by Sujit Das
1.3.1: The Reliability of Traditional Sources
Our knowledge and understanding of early Islam and its founder mainly rests on the writings we call Sira, al-Maghazi, Qur’an, Qur’anic exegesis (Tafsir), Tabari’s history, and Shahi Hadith collections.
Sira means “biography”; likewise Sirat Rasul Allah is the biography of the messenger of Allah written by Ibn Ishaq (704 - 767(?)). This is the earliest life of Muhammad of which we have any trace. Ishaq was one of the main authorities on the life and times of the Prophet. He had a very high reputation (e.g., al-Zuhri spoke of him as “the most knowledgeable man in Maghazi”). Ishaq’s biography provides the sole account of Muhammad’s life and the formation of Islam written within 200 years of his death. This work is very important for the researchers not only because it is the earliest biography but also for the reason that Ishaq was a free thinker and he was free from any influences of later idealizing or myth-making tendencies. While the character, message, and deeds portrayed within its pages are the direct opposite of Christ’s and his disciples, the Sira’s chronological presentation is similar in style to the Christian Gospels. His work contains much information of a character that is devastatingly unfavorable to the Prophet.
Al-Maghazi is the early Muslim military expeditions or raiding parties in which Muhammad took part in the Medinan period. But this term seems to have been more or less often used synonymously with term Sira.
The history of al-Tabari (Abu Ja’far Muhammad Ibn Jarir al-Tabari) is a mine of information for historical and critical research by Western scholars. This Persian historian was a devout Sunni Muslim, a commentator of the Qur’an and widely traveled. It is believed that he memorized the Qur’an at the age of seven, was a qualified religious leader at eight, and left home for further study at the age of twelve. He had not only devoted much time to history but in mathematics and medicine also. In his history, he did not hesitate to express his independent judgment. He derived much of his material from the oral traditions and literary sources, e.g., the works of al-Wiqidi, Ibn Sa’d, Abu Miknaf and of course Ibn Ishaq.
Qur’an’s claim to divine origin rests on the ahadith (plural of Hadith). The books of traditions are the records of what Muhammad did, what he enjoined, what was done in his presence and what he did not forbid. Hadith collections also include the authoritative sayings and doings of his companions. Muhammad was aware that people were taking note of all his casually uttered words and that stories of what he did were being passed around. He was aware of the dangers and warned against the practice because some of his words may get included in the Qur’an by mistake (Brahmachari, 1999, p. 131). But the trend once started could not be stopped and was accelerated after his death (Walker, 2002, p. 172). Hadith contains material from pre-Islamic times also. Much was added to it after Muhammad’s death with fresh material with the growth of Islamic empire.
It is true that much of the Hadith collections was fabricated before Imam Bukhari (his full name was Muhammad Ibn Ismail Ibn Ibrahim Ibn al-Mughirah Ibn Bardizbah al-Bukhari) made his compilation; e.g., Ibn Abi-I-Awja (executed 772 for apostasy) confessed before his death that he had fabricated more than 4,000 ahadith, in which he forbade Muslims what was in fact permitted and vice versa and he made Muslims to break the fast when they should have been fasting (Warraq, 2003, p. 45). There are instances where many ahadith were invented to serve the political purposes of the Umayyad, the Abbasids and later dynasties of Caliphs and handing down of the traditions went downwards to the level of a business enterprise as a means of livelihood (Goldziher, 1971, p. 169). Also a large amount of non-Islamic material was drawn into by the compilers which even included sayings of Buddhist wisdom, Roman stories and verses from the Zoroastrians, Jewish and Christian scriptures and even Greek philosophy (Gibb, 1969, p. 51). Shortly the number of ahadith already in circulation and still being invented became unimaginable, as one Muslim authority wrote (Nicholson, 1969, p. 145), “in nothing do we see pious man more given to falsehood than in the traditions”. So it was urgently necessary to compile an authentic collection. The best-known and most authoritative compilation is by Bukhari. Bukhari had examined a total of 6,00,000 traditions. He preserved some 7,000 (including repetitions), which means he rejected some 593,000 as inauthentic (Crone, 1987, p. 33). Excluding the repetitions, there remained only about 2760 in total. Second only to Bukhari’s collection is the work of Muslim Ibn al-Hajaj, which contains three thousand traditions. These compilations are believed to be Shahi Hadith (authentic traditions).
