All this is by way of historical background to a new statement of the revisionists’ thesis which takes their position much farther than before and directly contradicts traditional accounts of the first century of Islamic history.
The revisionists, it should be noted, constitute a small minority of the scholars in this field, and their arguments have not yet been seriously addressed or subjected to the academic cut and thrust through which new ideas are tested. If extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, the revisionists have so far provided more of the first than the second. Their position should probably at this stage be regarded as no more than a hypothesis. But their approach of testing Islamic literature against independent historical evidence is perfectly reasonable and justices a hearing for their views from both Muslim and Western scholars.
In a new book, The Hidden Origins of Islam, a collection of essays edited by Karl-Heinz Ohlig, a historian of religion, and Gerd Puin, an expert on Qur’anic paleography, the revisionists substantially extend the position described in the previous section. The Umayyad dynasty, in their view, were the first Arab rulers, there being no non-Islamic historical evidence for the existence of earlier ones. And the Umayyads, the revisionists say, were Arab Christian rulers who asserted, as against the Byzantines’ doctrine of the Trinity, that there was only one God and that Jesus, a mere human, was his messenger.
The first Arab leader who began to seize the reins of power in the void between the two exhausted regional superpowers was Mu‘awiyah, the founder of the Umayyad dynasty. The sign of the cross appears on one of his inscriptions and on his coins, according to the Oriental numismatist Volker Popp.222 He based his capital at Damascus in order to proclaim himself protector of the shrine of John the Baptist, said to be buried there. Given that in the traditional Islamic account Mu’awiyah is the fifth caliph, the difference between the revisionist and Islamic positions is evident.
The remarkable quiescence with which the populations of Syria, Palestine and Egypt yielded to Arab rule, and the strange absence of evidence for an Arab conquest, become much easier to account for under the premise that Mu’awiyah and his eventual successor Abd al-Malik were Christians. These peoples would have been yielding to Christian Arab rule, not to Muslim Arab conquest, and had no particular reason to fear that Christian Arabs would be worse masters than the widely resented Byzantines.
Mu’awiyah was a vigorous leader who launched a sustained though ultimately unsuccessful attack on Constantinople, which was beaten back with the first use of the Byzantine naval weapon known as Greek fire. Internally, the principal political problem that faced him and his successor, Abd al-Malik, was that of how to unite the Arab populations under their rule. As noted, those in the eastern parts of their domains were Nestorian Christians, and those in the west were either Monophysites or Melkites (adherents of the Byzantines’ Chalcedonian rite).
Looking for a unifying creed that all could subscribe to, ‘Abd al-Malik chose a generic phrase that in essence meant no more than “Praise Jesus!” The exact wording of this phrase in Arabic is of great significance but the theological context in which ‘Abd al-Malik placed it needs first to be outlined.
Since around 1000 B.C., the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean had been the Semitic language known as Aramaic and later as Syriac. Displacing Hebrew, Aramaic became the language of Jesus and of the Jews. Aramaic/Syriac was also the language of the early church in Syria. It long remained the liturgical language of the region and was so used by the Arabs under Abd al-Malik’s rule, even though in daily life they spoke Arabic.
Because the early Christians of Syria spoke the same language as the Jews, they were particularly open to Jewish influence and to the belief of some Jews that Jesus was no god but just another in the honored line of Jewish prophets. Syriac-speaking Christians thus had little sympathy for the trend being developed in Hellenistic Christianity to endow Jesus with divine as well as human aspects. They had no enthusiasm for the concept of the Trinity, first made official by the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, or for the interminable debates about the nature of Christ that followed from this strange, unbiblical doctrine.
In defining a unitary creed for Arab Christianity, ‘Abd al-Malik seems to have reached back to this early Syriac tradition of Jesus as a plain human prophet and used it to oppose the Trinitarian approach of Hellenistic Christianity. In the “Praise Jesus” motto he put on his coins and iin his great building, the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem, he referred to Jesus, the revisionists say, as the “messenger of God.”
