, and broken as a matter of scholarship.
What is true and indeed has been known to the whole serious scholarly consensus for a century, is that the Koran was written late, and the early period from Muhammad's own origin to the expansion of young Islam out of Arabia under Omar in 635 AD, has been subject to considerable revision, backdating, and wholesale invention by later Arab sources. Because it was a legal precedent matter for an important new state - nobody would have cared otherwise.
One can also see how nonsensical the view is on the internal doctrine side by following the actual doctrinal splits within Islam. Khajarites, Shia, and Qadarites all predate his supposed "origin". So does the shift to Baghdad and founding of the Abassids, and the Mutazilite theology associated with that event. Which is where Christian theology probably had its largest effect, actually.
The greatest period of "syncretism", shifting existing doctrine in response to theological argument taken from Christian sources, occurs around 750 in Baghdad (when the doctrine of free will is taught and enforced by a persecution), not 680 in Damascus. From the whole course of the fight over that doctrine, it is clear it was new, and that under the Omayyads fatalism was the accepted position.
Meanwhile, other events like the persecution of the Syrian church under Patriarch Mar Gewangis I around 670 (for refusal of tribute), recorded in Syriac sources not just Arabic ones, makes no sense if they were supposedly not Muslim "yet".
The more it is pushed, the more historical anomolies "stick out" and jar, making no historical sense. These guys want to push as far as they can in one direction anyway, except where constrained by a known non-Arabic text. When they know perfectly well it was an illiterate group, that almost everything was initially oral, and that there was essentially no interaction with non-Arab literate groups until after 635.
That is not the way historical scholarship is done. You don't get to write whatever fantasy you like in any place that looks "dark" in the sources, nor do you get to artificially increase the darkness to have more scope to do so, by rejecting as many sources as possible as supposedly untrustworthy.
Whatever story is told about early Islam has to fit the known facts, including e.g. the political divisions that already occurred, narrative of important and highly public political events like changes of rulers, assassinations, succession crises, major battles, etc. You can't falsify the very existence of such things close to the time they occurred. E.g. if every Arabic source on every side of the fight dates the Shia-Sunni split to a succession crisis after the fourth caliph, there is no reason to discount it.
Islamic *literalism* as an aggressive doctrine position dates to around the 750 AD period. We can name the man involved and the political events surrounding his taking the position (Ibn-Hanbal, persecuted by the Mutazilites of Baghdad). The codification of Hadith is somewhat later still. Islamic *literature* "settles down" by around 800 AD. But the political thing, and the main points of its doctrine, are all there by 645 AD at the latest.
Origins are often shrouded in mystery, since the importance of seminal events generally cannot recognized at the time, but only in retrospect.
That additional reason is the fact that Muslims claimed legitimacy for various practices on the basis that those actions were traditional, accepted ways of doing things. It is how Muslim law worked - precedent was the key concept. Muhammad was effectively recognized as a source of legislation. What he had taught, done, or tolerated in others of his time was regarded as sanctioned. Nobody else was recognized as having a right to legislate. They were supposed to be following a law they got from him that he got from God, not their own preferences.
Now you have to see both sides of what that has to mean for later positions on his sayings and actions. First, no one would have bothered trying to legitimate anything in this manner, unless there was a great mass of accepted practices that were uniform and agreed on this basis. You don't legitimate something by claiming some nobody that no one cares about said it was OK. Whole peoples don't hit on the same nobody that no one ever cared about to ascribe actions to him. Great bunches of people had to be agreeing to do all kinds of things because and only because Muhammad had taught those things, or there would be no motive whatever to claim he had taught this or that.
Then, second, once that is established - *what* gets ascribed to Muhammad is very much up in the air. Because it is possible for people coming later to merely allege that he did or said such-and-so, in order to get it accepted as legal. You can't graft a new law onto a non-existent tradition. But if you do have an existent tradition, you can indeed graft new laws onto it, by falsifying accounts of previous actions.
With all of the traditions just oral, not collected into one place or written down, it was relatively easy for new ones to slip in. So and so told me that whosits told me that Muhammad did X, and so and so and whosits were wonderful guys, don't you know, they'd never tell me something that wasn't so, therefore X is permitted. In that chain there are three people who could just be making it up - or who may have recast something real in their own way, as they understood a previous principle, whatever.
