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Revisionist school of Islamic studies

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 Historiography of early Islam
Muhammad in Mecca
History of Islam
History of the Quran
Criticism of Quran
Muqattaʿat (mystery letters)
Historicity of Muhammad
Historiography of early Islam
Muhammad in Mecca
Ulama

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In the early 1970s some non-Muslim Islamic scholars began to question the traditional/conventional account of the rise of Islam that the Islamic world and many secular historians subscribed to, and suggest alternative explanations as to what happened.

The "revisionist" scholars (such as John Wansbrough and his students Andrew Rippin, Norman Calder, G. R. Hawting, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, as well as Fred Donner, Günter Lüling, Yehuda D. Nevo and Christoph Luxenberg) (drawing on earlier work of Ignác Goldziher and Joseph Schacht) criticized the reliability of Muslim "literary sources" -- tafsir (commentaries on the Quran), hadith (accounts of what the Islamic prophet Muhammad approved of or didn't), and sira (biography of the prophet) — employing a "source-critical" approach to this literature, including as evidence relevant archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and contemporary non-Arabic literature, that they argued provided "hard facts" and an ability to crosscheck.

While the theories of revisionists are "by no means monolithic", they do share "methodological premises" and theories:

• that the religious, political, cultural break between the civilizations of Persia and Byzantium, and that of the 7th century Arab conquerors, was not as abrupt as the traditional history describes.
• that what we know as Islam was not formed before the 7th century Arab invasion of Byzantine and Persian empires, but after;
• that Muhammad did come from Mecca and the belief that he did is an invented tradition from decades after his death;
• that the relationship between Muhammad and Jews and Christians may have originally been much less adversarial than traditionally described.

On other issues they disagree, such as the extremely sensitive issue of whether evidence supports the historicity of Muhammad and the creation of the Quran mainly during Muhammad's lifetime, some revisionist believe the answer is yes (including Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, Fred Donner, Tom Holland, Günter Lüling); and some no (John Wansbrough, Hans Jansen, Karl-Heinz Ohlig, Yehuda D. Nevo). Even more disagree over the origins of the holy book of Islam, the Quran, on issues such as (in the words of Fred Donner): "When did it first appear? How was it first written? In what kind of language was -- is -- it written? What form did it first take? Who constituted its first audience? How was it transmitted from one generation to another, especially in its early years? When, how and by whom was it codified?"

(The time period Muslims often use when referring to the "origins" of Islam is that of Muhammad's mission (622-632 CE), but revisionists argue what we know as Islam was created over a longer period including Muhammad's mission, Rashidun caliphs and the Umayyad Caliphs.)

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...whereas traditional Islamic accounts — written 150 to 200 years after Muhammad — are/were subject to biases of and embellishments by the authors and transmitters.

The Revisionist school of Islamic studies, (also Historical-Critical school of Islamic studies and skeptic/revisionist Islamic historians) is a movement in Islamic Studies questioning much of "what the Muslim historical tradition can tell us about the origins of Islam".

In the traditional/conventional account of the rise of Islam that the Islamic world and many secular historians subscribe to, and that revisionists question, a new religious movement rises out of the remote and isolated, Arab pagan region desert of Hijaz (northwest Arabia), conquering and replacing the Persian and (most of) the Byzantine civilizations. Islam brings scripture, law and theology in Arabic, its system of law regulating not only religious ritual but all facets of life from penal law to social, economic life. Unlike earlier monotheist Abrahamic faiths (Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity) with which it shares some prophets and doctrines, Islam originates in Arabia, not the Eastern Mediterranean and "seems to begin" an appeal to Arabs to abandon traditional idolatry and polytheism and embrace the one true God.

Until the early 1970's, non-Muslim Islamic scholars accepted the Islamic origin story "in most of its details", and accepted the reliability of Muslim "literary sources" -- tafsir (commentaries on the Quran), hadith (accounts of what the Islamic prophet Muhammad approved of or didn't), and sira (biography of the prophet) — except for accounts of divine intervention. Revisionists instead use a "source-critical" approach to this literature, including as evidence relevant archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and contemporary non-Arabic literature. They believe these methodologies provides "hard facts" and an ability to crosscheck, whereas traditional Islamic accounts — written 150 to 200 years after Muhammad — are/were subject to biases of and embellishments by the authors and transmitters.

The school is thought to have originated in the 1970s and includes (or included) scholars such as John Wansbrough and his students Andrew Rippin, Norman Calder, G. R. Hawting, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, as well as Günter Lüling, Yehuda D. Nevo and Christoph Luxenberg). It is "by no means monolithic" and while its proponents share "methodological premises", they have offered "conflicting accounts of the Arab conquests and the rise of Islam". It is sometimes contrasted with "traditionist" historians or the "traditional" school of Islam who do accept the traditional origin story, though the two approaches "usually implicit" rather than "stated openly".

ARTICLES TO ADD TO: 

Historiography of early Islam
Muhammad in Mecca
History of Islam
Ulama
jizya (DONE - MORE OR  LESS)
Historicity of Muhammad (DONE - MORE OR LESS)

TO READ:
Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, 1987: p.204-214

Revisionist school of Islamic studies

Overview

Main thesis/concept of Revisionism

The revisionist school is has been said to be based on the study of Hadith literature by Islamic scholars Ignác Goldziher (1850-1921) and Joseph Schacht (1902-1969), who argued that the traditional Islamic accounts about Islam's early times — written 150 to 200 years after the events they describe — cannot be relied on as historical sources. Goldziher argued (in the words of R.S. Humphreys), "that a vast number of hadith accepted even in the most rigorously critical Muslim collections were outright forgeries from the late 8th and 9th centuries — and as a consequence, that the meticulous isnads which supported them were utterly fictitious". Schacht argued Islamic law was not passed down without deviation from the practice of Muhammad but "developed ... out of popular and administrative practice under the Umayyads, and this practice often diverged from the intentions and even the explicit wording of the Koran ... norms derived from the Koran were introduced into Muhammadan law almost invariably at a secondary stage."

The revisionists extended this argument beyond hadith into other elements of Islamic literature — sira (Muhammad's biography), the history of the Quran's formation, and the historical developments under the Umayyad Caliphate (the first Islamic dynasty). To determine what happendd in the earliest times of Islam historian must "step outside the Islamic tradition altogether and start again", in the words of Cook and Crone. newly researching and reconstructing (revisionists believe) by

1. applying the historical-critical method, or "source-critical approach to both the Koran and the Muslim literary accounts of the rise of Islam, the Conquest and the Umayyad period";
2. comparing these accounts with
   1. contemporary ones external to the Muslim tradition;
   2. archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics from the seventh and eighth century CE -- sources which should be preferred when there is a conflicts with Muslim literary sources.

Revisionists believe that the results of these methods will not only cast doubt on traditional texts which have shaped Islam for centuries; but indicate that the religious, political, cultural break between the Persian and Byzantine civilizations, and the 7th century Arab conquerors was not as abrupt as the traditional history describes.

In addition, questions about the traditional Islamic narrative include:

• whether what we know as Islam was not formed before the 7th century Arab invasion of Byzantine and Persian empires, but after;
• whether Muhammad did come from Mecca and the belief that he did is an invented tradition;
• whether the relationship between Muhammad and Jews and Christians may have been different than traditionally described.
• whether the Quranic text has been handed down to our times unchanged;
• whether in at least parts of the Quran, God's word is clothed in human words;

On the issue of the historicity of Muhammad (whether he is not a legend but actually existed) and the attribution of the Quran to Muhammad (a matter of supreme importance to Islamic belief), On the extremely sensitive issue of

• whether evidence supports the historicity of Muhammad and the creation of the Quran mainly during Muhammad's lifetime, some revisionist believe the answer is yes (including Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, Fred Donner, Tom Holland, Günter Lüling); and some believe it is no (John Wansbrough, Hans Jansen, Karl-Heinz Ohlig, Yehuda D. Nevo).

The designation Revisionism was coined first by the opponents of the new academic movement and is used by them partially still today with a less than positive connotation. Then, the media took up this designation in order to call the new movement with a concise catchword. Today, also the adherents of the new movement use Revisionism to designate themselves, yet mostly written in quotation marks and with a slightly self-mocking undertone.

Historical trends

The influence of the different tendencies in the study of Islam in the West has waxed and waned. Ibn Warraq believes "the rise of this revisionist school" may be dated from the Fifth colloquium of the Near Eastern History Group of Oxford University on July 1975, and Robert Hoyland believes revisionists were ascendant in the 1970s and 1980s.

Prior to that, from World War II to sometime around the mid-1970s, there was what scholar Charles Adams describes as "a distinctive movement in the West, represented in both religious circles and the universities, whose purpose" was to show both a "greater appreciation of Islamic religiousness" and to foster "a new attitude toward it". In doing so make "restitution for the sins of unsympathetic, hostile, or interested approaches that have plagued the tradition of Western Orientalism", (early Orientalists being openly hostile to Islam). Herbert Berg gives Wilfred Cantwell Smith and W. Montgomery Watt as examples of proponents of this "irenic approach" (traditionalist) approach to Islamic history, and notes that the approach necessarily clashed with the questions and potential answers of revisionists since these clashed with Islamic doctrine.

Hoyland believes the heyday of revisionism, diminished as the "public profile of Islam" increased "massively" sometime after the 1980s, when (Hoyland argues) the tendency of left leaning liberalism of academics "shy of criticizing Islam", "favored the traditionalist approach" while "pushing skeptics/revisionists to become more extreme." (Hoyland seeking to find a middle way between revisionism and avoiding criticism.)