Thus in Arabic, ‘Abd al-Malik’s unifying motto about Jesus was rendered as muhammadun rasūl allāh—“The messenger of God is to be praised.” Muhammadun is a gerundive, meaning “one who should be praised,” rasūl is “messenger” and allāh is “God.”
To anyone with a passing knowledge of Islam, this is a central phrase of the faith and has an entirely different meaning—“Muhammad is the messenger of God.”
What proof is there that ‘Abd al-Malik meant rasūl allāh to refer to Jesus? The proof, say the revisionists, is unambiguous and is provided by the inscriptions that ‘Abd al-Malik had written inside the Dome of the Rock. “Allāhum sallī alā rasūlika wa ‘abdika isa ibn maryam—God bless your messenger and servant, Jesus son of Mary” states the text on the inner northwest-north face of the octagonal arcade. The inner, east-southeast face includes the words, “Inma l-masīh ‘īsā ibn maryam rasūlu llāh—For the Messiah Jesus, son of Mary, is the messenger of God.”
The next sentence conveys ‘Abd al-Malik’s anti-Trinitarian message: “So believe in God and his messengers, and do not say ‘three.’ Stop that better for you. For God is one, unique—may he be praised! How could he then have had a child?”
The Dome of the Rock’s inscriptions include the phrase muhammadun ‘abdu llāhi wa-rasūluhū, traditionally translated as “Muhammad is the servant of God and his messenger.” But in the view of the revisionist who writes under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg, the intended meaning is “The servant of God, his messenger, is to be praised,” the subject being Jesus.223
The inscriptions also contain the first known use of the word Islam, traditionally understood to mean submission to God. But in Luxenberg’s view it means simply conformity or agreement, in this case to the “book” mentioned in the inscription. This book is traditionally taken to be the Qur’an but, given what Luxenberg sees as the entirely Christian context of the inscriptions, it must in his view refer to the Gospel.
The revisionists thus assert a radical and, if true, astonishing reconstruction of the genesis of Islam. The religion, in their view, began as the faith of an Arab Christian empire, rooted in the Syriac Christian tradition. At least the first two rulers of the new empire, and maybe others, were Christians, and its principal edifice, the Dome of the Rock, was a Christian place of worship, asserting the Syriac Christian view that God is one against the Byzantine concept of the Trinity. In place of the Byzantine empire’s system of dating years from the birth of Christ, the new Arab rulers constructed their own, starting from the year of their independence from their Byzantine and Sassanid overlords. “Long before the idea of a Hijra,” writes Karl-Heinz Ohlig, “there was an Arabian-Christian reckoning of time which began with the year 622 and which was only later ‘converted’ to a Muslim meaning. Until approximately the end of the eighth century, so it seems, Arabian-Christian tribal leaders governed the regions of the Near East and of North Africa; indeed, the Umayyad leaders and even the early Abbasids were Christians.”224
How then did Islam begin? Its genesis, in the revisionists’ view, lay in a change of dynasty. The Umayyad dynasty to which Mu‘awiyah and Abd al-Malik belonged was overthrown around 750 by the Abbasids, who had little respect for their predecessors’ accomplishments, including their religion. The Abbasids desecrated the Umayyads’ tombs and made Mecca the holy city in preference to Jerusalem or Damascus. God remained one but at some time under the Abbasids, perhaps during the rule of the
caliph Al-Ma’mun (813—833), even the Umayyads’ prophet was Arabized: Jesus and the gospels receded and in their place an Arabian prophet and his own revelation were emphasized.
The framers of Islam, in the revisionists’ reconstruction, simply appropriated the early history of Arab Christianity to their own purposes. They, just like the editors of the Pentateuch, “retrojected their religion into a ‘canonical’ time of beginnings, in which they then grounded and legitimated it,” writes Ohlig. Mu’awiyah’s era of the Arabs was switched to years after the Hegira, which had to start at the same time, the year 622. Abd al-Malik’s unifying formula “Praise the messenger of God” was reinterpreted as “Muhammad is the messenger of God.” The Dome of the Rock was declared to be an Islamic building, and the Abbasid caliph Al-Ma‘mun substituted his name as the builder in place of ‘Abd al-Malik’s.
