WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY KNOW ABOUT MOHAMMED?
Patricia Crone
Open Democracy, UK
Aug. 31, 2006
The early years of Islam compose an exciting field of current
scholarship that is yielding fresh insights and understanding, says
Patricia Crone, professor of Islamic history at Princeton University.
It is notoriously difficult to know anything for sure about the
founder of a world religion. Just as one shrine after the other
obliterates the contours of the localities in which he was active,
so one doctrine after another reshapes him as a figure for veneration
and imitation for a vast number of people in times and places that he
never knew. Muslim literary sources for Mohammed’s life only begin
around 750-800 CE (common era), some four to five generations after
his death, and few Islamicists – specialists in the history and study
of Islam – these days assume them to be straightforward historical
accounts. For all that, we probably know more about Mohammed than we
do about Jesus (let alone Moses or the Buddha), and we certainly have
the potential to know a great deal more.
There is no doubt that Mohammed existed, occasional attempts to deny
it notwithstanding. His neighbours in Byzantine Syria got to hear of
him within two years of his death at the latest: a Greek text written
during the Arab invasion of Syria between 632 and 634, mentions that
"a false prophet has appeared among the Saracens" and dismisses him
as an impostor on the ground that prophets do not come "with sword
and chariot". It thus conveys the impression that he was actually
leading the invasions.
Mohammed’s death is normally placed in 632, but the possibility that
it should be placed two or three years later cannot be completely
excluded. The Muslim calendar was instituted after Mohammed’s death,
with a starting-point of Mohammed’s emigration (hijra) to Medina
(then Yathrib) ten years earlier. Some Muslims, however, seem to
have correlated this point of origin with the year which came to span
624-5 in the Gregorian calendar rather than the canonical year of 622.
If such a revised date is accurate, the evidence of the Greek text
would mean that Mohammed is the only founder of a world religion who
is attested in a contemporary source. But in any case, this source
gives us pretty irrefutable evidence that he was a historical figure.
Moreover, an Armenian document probably written shortly after 661
identifies him by name and gives a recognisable account of his
monotheist preaching.
Patricia Crone is professor of Islamic history at the Institute
for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her publications most relevant to
this article include Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton
University Press, 1987 [reprinted 2004]; "How did the quranic pagans
make a living?" (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African
Studies (68 / 2005); and "Quraysh and the Roman Army: Making Sense
of the Qurashi Leathertrade" (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies, forthcoming [spring 2007]).
Patricia Crone’s main recent work is Medieval Islamic Political Thought
(Edinburgh University Press, 2004; published in the United States as
God’s Rule: Government and Islam [Columbia University Press, 2004])
On the Islamic side, sources dating from the mid-8th century onwards
preserve a document drawn up between Mohammed and the inhabitants of
Yathrib, which there are good reasons to accept as broadly authentic;
Mohammed is also mentioned by name, and identified as a messenger of
God, four times in the Qur’an (on which more below).
True, on Arabic coins and inscriptions, and in papyri and other
documentary evidence in the language, Mohammed only appears in the
690s, some sixty years after his death (whatever its exact date).
This is the ground on which some, notably Yehuda D Nevo and Judith
Koren, have questioned his existence. But few would accept the implied
premise that history has to be reconstructed on the sole basis of
documentary evidence (i.e. information which has not been handed down
from one generation to the next, but rather been inscribed on stone
or metal or dug up from the ground and thus preserved in its original
form). The evidence that a prophet was active among the Arabs in the
early decades of the 7th century, on the eve of the Arab conquest of
the middle east, must be said to be exceptionally good.
Everything else about Mohammed is more uncertain, but we can still
say a fair amount with reasonable assurance. Most importantly, we can
be reasonably sure that the Qur’an is a collection of utterances that
he made in the belief that they had been revealed to him by God. The
book may not preserve all the messages he claimed to have received,
and he is not responsible for the arrangement in which we have them.
They were collected after his death – how long after is
controversial. But that he uttered all or most of them is difficult
to doubt. Those who deny the existence of an Arabian prophet dispute
it, of course, but it causes too many problems with later evidence,
and indeed with the Qur’an itself, for the attempt to be persuasive.
The text and the message
For all that, the book is difficult to use as a historical source.
The roots of this difficulty include unresolved questions about how it
reached its classical form, and the fact that it still is not available
in a scholarly edition. But they are also internal to the text. The
earliest versions of the Qur’an offer only the consonantal skeleton
of the text. No vowels are marked, and worse, there are no diacritical
marks, so that many consonants can also be read in a number of ways.
