by Tom Holland
What about the “supports”—the “isnads”—that had been deployed with such care and attention to buttress the sayings of the Prophet? Their function was, of course, precisely to stamp the hadiths as genuine: to provide the Muslim people with tested chains of transmission, grappling hooks cast back across the tumult and upheaval of the centuries, anchors that could serve to moor them to the lifetime of the Prophet. Yet if the statements were fakes, then so too, it went without saying, were the isnads. Nor was that the worst. Even supposing that a hadith had authentically derived from the time of Muhammad, its value to any would-be biographer of the Prophet was unlikely to be much enhanced by the fact. Context, for the historian, is all—and no Muslim scholar or lawyer who quoted the Prophet ever had the slightest interest in establishing what the original context of his sayings might authentically have been. To brandish a hadith was to take for granted that the advice contained within it was timeless and universal. That Muslims in the heyday of the Caliphate were living under circumstances that would have been unimaginable to Muhammad himself never so much as crossed their minds. As a result, where the isnads were not being deployed to disguise a blatant fabrication, they were serving to obliterate all memory of the setting in which the Prophet’s sayings had first been delivered. Rather as in an Agatha Christie novel, where it is invariably the suspect with the most ornate alibi who proves to be the murderer, so similarly, in the field of hadith studies, it turned out that there was no surer mark of fraud or distortion than a really exacting attention to detail. As Schacht, with the knowing disillusion of a Poirot, put it: “The more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition.”43 The lavish name-dropping of references, in anything affecting to cite the Prophet, was a mark, not of reliability, but of precisely the opposite.
Here, then, for anyone committed to believing that what Muslim tradition taught about the origins of Islam might actually have been the literal truth, was a most unsettling possibility. “If all Hadith is given up,” as a noted Pakistani liberal, Fazlur Rahman, reflected a decade after Schacht’s momentous study, “what remains but a yawning chasm of fourteen centuries between us and the Prophet?”44 His tone of anguish was hardly surprising. Rahman well appreciated that it was not only the lawyers of the early Caliphate who had sought to bridge the “yawning chasm” between themselves and the age of Muhammad through the promiscuous deployment of isnads. Historians had done so as well. How, for instance, had Ibn Hisham been able to substantiate his story of the spectacular contribution made by angels to Muhammad’s victory at Badr? He was certainly not the first to write about it. Indeed, he positively gloried in his plagiarism, freely acknowledging that his whole book was a reworking of a biography written half a century earlier by a man named Ibn Ishaq—a child of the grandchildren of the generation of the Prophet. But that, of course, merely begs a further question: how had Ibn Ishaq obtained his own information?
“Remember when you prayed fervently to your Lord,” it was written in the Qur’an, “and He answered you: ‘I shall reinforce you with a thousand angels, coming in waves.’ ”45 This, Muslim scholars had settled, could only have been an allusion to the Battle of Badr. Eye-witnesses too, their testimony copied by Ibn Hisham from Ibn Ishaq’s book, had confirmed this verdict. “If I were in Badr today and had my sight,” one of them was said to have reminisced, “I could show you the glen from which the angels emerged. I have not the slightest doubt on the point.”46 Here, then, surely, was sufficient evidence to satisfy even the most hardened sceptic? And yet, and yet … Both proofs relied on isnads. It was an isnad which confirmed that the verse in the Qur’an did actually refer to the victory at Badr; it was an isnad that confirmed the testimony of the veteran. Remove them, and there was no evidence at all. No wonder, then, that Fazlur Rahman should so have dreaded the “yawning chasm” that he saw the bleak and ravening scepticism of the West as opening up before his faith. “In the vacuity of this chasm not only must the Qur’an slip from our fingers … but even the very existence and integrity of the Qur’an and, indeed, the existence of the Prophet himself become an unwarranted myth.”47
His forebodings were well founded. Over the past forty years, the reliability of what the Muslim historical tradition can tell us about the origins of Islam has indeed come under brutal and escalating attack—to the degree that many historians now doubt that it can tell us anything much of value at all. To be sure, there are still those who will recount the Battle of Badr as though it were an episode as rooted in history as, say, the Battle of Waterloo, carefully analysing Muhammad’s strategy, calculating the size of his forces, and illustrating his tactics with arrows on maps.48 Yet this, to many others, appears a spectacular misreading of the evidence, a confusion of history with something very different: literature. “Clientship and loyalty, plunder and pursuit, challenges and instances of single combat”:49 these were the themes of Ibn Hisham in his account of the Battle of Badr, just as they were similarly the themes that the Greek poet Homer, a millennium and a half earlier, had explored in his great epic of warfare, the Iliad. The one features angels; the other gods. Why, then, should we believe that the account of the Prophet’s first great victory is any more authentic than the legend of the siege of Troy?