The architecture of the Dome of the Rock and many other mosques is drawn from a kind of Byzantine church called a martyrium, designed for the display of sacred relics. “If you take a Middle Byzantine martyrium, and take out the icons and images—which is roughly what the iconoclasts did during the eighth century—what you are left with looks uncannily like a mosque,” writes the historian Philip Jenkins. 225
The origin of the Qur‘an, in the revisionists’ view, is obscure, but it is probably derived from a Syriac Christian liturgical work. “Qur’an” itself is in origin a Syriac word (qeryan) meaning lectionary, a selection of holy texts. According to Luxenberg, some of the many obscure passages in the Qur‘an become clear if the Arabic text is transliterated back into Syriac with correction of likely copying errors. The original version of the Qur’an “was put together entirely in the Syriac script,” he declares.226
Most of the Qur’an’s statements about Jesus and Mary seem to be derived from gospels that were popular in the Near East but were excluded from the New Testament, such as the story found in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas about the infant Jesus breathing life into a clay bird.
The assertion of a Syriac Christian background for the Qur‘an would, if verified, provide a historical context for the emergence of Islam, more plausible to some than the traditional Islamic view that the sacred text was dictated by an angel. But a weakness in the revisionists’ case is that they lack evidence about the wholesale appropriation process they allege. In their defense they cite the traditional Islamic account that the caliph ‘Uthman, in producing a standard edition of the Qur‘an, ordered all earlier manuscripts to be destroyed; this destruction, they suggest, would have included the Syriac antecedents of the Qur’an and all available evidence of Umayyad Christianity. The Dome of the Rock and its inscriptions survived only because they were misunderstood, Luxenberg writes.
If the Umayyad inscriptions refer to Jesus, as the revisionists contend, then what is the historical basis for the life of Muhammad? In Luxenberg’s view, scholars must in future distinguish between two Muhammads, the first of whom is Jesus. He writes: “The inscription on the Dome of the Rock cannot be used to defend the position that ‘Muhammad II’ lived from 570—632 CE, as the ‘Muhammad’ named there was entirely referring to Jesus, the son of Mary, that is, ‘Muhammad 1.’ It is the task of historians to discover whether ‘Muhammad II,’ about whom the ‘Sira’ has so much to report, actually lived shortly before the appearance of the biography of the prophet (ca. mid-eighth century), or whether he should be seen merely as a symbolic figure.”227
Whatever the eventual outcome of the differences between the revisionist and traditional historians as to the origins of Islam, the new Arab religion served its purpose with striking success. It provided the emerging Arab rulers with an effective religious identity to uphold against that of the Byzantines. The new religion inspired fervent loyalty. It was evidently well suited to the needs of the early Arab empire, enabling the Umayyads and then the Abbasids to unite many different peoples in an empire that stretched from Spain to the borders of India.
Religion and Borders
Religious behavior evolved to knit a tribe together. As such it reinforced other affiliative behaviors, such as those based on kinship, ethnicity or language. There is perhaps a natural tendency for each of these binding behaviors to maximize its overlap with the others, producing the most cohesive possible society.
In language, for instance, dialects form very fast because people in each region or village tend to develop their own special variations on a parent tongue. Before travel became common, these minor variants would have served instantly to identify strangers who might be spies. Kinship was also adjustable, at least among hunter gatherers and primitive farmers. When groups grew larger than 150 or so people, quarrels tended to break out and the group would split, usually along kinship lines, with the result that the average degree of relatedness in the two new groups was higher than before. “There appears to be an upper limit to the size of a group that can be cooperatively organized by the principles of kinship, descent and marriage, the integrating mechanisms characteristically at the disposal of primitive peoples,” writes Napoleon Chagnon, a social anthropologist who has worked for many years with the Yanomamo of South America.228
Until the advent of archaic states and empires, religions too may have been mostly congruent with tribal and linguistic boundaries. Within larger empires, however, a single religion may split along political lines into rival sects if it proves too weak to unite the empire’s many regional interests and cultural differences. The Roman empire imposed an undemanding state religion on all its subject peoples, while generally allowing them to practice their own religions as well. But the old Greek and Roman rituals had been shaped for smaller societies. They were challenged by ecstatic religions from the eastern provinces before yielding to Christianity. But even the new faith could not bind the vast empire that now circled the shores of its private sea, the Mediterranean.