Regretfully, the above five oldest and most trusted Islamic sources do not portray Muhammad a superior being or any kind of mercy of God among mankind. The sources reveal that he was a thief, a liar, an assassin, a pedophile, a shameless womanizer, a promiscuous husband, a rapist, a mass-murderer, a desert pirate, a warmonger, a spineless coward and a calculating and ruthless tyrant. It is certainly not the character profile of the founder of a true religion.
Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the Bukhari’s collections were later corrupted by religious rivalries. Other traditional books were written by pious Muslims, the copies are preserved and certainly it would not be the characteristic of believers to portray their Prophet as a villain. After all Muhammad had promised them paradise in exchange of their acceptance of Islam. How can they malign their beloved Prophet?
Similarly the trustworthiness of Christian sources cannot be doubted either. By the time Muhammad received his first revelation early in the seventh century; Christianity was already an established religion and had been in law of the exclusive faith of the Roman kingdom, the superpower of the Mediterranean for some two centuries. Christianity also had been planted from Ethiopia to Ireland and Morocco to Georgia and in Mesopotamia, i.e., modern Iraq (Fletcher, 2003, pp. 4, 6). The multiplicity and diversity of the Christian texts stands as a proof of an intellectual life of Christendom within the Roman world. In fact this was a new era when this faith was slowly coming out of the religious orthodoxy. As the grip of the Orthodox Church was relaxed, there was a wave of theological deviants and the contemporaneous Christians evaluated Muhammad and his sect as yet another such group which had gone astray. It was unthinkable to them that Islam might be “a new religion” in the strict sense of the term.
The Muslim invaders remained on friendly terms with the Christian populations of the land they conquered. Qur’an (29.45) requires Muslims should respect the Ahl al-Kitab, the people of the book, that is to say the Christians and Jews. Hence we have hardly any doubt on the authenticity of early Christian sources. It was too late for the Christians to realize the true nature of Islam.
1.4: Discrediting Muhammad using Traditional Sources
The original book of Ibn Ishaq is lost to history, and all we know of it is what is quoted from it by the later writers, mainly Ibn Hisham and Tabari. These quotations are fortunately quite reliable. Ibn Hisham edited and abridged Ishaq’s work about sixty-five years later. In his edition, Hisham (Guillaume, 1955, p. 691) wrote,
I am omitting things which Ishaq recorded in this book. I have omitted things which are disgraceful to discuss and matters which would distress certain people.
This particular comment speaks volumes. Today we need to know, what are the “disgraceful to discuss” topics Hisham omitted from Ishaq’s original work and what are the “matters which would distress certain people”. We understand Hisham was actually compromising with the truth to save his life, which depended upon not offending the cleric-kings during his time. But he was honest enough to admit that he had compromised with the truth. As Margoliouth (cited Warraq, 2000, p. 340) commented, “ The character attributed to Muhammad in the biography of Ibn Ishaq is exceedingly unfavorable … for whatever Muhammad does he is prepared to plead the express authorization of the deity. It is however, impossible to find any doctrine which he is not prepared to abandon in order to secure a political end. At different points in his career he abandons the unity of God and his claim to the title of a Prophet. This is a
disagreeable picture for the founder of a religion, and it cannot be pleaded that it is a picture drawn by an enemy. ”
However, a few modern historians have attempted to recover the lost portion of Ishaq’s work by applying the Biblical criteria of “Form and Redaction criticism” (Form criticism is an analysis of literature, particularly the Bible, to discover earlier oral traditions, e.g., stories, legends and myths. Redaction criticism is concerned with when and by what process did a particular section of the Bible reach its final literary form) to the basis historical assemblage of Ishaq.
The pagan Meccans were wise enough not to believe Muhammad’s gigantic claim because they had seen many such imposters. There are more than a dozen verses which confirm that Muhammad and the “voice” he had heard were ridiculed by the pagans. They thought that Muhammad was fabricating verses, or in the parlance of those days, he was demon-possessed. The contemporaries of Muhammad called him majnoon (lunatic, crazy, possessed by jinn) (Sina, 2008, p. 6) or a soothsayer kahin. This is very explicit in the ten Qur’anic verses 15.6, 23.70, 34.8, 34.46, 37.36, 44.14, 52.29, 68.2, 68.51 and 81.22. In a few instances, there are verses 21.5, 36.69, 37.36 and 52.30 where an alternative explanation was given that Muhammad was an ambitious but fanciful poet who had merely invented it all.
