A historical look at the birth of Islam - New Study by Tom Holland
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A historical look at the birth of Islam
If I were a theologian, my idea of Valhalla would be something like a villa in Languedoc, an endless supply of red, a smoke (I assume that won't be a problem in the afterlife) and a good history book.
Among my favourite authors is Tom Holland, whose previous publications Rubicon, Persian Fire and Millennium have accompanied me on those increasingly rare periods of relaxation abroad.
Holland writes about antiquity with great flair and authority, capturing the sense of struggle, anxiety and desperation that often overshadowed great men and great civilisations as they battled for supremacy (and anyone who doubts Steven Pinker?s thesis that we are all getting nicer and less violent should study ancient history more closely).
Holland?s latest, In the Shadow of the Sword, takes a look at a period of antiquity, the 6th and 7th centuries, that has fallen to the very back of the western mind, largely because for our ancestors the light of civilisation had gone out (or had not yet been switched on); in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, however, the Roman Empire continued much as normal, although now centred in Constantinople and speaking Greek. During this period the Romans battled for supremacy with the Persian Empire, occasionally fighting ferociously in Mesopotamia or Syria but more often in a state of uneasy truce.
But Holland?s latest book is interesting in a different way, for as Charles Moore noted on Monday, it delves into a seriously controversial area ? the birth of Islam.
The Near East at the time was a fascinating hodge-podge of different faiths; Holland opens the narrative with the story of Yusuf As?ar Yath?ar, an Arab king who defeated the Christians in the Najran region by the Red Sea ? the twist being that Yath?ar was not Muslim but Jewish, and there were communities of both living in Arabia at the time.
And sometimes the dividing line between the faiths was unclear. Further north in modern-day Iraq, where Jews had lived for a millennium and Christians for several centuries, there were Jews who still prayed to Jesus and Christians who practised Jewish rites. Iran itself was Zoroastrian, the world?s oldest major religion although today rather tiny (Freddie Mercury is perhaps the only Zoroastrian many of us could name) it was to influence Islam heavily, as Holland points out. Another even smaller group, the Samaritans (so small in number that they?ve been forced to marry out for genetic reasons) were still a significant force at this time, before their strength was broken by two failed uprisings.
Further out in the wilds of Arabia there were all sorts of pagans, some of who worshipped cubes (which seems to have been a particular thing with Arabs at the time).
And it was out of this wilderness that came one of the world?s great religions, whose followers would in a short space of time conquer an empire from Spain to central Asia, and whose scholars would form a coherent religion that has flourished to this day.
And yet from a historical point of view the study of Islam and its founder is problematic. The oldest biographies of Mohammed, in the form we have them, date back to more than two centuries after his death, and despite the diligent work of Al-Bukhari, who is said to have collected 600,000 supposed sayings of the prophet and dismissed all but 7,225, the religion is as vulnerable to higher criticism as Judaism and Christianity.
That criticism, which began with historians such as Edward Gibbon and accelerated in 1863 when Ernest Renan published a biography of Jesus that treated his subject as a man, leading one critic to describe it as a ?new crucifixion of Our Lord?, has been irreversible.
Yet while in the 18th century Muslim jurists concluded that the ?gate of interpretation? was closed because all there was to learn had been learned, by the late 19th century Western scholars such as Ign?c Goldziher also began to ask questions about Islam, especially about the hadiths, the collection of sayings that made up the Sunna, or Islamic law ? a question that Muslim scholars had asked a thousand years before (concluding that many were fakes).
And in the past four decades Islam has come under a far more rigorous microscope. In 1950 the German professor Joseph Schacht wrote that ?We must abandon the gratuitous assumptions that there existed originally an authentic core of information going back to the time of the Prophet.?
Instead, as Holland concludes, many of the inventions of Islam already existed at the time it arose. It seems unlikely that Mecca, so biographers of Mohammed say, was a pagan city, devoid of any Jewish or Christian presence, in a great desert. This would indeed make the rise of fully-fledged monotheism there, complete with references to Abraham, Moses and Jesus, a miracle. As Holland writes
Muslims, understandably sensitive to any hint that the Prophet might have been a plagiarist, have always tended to resent the inevitable implications of such a project; and yet, once God is discounted as an informant, it is surely not unreasonable to wonder just how it came to be that so many characters from the Bible feature in the Qur?an.