Modern scholars usually assure themselves that since the Qur’an
was recited from the start, we can rely on the oral tradition to
supply us with the correct reading. But there is often considerable
disagreement in the tradition – usually to do with vowelling, but
sometimes involving consonants as well – over the correct way in
which a word should be read. This rarely affects the overall meaning
of the text, but it does affect the details which are so important
for historical reconstruction.
In any case, with or without uncertainty over the reading, the Qur’an
is often highly obscure. Sometimes it uses expressions that were
unknown even to the earliest exegetes, or words that do not seem to
fit entirely, though they can be made to fit more or less; sometimes
it seems to give us fragments detached from a long-lost context;
and the style is highly allusive.
One explanation for these features would be that the prophet
formulated his message in the liturgical language current in the
religious community in which he grew up, adapting and/or imitating
ancient texts such as hymns, recitations, and prayers, which had been
translated or adapted from another Semitic language in their turn.
This idea has been explored in two German works, by Gunter Luling and
Christoph Luxenberg, and there is much to be said for it. At the same
time, however, both books are open to so many scholarly objections
(notably amateurism in Luxenberg’s case) that they cannot be said to
have done the field much good.
The attempt to relate the linguistic and stylistic features of the
Qur’an to those of earlier religious texts calls for a mastery of
Semitic languages and literature that few today possess, and those
who do so tend to work on other things. This is sensible, perhaps,
given that the field has become highly charged politically.
Luxenberg’s work is a case in point: it was picked up by the press
and paraded in a sensationalist vein on the strength of what to a
specialist was its worst idea – to instruct Muslims living in the west
that they ought to become enlightened. Neither Muslims nor Islamicists
were amused.
The inside story
The Qur’an does not give us an account of the prophet’s life. On the
contrary: it does not show us the prophet from the outside at all, but
rather takes us inside his head, where God is speaking to him, telling
him what to preach, how to react to people who poke fun at him, what
to say to his supporters, and so on. We see the world through his eyes,
and the allusive style makes it difficult to follow what is going on.
Events are referred to, but not narrated; disagreements are debated
without being explained; people and places are mentioned, but rarely
named. Supporters are simply referred to as believers; opponents are
condemned as unbelievers, polytheists, wrongdoers, hypocrites and the
like, with only the barest information on who they were or what they
said or did in concrete terms (rather as modern political ideologues
will reduce their enemies to abstractions: revisionists, reactionaries,
capitalist-roaders, terrorists). It could be, and sometimes seems to
be, that the same people now appear under one label and then another.
One thing seems clear, however: all the parties in the Qur’an are
monotheists worshipping the God of the Biblical tradition, and all are
familiar – If rarely directly from the Bible itself – with Biblical
concepts and stories. This is true even of the so-called polytheists,
traditionally identified with Mohammed’s tribe in Mecca.
The Islamic tradition says that the members of this tribe, known as
Quraysh, were believers in the God of Abraham whose monotheism had been
corrupted by pagan elements; modern historians would be inclined to
reverse the relationship and cast the pagan elements as older than the
monotheism; but some kind of combination of Biblical-type monotheism
and Arabian paganism is indeed what one encounters in the Qur’an.
The so-called polytheists believed in one creator God who ruled the
world and whom one approached through prayer and ritual; in fact,
like the anathematised ideological enemies of modern times, they seem
to have originated in the same community as the people who denounced
them. For a variety of doctrinal reasons, however, the tradition
likes to stress the pagan side of the prophet’s opponents, and one
highly influential source in particular (Ibn al-Kalbi) casts them as
naive worshippers of stones and idols of a type that may very well
have existed in other parts of Arabia. For this reason, the secondary
literature has tended to depict them as straightforward pagans too.
Some exegetes are considerably more sophisticated than Ibn al-Kalbi,
and among modern historians GR Hawting stands out as the first to
have shown that the people denounced as polytheists in the Qur’an
are anything but straightforward pagans. The fact that the Qur’an
seems to record a split in a monotheist community in Arabia can be
expected to transform our understanding of how the new religion arose.
The prophet and the polytheists
What then are the big issues dividing the prophet and his opponents?
Two stand out. First, time and again he accuses the polytheists of
the same crime as the Christians – deification of lesser beings. The
Christians elevated Jesus to divine status (though some of them
were believers); the polytheists elevated the angels to the same
status and compounded their error by casting them (or some of them)
as females; and just as the Christians identified Jesus as the son of
God, so the polytheists called the angels sons and daughters of God,
apparently implying some sort of identity of essence.