Major representatives

Among the "foremost" proponents of revisionism are/were John Wansbrough (1928-2002), Patricia Crone (1945-2015), Michael Cook, Yehuda D. Nevo (1932-1992, and Fred M. Donner. Revisionists are not all in agreement.

The new movement originated at the SOAS (School of Oriental & African Studies) at the University of London with the publications of two works by Wansbrough: Quranic Studies (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu (1978). Andrew Rippin (1950-2016), Norman Calder, G. R. Hawting, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook were students of Wansbrough. In 1977 Crone and Cook published Hagarism, which postulated -- among other things -- that Islam was established after, not before, the Arab conquests and that Mecca was not the original Islamic sanctuary. Later, both distanced themselves from the theses of Hagarism as too far reaching, but continued to "challenge both Muslim and Western orthodox views of Islamic history". Martin Hinds (1941-1988), also studied at SOAS and Robert G. Hoyland was a student of Patricia Crone.

In Germany at the Saarland University, Günter Lüling (1928-2014) and Gerd-Rüdiger Puin focused on the historical-critical research of the development of the Quran starting in the 1970s, and in the 2000s, Karl-Heinz Ohlig, Volker Popp, Christoph Luxenberg and Markus Groß argued that Muhammad was a legendary, not historical figure. Hans Jansen from the Netherlands published a work in 2005/7 arguing in detail why (he believed) known accounts of Muhammad's life were legendary. Yehuda D. Nevo also questioned the historicity of Muhammad. Sven Kalisch, a convert to Islam, taught Islamic theology before leaving the faith in 2008 when he questioned the historicity of Mohammad (as well as Jesus and Moses).

James A. Bellamy has done textual criticism of the Quran and his proposed "emendations", i.e. corrections of the traditional text of the Quran.

Popular historian Tom Holland's work In the Shadow of the Sword (2012) has popularized the new research results and depicted a possible synthesis of the various revisionist approaches.

John Wansbrough

See also: John Wansbrough

Wansbrough argues that the Quran is more recent than thought, and should be dated not from the 1st century Hijaz, Western Arabia, but from the 2nd 3rd Islamic century in Abbasid Iraq when it "became a source for biography, exegesis, jurisprudence and grammar", and following the model of an older monotheist religion -- Judiasm -- provided a fixed, sacred scripture revealed by (a) prophet to form the basis for their (sharia) code of law. Wansbrough argues that variants of Quranic text are so minor they are not "recollections of ancient texts that differed from the Uthmanic text," but the outcome of exegesis. And also that classical Arabic was developed later than the colloquial forms, "contemporaneously with the codification of the Quran." His theories have neither been "widely accepted" nor rejected according to Gabriel Said Reynolds.

Patricia Crone

See also: Patricia Crone

Crone along with Michael Cook, authored Hagarism (1977), while at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, fundamentally questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam by examining only non-Arabic sources. Later, Crone refrained from this attempt of a detailed reconstruction of Islam's beginnings. but argued that the historicity of Islamic sources on Islam's beginnings has to be fundamentally questioned; Islam has deep roots in Judaism, and Arabs and Jews were allies; that Mecca was never an important trading center and that the cradle of Islam was located closer to the Mediterranean. While she believed "there is no doubt that Mohammed existed" and that "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", she argued that the historicity of Islamic sources on Islam's beginnings has to be fundamentally questioned; that Islam has deep roots in Judaism, and that the early Muslim Arabs were allies with Jew; and that Mecca was never an important trading center, and that the cradle of Islam was located closer to the Mediterranean.

Fred Donner

See also: Fred Donner

Fred Donner, in his several books on early Islamic history raises few doubts about the identity of Muhammad or the timeline of early Islamic expansion, but argues that in Muhammad's community, "believers" (muminin) was a broader term than Muslims, and may have included pious Christians and Jews as well as Muslims; that the community did not revolve around obedience to the Qur'anic law; cause much destruction in its invasions; or proselytize the conquered until decades after conquest. It was only during the reign of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (685-705) that the early ecumenical monotheism of the Arab conquerors begin to separate from Christians and Jews. Unlike Wansbrough and Nevo, Donner argued that the Quran was not canonized decades after the traditional accounts tell us.

Yehuda D. Nevo

See also: Crossroads to Islam

In his work Crossroads to Islam, Israel archaeologist Yehuda D. Nevo his co-author Judith Koren also argued Islamic doctrine developed later than its historical tradition claimed, and that the Quran was developed by the Abbasids to create a fixed canon upon which to base their code of law. He believed that Arabic inscriptions he studied in the Negev desert indicated a "progressive religious development" of Islam "during the first two Islamic centuries", moving from "indeterminate monotheism to formal Islamic doctrine". Rather than conquering Byzantine provinces, Arab tribes were made "clients" (foederati) by the declining Byzantine Empire as it withdrew from its Eastern provinces and tried to maintain some control over the area, encouraging "heterodox Christianity". Nevo argues that rather than being the fifth Caliph, Muawiyah I was the first historical ruler of the Arab Empire, and arose from the other foederati to become a warlord/strongman.

Christoph Luxenberg

See also: The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran

Unlike Wansbrough and Nevo, Luxenberg and Lüling argue that "the genesis of the Quran" was much earlier than the Islamic historical tradition, and began with Christian writings" Rather than speaking an Arabic dialect, he argues "the inhabitants of Mecca ... must" have spoken some kind of "Aramaic-Arabic hybrid language" at the time the Quran was revealed, and that parts of the Quran that are "inexplicable from the point of view of Arabic", make more sense when translated as Syro-Aramaic. The "writing conventions" of this Syro-Aramaic were later forgotten or misunderstood and read "as though they were Arabic".

Günter Lüling

See also: Günter Lüling

Lüling attempted to demonstrate a link between the composition of the Quran and pre-Islamic hymns of Christians in Mecca. He theorized that the early believers of what later became Orthodox Islam were non-Trinitarian Christian whose theological positions were adopted by later generations to become an Arab religion Islam (i.e. "religion of Abraham and the tribes"). He also proposed that "mushrikun" (usually translated as polytheists) adversaries of Muhammad denounced in the Quran were not pagans but Trinitarian Christians. He theorized that approximately one-third of the Quran has pre-Islamic Christian origins (specifically one-third is made up of a Christian hymnal).

THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE PART THAT SHOULD BE PREPARED FOR SEPERATE ARTICLE

Problems with traditional sources

Among the reasons revisionists find traditional sources unreliable is because their purpose is not to investigate and find out what actually happened, but to strengthen religious faith; because of their late dates (the beginning of the third Islamic century) make them more subject to error through long oral and written transmission, in addition to raising questions of whether it allowed time for a makeover (fabrication) of history; the fact that they contain "contradictions, confusions, inconsistencies", and that even compilers of the accounts (in particular hadith) agree the sources contain many falsified historical accounts.

Islamic historical narratives

According to traditional belief, Islamic literature provides the sources for the standard history of the origins of Islam, Islamic law, the life of the prophet. (The Quran is the holy book of Islam but is thought to require commentary to be "historically comprehensible".)

Some of the genres include early tafsir (commentaries on the Quran), sira (biography of the prophet), khabar (reports or stories about historical events from early Islam, also a “narrative of biographical character”), qissa ("edifying narratives of the prophets that may be spiced with interesting titbits [sic] intended to keep the attention of the audience"), mathal (narratives or a sayings that are "used to prove a point of doctrine or explain a circumstance of life", maghazi (narratives of "the military campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad"), and hadith (records of the words, actions, and the silent approval of accounts of Muhammad -- which like the Quran qualify as God's revelation according to the traditional Islamic history).

From narratives about Muhammad (usually sira and hadith), for example, "we know everything more or less" (in the words of Salman Rushdie), "where [Muhammad] lived, what his economic situation was, who he fell in love with. We also know a great deal about the political circumstances and the socioeconomic circumstances of the times".

But to modern secular historians they simply not reliable for a number of reasons:

Purpose

Unlike "history" that seeks to investigate the past to determine historicity (what actually happened), the narratives are salvation history or "sacred history", whose purpose is "to show the workings of God, not the machinations of man", much like the holy religious sources of other religions -- the Pentateuch, Talmud, New Testament.

In traditions of early military campaigns and battles, for example, instead of descriptions of planning, tactics and weaponry, troop strength, layout, or movement, of the sort you would expect to find in the Greco-Roman history; there are stories of "past glories and heroic exploits" to encourage the troops, told by storytellers/preachers. Islamic literature includes supernatural elements, most importantly that the Quran and Hadith are revealed by God through the angel Jibril. But there are other tales of divine intervention -- Ibn Ishaq described hosts of angels coming to the aid of Muhammad at the Battle of Badr.

Oral or written transmission

Hadith where passed down orally. Ibn Warraq argues that it is highly likely that the sira available to modern readers was passed down orally at first and later by hand-copied text, since the oldest paper with Arabic writing found on it dates from between 796 and 815 CE and Ibn Ishaq died in 767; there are least 15 transmitters of his Sira and their versions contradict each other. Hadith were passed down orally until canonical compilations in the late ninth century.

But written and oral accounts of historical events are subject to error. Generations of transmitters can unintentionally distort the original account (as in the children's game "Chinese whispers"), authors of ancient chronicles necessarily tell readers what they thought happened or wanted to believe happened and not necessarily "what actually happened". Eyewitnesses are subject to "conscious and unconscious ... attempts to fit" what they see into "preexisting knowledge". Transmission of history is subject to "embellishing and explaining, ... adding, subtracting ... substituting a word, a phrase or a gloss". For example, substituting "Muhammad" for "The Prophet" -- since the copyist "knows" The Prophet is Muhammad.