And, as with all religions, much of Islam was probably formed in the centuries after the original founder, following the Arab conquests of the Near East, and was influenced by the religions of that region. While the Koran, for example, suggests that adulterers should be whipped, the hadiths, and Muslim jurists, demand stoning, which is probably an import from Judaism. Similarly, the call to pray five times a day probably comes from Zoroastrianism.
Trying to operate a spiritual empire composed of conquerors and, now, the conquered, Muslim jurists constructed much of Islam in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries. Holland says
The Prophet had been made to serve as the mouthpiece for a whole host of rival, and often directly antagonistic, traditions. Many of these, far from deriving from Muhammad, were not even Arab in origin, but originated instead in the laws, the customs, or the superstitions of infidel peoples.
Stitching together a whole new legal framework for the infant empire, it had become the habit of these ingenious scholars to attribute their rulings, not to their own initiative or judgement, but rather to that ultimate in authorities the Prophet.
It will be interesting to see if Islam continues to come under the same criticism as the other Abrahamic religions, and how believers respond. There are differences, of course the German Biblical scholars did not have to face any physical threats, and criticism of the Bible came from within Christianity, which made it easier for Christians to take; far harder to accept criticism of one?s sacred traditions from outsiders.
Not that Muslims need feel threatened; after reading this fascinating sweep of the world of Justinian and the Shahanshah, and the desert folk who would beat both empires, it is hard to come away without a great admiration for the civilisation of early Islam. Neither, of course, is it a bad thing to learn just how much the world?s various civilisations owe to each other.
http//blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100151556/a-historical-look-at-the-birth-of-islam/#disqus_thread
Also a BBC interview
http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUrsmyKbnQ
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I agree with Zoroastrianism affecting Islam.
That's how salat's meaning was changed into prayer when it's not.
Bukhari was either a Zoroastrianism or a jew. Judaism also has been affected by Zoroastrianism heavily so it doesn't really matter which one. -
Abu Hurairah was said to be a Jewish Convert.
Some of his Hadiths have a Jewish background....
He was accused of being a liar even by Aisha in Hadiths. -
; and yet, once God is discounted as an informant, it is surely not unreasonable to wonder just how it came to be that so many characters from the Bible feature in the Qur?an.
It's funny to see how scientific thinking has come to be opposed to the concept of God. The material world view is built around the five senses and the scientific tradition is part of this. Since God (or whatever you call the creator) cannot be proven in the scientific sense... the only reasonable, objective, scientific, sober, realistic and intelligent thing is to realize God is just a construct of man, in order to cope with reality.
These authors generally do a very good job... exactly because they are not stuck in any religious belief system, and thereby biased. But it seems rare than anyone takes a neutral stance on the existence of a creator; either they believe in a god, or they believe there is no god. There never seem to be any humbleness in that there may or may not be a creator, and that we may not know everything and therefore should not discount the existence of a creator.
When was God discounted as the informant?
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Peace Zulf, all
Regarding the proof for the existence of at least one creator, let's proceed by contradiction
Let's suppose that there is no creator
=> there is no creation
=> you, me and the creation around do not exist => FALSE because at least I know that I exist.Thus the presence of at least one creator is a very plausible and proven fact.
Please point to any flaw you may see in this line of reasoning.
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And what/who created the creator? ;D
This is what people would say. As far as proof of a Creator is concerned, no matter how solid... you will always find people who will not agree with the proof... therefore, in that sense, it is impossible to prove the existence of God. And this is of course dependent on what we mean with 'prove'/'proof'.
peace
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hmm
then I guess this is why the god the creator (in terms of creating some thing out of no-thing) has so many attributes in al-quran, from them that he is the first and the last... Thus I should add more conditions on the creator in my previous reasoning I guess...
