by Tom Holland
Taken to its logical extreme, of course, this would mean that only worshippers of Jupiter could legitimately write about the Romans, and only Odinists about the Vikings. Nevertheless, it is hardly necessary to be a Saudi theologian, or even a Muslim at all, to find something profoundly destabilising in the thesis that the stories told by Islam about its own origins might obscure as much as they reveal. The faithful, after all, are not alone in having a massive stake in the veracity of their inherited traditions. So too do plenty of non-Muslim historians. Whole centuries’ worth of scholarship have been founded on the presumption that the sources for early Islam can be trusted. To this day, they continue to be recycled endlessly, whether in popular biographies of Muhammad or in academic texts.65 It still tends to be taken for granted that they remain, for anyone wishing to construct a narrative of Islam’s origins, the only real building blocks to hand. Unsurprisingly, then, over the past century—and particularly over the past few decades—many scholars of early Islam have conducted an aggressive rearguard action to save these sources from total redundancy. Despite the increasingly widespread acknowledgement among historians of the period that it is “exceedingly difficult to know much about Islamic origins,”66 attempts to shore up the foundations continue. The building blocks fashioned by Ibn Hisham and his successors have certainly not been abandoned yet.
Paradoxically, however, these attempts to repair the damage done to the mighty edifice of Muslim tradition do more than anything else to highlight the full scale of the paradigm shift that is afflicting it. Clearly, when two scholars can devote their entire careers to studying the same languages and sources, and yet arrive at wholly contradictory conclusions, it is no longer possible to presume that there is anything remotely self-evident about the birth of Islam. Forty years ago, any querying what Muslim tradition taught about its own origins might have been dismissed as mere crankish trouble-making: one that no more merited a response from heavyweight experts than did, say, the attempt to ascribe Shakespeare’s plays to Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford. Nowadays, it is hard to think of any other field of history so riven by disagreement as is that of early Islam. One of the world’s leading Qur’anic scholars has gone so far as to speak of a “schism.” “The controversy about the Qur’an,” she has lamented—whether it is an authentic record of the Prophet’s utterances or an anthology, stitched together from various different sources—“permeates the entire field of Qur’anic studies.”67 Yet, even to speak of “schism” may be overly optimistic. The reality, perhaps, is even messier. In truth, it can often seem—the fragmentary nature of the evidence being what it is, not to mention the complexity and sensitivity of the issues at stake—that there are as many different interpretations of Islam’s origins as there are experts writing about it.68
All of which, in a non-specialist, can tend to inspire a peculiarly lurching sense of dizziness: the kind that might afflict someone studying a trompe-l’oeil in a hall of mirrors. No wonder, then, that it should sometimes feel tempting to back away from the problem altogether, to close one’s eyes to it, to pretend that it does not exist. Rehash the traditional Muslim sources, and follow the path of least resistance. After all, as one prominent hadith scholar has cheerily admitted, the entire “isnad debate” is not merely “long” but “tedious.” Nevertheless, as he then reminds the faint-hearted, “it is one in which scholars of Islamic origins must participate. There is no ignoring the debate in order to forge ahead with more important or more intriguing issues.” To avoid it is “at best naïve and at worst negligent.”69 History, unlike faith, cannot be built upon foundations of sand.
But where is solid bedrock to be found? When I first embarked on the project of writing this book, I had no idea that locating it would prove so problematic. My initial state of ignorance being what it was, I had vaguely assumed, based on my reading of numerous biographies of the Prophet, that I would find a whole wealth of sources dating from his lifetime just waiting to be quarried. It was therefore a bit of a blow to discover that the bulk of what we have constitutes, in the memorable formulation of one historian, “a monument to the destruction rather than the preservation of the past.”70 The same questions that have been confronting scholars of early Islam for the past forty years were now staring me full in the face. How, if the underpinnings of Muslim tradition are so unstable, is it possible to write anything at all about Islam’s origins? What hope, if the isnads and all the many writings that depend upon them are unreliable, of ever explaining the birth of one of the world’s great civilisations? Can it really be the case that the lack of a story is the only story?