Certainly, it can come as a jolt to discover that, with a single exception, we have no extant descriptions of the Battle of Badr that date from before the ninth century AD. We do not even have Ibn Ishaq’s original biography of Muhammad—only revisions and reworkings. As for the material on which Ibn Ishaq himself drew upon for his researches, it has long since vanished. Set against the triumphal hubbub raised by Arab historians in the ninth century, let alone the centuries that followed, the silence is deafening and perplexing. The precise state of play bears spelling out. Over the course of almost two hundred years, the Arabs, a people never noted for their reticence, and whose motivation, we are told, had been an utterly consuming sense of religious certitude, had set themselves to conquering the world—and yet in all that time, they composed not a single record of their victories, not one, that has survived into the present day. How could this possibly have been so, when even on the most barbarous fringes of civilisation, even in Britain, even in the north of England, books of history were being written during this same period, and copied, and lovingly tended? Why, when the savage Northumbrians were capable of preserving the writings of a scholar such as Bede, do we have no Muslim records from the age of Muhammad? Why not a single Arab account of his life, nor of his followers’ conquests, nor of the progress of his religion, from the whole of the near two centuries that followed his death?
Even the sole exception to the rule—a tiny shred of papyrus discovered in Palestine and dated to around AD 740—serves only to compound the puzzle.50 Reading it is like overhearing a game of Chinese whispers. Over the course of only eight lines, it provides something truly startling: a date for the Battle of Badr that is not in the holy month of Ramadan. Why should this come as a surprise? Because later Muslim scholars, writing their learned and definitive commentaries on the Qur’an, confidently identified Badr with an otherwise cryptic allusion to “the day the two armies clashed”51—a date that fell in Ramadan. Perhaps, then, on this one point, the scholars were wrong? Perhaps. But if so, then why should they have been right in anything else that they wrote? What if the entire account of the victory at Badr were nothing but a fiction, a dramatic just-so story, fashioned to explain allusions within the Qur’an that would otherwise have remained beyond explanation? A battle on a valley’s edge won against terrifying odds; angels swooping down to strike at infidel necks; plunder seized from routed caravans: the holy text certainly alludes to all these things. Yet, aside from a single name-check, Badr itself is never mentioned.52 There is certainly no confirmation that a great battle—such as the one described by Ibn Hisham—was ever fought there. Whatever else it may be, the Qur’an is no work of history. Startlingly, were it not for all the commentaries elucidating its mysteries, all the biographies of the Prophet, and all the s
prawling collections of hadiths—none of which, in the form we have them, pre-dates the beginning of the third century after the hijra—we would have only the barest reason to associate it with a man named Muhammad at all.
That the coming of Islam was one of the supreme revolutions of world history is evident enough. All the more devastating to realise, then, that of written evidence composed before AD 800, the only traces we possess are either the barest shreds of shreds, or else the delusory shimmering of mirages.53 No empire can be raised amid a silence, of course; but what we chiefly hear now of the founding of the Caliphate is the merest sound and fury, tales told centuries later, and signifying, if not nothing, then very little. The voices of the Arab warriors who dismembered the ancient empires of Persia and Rome, and of their sons, and of their sons in turn—let alone of their daughters and grand-daughters—have all been silenced, utterly and for ever. Neither letters, nor speeches, nor journals, if they were ever so much as written, have survived; no hint as to what those who actually lived through the establishment of the Caliphate thought, or felt, or believed. It is as though we had no eye-witness accounts of the Protestant Reformation, or the French Revolution, or the two World Wars. No wonder, then, that a leading historian of the process by which Islam, in the ninth and tenth Christian centuries, finally came to construct an accepted past for itself, and to make sense of its rise to global power, should have lamented the “loss of the tradition’s earliest layers,” and pronounced it “nothing short of catastrophic.”54 Far from Islam having been born in the full light of history, its birth was shrouded in what has appeared, to an increasing number of scholars, an almost impenetrable darkness.
To be sure, there are very few scholars who would go so far as to claim that the Prophet never existed.55 Someone by the name of Muhammad does certainly appear to have intruded upon the consciousness of his near-contemporaries. One Christian source describes “a false prophet”56 leading the Saracens in an invasion of Palestine. This was written in AD 634—just two years after the traditional date of Muhammad’s death. Another, written six years later, refers to him by name. Over the succeeding decades, a succession of priests and monks would write of an enigmatic figure whom they described variously as “the general,” “the instructor” or “the king” of the Arabs. Yet these cryptic allusions—not to mention the fact that they were all made by infidels—merely highlight, once again, the total absence of any early Muslim reference to Muhammad. Only in the 690s did a Caliph finally get around to inscribing the Prophet’s name on a public monument; only decades after that did the first tentative references to him start to appear in private inscriptions;57 and only around 800, of course, did biographies come to be written of Muhammad that Muslims took care to preserve. What might have happened to earlier versions of his life we cannot know for certain; but one possibility is strongly hinted at by none other than Ibn Hisham. Much that previous generations had recorded of the Prophet, he commented sternly, was either bogus, or irrelevant, or sacrilegious. “Things which it is disgraceful to discuss; matters which would distress certain people; and such reports as I have been told are not to be accepted as trustworthy—all these things have I omitted.”58 As well he might have done. What was at stake, in Ibn Hisham’s devout opinion, was not merely his status as a reputable historian, nor even his good name as a Muslim, but something infinitely more precious to him: the fate of his soul.