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It's funny to see how scientific thinking has come to be opposed to the concept of God. The material world view is built around the five senses and the scientific tradition is part of this. Since God (or whatever you call the creator) cannot be proven in the scientific sense... the only reasonable, objective, scientific, sober, realistic and intelligent thing is to realize God is just a construct of man, in order to cope with reality.
These authors generally do a very good job... exactly because they are not stuck in any religious belief system, and thereby biased. But it seems rare than anyone takes a neutral stance on the existence of a creator; either they believe in a god, or they believe there is no god. There never seem to be any humbleness in that there may or may not be a creator, and that we may not know everything and therefore should not discount the existence of a creator.
When was God discounted as the informant?
I agree. I think they make good religion historic researchers because of their lack of bias. But it is also important to remember that he is trying to find an alternative explanation to how a believer sees the Koran. The issue here is what can we learn and how can we critique. The author talks about the Jewish and Christian influence in the Koran and that this means that Muhammad and Meccan had a lot more Jewish and Christian influence on them. Of course the Koran says otherwise about Muhammad, like you were never a bible scholar and that you were unaware of the previous prophets. Many prophets are not found in the Jewish or Christian traditions but are found in the Koran. We can learn a great deal about the Koran from these secular scholars since they approach it with a different angle.
Over all its a tough job to try to pin the Koran on a single author whether its Muhammad or otherwise. Which is why Patricia Crone tried to tie the Koran with the Ummayids. This way its a work on many scholars and many adjustments taking years and maybe generations. But it was seen as too incoherent by other scholars who saw Crone as relying on speculation. She now changed her view and now admits that the Koran is what Muhammad left behind. This shows how difficult it is. But at least all secular scholars believe hadith are not relaiable and many were fabricated. The author in the interview talked about the stoning adultery hadith and the 5 prayers which he believes came from Zoroastrian influence.
All for the better.
They can be our best allies.
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Yes, ironically they can be very useful in pointing out the fallacy of hadith etc... but they remain on a level of a 'worldly scholar', so they will only be useful to a certain extent.
Their stance on the existence of a creator also results in heavy bias, and mostly it seems, they try to show and prove that there is nothing divine behind the existence of the quran. This is the underlying theme, although it might disguise itself as objective research... but the foundation is not objective... and cannot be since you cannot prove or disprove the creator in the scientific sense of 'proof'. It is all about faith... although atheists would vehemently deny this. They say they would (as people with sound rational minds) believe if they would have been presented with proof, but if they cannot believe after contemplating the world and universe, then no proof in the world will be enough.
It is this very crucial dichotomy of creator vs no creator, that is the foundation of the whole reasoning of the source of biblical stories and characters in the quran.
If they assume there is no divine informant, of course the info on biblical characters etc must have been borrowed from other religions... how else would it have ended up in the quran? Without the creator who knows all, without and beyond religions, this is the logical conclusion, understandably. Even christians reason this way. They don't believe in the quran strictly due to emotional ego issues and ignorance, and therefore, like atheists, dismiss the quran as a man-made text... even though they claim to believe in a creator. How ironic. So much for objectivity. But seen from another angle, one cannot blame them either, when seeing what the sunnis and shias have turned islam into. I would not be impressed by stoning and hand-cutting either. But the problem is that people always tend to go to one extreme or the other. And frankly speaking, it all starts with your relationship with the creator and truth. If you sincerely want to know the truth, no matter what it is, then you will be guided to it. Persist and you will ascend to better and better understanding. But it seems the vaaaast majority of people believe they have found it, and therefore there is no need for continued search. This, in reality, leads to stagnation and in a way spiritual and intellectual death. Death is when the is no growth.But then again we have things like the 5 namazes that most likely indeed are taken from zoroastrians... so it becomes mixed up. Outsiders, that is people who research the history of islam and quran without believing in its divine dimension, will not see the distinction very clearly between original message and added fabrications. It seems they generally takes islam as one thing and then research it. If they don't believe in the divinity of the quran, they have no reason to work hard to purify the understanding of the quran and see what the text actually says, and thereby being able to see what things are actually not islam. They just see islam as a phenomenon/religion like any other object of study.
It's funny to see how people either take the quran as a historical, man-made text, or they start growing beards and other sect-like attributes.