The polytheists further claimed that the angels (or deities, as they
are also called) were intercessors who enabled them to approach God,
a well-known argument by late antique monotheists who retained their
ancestral gods by identifying them as angels. For Christians also
saw the angels as intercessors, and the prophet was of the same view:
his polemics arise entirely from the fact that the pagan angels are
seen as manifestations of God himself rather than his servants. The
prophet responds by endlessly affirming that God is one and alone,
without children or anyone else sharing in his divinity.
The second bone of contention between the prophet and his opponents was
the resurrection. Some doubted its reality, others denied it outright,
still others rejected the idea of afterlife altogether. The hardliners
appear to have come from the ranks of the Jews and/or Christians
rather than (or in addition to, the polytheists); or perhaps the
so-called polytheists were actually Jews or Christians of some local
kind. In any case, the hardliners convey the impression of having
made their appearance quite recently, and again people of the same
type are attested on the Greek (and Syriac) side of the fence.
The prophet responds by repeatedly rehearsing arguments in favour of
the resurrection of the type familiar from the Christian tradition,
insisting that people will be raised up for judgment. He adds that
the judgment is coming soon, in the form of some local disaster such
as those which overtook earlier communities (e.g. Lot’s) and/or a
universal conflagration. His opponents tease him, asking him why
it does not seem to be happening; he persists. At some point the
confrontation turns violent and the book is filled with calls to arms,
with much fighting over a sanctuary.
By then it is clear that there has been an emigration (hijra), though
the event itself is not described, and there is some legislation for
the new community. Throughout the book there is also much acrimonious
debate about the credentials of the prophet himself. But God’s unity,
the reality of the resurrection and judgment, and the imminence of
violent punishment are by far the most important themes, reiterated
in most of the sura (chapters of the Qur’an).
In sum, not only do we know that a prophet was active among the Arabs
in the early decades of the 7th century, we also have a fair idea of
what he preached. Non-Islamicists may therefore conclude that the
historians’ complaint that they know so little about him is mere
professional grumpiness. But on one issue it is unquestionably more.
This is a big problem to do with Arabia.
A question of geography
The inhabitants of the Byzantine and Persian empires wrote about the
northern and the southern ends of the peninsula, from where we also
have numerous inscriptions; but the middle was terra incognita. This
is precisely where the Islamic tradition places Mohammed’s career. We
do not know what was going on there, except insofar as the Islamic
tradition tells us.
It yields no literature to which we can relate the Qur’an – excepting
poetry, for which we are again dependent on the Islamic tradition
and which is in any case so different in character that it does not
throw much light on the book. Not a single source outside Arabia
mentions Mecca before the conquests, and not one displays any sign of
recognition or tells us what was known about it when it appears in the
sources thereafter. That there was a place called Mecca where Mecca
is today may well be true; that it had a pagan sanctuary is perfectly
plausible (Arabia was full of sanctuaries), and it could well have
belonged to a tribe called the Quraysh. But we know nothing about
the place with anything approaching reasonable certainty. In sum,
we have no context for the prophet and his message.
It is difficult not to suspect that the tradition places the prophet’s
career in Mecca for the same reason that it insists that he was
illiterate: the only way he could have acquired his knowledge of all
the things that God had previously told the Jews and the Christians
was by revelation from God himself. Mecca was virgin territory;
it had neither Jewish nor Christian communities.
The suspicion that the location is doctrinally inspired is
reinforced by the fact that the Qur’an describes the polytheist
opponents as agriculturalists who cultivated wheat, grapes, olives,
and date palms. Wheat, grapes and olives are the three staples of
the Mediterranean; date palms take us southwards, but Mecca was not
suitable for any kind of agriculture, and one could not possibly have
produced olives there.
In addition, the Qur’an twice describes its opponents as living in
the site of a vanished nation, that is to say a town destroyed by God
for its sins. There were many such ruined sites in northwest Arabia.
The prophet frequently tells his opponents to consider their
significance and on one occasion remarks, with reference to the
remains of Lot’s people, that "you pass by them in the morning and
in the evening". This takes us to somewhere in the Dead Sea region.
Respect for the traditional account has prevailed to such an
extent among modern historians that the first two points have passed
unnoticed until quite recently, while the third has been ignored. The
exegetes said that the Quraysh passed by Lot’s remains on their annual
journeys to Syria, but the only way in which one can pass by a place
in the morning and the evening is evidently by living somewhere in
the vicinity.
The annual journeys invoked by the exegetes were trading journeys.