Fortunately, amid all the confusion and obscurity, of one thing at least we can be confident: Islam did not originate in a total vacuum. Of the world into which Muhammad was born, with its rival superpowers and its formidable array of monotheisms, we are most decidedly not ignorant. To compare the would-be universal dominions of Persia and Rome with the empire that the Caliphate became, or to trace echoes of Jewish and Christian writings in the Qur’an, is to recognise that Islam, far from spelling the end of what had gone before, seems in many ways to have been its culmination. Even the belief to which Muslims have long subscribed, that the Prophet received his revelations not by means of human agency, but courtesy of an angel, in fact hints at just how deeply rooted are the doctrines of Islam within the subsoil of the ancient Near East. From where precisely does the tradition of Muhammad’s first terrifying encounter with Gabriel in a cave derive? There is no reference to it in the Qur’an; nor to the Prophet’s initial agony when receiving the revelations; nor even to the hearing of any supernatural voice. Across the lands conquered by the Arabs, however, it had long been taken for granted that angels visited those particularly favoured by God—and that the experience was often agonising. Coincidence? It seems most unlikely. Rather, it surely reflects the unique circumstances of the world that the Arabs, building on the foundations laid by the Persians and the Romans, had made their own: a world in which the yearning to fathom the purposes of a single god had become universal, and Gabriel a name on everybody’s lips.
All of which, to anyone pondering how a Near East divided between two venerable empires might have ended up Muslim, opens up an intriguing and suggestive line of enquiry. Is it possible that Islam, far from originating outside the mainstream of ancient civilisation, was in truth a religion in the grand tradition of Judaism and Christianity—one bred of the very marrow of late antiquity?
The Sectarian Milieu
Gabriel—or Jibril, as he is called in Arabic—is not entirely absent from the Qur’an. One verse confirms him as the agent who has been bringing down revelations into the heart of God’s chosen messenger; a second, somewhat bathetically, describes him as primed to intervene in a domestic squabble between the Prophet and two of his wives.71 Clearly, then, wherever and whenever the Qur’an may have been composed, its target audience was perfectly familiar with the most celebrated angel in the Bible. Clinching proof of this is provided by the detailed coverage given by the Prophet to what, for Christians, had always ranked as the ultimate in annunciations: Gabriel’s visitation to Mary, the mother of Christ. The episode is given a notably starry role as well in the Qur’an—where it is retold not once, but twice. Mary was evidently a person much on the Prophet’s mind. Not only is she the one woman in his revelations to be mentioned by name, but she features as well in a whole range of incidents quite aside from the Annunciation. Details left unrecorded by the New Testament—for instance, that she went into labour beneath a palm tree, where her son, speaking from within her womb, encouraged her to snack on a date or two—are given pride of place in the Qur’an. Gratifying evidence, so it appeared to Muslims contemptuous of the Christian scriptures, that they were far better informed about the life of Jesus than were those who, in their folly and delusion, presumed to worship him as a god.
But how had the Prophet come by these various stories? To Muslims, of course, the question was a waste of breath. Muhammad had been visit
ed by the divine. Just as Christians believed that Mary, by giving birth to her son, had delivered what they termed the Logos, or the “Word,”72 so Muhammad’s followers knew that his revelations, gasped out with “the sweat dripping from his forehead,”73 were the veritable speech of God. Muslims were no more likely to ask whether the Prophet had been influenced by the writings of other faiths than were Christians to wonder whether Mary had truly been a virgin. What the stiff-necked Jews and the obdurately blinkered Christians had failed to realise, in the opinion of the Muslim faithful, was that every single prophet mentioned in the Bible had actually been a follower of Islam. Hence the starring roles granted to so many of them, from Adam to Jesus, in the Qur’an. And to Mary too, of course. That stories of the Virgin being succoured by a friendly palm tree had actually been a Christian tradition for centuries, and seem in turn to have derived from a legend told by the pagan Greeks, was blithely ignored—as, of course, it was bound to be.74 No Muslim scholar could possibly have countenanced a notion that the Prophet might have been in the business of filching anecdotes from infidels. The Qur’an, after all, did not derive from outside sources. Rather, it was the Jews and the Christians, by allowing their holy books to become corrupted, who had ended up with distorted, second-hand scriptures. Only in the Qur’an had the awful purity of the divine revelation been properly preserved. Every last word of it, every last syllable, every last letter, came directly from God, and from God alone.