By the time you are looking at a codified and centralized, written end result a century and a half later, there will be all sorts of things in that mass of accounts. There wouldn't be such a structure of tradition in the first place, if -all- of it were made up things, added later. There never would have been anything to add them to, anything deferred to already by masses of people. But of each -particular- item, it is possible it was an innovation sometime in that 150 years, rather than really being there in the time of Muhammad.
The principle of legislation by precedent, then, tended to encourage falsification of earlier history - while also encouraging lots of attention to earlier history, to be sure. That tradition was used this way proves that there already was a tradition and a body of thought, Islam. It does not prove of each proposition you care to name, one after another, that it already was part of the body of thought called Islam. Some are so central they are beyond serious question - the God of Abraham without any other, Muhammad as prophet, a day of judgment, required prayer, etc. Many lesser points could have come in any time later.
Traditional Sunnis deal with all of this by simply accepting an eventual outcome, as codified in the Koran on the one hand, and various compilations of hadith (narratives) on the other. How much ongoing legislation they continue to allow then turns on how they handle legal principles like precedent (latest or earliest? e.g.), consensus (of the present or the time of Muhammad?), analogy (what is the principle of this hadith? how does it generalize? e.g.), and what role they leave to the opinion of the judge (equity vs. "original intent", etc).
Four different traditional schools of law formed around different sets of answers to those questions, and different compilations of hadith. Shiites, meanwhile, don't trace law to such traditions but to some living authority, in effect put in the role of Muhammad as a living legislator. Recent literalists try to get away from the instability of legal scholarship on the one hand, and authority on the other, by appealing solely to the text of the Koran, and to hadith compilations about the time of the first four caliphs, before the Sunni-Shia split. They then want every Muslim to judge for himself based on those texts alone.
The last is very important in all of this. Because it means the literalists are appealing almost entirely to the period when Islam was least known, certainly to the period before it was all written down. A fact, however, they are unwilling to acknowledge, being literalists. They regard themselves a copying a golden age explained in texts they regard as infallible and contemporary with that age. Actually, it probably never existed in that form.
It would be a little like Englishmen trying to copy the legends of Arthur instead of following the Magna Carta or the common law. They think that by disapproving of principles of later legislation they can avoid instability. They wind up actually following a fictional utopia read back into the period we know the least about. They think they are avoiding the causes of later splits in Islam. Actually, they follow back-dated work-arounds of later winners, without the accompanying systems of thought those were based on (legal schools, theological positions, etc).
From a modern western point of view, the most hopeful period doctrinally is the relatively early Abassid period, when much of the legalistic stuff was codified, but in addition there was a lively interaction with and digestion of other learned traditions. The enlightening caliphs of the period around 750-850, their courts and their scholars, were interested in every sort of thought, from Greek philosophy to Christian theology to Zorastrian and Indian religion. It would be a much better period for them to be emulating. It is not full religious tolerance, let alone liberalism or democracy, but it is an intellectual and open period.
No one disputes the fact that Islam existed
long before the official version of the Koran was written.
(I would even make the hypothesis that it predated the birth of the alleged Mohammed).
That is not the point.
My understanding of Wansbrough's work is
that it is based on a very careful textual analysis of the Koran.
The literary devices used in it were common
in the Syrian Christian and Jewish communities.
They would have been meaningless to the tribesmen of Arabia.
The entire Koran assumes the reader (or listener) was thoroughly familiar
with Christian and Jewish legends
which the Arabian tribesmen would have known nothing about.
Thus if there was a historical Mohammed who received a message from Gabriel
(and this certainly is one of the most central doctrines of Islam)
whatever this message was
it certainly was totally falsified in the official Koran.
But if this message was so totally falsified in later years
what then is there left to believe?
Perhaps there was no such message in the first place.
Perhaps there was not even such a Mohammed.
Of course Gabriel did not dictate the Koran to Muhammad. Not because there was no Muhammad, but because there was and is no Gabriel. It is a fairy tale. Santa Claus doesn't exist either. This is not news. The Koran as a book would have been "meaningless" to the tribesmen of Arabia because it was written and they couldn't read. Every serious scholar has known both as long as modern scholarship about Islam has existed, certainly since the 19th century.
You conceed the existence of Islam as the political entity it was, long before the codification of the written Koran. You have to, it is plain as a pikestaff. Yet you still want to insinuate in your closing "perhaps" that Muhammad did not exist. Um, who were all of those people who conquered the near east following and obeying and referring to in their internal legitimations and disputes? It wasn't Muhammad, of course, since he didn't exist - it was all made up about this other guy - named Muhammad.