Fissures erupted in Christianity, along the fault lines that separated people by language, ethnicity and politics. The Bishop of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople had different binding problems, not least of which were the political forces that divided their congregations. The doctrinal dispute over the word filioque—an addition to the Trinitarian Nicene Creed implying that Jesus enjoyed the same level of divinity as God—was perhaps a convenient excuse for the western and eastern branches of Christianity to shape versions of their common faith that would define their mutual antagonism. A second major schism, Protestantism, also took place along fault lines of language and ethnicity, dividing the Germanic language countries (Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, England and Scotland) from Romance language powers (Italy, France and Spain).
The Islamic empire faced similar issues. Iran, a major part of its eastern conquests, was an ancient nation that had vied with the Greeks, the Romans and the Byzantines. Its people were not Arab and spoke an Indo-European language. After the Sunni-Shi‘a split developed in Islam, Iran in 1501 adopted a Shi’a identity that differentiated it from the mostly Sunni populations to its east and west. Its religion, ethnicity and language were thus brought into congruence, probably a necessary step for a large polity with many different ethnic minorities to maintain its overall cohesion.
Though new religions are derived from old ones and seek, as it were, to steal their clothes, the promoters of a new religion are often at pains to differentiate it from its predecessor. An obvious instance is that Christianity and Islam, both derived from Judaism, have separated themselves from it liturgically. Both religions accept the week (borrowed by Judaism from the Babylonians) as the unit of religious time but choose Sunday and Friday respectively as their principal holy days, in distinction to the Jews’ Saturday. Since the Last Supper before the crucifixion was a Passover meal, the date of Easter should be linked to that of Passover, but the early Christians severed the link, at least in part to distance themselves from Jewish practice.
LOOKING BACK AT THE emergence of the three monotheisms, a striking process is evident: throughout history, religion has been repeatedly reshaped to se
rve new needs as the nature of society changed. And this reshaping, brought about by daring cultural innovations, has taken place within a superbly flexible genetic framework, a set of propensities for religious behavior.
Hunter gatherer religion is based on implicit negotiation with supernatural agents whose requirements make members of a community behave in socially cohesive ways. The principal form of interaction with the supernatural world was sustained communal dances and the trances through which the agents of the other world could be encountered.
Then came settled societies, grappling with the uncertainties of early agriculture. They recentered their religions on the cycle of the seasons and the demands of planting and harvesting. The dances were entrained into agricultural festivals like the early Canaanite predecessors of Passover and Rosh Ha-Shanah.
As human populations expanded in the Neolithic age that began 10,000 years ago, social hierarchies replaced the egalitarianism of the hunter gatherer bands. Priests took over the organization of religious activities and enhanced their power by monopolizing access to the supernatural. Much larger numbers of people could now be brought under the sway of the sacred.
With the invention of writing 5,000 years ago, ideas about the supernatural were put into written form and a sacred text became a standard component of urban religions. In around the seventh century B.C., Judaism, an amalgam of ritual, history and an irredentist political agenda, became the first modern religion, replacing the usual miscellany of special purpose deities with a single divine being, and making direct interactions with the supernatural a matter of past history, not present experience.
This new religion was just as effective as its hunter gatherer predecessors in binding a community together, even though the community in this case was not a hunting band but a small nation. Inspired by their religion, Jews rebelled repeatedly against their Roman occupiers. Thereafter, during 19 centuries without a homeland, Jewish communities depended for survival on the cohesion provided by their faith.
The Faith Instinct Page 21