To defend himself Muhammad added several references to Biblical Prophets likewise accused of ghost-possession, e.g., earlier Prophets in general (Q: 51.52), Noah (Q: 23.25), Moses (Q: 26.26, 27; 51.39). Let it be on record that the Bible nowhere mentions such an allegation against Noah, Moses or most other Prophets. The one exception is Hosea, a Prophet apparently unknown to Muhammad, “ They call the man of the spirit a madman” (Hosea: 9.7). Undoubtedly, Muhammad, whose knowledge of the Bible was only sketchy, was merely projecting his own plight onto Noah and Moses. Muhammad’s silly arguments stood on a very slippery ground; something like this – “I am a Prophet but am not acknowledged by my narrow-minded contemporaries, just as the ancient genuine Prophets were not given due recognition either at first instance. Hence I am also a genuine Prophet”. Muhammad lost many of his followers on this account.
Bukhari (9.87.111) recorded that Muhammad’s prophethood was confirmed by a cousin of Khadija, a Christian convert from Judaism, named, Waraqa Bin Naufal. But Waraqa died mysteriously after few days of confirming his prophethood. The fact that Waraqa was a Christian had been a source of embarrassment to Muslims. Hence they often deny it. Some overenthusiastic Muslim sources say that by recognizing the Prophet Waraqa converted to Islam. However, some modern scholars contend that Waraqa actually rejected Muhammad and the text of Ibn Hisham’s version of the Sira was later corrupted (Spencer, 2006, p. 53). There is no account in voluminous Hadith that Waraqa converted to Islam and the details of his mysterious death. From the Hadith collections we can find minutest details of Muhammad’s activities and the events of early Muslim communities. The first conversion of a Christian priest would have been a momentous event. Waraqa was the most revered holy man in Mecca. Why the cause of his death was not recorded in the Hadith? Though it would appear shocking, I guess that Waraqa was murdered by Muhammad. This is a possibility which we cannot ignore. After Muhammad and Khadija had used him, he became a liability; someone who could and would profess that his claims were untrue. Once Waraqa was dead, Muhammad felt free to concoct any lies and attribute them to him and the deception continued unabated.
Strangely, even there is a mention in Bukhari (4.56.814) that Muhammad was once challenged by a Christian convert who reverted back to Christianity by seeing that Muhammad was actually faking the Qur’anic revelations and openly declared, “ Muhammad knows nothing but what I have written for him”. There was a similar observation by one of the Muhammad’s scribes; Abdullah Ibn Abi Sarh, who used to write down Allah’s revelations. When Abdullah suggested some changes to Muhammad’s dictation, Muhammad readily agreed with him. This led Abdullah to suspect Muhammad’s claim of reception of messages from God, apostatized and left Medina for Mecca. He then proclaimed that he (Abdullah) too could easily write the Qur’anic verses by being inspired by Allah (Caner & Caner, 2002, p. 45).
When Muhammad advised a small group of his followers to flee Mecca, the Christian king of Abyssinia received them and gave them protection. In biographies of Muhammad there are many references of a Christian monk named Bahira who is said to have recognized in him the signs of a Prophet. In 638, when Jerusalem was surrendered to Muslims, Sophronius (Patriarch of Jerusalem), who had negotiated the surrender of the city to the Muslims, explained the invasion of Palestine as divine punishment for the sins of the Christians. The notion was that the Muslims were the instruments of the God’s wrath (Fletcher, 2003, p. 16). The idea that Islam might be “a new religion” was unthinkable to the Christians. But slowly they recognized Muhammad as a man of blood and his followers as irredeemably violent.