All the sources say that the Quraysh traded in southern Syria, many
say that they traded in Yemen too, and some add Iraq and Ethiopia to
their destinations. They are described as trading primarily in leather
goods, woollen clothing, and other items of mostly pastoralist origin,
as well as perfume (not south Arabian frankincense or Indian luxury
goods, as used to be thought). Their caravan trade has been invoked
to explain the familiarity with Biblical and para-Biblical material
which is so marked a feature of the Qur’an, but this goes well beyond
what traders would be likely to pick up on annual journeys. There is
no doubt, however, that one way or the other a trading community is
involved in the rise of Islam, though it is not clear how it relates
to that of the agriculturalists of the Qur’an. On all this there is
much to be said, if not yet with any certainty.
Three sources of evidence
The biggest problem facing scholars of the rise of Islam is identifying
the context in which the prophet worked. What was he reacting to,
and why was the rest of Arabia so responsive to his message? We
stand a good chance of making headway, for we are nowhere near
having exploited to the full our three main types of evidence –
the traditions associated with the prophet (primarily the hadith),
the Qur’an itself, and (a new source of enormous promise) archaeology.
The first is the most difficult to handle; this overwhelmingly takes
the form of hadith – short reports (sometimes just a line or two)
recording what an early figure, such as a companion of the prophet
or Mohammed himself, said or did on a particular occasion, prefixed
by a chain of transmitters. (Nowadays, hadith almost always means
hadith from Mohammed himself.) Most of the early sources for the
prophet’s life, as also for the period of his immediate successors,
consist of hadith in some arrangement or other.
The purpose of such reports was to validate Islamic law and doctrine,
not to record history in the modern sense, and since they were
transmitted orally, as very short statements, they easily drifted
away from their original meaning as conditions changed. (They were
also easily fabricated, but this is actually less of a problem.) They
testify to intense conflicts over what was or was not true Islam in
the period up to the 9th century, when the material was collected and
stabilised; these debates obscured the historical nature of the figures
invoked as authorities, while telling us much about later perceptions.
The material is amorphous and difficult to handle. Simply to
collect the huge mass of variant versions and conflicting reports
on a particular subject used to be a laborious task; now it has been
rendered practically effortless by searchable databases. We still do
not have generally accepted methods for ordering the material, however,
whether as evidence for the prophet or for the later doctrinal disputes
(for which it will probably prove more fruitful).
But much interesting work is going on in the field.
As regards the second source, the Qur’an, its study has so far been
dominated by the method of the early Muslim exegetes, who were in
the habit of considering its verses in isolation, explaining them
with reference to events in the prophet’s life without regard for
the context in which it appeared in the Qur’an itself. In effect,
they were replacing the Qur’anic context with a new one.
Some fifty years ago an Egyptian scholar by the name of Mohammed
Shaltut, later rector of al-Azhar, rejected this method in favour of
understanding the Qur’an in the light of the Qur’an itself. He was
a religious scholar interested in the religious and moral message of
the Qur’an, not a western-style historian, but his method should be
adopted by historians too. The procedure of the early exegetes served
to locate the meaning of the book in Arabia alone, insulating it from
religious and cultural developments in the world outside it, so that
the Biblical stories and other ideas originating outside Arabia came
across to modern scholars as "foreign borrowings", picked up in an
accidental fashion by a trader who did not really understand what
they meant.
The realisation is slowly dawning that this is fundamentally wrong.
The prophet was not an outsider haphazardly collecting fallout
from debates in the monotheist world around him, but rather a full
participant in these debates. Differently put, the rise of Islam has
to be related to developments in the world of late antiquity, and it
is with that context in mind that we need to reread the Qur’an. It is
a big task, and there will be, indeed already has been, false turns
on the way. But it will revolutionise the field.
The third, and immeasurably exciting, type of source is looming
increasingly large on the horizon: archaeology. Arabia, the big
unknown, has begun to be excavated, and though it is unlikely that
there will be archaeological explorations of Mecca and Medina anytime
soon, the results from this discipline are already mind-opening.
Arabia seems to have been a much more developed place than most
Islamicists (myself included) had ever suspected – not just in the
north and south, but also in the middle. We are beginning to get a
much more nuanced sense of the place, and again it is clear that we
should think of it as more closely tied in with the rest of the near
east than we used to do. The inscriptional record is expanding, too.
With every bit of certainty we gain on one problem, the range
of possible interpretations in connection with others contracts,
making for a better sense of where to look for solutions and better
conjectures where no evidence exists.
We shall never be able to do without the literary sources, of course,
and the chances are that most of what the tradition tells us about
the prophet’s life is more or less correct in some sense or other.
But no historical interpretation succeeds unless the details, the
context and the perspectives are right. We shall never know as much
as we would like to (when do we?), but Islamicists have every reason
to feel optimistic that many of the gaps in our current knowledge
will be filled in the years ahead.
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