Late date

Revisionists like G.R. Hawting point out,

We have no biography of Muhammad, no commentary on the Quran, no law book, no collection of Hadiths, no history of early Islam, etc. which can be said to predate, in the form in which we have it, the beginning of the third Islamic century."

The longer the period from event until account, the more opportunity for distortions described above, but revisionists also raise the question of why there would be such a long gap in time. (Thomas Holland pointing out that historical records were being written and have survived "even on the most barbarous fringes of civilisation" in Dark Ages era Britain.) Why wouldn't they in the heartland of a blossoming empire?

Neva & Koren argue that the idea that no earlier tafsir works "have survived from before the late second century because variant texts were destroyed", is much less plausible than a simpler explanation -- namely "that no one commented because nothing existed to comment on" -- i.e. that the Quran did not emerge until later than the Islamic tradition tells us.

Holland, another revisionist, argues that there must have been biographical mentions/information about such an important figure as Muhammad earlier than the the ninth century and that it is more likely this literature (sira not tafsir) were destroyed -- something he thinks is hinted at by Ibn Hisham introductory remarks of Sira, where he states that “things disgraceful" to discuss and upsetting to people were omitted.

Hadith

(As mentioned above) Hadith (the body of accounts of the prophets saying, doings, etc.), are unlike sira and khabar because they are considered a source of Islamic revelation and provide the basis of the "great bulk" of the rules of Sharia (Islamic law). Proper hadith include an "isnad", a "chain" of the transmitters who orally relayed the content of the hadith (matn) from Muhammad to a hadith compiler (such as Muhammad al-Bukhari or Ahmad ibn Hanbal). The most highly respected compilers carefully examined hadith to weed out false accounts.

Notwithstanding these measures, early Muslims Al-Nawawi, Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ, Ibrahim an-Nazzam; later reformers Syed Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Iqbal; and of course revisionist scholars from the West such as Ignác Goldziher, Joseph Schacht, John Wansbrough, Michael Cook (historian), and Patricia Crone; argue that even the highly rated sahih ("sound" or authentic) hadith suffer from corruption or should be limited in their use.

One concern is that rather than decreasing in number over time as they were lost or forgotten, the number of hadith increased, a red flag that fabrications must have been added. Revisionist Patricia Crone argues that it's not possible to find a "core" of authentic hadith because we do not know when the fabrication of them started.

Bukhari [810–870 CE] is said to have examined a total of 600,000 traditions attributed to the Prophet; he preserved some 7000 (including repetitions), or in other words dismissed some 593,000 as inauthentic. If Ibn Hanbal [ (780–855 CE)] examined a similar number of traditions, he must have rejected about 5700, his collection containing some 30,000 (again including repetitions). Of Ibn Hanbal's traditions, 1,710 (including repetitions) are transmitted by the companion Abd Allah ibn Abbas [(619–687 CE)]. Yet less than fifty years earlier one scholar had estimated that Ibn Abbas had only heard nine traditions from the Prophet, while another thought that the correct figure might be ten. If Ibn Abbas had heard ten traditions from the Prophet in the years around 800, but over a thousand by about 850 CE, how many had he heard in 700 or 632? Even if we accept that ten of Ibn Abbas' traditions are authentic, how do we identify them in the pool of 1,710?

Sira

With the exception of fragments, Patricia Crone laments that the Sira of the Prophet is full of "contradictions, confusions, inconsistencies and anomalies" and constitutes "destruction rather than preservation of the past". Ibn Ishaq was not a grandchild of "the Prophet's generation ... but a great grandchild", writing from the point of view of the Abassids, not the earlier Umayyads that the Abassids overthrew and slaughtered. The traditions conflict with each other so often and so regularly `that one could were one so inclined, rewrite most of Montgomery Watt's biography of Muhammad in the reverse.'" (some examples being: Meccans first traded with foreigners who came to Mecca but stopped in the pre-Islam past, or alternately stopped after Islam triumphed to have more time to pray. The Meccans went to Syria every summer and winter, or instead went to Syria in one season and to Yemen the next.)

Examining them, Patricia Crone found a pattern, where the farther a commentary was removed in time from the life of Muhammad and the events in the Quran, the more information it provided, despite the fact it depended on the earlier sources for its content. Crone attributed this phenomenon to storytellers' embellishment.

If one storyteller should happen to mention a raid, the next storyteller would know the date of this raid, while the third would know everything that an audience might wish to hear about.

An example was the oldest prophetic biography, that of Ibn Ishaq (died 767), which was much smaller than the commentary of Al-Waqidi (d.823), despite the fact that Waqidi's later works covered a shorter periods of time (only Muhammad's period in Medina).

Waqidi will always give precise dates, locations, names, where Ibn Ishaq has none, accounts of what triggered the expedition, miscellaneous information to lend color to the event

making him a popular source for scholars. The implication is that not only should Waqidi not be considered a reliable source, but that it is likely the same myth creation process didn't start with him but contaminated Ibn Ishaq's accounts.

... given that this information was all unknown to Ibn Ishaq, its value is doubtful in the extreme. And if spurious information accumulated at this rate in the two generations between Ibn Ishaq and al-Waqidi, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that even more must have accumulated in the three generations between the Prophet and Ibn Ishaq.

Hans Jansen also alleges self-contradictions, contradictions to other historical sources, embellishments by later authors, politically or theologically motivated distortions, etc., in Ibn Hisham's version of the Sira by Ibn Ishaq. Among the questionable accounts are Muhammad's satisfying all his wives in one night, killing more enemies than described in similar hadith stories, and that not a not a single one of the many events Ibn Ishaq describes falls during a leap-year month. A fact Jansen finds suspicious because leap year months (which adjust for difference between the 365-day solar year and the 354/355 days of 12 lunar months, and which were used during almost all of Muhammad's lifetime) occur approximately every three years and were used by pre-Islamic Arabs. (This, of course, might be explained by the fact that Ibn Ishaq lived many years after Muhammad had done away with the leap years, if Ibn Ishaq's accounts were fictitious.)

Another revisionist, Tom Holland, argues that there must have been biographical mentions/information about such an important figure as Muhammad earlier than the the ninth century and that it is more likely this literature (sira not tafsir) was destroyed -- something he thinks is hinted at by Ibn Hisham introductory remarks of Sira, where he states that “things disgraceful to discuss” and upsetting to people were omitted, i.e accounts that contradict the story he wants to tell, the official account that is contradicted by others.

Khabar

Khabar (literally news, information, pl. akhbar) are statements, often reports or stories about historical events from early Islam, sometimes distinguished from hadith in that they are not from Muhammad but said to be from authoritative Muslims -- often Companions and Successors. In studying khabar, one non-Muslim scholar, Stefan Leder, found instances of "two or more irreconcilable accounts of the same event, possibly quoted from the same eyewitness", that were allegedly "truthfully handed down from prior witnesses" but in the process of transmission were "reshaped and gradually elaborated". Leder found it was not possible to sort out folkloric stories of storytellers (qussas) from allegedly historical akhbar, both "having their roots in the oral tradition of social gatherings".

In their study of the traditional Islamic accounts of early conquest, historians Albrecht Noth and Lawrence Conrad found the conquests of several key cities -- Damascus and Caesarea in Syria, Babilyn/al-Fusat and Alexandria in Egypt, Tustar in Khuzistan and Cordoba in Spain -- "are all described as having fallen into the hands of the Muslim in precisely the same fashion". There is a

"traitor who, ... points out a weak spot in the city's fortification to the Muslim besiegers; a celebration in the city which diverts the attention of the besieged; then a few assault troops who scale the walls, ... a shout of 'Allahu akbar!' ... from the assault troops as a sign that they have entered the town; the opening of one of the gates from inside, and the onslaught of the entire army."

One example of an account of an Arab conquest studied by Lawrence Conrad was that of the island of Arwad (3 km off the Syrian coast) in 29 A.H/650 CE. Conrad found that it not only contained contained stereotypic and formulaic elements found in other accounts, but differed "to an extraordinary extent" and was "irreconcilable" with the account given by one non-Muslim chronicler -- Theophilus of Edessa".

Noth and Conrad argue that these are too numerous and their similarity too exact to be historical coincidences. Conrad concludes that however "engaging and eventful", the original story of the conquest "must have been", that account was eventually lost as the need of the storytellers who passed down the tale shaped it to provide an account the "audience would find edifying and/or entertaining ... harmonious with that audience's conceptions of the origins of Islam and the early growth of the community".

Conflict between traditional account and source criticism

In addition to finding fault with the historical sources for the traditional/conventional account of the rise of Islam (mentioned above), revisionists see conflicts when comparing the results of other more reliable sources (the aforementioned archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and contemporary non-Arabic literature), with the traditional/conventional account.

Traditional account

This account that at least many in the Islamic world subscribe to and which much of is accepted by many secular historians, might be summarized as:

A new religious movement rises out of the remote and isolated, Arab (formerly) pagan region desert of Hijaz (northwest Arabia), Unlike earlier monotheist Abrahamic faiths (Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity), with which it shares some prophets and doctrines, Islam originates in Arabia, not the Eastern Mediterranean. Unlike them, an important part of its beginning is the appeal to its target audience to abandon traditional idolatry and polytheism and embrace the one true God, and its scripture, law and theology are in the Arabic,

Following the death of its prophet and motivated by "an uncomplicated desire to spread the Word of God", Arab Muslim warriors conquer the Persian and (most of) the Byzantine empires, replacing not only their rulers but their system of law with a new divine one that encompasses not only religious ritual but all facets social, economic life -- marriage, inheritance, money lending, penal law, etc..