Naturally, a whole army, state, and empire hit upon the bright idea of all agreeing they were following the orders given to them by a non-existent personage they all knew hadn't really been still walking around a handful of years previously. When they fought each other, they all agreed to do so by claiming legitimacy from this non-existent personage. The Armenian history of the events, written within living memory of them happening, was just as deluded as all of them about the existence of Muhammad, the message he preached, and its unifying political effect on them and its launching them on their conquests. It was a sort of collective psychosis, over the whole middle east.
Later, some Syrian monks cleverly put words into the mouth of the non-existent personage the others were all following, but just neglected to include little details like the Incarnation, probably because they overlooked it. Darn, if only they had included a little more in the way of traditional Syrian literary devices, Islam would be a branch of eastern Orthodoxy to this day.
The reason the whole new army and state could not be made Christian by inserting two stories into a batch is that they already weren't Christians and would not have put up with it. They already knew what they believed, and did not need scribes to write it down for them first. Possession of writing does not confer automatic ability to rule all of the thoughts of all illiterates.
Also, just a minor little point, they all agreed on what they believed, to an amazing extent. It was one of the great coincidences of history. They all said they thought these things because this guy named Muhammad - who was of course a figment of their imaginations - told them what to believe and they all followed his orders. The Armenians even knew what those were. But of course they just believed what they heard about it from delusional Arabs.
There is no getting around the connection between the worldly teacher, the basic doctrine, and the political movement. You don't get the effect without the cause. It is not a matter of a mythical fairy tale cause, but a real human historical one that anybody with half a brain can verify. New states all saying they are following the teachings of one man imply the existence of that man. Uniform consistency of their doctrine in determined political hostility to neighboring contemporary doctrines implies an innovating new source of a difference in doctrine.
Muhammad existed, he told his followers he was inspired, and preached to them a simplified monotheism based on what he said was the God of Abraham. It was a doctrine determinately different from those of the nearby great powers of his day, Sassanid Persia's Zorastrianism and Byzantine Christianity, borrowing elements from both. His followers took control of a small section of southwest Arabia, and from it as a base intervened in the ongoing power struggle between Persia and Byzantium. They conquered Persia, greater Syria, and Egypt, in less than 10 years. Syria became the developed heartland of the conquered territories. A power struggle for control of the new area was one by Syrian provincials, who moved the capital from its original seat in southwest Arabia to Damascus.
*Then* a lot of literary stuff happened. All of it long after the main religious and political events had already ben settled. The fact that the new governors of the new state believed definite things because Muhammad had taught them those things *constrained* whatever literary activity they put their own names to. Written Arabic literature appeared for the first time, as the conquerors learned literacy from their conquered subjects. Who were Syrian Christians - especially those from sects previously persecuted under Byzantium, like Nestorians and Monophysites, as more reliable than the Orthodox, who had a greater loyalty to Byzantium.
Then they had an additional political fight over the influence of Persian soldiery in an army previously Arab, along with innovations in doctrine based to a large extent on differences between what they had believed when they rode out of Arabia, and what the learned among them had been absorbing from Syrian theology - e.g. in disputes about free will, the problem of evil, etc.
The innovators won, backed by Persians, and moved the capital east to Baghdad (which had grown up next to Persian Ctseiphon as the Arab army garrison next door). The first kings of the new dynasty patronized all forms of literature, from translations of Greek philosophy and Indian religious texts - to large codifications of law. Official texts of Koran and of masses of hadith, as collections of material spanning the entire movement up to that point, were codified and published.
That history relates what every serious scholar has believed for a century. Not one line of it is contradicted by anything you've said. Every circumstance that either you or I have related fits into it perfectly, without anything amazing sticking out this way or that.
The broad outlines of the new doctrine and the person who preached it came first, and were not made up. Causes precede effects. The military-political earthquake that established the new thing came after that, hard on its heels, in a very compressed frame of time. It is recorded by a contemporary non-Arabic source, including referrence to the originator and the basic doctrine.
The place of Syriac literary influence on the whole development is also clear. It is -not- back before the early 7th century political events as their cause. It -is- before the final codified texts in Baghdad in the 8th century. The political timeline accords with the place of these influences. They occur -after- the new thing -conquers- Syria.