Here, then, at least, is terra firma. What we can know with absolute confidence is that by the early ninth century, the precise details of what Muhammad might have said and done some two hundred years previously had come to provide, for vast numbers of people, a roadmap that they believed led straight to heaven. God had seized personal control of human events. The world had been set upon a novel course. To doubt this conviction was to risk hellfire. Given this perspective, it is scarcely surprising that any ambition to write history or biography as we might understand it should have paled into nothingness compared to the infinitely more pressing obligation to trace in the pattern of the Prophet’s life the wishes and purposes of the Almighty. That is why, in leaving the age of Ibn Hisham behind, and venturing back into the heaving ocean of uncertainty and conjecture that is the early history of Islam, today’s historians can find it such a struggle to identify reliable charts. Adrift amid the shadowy vastness, what prospect of finding landfall? There is always the Qur’an, of course—and yet the holy text itself, once stripped of all its cladding, all the elaborate scaffolding of commentaries built up around it with such labour and devotion from the ninth century onwards, can seem only to add to the voyager’s sense of being lost upon a darkling ocean. “It stands isolated,” one scholar suggests, “like an immense rock jutting forth from a desolate sea, a stony eminence with few marks on it to suggest how or why it appeared in this watery desert.”59 Or even, most shockingly, when. After all, if the entire colossal edifice of Muslim tradition depends upon isnads for its veracity, and if the isnads cannot be trusted, then how can we know for sure that the Qur’an dates from the time of Muhammad? How can we know who compiled it, from what sources, for what motives? Can we even be sure that its origins lay in Arabia? In short, do we really know anything at all about the birth of Islam?
Scholarship, like nature, abhors a vacuum. A number of historians, over the past forty years, have responded to the eerie silence that seems to shroud the origins of Islam by rewriting them in often unsettlingly radical ways. It has been argued that the wellspring of the Qur’an lay not in Arabia but in Iraq; that it was written originally not in Arabic but Syriac, the lingua franca of the Near East at the time; that “Muhammad” was originally a title referring to Jesus.60 By and large, when a book attempts to redraft the origins of a major world religion on quite such a jaw-dropping scale, the cover will feature a picture of the Knights Templar or the Holy Grail. A sensational argument, however, need not necessarily be an exercise in sensationalism. Far from aping Dan Brown, most of the scholars who have explored Islam’s origins seem to pride themselves on making their prose as dense with obscure vocabulary, and obscurer languages, as they possibly can. As a result, their speculations have rarely impinged on the public consciousness. Despite the fact that Western interest in Islam, over the past decade or so, has soared to unprecedented heights, the mood of crisis currently convulsing the academic study of its origins has received notably little airtime. Like some shadowy monster of the seas, it only ever rarely breaks for the surface, preferring instead to lurk in the deeps.
Nor is the inherent complexity of the subject the only reason for this. Just as Darwin was physically prostrated by anxiety over how his theories might be received by his family and friends, there are many today no less nervous about causing offence to people whose whole lives are grounded in their faith. For a non-believer to claim that the Qur’an might have originated outside of Arabia, or derived from Christian hymns, or been written in Syriac, is liable to be no less shocking to Muslims than has the Muslim denial of Jesus’s divinity always been to Christians. Unlike in nineteenth-century Europe, where it was disillusioned seminarians and the sons of Lutheran pastors who led the way in subjecting the origins of their ancestral religion to the full pitiless glare of historical enquiry, the contemporary Islamic world has not, it is fair to say, shown any great inclination to follow suit. No equivalent of Ernest Renan has emerged, to scandalise and titillate the Muslim faithful. The authorship of the Qur’an has not been questioned by the disillusioned offspring of imams. Those few Muslims who have sought to follow the trail originally blazed by nineteenth-century European scholars have generally opted to publish under pseudonyms—or have suffered the consequences. In the Arab world, at any rate, to doubt the traditional account of Islam’s origins has been to risk death threats, prosecution for apostasy, or even defenestration.61
As a result, inevitably but regrettably, questioning the traditional narrative of Islam’s origins remains largely what it has always been: the preserve of Western scholars. Some of these, it is true, are
themselves Muslim—and one of them, a professor at the University of Münster, has proved himself such a chip off the old Teutonic scholarly block that he too, like some of his more radical infidel colleagues, has gone on record as claiming Muhammad to be a figure of myth.62 None of which, unhappily, has done much to allay the suspicions of other Muslims that the probing of their most sacred traditions is not all some sinister conspiracy, most likely cooked up by Mossad, or perhaps the Vatican, or else American evangelicals. That the methods currently being deployed by Western scholars to place the Qur’an in its historical context were first honed upon the Bible has dented this conviction not a whit. One appalled Muslim scholar has argued that “even the crusaders’ fury pales to nothing” in comparison with modern academics’ “iconoclastic attack.”63 Implicit in this bellow of indignation is the presumption that non-believers have no business poking their noses into Islam’s origins. As one Saudi professor sternly tells his co-religionists, “Only the writings of a practising Muslim are worthy of our attention.”64