A number of signs point to divine intervention on behalf of the new religion. It's prophet, Muhammad, cannot read, and lives 1000 km from the Jewish and Christian holy land, but the holy book revealed to him (the Quran) is "unparalleled" in its "sublimity" and talks much about Jewish and Christian scripture. Though often heavily outnumbered the warriors of the new religion advance, seizing for Islam a swath of territory "larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion", taken in half the time it took the Romans to conquer theirs.

Among the traditional images/themes of the first Muslim conquerors (according to Muslim historians of the 9th century) are its calendar, whose beginning date commemorates the Prophet and his struggling followers fleeing oppression in Mecca for the oasis of Medina; that the conquerors were 'a horde of nomads' with experience fighting and raiding but not fighting military campaigns, and outsiders to the "civilized world" of Persia and Byzantium; that they were welcomed by the common people of the lands they conquered; that they always presented their soon to be conquered enemies with "the same three choices of conversion, surrender and payment of a poll tax, or death in battle"; and that the diversity in "languages, ethnicities, cultures, and religions" of their defeated peoples were replaced in the early seventh century "by "Arabian Islam, and not gradually later.

Implications of archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, and contemporary non-Arabic literature

Evidence for this account should be reflected not only in Islamic literature of later Muslims but physical remains dating from the first century or so after Muhammad's death (630-730 CE). For example, there are thousands of rock inscriptions in the Arabian Peninsula and Syro-Jordanian desert, some that can be dated to the time around 630 CE. Those inscriptions before 630 should be pagan and those after Islamic, with some perhaps some signs of transition (mentions of paganism or pagan names in early Islamic inscriptions). Archaeological digs should find things like remains of major battles, ruins of overrun forts, destroyed symbols of Byzantine authority, etc. dating to about the times of conquest -- Syria and Palestine in 641 CE, Mesopotamia in 636 CE, Egypt between 639 and 646 CE, and the rest of the Persian/Sassanid empire by 651. Coins are "official pronouncements of current state attitudes", so that those found from the era should have verses or parts of verses from the Quran and mention of Muhammad and the caliphate, as coins of later Islamic states do. Byzantine, Jewish or Persian literature, such as chronicles, from 7th century should mention the conquering Arab Rashidun Caliphs (632–661 CE) bringing a new religion, new laws, new ways of doing things.

Conflict with archaeological sources

Epigraphs and language

There are thousands of pagan and monotheist epigraphs or rock inscriptions throughout the Arabian peninsula and in the Syro-Jordanian desert immediately north. Here also, Nevo and Koren have found a number of features not consistent with the traditional Islamic narrative of Arabic pagan culture in the hijaz prior to Islam. These include

• A lack of "inscriptions in Classical Arabic ... found in the Hijaz" (west Arabia region of Mecca and Medina) until the 40s/660s, the beginning of the reign of Mu'awiya. These "come from the Ta'if area, which Mu'awiya seems to have been interested to colonize around that time."
• No pagan inscriptions in Classical Arabic have been found in the Hijaz, (although pagans spoke and wrote in Arabic before Islam).
• No Classical Arabic inscriptions "make any mention of paganism, or include pagan names", (during a transition from paganism to Islam it would be usual to find names based on the old religion among "first-generation converts."
• No traces in the Hijaz of pre-Classical or less-than-fully-developed forms of arabic script you would expect to see from inscriptions made before the era of classical arabic, while these are found in Syria, "where inscriptions in a close variety of Classical Arabic and an early Kufic script appear (e.g. on church lintels.) in sixth century CE."
• The adaptation around this time of a script (Aramaic) that seems a poor match compared to script already in use by close-by Arabic speaking Jahili Peninsular tribes (such as the Tamudians, Safaites, Lihyanites).
• In the area where the prophet of the new religion lived (Hijaz), no inscription including Muhammad's name appears on a public monument until the 690's CE. No inscriptions on private structures appears until decades after that, according to Tom Holland.

Archaeology of conquered areas

Conquest of a civilization by another typically involved significant destruction of fortifications, palaces, cities, etc. According to archaeological evidence accumulated by Fred Donner, there is a lack of evidence of such destruction following the conquest and some evidence of a co-existence between Islam and Christian worship not found in later eras.

• a church near Jerusalem was rebuilt early 8th century with both an apse and prayer niche (mithrab) for Islamic prayer.
• When Muslims arrived in Damascus, they took over the church of St. John and divided it in half, with one part for Christians and one for Muslims
• It is hard to distinguish archaeologically between late Byzantine and early Islamic examining the layers of sediment, debris, rock, and other materials that form or accumulate to create Stratigraphy. Unlike most conquests in Palestine, there is no layer of destruction, the kind and/or style of pottery doesn’t change. (Hoyland also states that "the Arab conquests were not particularly destructive".)

Archaeology of pagan sites

Nevo and Koren also state that "extensive ... large scale, systematic surveys and excavations" archaeological work for several decades up to 1990 in Hijaz has found, contrary to Islamic tradition, "no signs of local Arab cultures from the sixth and early seventh centuries" including no pagan cites or sanctuaries", and no trace of Jewish settlement at Medina, Khaybar or Wadi al-Qurrar. This is despite finding the remains of many other cultures (Hellenistic, Nabatean, Roman, and Early Byzantine), and a "wealth" of pagan shrines and stone stelae in an area to the north -- the central Negev desert (between Arabia and Palestine) -- indicating (also contrary to Islamic tradition), that "active pagans must have formed a considerable part of the Negev population right through the first one-and-a-half centuries of the Muslim era".

Archaeology of imperial forts

Islamic accounts of its early victories under Muhammad and the early Caliphate (Rashidun Caliphate) describe it defeating enemies despite being heavily outnumbered, a sign of God's favor and the religious zeal of Muslims.

The actual history of battles against Byzantines and Persians may have been different. Archaeological work by S.T. Parker concluded that "during the fifth and sixth centuries C.E. ... Byzantium abandoned most of its fortifications ... and withdrew most of the regular troops" along the desert frontier (Limes Arabicus) designed to prevent Roman province of Arabia from attacks by the "barbarian" tribes of the Arabian desert. This left the "frontier defense mainly in the hands of the Arab phylarchs" (Arab tribal leaders allied with Byzantium). "In addition Bzyantium stopped "imperial patronage of secular building in sixth century Syria". Nevo and Koren conclude "archaeological evidence thus indicates that Byzantium began to withdraw militarily from Al-Sham" about the beginning of the 6th century and by early 7th century suggesting "a policy decision" by Byzantium, "long before" the Arab conquest, not to defend al-Sham, which further suggests that that it is unlikely the Arab invaders were engaged in any large battles with Byzantine forces.

Coinage

Nevo and Koren note coins of the region and era used Byzantine -- not Islamic -- iconography until the reign of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (646-705 CE). Neva & Koren find it significant that that until 70 AH (689/690 CE) Arab-Sassanian coins include monotheist phrases such as bism Allah, bism Allah rabbi/al-malik, rabbi Allah, but no specifically Islamic phrases such as the name of Muhammad until sometime after 685 CE.Once these slogans were introduced they "became obligatory on all coins minted over a wide area."

Revisionist historians finds the inscriptions and images on coins of an era under study significant because -- in the words of archaeologist Yehuda Nevo and researcher Judith Koren --

"legends on coins are official pronouncements of current state attitudes (in this case to religion), intended for wide promulgation. Merely placing religious formulae on coins involves a conscious act of choice regarding what to say and what to omit."

Specifically, old coins of Al-Sham/Levant can yield information on the progress of the Arab conquest of the Levant.

Contemporaneous non-Arab literature

Perception of the new religion and the Arab invasion

While Christian and Jewish accounts were "just as much a part of the sectarian milieu" as the Muslim version of events and can't be assumed to be more accurate, (according to J. Wansbourgh) they deserve study also. What the invaded people understand of the religion of the immigrants is ambiguous. Examining 7th century Byzantine Christian sources commentary on the Arab "immigrants" (Mhaggraye) who were invading/settling in formerly Byzantine territory at that time [starting in the late 630s], historian Abdul-Massih Saadi found the Christians never mentioned the terms "Quran" nor "Islam" nor that the immigrants were of a new religion.

The Christians used secular or political, not religious terms (kings, princes, rulers) to refer to the Arab leaders. Muhammad was "the first king of the Mhaggraye", also guide, teacher, leader or great ruler. They referred to the immigrants in ethnic terms -- "among them (Arabs) there are many Christians...". (Donner also states Christians were soldiers in the Arab immigration/invasion.) Robert Hoyland also found "contemporary observers mostly referred to the conqueror in ethnic rather than religious terms".

But if they don't mention that (most of) the Arabs were of a new religion, they do mention their religion. The immigrants' religion was described as monotheist "in accordance with the Old Law (Old Testament)". When the Emir of the immigrants and Patriarch of the local Christians did have a religious colloquium there was much discussion of the scriptures but no mention of the Quran, "a possible indication that the Quran was not yet in circulation." The Christians reported the Emir was accompanied by "learned Jews", that the immigrants "accepted the Torah just as the Jews and Samaritans". At the same time, none of the sources described the immigrants as Jews. The Byzantine Christians did mention "First and Second Civil Wars" among "Arab political and tribal factions" which they saw as destroying the immigrants.