The reason the eventual doctrines are not exactly the same as Syrian Christianity is also explained - the Syrian originators of the literary conventions were -subjects- of new rulers who already believed a -different- basic doctrine. The reason for literary influence anyway, despite the scribes being subjects rather than rulers, is also explained - the rulers had no learned literary tradition of their own, because they were largely -illiterate- when they arrived. They were nomad soldiers, not urban scribes.
And the reason for the codification of the doctrine in textual form, its "settling down", is also explained. The political revolution from the Omayyads to the Abassids included the replacement of an unlimited exclusively Arab military monarchy interested primarily in power and loot, with a more law-limited cosmopolitian monarchy that patronized all forms of literary activity as a means of legitimation and especially of assimilation of vast conquered areas diverse in native doctrine.
Duncan McDonald (to pick one example of traditional orientalist scholarship) knew about as much a hundred years ago. None of the revisionist scholarship you have cited changes a particle of the picture of the events he already had. You don't get "credit" for not believing in Santa Claus; it does not mean that your guesses as to the existence of Karl Marx must be taken more seriously.
The long discussion following #71 might be of interest to you.
Now you want to shift the argument to whether Gabriel dictated the message or not.
I merely am repeating official Islamic doctrine.
It matters to me not one bit whether Gabriel dictated the message or not.
The fundamental fact remains, it is said Mohammed preached a message.
What was it?
As already explained, any given item of minutae may be questioned as to whether it was original or late. But there is no question of all of it being late, because then there would have been nothing to graft the later bits onto, and the whole political history of the middle east in the 7th century would be completely falsified.
You insinuate that Muhammad may not even have existed. Stop insinuating and make a claim, or don't make a claim. If he didn't, explain middle eastern political history in the 7th century. If you can't, then he did. You insinuate that all of Muslim doctrine may date from the 8th century and stem from Syrian sources. If so, then explain the doctrinal conflict of Gerflume (the new substitute for "Islam" as the name of the political state) with that of conquered and previously Byzantine Syria.
If they got it all from Syrian monks, why doesn't the later doctrine in Baghdad in the 8th century agree with the prior doctrines of those Syrian monks? Did they just forget the Incarnation because they overlooked it? Or did somebody deny it and get widespread political backing for that denial? Who was it, supposedly, in your revisionist version of middle eastern history?
The twin denials of (1) the existence of a man named Muhammad and (2) his creating a state that did not believe what Syrians prior to him believed, lead to historical gibberish. Taken as hypotheses, posited for the sake of argument, they cannot explain any of the contemprary history of the mideast in the 7th and 8th centuries. But they are advanced as hypotheses supposedly because they accord better, not worse, with known historical facts and sources. And they simply don't. They fail the test of perfectly skeptical, in no way apologetic, objective history.
It remains a tendentious bit of historical revisionism pushed to the breaking point, that predictably then breaks. The facts it sets out from (late Koran, backdating particular precedents for legitimation in Arabic sources) are not disputed by scholars and haven't been for more than a century - although they are denied by Muslim orthodoxy, which is hardly surprising. The place it wants them to drag us all to, the non-existence of Muhammad and invention of all the teachings ascribed to him by Syrian Christians, neither follows from those premises nor can explain any of the surrounding history.
One may charitably say that seeing why it is wrong is a useful exercise. But it is totally wrong.
This theory seems to me not only plausible
but probable
certainly much more probable
than the fairy-tale we read about
in the Koran.
1. It does not explain the contemporary account in the Armenian history that mentions Muhammad by name, specifies the monotheist doctrine, and ascribes the new political unity of the Arabs to it.
2. It does not account for the new political unity of the Arabs.
3. It does not account for the new doctrine in Syria not being e.g. Nestorian Christianity, or straight Judaism, rather something new that turns out to be Islam.
4. It does not account for the capital in the Hijaz, before moving to Damascus. It does not account for the new capital once the Omayyads take over being in Damascus, rather than say Jerusalem, or Antioch, certainly more important cities under the previous religions of Syria.
5. It does not account for the early fights recorded by the Muslims themselves being over principles of succession, not doctrine. If a new doctrine was being adopted by the newly arrived army, why was there no party of the old doctrine, and no fight over the shift?