Perhaps it was only to be expected, then—despite the profoundly ambiguous testimony of the holy text itself—that a tradition should gradually have grown up, which in due course hardened into orthodoxy, that Muhammad himself had been illiterate.g Even had the Prophet wished to curl up with an infidel book or two, in other words, it would have been beyond him to decipher them. Yet reassuring a reflection though this certainly provided to the faithful, it still did not rank, perhaps, as the surest evidence that the Qur’an had truly descended from the celestial heights. Even more infallible a proof was witnessed by the circumstances of Muhammad’s upbringing. Mecca, after all, had been inhabited by pagans, not Jews or Christians—and it stood right in the middle of an enormous and empty desert. The ancient capitals of the Near East, which for more than four thousand years had served as the cockpits of civilisation, immense petri-dishes teeming with peoples of every conceivable faith, dense with temples, and synagogues, and churches, were a colossal distance away. Even to the borders of Palestine, where Abraham had built his tomb, and Solomon reigned, and Jesus been crucified, it was a full eight hundred miles. What likelihood, then, the Muslim faithful demanded to know, that a prophet born and raised so far from such a milieu could conceivably have been influenced by its traditions and doctrines and writings? The sheer prophylactic immensity of the desert that surrounded Mecca, impenetrable to outsiders as it was, appeared to render the answer obvious. Just as it was the blood and muscle of Mary’s virgin womb that had, in the opinion of Christians, nurtured the coming into the world of the divine, so likewise, in the opinion of Muslims, was it the spreading sands of Arabia which had served to preserve the word of God, over the course of its protracted delivery, in a fit condition of untainted purity.
But the emptiness into which Islam had been born was more than physical. The void had been a spiritual one as well. Muslim scholars termed it Jahiliyyah—the “Age of Ignorance.”75 The Arabs, who had drunk, and stolen, and brawled, and thought nothing of burying unwanted children in the sands, nor of practising the most unspeakable sexual abominations, nor of conducting the most interminable feuds, had been lost, it appeared to their heirs, in that pitchest blackness which was the lack of knowledge of God; and this it was that had made the coming of the Prophet all the brighter, all the more dazzling and refulgent a dawn. The contrast between Islam and the age that had preceded it was as clear as that between midday and the dead of night. Yet, it was not only Arabia that had been lost in darkness. The whole world had laboured in the shadows of jahl—“ignorance.” God, however, was great. The old order had been gloriously toppled, and a Caliphate established in its place. Everything had been brought to change. The white radiance of Islam, blazing beyond the borders of Arabia to the limits of the globe, had served to bring all humanity into a wholly new age of light.
This, however, was to redraft history in a quite stunningly radical way. Never before had the past been dismissed with such utter and imperious disdain. Even to Christians, the cycles of time redeemed by the birth of Christ had served as a preparation for the coming of the Messiah. To Muslims, however, everything that had preceded the revelations of their Prophet, all its manifold splendours and achievements, had been the merest phantom show, a shirk-haunted wasteland, to which Islam owed precisely nothing. The effect of this presumption was to prove incalculable. To this day, even in the West, it continues to inform the way in which the history of the Middle East is interpreted and understood. Whether in books, museums or university departments, the ancient world is invariably presumed to have ended with the coming of Muhammad. It is as though everything that had made antiquity what it was came to a sudden and crunching halt around AD 600. The inherent implausibility of this is rarely considered. Instead, at a time when most historians are profoundly suspicious of any notion that great civilisations might emerge from nowhere, owing nothing to what went before, and transforming human behaviour in the merest blinking of an eye, Islam continues to be portrayed as somehow exceptional: lightning from a clear blue sky.