In keeping with seeming ignorance of the religion of the immigrants/invaders a Christian source, John of Fenek, writes that "of each person" the Arabs "required only tribute, allowing him to remain in whatever faith he wished." According to Hoyland, none of early sources found by historians makes any mention any offers by the Arabs to Persians and Byzantines to avoid conquest by converting to Islam. Tribute paid to the Arabs was the cost of being conquered, not of being non-Muslims.

Nevo and Koren argue early Christian sources do not mention the "rightly guided caliphs" nor any of the famous futūḥ battles (i.e. the early Arab-Muslim conquests which facilitated the spread of Islam and Islamic civilization). Brock did not find any indication from Syriac chroniclers perceived, noticed or recognized Arabs had begun ruling their land for the first decade at least, nor the Arab religion for most of the first century."

One non-Arab (Greek) source not at all incompatible with traditional Islamic narrative, talks of "the belief that Abraham had bequeathed a monotheist religion" to Arabs, "including descent from Ishmael and Hagar and prohibition of pork and other Jewish practices". This source, The Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen", was written by a native of Gaza (Sozomen) whose "mother tongue was Arabic, so we have testimony from a reliable source that there were Abrahamic monotheists (hanifs) by orgin; whether this was true of Arabs throughout the peninsula it is impossible to say".

In the Fertile Crescent, inhabitants did not (in the words of Neva & Koren) "perceive, or notice, or recognize the fact of Arab rule for the first decade at least, not the Arab religion for most of the first century," (according to Syriac and Byzantine sources studied by historian S.P. Brock). "The title 'prophet'" applied to Muhammad by the Syriac and Byzantine inhabitants "is not very common, 'apostle' even less so. Normally he is simply described as the first of the Arab kings, [presumably after the inhabitants noticed the Arabs were ruling] and it would be generally true to say that the Syriac sources of this period see the conquests primarily as Arab, and not Muslim".

Regarding the Islamic calendar, whose first year is said to commemorate the Hegira or migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina, "there is no seventh century source that identifies" the year as that of the Hijra. The "only clue to its nature comes from two Nestorian Christian documents of 676 and 680 that call it the year of the 'the rule of the Arabs'". (Early sources also don't agree on the dates of the Prophet's birthday and death. According to non-Muslim scholar Lawrence Conrad, "well into the second century A.H. scholarly opinion of the birth date of the Prophet displayed a range of variance of 85 years."

Arab literature

According to Hoyland, "Muslim lawyers debated Muhammad's rulings about what share of the spoils of war should go to Jews and Christians who fought alongside Muslims," indicating (contrary to later Muslim historians) that Muhammad's coalition included Christians and Jews.

Robert Hoyland writes that agreements/treaties between the invading Arabs and forces in land the Arabs conquered varied in terms:

• "the Samaritans of Palestine [who] agreed to act as guides and spies in return for exemption from land tax",
• "the Jarajima, longtime residents of the Black Mountain region around Antioch, [who] served as frontier guards on the condition that they paid no tax and kept any booty they took when they fought alongside the Arabs."
• "The Persian governor of Darband and his troops were spared payment of tribute in return for rendering military service, and indeed `it became accepted practice that those non-Muslims who went into combat against he enemy (on behalf of the Arabs), and also those who only contribution was to maintain readiness to fight, should be relieved of tribute.`"

All these were contrary to 9th century claims by Muslim historians that conquerors "offered the same three choices of conversion, surrender and payment of a poll tax, or death in battle" to those they were about to conquer.

The Constitution of Medina speaks explicitly of Jews being part of the Medinan community, according to Fred Donner, and St John of Damascus is believed to have been an advisor or administrator to the Umayyad caliph.

Conflict with account of the location of the home of Muhammad, Quran and the house of God (Mecca)

On one issue in particular -- the importance of Mecca -- there is another conflict between both with the traditional historical account, an account championed by some non-Muslim historians and a different non-Islamic sources (as well as geographic facts) put forth mainly by Patricia Crone.

According to this traditional account, the location Muhammad is born in and preaches is Mecca, a wealthy and powerful international trading city trading (according to Islamic traditions) with Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, and/or Iraq. It is given the honorific "mother of cities" -- Umm al-Qura -- (according to tradition) by the Quran, 6:92, and "known to ancient geographers as Makoraba". Located in the desert in southern Hijaz (Western Arabia) many days journey from the Mediterranean Sea and Palestine, it was nonetheless founded by the prophet Abraham who built its Kaaba sanctuary and pilgrimage site, (according to revelation received by Muhammad).(2:125-129) Though Abraham had cleansed the semitic tribes of idolatry, polytheism had returned to Mecca, and it was Muhammad's mission to again establish monotheism -- turn humanity away from corruption and ignorance (jahil), towards knowledge ('ilm) and truth (haqq).

Similarly, historians both Western (W.M.Watt Karen Armstrong) and Muslim have argued that this led to "a social and moral crisis" there (specifically a "breakdown of traditional norms" with the rich growing richer and ignoring the impoverishment of their kin). which "Muhammad's revelation was a response to".

In the conventional Islamic history, Mecca was "the center of a far-flung trading empire", a large trading hub with caravans such as two annual commercial caravans by the Quraysh tribe back and forth between Mecca and Yemen in the winter, and another caravan to Syria in the summer. These are believed to be referred to in Quran 106:1–2.

"It is almost an axiom of Muslim studies that Mecca was the center of an important international trading network, from which its inhabitants gained considerable wealth and a preeminent position in Peninsular politics. The items traded through this network have usually been seen as Arabian spices and incense, with the addition of a transit trade in high-cost , low bulk luxury wares from India, supplied to the Mediterranean world."

Revisionist historians (mostly Patricia Crone) have found a number of problems with the claim of Mecca as "a place of great significance and wealth".

flakiness of traditions

The traditions from which the claim derive "conflict with each other (as mentioned above) so often and so regularly `that one could were one so inclined, rewrite most of Montgomery Watt's biography of Muhammad in the reverse.'" (Meccans first traded with foreigners who came to Mecca but then Muhammad's father brought caravans to the foreigners' countries, Syria and Persia, and traded there; or alternately Meccans used to trade with these countries but stopped in the pre-Islam past or after Islam triumphed to have more time to pray. The Meccans went to Syria every summer and winter, or instead to Syria in one season and to Yemen the next; silver was what Meccans traded or just one of the items they traded, and so on.)

conflict with non-Muslim sources

Crone also found no evidence non-Muslim sources placed Mecca "where the Mecca we know today is placed, that is to say in the southern Hijaz." Examining the claim (made as recently as 1988 by one G.D. Newby) in line with the conventional/traditional Muslim account, that the city was "known to the ancient geographers as Macoraba", Patricia Crone states: "The plain truth is that the name of Macoraba has nothing to do with that of Mecca, and that the location indicated by Ptolemy for Macoraba in no way dictates identification of the two ... if Ptolemy mentions Mecca at al, he calls it Moka, a town in Arbia Petraea", i.e. near Petra in modern day Jordan.

According to Holland "In gazetteers written by Muhammad's contemporaries -- whether by diplomats geographers or historians -- mentions of [Mecca] are notable by their glaring absence". Most striking of all is the absence of any mention of Mecca in Procopius, since in one passage of the history of the wars (1.19) the historian provides a remarkably detailed survey of the western coast of Arabia.

Another historian, D.S. Margoliouth, also found that the name Makoraba cited by "Ptolemy (VI. vii.32)" could not have been a variation on the name Mecca because it was "derived from a different root", and that classical geographers like Ptolemy, "who devote[d] considerable attention to Arabia," made no reference to any settlement in the location of present day Mecca.

Also suspiciously ignorant of Mecca in the Hijaz (and its supposed leading tribe Quraysh) were Roman mercenary recruitment record keepers who kept track of arabs (who made up the foederati) signing up to be mercenaries for Byzantium. While many "exotic names" and most every ethnic grouping "between Palestine and Hijaz appeared on the Roman register", no arabs registered from the location of Mecca or the tribe of Quraish. This was despite there being a tradition that "Muhammad's own ancestor Qusayy, ... seized power in Mecca only after" the Roman emperor "had extended him aid".

Among the Greeks and Latins who would have been the customers of the alleged trading hub there is no mention of Meccans or Quraysh "as the middlemen in a long-distance trade" in contemporary writings either before or after the Arab invasion. (No mention by their new Syrian subjects that the Meccans/Quraysh were "the people who used to supply such-and-such regions with such-and-such goods".)

• Among the conquered subjects of the Arabs there is no mention of the invaders as Meccan "for a long time". The city that the invaders came from "was long assumed to have been Yathrib" (i.e. Medina).

Geography

But perhaps most importantly it made no sense that Mecca was an important trading hub in that time and place. Mecca was not on the overland trade route from Southern Arabia to Syria ("only by the most tortured map reading can it be described as a natural crossroads between a north-south route and an east-west one.") Crone estimates the incense route "bypassed Mecca by some one hundred miles". If a caravan did come to the far west of the penninsula, it could stop at the oasis of Taif, which unlike Mecca had food supplies and did not require a steep decent.

• But even if it had been on that route, the overland trade route from Southern Arabia to Syria was not very important compared to the maritime trade route
• and by the end of the second century AD at latest, the trade route was no longer in use.

conflict with Arab sources

• A close examination of the Muslim sources themselves show that , except for Yemeni perfume, the Meccans traded mainly in cheap leather goods and clothing, and occasionally, in basic foodstuffs (clarified butter and cheese)
• These goods were not exported to Syria, which already had plenty of them, but were supplied almost exclusively to inhabitants of the Peninsula.
• According to Ignac Goldziher, "the fact that the Prophet's birthplace (at Mecca) was used as an ordinary dwelling house during Umayyad time and was made a house of prayer only by al-Khayzuran (d.173), the mother of Harun al-Rashid, would suggest that the consecration of places associate with the legend of the Prophet did not date from the earliest period of Islam".