6. It does not account for no one in the later splits within Islam appealing back to any such period or any such events, but instead all trying to claim legitimacy from the time and purported sayings of a supposedly mythical founder.
7. All of it in you most recent version is supposed to occur in the time of Omar, that is within 10 years of the death of Muhammad according to the usual history. That means, within living memory of the supposedly falsified events. Everyone in that generation would therefore have known it as a conscious fraud, which is wildly implausible. It is one thing to allege (as some of your sources do) a slow accretion process in literature over 150 years. It is something else again to allege a conscious deception taking hold within 10 years without sparking the slightest recorded notice or opposition, internal or external to Arabs.
8. The standard history (among orientalists e.g.) account fully for all of the literary influence evidence put forward (and no other evidence -is- put forward), as results of the period between Muhammad's oral teaching around 630, and the eventual Abassid codification of official texts in the 8th century.
9. The standard history's reading of the Syrian textual influence's placement simultaneously fits all of the other elements mentioned above. None of those correspondances has been argued to be wrong by the revisionist position. No evidence has been advanced for rejecting any of them. Instead, the revisionist position fights the weak straw man orthodox Muslim account, while ignoring instead of addressing the consensus of the objective historians.
10. The revisionist position accounts for absolutely nothing in the Arabic sources and their version of the history, except to reject the entire lot of it as a grand tissue of lies, motives for which, methods of which, etc, are entirely hypothetical guesses of the revisionists. No attempt to track e.g. the series of internal Muslim political disputes is made.
It explains far less, it is contradicted by contemporaneous sources, it advances nothing against the scholarly position it seeks to supplant, and instead makes up whatever it likes to put in place of the lies detected in the straw man of Muslim orthodox fairy tales. That is not objective history. It is the mirror image of tendentious apologetics.
Briefly: I never said this took place over 10 years.
It undoubtedly took place over several hundred years.
I never said it was a conscious fraud.
The greatest con-artists are those who believe in their own frauds.
(Many political, religious and even scientific movements come to mind!)
It might have begun with someone saying:
"Old King Muhammed believed that too. They say he had visions".
And it went on from there.
Any group of people who have strong motives for wanting to believe something
eventually will end by creating reasons for believing it.
Vlahos is continuing his fascinating series
on the 'historical Mohammed'
debunking of legends and fairy tales
about the origins of Islam
which non-Moslems as well as Moslems
almost universally accept as historical truth.
You might be interested in a book he recommends:
Arabs and Others in Early Islam
by Suliman Bashear
an Arabic scholar
who maintains
(as I hypothesized earlier)
that Islam originally developed in Syria
as a fusion between Jewish and Christian beliefs
and later was adopted by the invading Arab armies
as their state religion
much as Christianity was adopted
by the Romans.
(Bashear was attacked and thrown from a window
by his Arab students
because of his heretical investigations)
It comes as no suprise to me that Jerry Falwell's comments should incite such irrational hatred from the Iranian leadership. It is my firm opinion, after spending time in the region and reflecting on what I see and hear, that muslims are some of the most arrogant, racist, intolerant, and violent people in the world. I think Islamic extremism is the most grave threat to the world since communism. It is not possible to have a civilized discussion with many of these people because, as soon as you question an aspect of their faith, or propose an alternative explanation for why they have fallen behind the rest of the world in virtually every measurable aspect of success, they are ready to declare jihad against you and cut off your head. I am so sick of the hypocritical muslims and their false faith that they attempt to push on the rest of the underdeveloped world--seeking out the ignorant and impressionable for sucide bombings and jihad against the west. Why are no Muslim clerics issuing fatwas against the rhetoric of Ahmadinejad and others who voice their desire for the destruction of Israel? Why does no Muslim leader have the courage to denounce acts of terror, suicide bombings, murder of other muslims in Iraq, and all the other tragedies that play out daily in the middle east? Either they are scared of the reaction they will get from thier fellow muslims, or perhaps, they agree with what Ahmadinejad, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and others propose. I think the first explanation is much more likely, but the fact remains that the world faces a dangerous enemy, which makes it their mission to spread their faith that has been so manipulated for political and personal reasons that it leaves us to wonder what the future will be like if no one is willing to stand up to these people, denounce their teachings as false, and to spread the message of peace and freedom that President Bush so courageously has been doing. God protect us from the radical muslims and their disrespect for human life. The middle east is the most volatile, dangerous, and needy region on this earth.
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