Throughout the medieval period, all of the characteristics of Muhammad that confirmed his authority in the eyes of Muslims were reversed by Christian authors and turned into defects. When Christians recognized Islam as a rival religion to Christianity they simply refused the notion of a new Prophet after Christ (Ernst, 2005, p. 14). The traditional belief that Muhammad was illiterate, which to Muslims was a proof of divine origin of Qur’an, indicated to the Christians that he must have been a fraud. When challenged by the Meccans to produce miracles, Muhammad said that Qur’an was his only miracle. While Muslims viewed this as a proof of the spirituality of his mission, Christian antagonists considered this lack of miracles as clear evidence that Muhammad was a fake.
In 850, a monk called Perfectus went shopping in the capital of Muslim state of al-Andalus. Here he was stopped by a group of Arabs who asked him whether Jesus or Muhammad was the greater Prophet. There was a trick in the question because it was a capital offence in the Islamic empire to insult Muhammad, and Perfectus knew it. So at first he responded cautiously. He gave an exact account of the Christian faith respecting the divinity of Christ. But suddenly he snapped and burst into a passionate stream of abuse, calling Muhammad a charlatan, a sexual pervert and the antichrist himself and a false Prophet spoken of in the Gospel (Foxe, 1827, pp. 76-7). He was thrown into the prison but later released because the judge realized that he was provoked by the Muslims. However after few days of his release, the Muslim pranks provoked him once more and Perfectus cracked a second time and insulted Muhammad in such crude terms that he was again taken and later on executed. Few days later, another Christian monk, named Ishaq appeared before the same judge and attacked Muhammad and his religion with many crude and disgusting words. His insulting words to Muhammad and Islam were so strong that the Judge, thinking him drunk or deranged, slapped him to bring him to his senses. But Ishaq persisted in his abuse, and the Judge ordered his execution too. A few days after Ishaq’s execution, six monks from the same monastery arrived and delivered yet another venomous attack on Muhammad; they were executed too (Armstrong, 2006, pp. 22-3). That summer, about fifty monks died this way.
Those Christian monks had all the rights to call Muhammad a fake. They were wise people and they had studied Muhammad and his religion thoroughly. The two biggest Christian criticisms of Muhammad were undoubtedly in relation to his military activities, marriages and sexual perversions. For Christians, the celibacy and nonviolent approach of Jesus Christ were generally seen as indispensable characteristics of true spirituality. The cruelty of Muhammad and his sexual perversion were taken as clear proof that Muhammad could not be on the same exalted level as Jesus. The early Christian critics of Muhammad generally described him as motivated by a combination of political ambition and sensual lust. But the success of Islam raised a disturbing theological question: How had God allowed this impious faith to prosper? Could it be that God had deserted His own people?
The earliest reference to Muhammad in Christian literature is found in the writings of seventh century. The Armenian Chronicle of Sebeos (history attributed to Sebeos) says that Muhammad was an “Ishmaelite” who
claimed prophethood. In the coming years many Biblical scholars realized that though Islam and Christianity have many similarities; like, praying, fasting, pilgrimage, giving alms, etc., actually Islam is against Christianity. During the middle ages of Christian Europe, Christians had very strong negative feelings against Muslims, e.g., Bede, a monk and Biblical scholar described Qur’an as “a parody of sacred Scripture of Christianity [Bible]” and Muhammad as a pseudo-Prophet, who and his followers have made war on Christians and seized their holy places (Fletcher, 2003, p. 19). In a work of Biblical commentary in 716, Bede described Muslims as “enemies of the Church”.
Another prolific writer of theology was John of Damascus. He hailed from an ethnic Arab family whose three generations had served the Muslim rulers. He was one of the earliest Christian writers to concern himself at any length and in a systematic way with Islam. He was the first scholar to explain the Biblical deviation of the Ishmaelites. He went on to criticize Muhammad as a false Prophet who cribbed part of his teaching from the Old and New Testaments and also from the sayings of a heretic Christian monk, Bahira. According to John, Muhammad wrote down “ some ridiculous compositions in a book of his” (Chase, 1958, p. 153), which he claimed had been sent down to him from heaven. Around 745, John composed a play Dialogue between a Saracen and a Christian which envisages a situation in which a Muslim puts awkward questions to a Christian on such matters as the nature of Christ, creation, free will and many others. The Christian parries these questions so skillfully that at the end of the play “the Saracen went his way surprised and bewildered, having nothing more to say” (Seale, 1978 p. 70). John also quoted at length but selectively from Qur’an and mocked the faith of the Ishmaelites.