---

Crone concludes that "Meccans did not trade outside of Mecca on the eve of Islam". That there was no continuous transmission of historical fact through the three generations or so that separated the early first/seventh century from the mid-second/eight century" and that the lines of transmission of the accounts were "pure fabrications".

Roman record and lack of mention of Mecca or Quraysh

"in the decades prior to the great war with Persia", Byzantine Romans registered large numbers of Arabs who flocked to the Roman border as part of a Roman recruitment drive for arab mercenaries (who made up the foederati). While many "exotic names" and most every ethnic grouping "between Palestine and Hijaz appeared on the Roman register", no arabs registered from the location of Mecca or the tribe of Quraish. This was despite the putative status of the tribe as the dominant power in the Hijaz and that of the city as trading center, but also in contradiction with the tradition indicating that Mecca and the Quraysh should have been known to the Romans since (according to the tradition) "Muhammad's own ancestor Qusayy, is supposed to have seized power in Mecca only after ‘’Qaysar’’ (caesar, synonym for Roman Emperor) "had extended him aid". Holland states that "even eminent Muslim scholars might confess themselves puzzled by the precise meaning of the word 'Quraysh'" and speculates that if Quraish did not refer to a particular tribe it might have been derived from the Syriac term for "confederated" and have been "a convenient shorthand for all those tribes" hired as mercenaries by the Romans.

Muslim invasion as spread of Islamic civilization

Traditional account

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Religious faith has been described as the motivation and the reason for the success of the Arab invasion. Western historian Howard-Johnston writes "faith was the driving force behind the Muslim conquests".

"In the early days of Islam, the extension of Islamic rule had been based on an uncomplicated desire to spread the Word of God. Although the Muslims used force when they met resistance they did not compel their enemies to accept Islam."

Robert Hoyland notes that both the conquered Byzantines and Arab conquerors blamed the success of the invaders on "God's decree"; Christians tending to explain it as God's punishment for their sins and Arabs explaining it as reward for their (the Arabs') "adherence to the true faith".

Revisionist account

However, regarding the faith of the invaders, Robert Hoyland found "contemporary observers mostly referred to the conqueror in ethnic rather than religious terms". He also argues that the conquest was not "managed and directed solely by Muhammad and his successors from Medina". "Other" Arab leaders "in other locations" had preceded Muhammad but had been "airbrushed out of history by later Muslim writers".

Nevo and Koren argue early Christian sources do not mention the "rightly guided caliphs" nor any of the famous futūḥ battles (i.e. the early Arab-Muslim conquests which facilitated the spread of Islam and Islamic civilization).

Traditional history of Islam describes the 7th century invasions as a means of spreading Islam: However Hoyland states: "Arab conquerors do not seem to have expected ... the conversion of the conquered population to Islam ... God had ordained that the conquered people would be the Arabs' booty not it's equals" A Christian source, John of Fenek, states "of each person they [the Arabs] required only tribute, allowing him to remain in whatever faith he wished." Neither he nor other early sources mention any offers by the Arabs to Persians and Byzantines to avoid conquest by converting to Islam.

Dates of early Islam

The year 622 is the first year of the Islamic calendar, chosen according to Islamic tradition because it is the year of the Hegira or migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Yathrib (later renamed Medina). "But there is no seventh century source that identifies it as that of the Hijra, and the only clue to its nature comes from two Nestorian Christian documents of 676 and 680 that call it the year of the 'the rule of the Arabs'". early sources don't agree on other important dates in early Islam -- the Prophet's birthday and death. Non-Muslim scholar Lawrence Conrad writes, "well into the second century A.H. scholarly opinion of the birth date of the Prophet displayed a range of variance of 85 years."

traditional account

starts with Muhammad, an illiterate camel trader orphaned as a young boy, who is chosen by God to deliver a religious message of pure monotheism -- his message being the latest and last of God's revelation to humanity. Muhammad preaches in Mecca, an international trading city located in the desert many days journey from the Mediterranean Sea and Palestine, but one founded by the prophet Abraham who built its Kaaba sanctuary and pilgrimage site, (according to revelation received by Muhammad).(2:125-129) Though Abraham had cleansed the semitic tribes of idolatry, polytheism had returned to Mecca, and it was Muhammad's mission to again establish monotheism -- turn humanity away from corruption and ignorance (jahil), towards knowledge ('ilm) and truth (haqq). Starting in 610 CE, he gradually builds up a following, but is persecuted by the leaders of the powerful Quraysh tribe that controlled Mecca's economy and its pagan shrines. In 622 -- year one of the Islamic calendar -- the first Islamic community is founded when he flees to the city of Medina with his followers and turns to "fighting in God's path" to defeat paganism; he attempts to win over Jewish tribes but ends up executing and enslaving the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe for their treachery, and changing the direction of prayer from the Israelite capital of Jerusalem to Mecca. A number of signs point to divine intervention on Muhammad's behalf: although he cannot read, and lives 1000 km from the Jewish and Christian holy land, the Quran Muhammad reveals is sublime in "unparalleled in sublimity" and talks much about Jewish and Christian scripture; though often heavily outnumbered the warriors of the new religion advance, first taking control of Mecca and West Arabia, then north to conquer the Persian empire and most of the Byzantine empire, seizing for Islam a swath of territory "larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion", seized in half the time it took the Romans to conquer theirs. All conquered peoples are invited to become Muslims, but Christians and Jews who do not are shown tolerance, allowed to practice their religion in exchange for payment of tax and a show of humility.

Through Muhammad, God's revelation comes to Muslims both in the form of spoken words that make up the Quran, and in the example Muhammad provides to his followers that make up the Sunnah, both of which form the divine law or sharia. This essence of Islam is brought from West Arabia to the conquered lands, where it is systematized and elaborated following a direct chronological path of Allah-> Muhammad-> Companions-> Followers-> Fiqh. The Quran is carefully complied, edited and codified shortly after his death so that fourteen centuries later we can read and follow exactly what was revealed to The Prophet. The traditions of Muhammad and early Islam were passed down orally and also carefully complied, edited to discard false accounts, so that "we know everything more or less" (in the words of Salman Rushdie), "where [Muhammad] lived, what his economic situation was, who he fell in love with. We also know a great deal about the political circumstances and the socioeconomic circumstances of the times," As the Muslim world grows and spreads, the conquered people (and later unconquered people) will accept the faith until Islam becomes the world's second largest faith. Muslims will not always have the pious and just leadership of Muhammad (613-632 CE) or the correct legal practice of the first four divinely guided caliphs (632-661 CE), or virtue of "Islam's founding fathers (the salaf)", but it will always be able to look back on this golden age to inspire them.

Implications

This account should be reflected in not only Islamic literature but in archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and contemporary non-Arabic literature from the years of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphate. The major dates of Islam -- the early Muslim conquests of Mecca in 630, -- should be indicated Pagan arabic inscriptions in rocks and monuments should be found before around 630 CE (when Mecca was taken by Muhammad's Muslims) in the hijaz, but after this date Islamic arabic inscriptions. And since written Arabic was developing to become classical Arabic during this time, we should expect to see some inscriptions in early forms of written arabic in the Hijaz. Archaeology evidence of major battles, ruins of overrun forts, etc., symbols of Byzantine authority should follow the dates of conquest -- Syria and Palestine in 641 CE, Mesopotamia in 636 CE, Egypt between 639 and 646 CE, and the rest of the Persian/Sassanid empire by 651. Not so shortly there after these dates in these areas there should be signs of the new caliphate in inscriptions on monuments and rocks (there are "thousands" of rock inscriptions in the Arabian Peninsula and Syro-Jordanian desert), Islamic sayings of the Quran and mention of Muhammad and the caliphate on coins found from that era (since in the words of archaeologist Yehuda Nevo and researcher Judith Koren -- "legends on coins are official pronouncements of current state attitudes (in this case to religion), intended for wide promulgation. Merely placing religious formulae on coins involves a conscious act of choice regarding what to say and what to omit.")) In Byzantine, Jewish or Persian chronicles from the conquered territory there should be mention of the conquering Arab Rashidun Caliphs bringing a new religion, new laws, new ways of doing things.

Islamic literature on the Prophet of Islam, his sayings, interpretations of the Islamic holy book the Quran, how their enemies were defeated, etc. -- should be abundant from this era particularly since (according to Islamic tradition) Muslims conquered and expanded their empire to spread the religion of Islam, and were in control of the levers of power of an expanding empire during the years of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphate, (not hiding from the persecution of authorities like early Christians).

Questions about Islamic law

traditional account

Islamic law grew directly from the commands and prohibitions chosen by God Listening to God's revelation (Quran) and instruction on how to act in their lives (hadith), the first Muslims (the Companions) hear and obeyed, and passed on the revelations to succeeding generations (salaf). This essence of Islam was brought from West Arabia to the conquered lands,{#tag:ref|for example, Sunni Hanbali scholar/preacher Al-Hasan ibn 'Ali al-Barbahari (d.941) who ruled the streets of Baghdad from 921-941 CE, insisted that "whoever asserts that there is any part of Islam with which the Companions of the Prophet did not provide us has called them [the Companions of the Prophet] liars".|group=Note}} where it was systematized and elaborated following a direct chronological path of -- Allah-> Muhammad-> Companions-> Followers-> Fiqh.