Clearly, if the Qur’an did descend from heaven, then there is no problem in explaining why the stories it tells of Mary, say, should contain such palpable trace-elements of Christian folklore and classical myth. All things, after all, are possible to God. Yet even on the presumption that what Islam teaches is correct, and that the midwife of the faith was genuinely an angel, it is still pushing things to imagine that the theatre of its conquests might suddenly have been conjured, over the span of a single generation, into a set from The Arabian Nights. Just because histories written by pious Muslims two hundred years later can serve to give us such an impression does not mean that they are right. The Near East of the Caliphate at the peak of its power and glory was decidedly not that of its foundation two centuries before. To presume otherwise is not merely to perpetuate the notion of the Arab conquests as the sudden dropping of a guillotine onto the neck of everything that preceded them, but to risk enshrining bogus tradition as historical fact. To understand the origins of Islam, and why it evolved in the way that it did, we must look far beyond the age of Ibn Hisham. We must explore the empires and religions of late antiquity.
And if we do, then the landscape through which the first Arab conquerors rode does not seem so very different from landscapes elsewhere in the one-time Roman Empire. Landscapes marked by the seismic shock of superpower collapse; by the desperate struggle of erstwhile provincials to fashion new lives, and new security, for themselves; and by the depredations of foreign invaders, speaking strange languages and adhering to peculiar creeds. What the Arab conquest of formerly Roman provinces such as Palestine and Syria served to demonstrate was that the rising tide beneath which the western half of the empire had vanished was now rolling in across its eastern possessions.
“I took from you at Herakleopolis sixty-five sheep. I repeat—sixty-five and no more, and as an acknowledgement of this fact, we have made the present confirmation.”76 This was the receipt issued by an Arab war band in 642 to the city fathers of Herakleopolis, a somnolent backwater in what only two years previously had still ranked as the Roman province of Egypt. The seamless fusion of extortion and bureaucracy contained in the document would have been nothing unfamiliar to the elites of other abandoned provinces—whether in North Africa or Spain, Italy or Gaul. The security of Rome’s empire had gone—and gone for good. Compromise with barbarian overlords, in an age of Roman retreat and diminishment, had become the name of the game.
Granted, the Arabs who had come swaggering into Herakleopolis do seem to have been uniquely se
lf-possessed. Fastidiously, they logged the date of their transaction with the city elders: in Greek, as “the thirtieth of the month of Pharmouthi of the first indiction,” and in their own language, as “the year Twenty-Two.” To us, with the benefit of hindsight, it is the latter detail that leaps out. Redeemed from a provincial rubbish tip, it constitutes something truly momentous: the earliest mention on any surviving datable document of what would end up enshrined as the Muslim calendar. Clearly, then, it was something more than merely a greed for mutton that had brought the Arabs to Herakleopolis. But what? Some sense of a new beginning, of a new order, self-evidently. Yet whether their beliefs and ambitions were equivalent to what we would recognise today as Islam is altogether less clear. It is noteworthy, for instance, that the conquerors are described on the back of the receipt, not as Muslims, but as something altogether more enigmatic: Magaritai. What precisely this might have meant, and how it was to be linked to the unfamiliar dating system employed by the newcomers, and whether, if at all, it had been inspired by some novel understanding of God, the document does not reveal. Instead, it is the motives of those who are being screwed for livestock, the city fathers of Herakleopolis, that are the more readily transparent. How else, after all, save by attempting to patch together an accommodation with their unwanted guests, were they to salvage anything of the status quo? If there was much from the past that would necessarily have to be junked, then so too was there much that might be redeemed. In what had once, two centuries before, been the western half of the empire, the ghosts of Rome’s vanished order still haunted the barbarian kingdoms that had been founded upon its grave. In the East as well, judging from the receipt issued at Herakleopolis, the old order did not change overnight, yielding place to new. Its legacy endured.