Revisionist findings

Revisionists found a decided break in this chain in their study of early Islam. Joseph Schacht, found (sharia) "did not derive directly from the Koran but developed ... out of popular and administrative practice under the Umayyads, and this practice often diverged from the intentions and even the explicit wording of the Koran ... norms derived from the Koran were introduced into Muhammadan law almost invariably at a secondary stage." He found the law as practiced was made up of three different bodies of custom, rules and law ("sunnahs") operating in parallel: the "pre-Islamic sunnah" of Arabia, the mixed custom-administrative law of the distant provinces" of the Umayyads, and later the "living traditions" of the newly formed Islamic schools.

Prior to the changes made by legal scholar Al-Shafi‘i (who died 190 years after Muhammad), "it is clear that the caliphs were free to make and unmake Sunnah as they wished. `We do not know of anyone who adjudicated on the basis of this rule before Abd al-Malik`, a transmitter remarks without in any way wishing to depreciate the validity of the rule in question; in other words, it was valid because a caliph had made it, not because it went back to the Prophet or a companion".

Patricia Crone writes that under the Umayyads, Sunnah was not the practice of Muhammad, but "good practice in general and that of prophets and caliphs in particular. Among the prophets David and Solomon have price of place", in other words not Sunnah of the Prophet.

Crone also compared "Sunni, Shia and Ibadi law to Roman law and provincial law in Byzantine Syria and Egypt. She concludes that the Islamic institution of the Sharia is the result of a long process of adjustments by the ulama, who inherited its substance from the Umayyad caliphate in general and Mulawiya, in particular." Sharia originated as"substantially it was of ancient Near Eastern and Greek origin, or in other words it was the indigenous law of the Near East s it had developed after Alexander. The Muslims sifted and systematized this law in the name of God, imprinting it with their own image in the process"

Robert Hoyland also argues that some of the earliest Islamic scholars saw use of hadith of Muhammad as an innovation and departure from legal practices of the generations immediately following the death of the prophet:

• "I spent a year sitting with Abdullah ibn Umar (son of the second Caliph, d.693, who is said to be the second most prolific narrator of ahadith, with a total of 2,630 narrations) and I did not hear him transmit anything from the prophet";
• "I never heard Jabir ibn Zayd (d. ca. 720) say 'the prophet said ...' and yet the young men round here are saying it twenty times an hour".

PUT IN NEW THESIS?

The concept of the hadith of Muhammad being the pre-eminent criteria (except for the Quran) for the source of a ruling came under legal scholar Al-Shafi‘i (767–820 CE), when legal scholars sought to unify the law into one sunnah, according to Schacht.

Questions about the Quran

REWRITE!! TOO LONG!!

As the holy book of Islam, the Quran is an important part of the origin of Islam but while it is traditionally thought to be a book in need of sources to explain it historically (specifically tafsir), revisionists (Crone, Cook, Holland) think it also sheds light on the beginnings of Islam.

Traditional account

The holy book of Islam, the Quran, according to traditional Islamic belief, was the result of revelation to Muhammad, an illiterate Arab camel trader from Mecca orphaned as a young boy, who is chosen by God to deliver a religious message of pure monotheism. The Quran is not only the latest and last of God's revelation to humanity, it is literal, infallible, "perfect, timeless", "absolute" unadulterated word of God. identical to an eternal “mother of the book” the archetype/prototype of the Quran kept in heaven.

We can be sure that fourteen centuries later that what we read and follow is exactly what was revealed to The Prophet,because of divine protection of the work and the care taken by the first Muslims. They memorized and wrote the Quran down on scraps, and shortly after the death of Muhammad carefully compiled, edited and codified it, sending copies of the book throughout the newly conquered lands.

Although Muhammad, the Messenger of Islam, is believed to be the last line of prophets known to Jews and Christians from the bible, unlike Judaism and Christianity Islam is revealed in a different language (Arabic), and location, (Arabia) -- specifically two settlements (Mecca and Medina) over 1000 km from the land of Moses and Jesus (the Eastern Mediterranean).

Questions

Revisionists, on the other hand, hold that the Quran should be "viewed in the same way as the Old Testament has been viewed by biblical scholars for over a century: as a literary source to be critically analyzed in order to ascertain its probable origins and textual history".

As a holy book of guidance of belief and behavior revealed by God, the Quran is not a major source of information on Islamic history. Reading the Quran but being ignorant of commentary we could "probably" infer (in the words of M. Cook) that

"the protagonist of the Quran was Muhammad, that the scene of his life was in western Arabia, ... But we could not tell that the sanctuary was in Mecca, or that Muhammad himself came from there, and we could only guess that he established in Yatrib. We might indeed prefer a more northerly location altogether, on the ground that the site of God's destruction of Lot's people (i.e. Sodom) is said to be one which those addressed pass by "morning and night" (37:137–138).

Few names of places, people, etc. are given in the Quran; in the entire book, four religious communities (Jews, Christian, Magians, Sabians), three human beings, three Arabian deities, two ethnic groups (Quraysh, Romans), and nine places are named (according to Michael Cook), often only a few times -- Muhammad, for example is mentioned by name only four or five times. (Muslims believe more are mentioned, although often not by name.) Consequently, "identifying what the Quran is talking about in a contemporary context is ... usually impossible without interpretation"; Fredrick Paxton agrees: "The Qur'an itself is historically incomprehensible without commentary" Interpretation/commentary (known as tafsir) that "has been woven tightly around the the holy text since the early ninth century", (in the words of Holland), But like other traditional Islamic historical sources (hadith, sira) tafsir commentary is highly questionable in revisionist eyes.

Examining the Quraysh chapter in Quran, Crone finds the traditional exegesis contradictory and "concludes the Islamic commentators had no more idea of what it means than we do today. "The numerous purported historical events that are supposed to have occasioned a revelation (Badr, Uhaud, Hudaybiyya, Hunayn, and so on) owe many of their features and often their very existence to the Quran itself. That is to say, wherever the Quran mentions a name or an event, stories were invented to give the impression that somehow, somewhere, someone, knew what they were about. This means that `much of the classical Muslim understanding of the Quran rests on the work of popular storytellers, such storytellers being the first to propose particular historical contexts for particular verse`" in short: `What tradition offers is a mass of detailed information, none of which represents straightforward facts'" Crone believes that there is no core of actual events underneath the embroidery of storytellers, "it was the storytellers who created the tradition".

But revisionists believe the Quran gives "hints" to answers of historical questions about the location of the homeland of Muhammad and the Quran, and of its own history.

Another hint of the location is verse 30:1 "The Romans have been defeated in a nearby land, and yet after their defeat they shall be victorious in a nearby land." Q.30.1 Holland notes "it is hard to know what this is referring to if not the loss of Palestine to Khusrow II".

Islam originated in Mecca in Arabia, according to the traditional narrative of Islam. Muhammad was born and lived in Mecca for for the first 52 years of his life (570–632 CE). The religious sanctuary of Islam, its most sacred site, the Kaaba, (also Bayt Allāh (Arabic: بَيْت ٱللَّٰه, "House of God"), is in Mecca; all Muslims pray obligatory ritual prayers (salat) facing Mecca. G.R. Hawting states that other institutions of Islam such as its calendar and practice of polygamy are "traditionally explained against the background of pre-Islamic Arabia".

hint of location of homeland of Muhammad and Quran

Crone and Holland point out that verses in the Qur'an describe the Muslims' polytheist opponents as cultivating wheat, grapes, olives, and date palms (80:27–31 and 6:99) -- which cannot be grown in Mecca; and living near the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah (37:137–138) -- which is believed to be located over 1000 km north of Mecca; the Quran also says "The Romans have been defeated In the nearer land, and they, after their defeat will be victorious” (30:2–3) -- which fits the description of the Roman/Byzantine defeat/loss of Palestine to Khusrow II" and comeback in fighting the Persians/Sasanians but occurred in land many days journey to the north of Mecca, not nearby.

Historian Tom Holland writes that the Quran does not mention pagan idols, goddesses, pagan sanctuaries or shrines and that revelation seems to be attacking the mushrikun practice of asking angels for intercession. (chapter about what we don't know. page77-79) Similarly Judith Koren and Yehuda D. Nevo also claim that "the most elementary stylistic and analysis" demonstrates that readers or listeners of the Quran were "expected to be familiar with the stories of Judiaic-Christian scripture" rather than polytheist pagans.

Tom Holland states that that there is "not a shred of backing ... within the pages of the Quran itself" for the traditional belief that the Mecca in Quran (48:24) is the Mecca of classical Islam located in Hijaz or that Bakkah in the Quran refers to Mecca.

Opponents of Muhammad and Quran are worshipers of other gods

In 53:19-22, where the Quran denounces the "reverence" for al-Uzza, al-Lat and Manat it never accuses mushrikun or anyone of worshipping the three, nor does it state they are goddesses, nor is the word "goddesses" found anywhere in the Quran. Muhammad does not mention the existence of pagan shrines or sanctuaries. What the Quran does say is: "Those who deny the life to come give the angels female names." (53:27) Holland asks whether the mushrikun where accused not of worshipping more than one god but of praying to angels.

Questions about mysteries of the books contents

Among the characteristics of the Quran giving rise to questions are that "if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense," according to scholar Gerd R. Puin, "a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible". The Quran "sometimes makes dramatic shifts in style, voice, and subject matter from verse to verse, and according to journalist and scholar Toby Lester. In many verses, God is being addressed by humans, instead of addressing human beings. The "extent to which we find the Prophet apparently being addressed and told about God as a third person, is unusual", as is the number of times where "God is made to swear by himself", according to R. Bell and W.M. Watt.

It assumes a familiarity with language, stories, and events that seem to have been lost even to the earliest of Muslim exegetes", (Toby Lester).

The text contains a number of what Michael Cook calls "linguistic puzzles". A dozen or so words in the text, such as qaḍb (8:28), ʿābb (8:31), Jibt (4:51), whose meaning Muslim commentators (and Western scholars) have not been able to ascertain. What the phrase "out of hand" means (9:29) in regard to how unbelievers are to pay tribute to Muslims, is also a long-standing puzzle.

There are also "mystery letters" (aka Muqattaʿat ('disjointed letters' which begin about one quarter of surahs of the Quran. They come in groups of between one and four letters, do not form words, and their significance "has perplexed the commentators from the earliest times", according to Muslim translator and expositor Muhammad Asad:

"There is no evidence of the Prophet's having ever referred to them in any of his recorded utterances, nor any of his Companions having ever asked him for an explanation. None the less, it is established beyond any possibility of doubt that all the Companions - obviously following the example of the Prophet - regarded the muqatta'at as integral parts of the suras to which they are prefixed, and used to recite them accordingly...

In addition to mystery letters there is a mystery religion -- the Sabians or Ṣābiʼūn -- mentioned three times (2:62, 5:69, 22:17), but whose identity was not known even to the earliest Quranic commentators of the 7th and 8th century.

A mystery of sharia rather than linguistics is why verse 24:2 prescribes a penalty for adultery of "100 lashes" for zina (sex outside of marriage), but sharia law based on hadith of Muhammad calls for sentencing adulterers to death by stoning -- despite the fact that in theory the Quran always trumps hadith as a basis for Islamic law.

Explanation

If we assume that someone "must once have known" what these words and letters meant (rather than their always having been known only to God), an explanation offered by revisionists such as Michael Cook is that there must have been a gap in the transmission of the Quran where (in the word of Fred Donner) it was "transmitted in purely written form, without the benefit of a controlling tradition of active recitation". Cook believes the break could have come before and/or after Muhammad:

1. "[M]aterials that make up the Quran did not become generally available as scripture until several decades" after Muhammad, "with the result that by the time this happened, memory of the original meaning of the material had been lost." and/or
2. "much of what found its way into the Quran" came (long) before Muhammad and so its meaning was forgotten.

Problem with biography of Muhammad

Main article: Historicity of Muhammad

PUT IN A SUMMARY

Modern seculra historians find a shortage of early reliable sources about Muhammad. According to Herbert Berg "without blind faith in the reliability of the sira, ... there is little for the scholar who wants to study the life of Muhammad in his early seventh century Arabian context to do or say." and revisionists do not trust the Sira.

Historian John Burton states

"In judging the content, the only resort of the scholar is to the yardstick of probability, and on this basis, it must be repeated, virtually nothing of use to the historian emerges from the sparse record of the early life of the founder of the latest of the great world religions ... so, however far back in the Muslim tradition one now attempts to reach, one simply cannot recover a scrap of information of real use in constructing the human history of Muhammad, beyond the bare fact that he once existed".

According to historian Tom Holland, "only in the 690's 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".

Muhammad as leader of Islam from day one to current time

"It is a striking fact that much documentary evidence as survives from the Sufyanid period (661-684) makes no mention of the messenger of God [Rasul Allah] at all. The papyuri do not refer to him. The Arabic inscriptions of the Arab-Sassanian coins only invoke Allah, not his rasul" (messenger).

Use of Muhammad's birthplace

CHECK FOR DUP

According to Ignac Goldziher, "the fact that the Prophet's birthplace (at Mecca) was used as an ordinary dwelling house during Umayyad time and was made a house of prayer only by al-Khayzuran (d.173), the mother of Harun al-Rashid, would suggest that the consecration of places associate with the legend of the Prophet did not date from the earliest period of Islam".

Historian S.P. Brock, studying Syriac and Byzantine sources among the inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent, notes "the title 'prophet'" applied to Muhammad "is not very common, 'apostle' even less so. Normally he is simply described as the first of the Arab kings, and it would be generally true to say that the Syriac sources of this period see the conquests primarily as Arab, and not Muslim".

The new theses about the origins of Islam

The events in early Islamic times have to be newly researched and reconstructed with the help of the historical-critical method. Among the arguments of Cook, Crone and other revisionists are that rather than Islam giving birth to the Arab/Umayyad empire in its missionary zeal to spread the new religion; the empire gave birth to Islam. Islam was formed as a coherent religion with doctrines and laws after, rather than before, the Arab invasions of Al-Sham and Egypt, possibly to legitimize the rule of the invaders and "hold" the "empire together", emulating the sophisticated civilizations they had conquered while creating their own religious identity, following the model of Jews and Christians with a book of revelation and a prophet "as a model for moral conduct".

In broad outline, some of the theses of the revisionists include:

Military conquest

Arabs had experience fighting for the two empires as mercenaries using their technologies and tactics, but also in rebelling against them. The conquered Byzantines and Arab conquerors blamed the success of the invaders on "God's decree" (according to Robert Hoyland); Christians tending to explain it as God's punishment for their sins and Arabs explaining it as reward for their (the Arabs') "adherence to the true faith". When the empires became both militarily and financially weakened -- unable to either pay or subjugate the Arabs -- the former mercenaries did not require religious motivation to turn on their masters.

Why conquest was successful -- revisionist account

Secular historians (traditional and revisionist) credit a weakening of the two empires. There was a "huge" financial and manpower drain from the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628, and the bouts of plague in the region starting in around the mid 6th century CE. Rather than overcoming superior forces in their the conquest of Sham to the north, the Arabs moved into ravaged empires -- where according to a Christian bishop in the case of the Byzantiums the emperor Heraclius "could raise no more troops to opposed the Ishmaelites".

Hoyland postulates that the motivation for the invasion may not have been religious or even nationalistic but simply booty -- the success of earlier raids and the realization that they encountered little or no opposition. An explanation of a motive for conquest is summarized by Patricia Crone: "Muhammad had to conquer, his followers liked to conquer, and his deity told him to conquer: do we need any more?"

Lack of competition from potential invaders

An explanation of why the Arabs succeeded in creating an empire while other nomadic warriors equally eager to raid and pillage did not, is that those to the north and east (the Avars and Turks), were hindered by "substantial natural and man-made obstacles". The Arabs were (as Robert Hoyland puts it) favorably positioned "directly adjacent to the soft southern underbellies of these empires".

military experience from the empires

"The image of the Arab conquerors as 'a horde of nomads with no military experience' and as outsiders to the civilized world". While it is true that nomads have advantages over agriculturalists in pre-modern combat of being mobile, more used to fighting in their everyday lives, having an occupation (herding) that gives them more spare time to fight. But it is far from true that they had no military experience.

By the time of 530 CE, leaders of Arab mercenaries for the two empires were established enough for there to be "Romano-Arab and Perso-Arab polities" with dynasties extending "three, four, or more generations", according to Robert Hoyland. Arabs served both in regiments in the imperial army and "as independent vassals allied to the empire". One example is an Arab chief by the name of Arfar, who was "an experienced man of war, well-trained in the technology of the Byzantine military" Thus they had "acquired valuable training in the weaponry and military tactics of the empires".

... but not necessarily loyalty

However in 594 a leading Arab chief (Lakhm) was poisoned by Persian emperor Khusrau all the Arabs of the Byzantine and Persian realms revolted and dispersed," becoming "causing much trouble in the provinces" according to one chronicler.

Holland notes that the large numbers of Arabs who worked as mercenaries for Rome felt the loss of Roman gold (income) after the plague and destructive wars weakened that empire. This may have made the ex-mercenaries all the more receptive to declarations from Muhammad and the Quran that booty from conquest was divinely approved, and to the suggestion that they turn on their former employers.

As the "west Arabian coalition of Muhammad and his successors" (who had ties of commercial and personal ties with the mercenaries) were seen to win victories and gain plunder against their masters, they gained recruits from the (former) mercenaries -- some of the mercenaries being from the land they were "invading".

Other characteristics

Why lack of comment about conquest at first

• Failure of the inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent to notice any "organized conquest" by Arabs when they arrived can be explained by the hypothesis that the Arab attacks on the lands of Persia and Byzantium to the north were mounted raids rather than religiously motivated military campaigns. Finding no opposition from the formerly mighty empires -- which had abandoned forts and watch posts after being decimated by plague and by warfare between each other -- the Arabs stayed and intermarried.

Welcome of invaders?

• Hoyland also casts doubt on the "old idea, still encountered in modern scholarly literature" that the conquered welcomed their Arab conquerors, though anti-Chalcedonian Christians were more amendable to accommodation with Arab rule "once the initial period of fighting and looting had ended".

The "history" of Islamic conquest now found in Islamic literature sources developed from more satisfying but exaggerated tales of "How We Beat the Romans"; these were "selected and embellished" in "the late Umayyad and early Abbasid" era.

FIND A PLACE TO PUT THIS (BELOW)

However, regarding the faith of the invaders, Robert Hoyland found "contemporary observers mostly referred to the conqueror in ethnic rather than religious terms". He also argues that the conquest was not "managed and directed solely by Muhammad and his successors from Medina". "Other" Arab leaders "in other locations" had preceded Muhammad but had been "airbrushed out of history by later Muslim writers".

original home of Muslims

plausibility of Palestine

The lack of epigraphy (rock inscriptions), archaeological remains, indicating pre-Umayyad Arab or pagan activity in Hijaz; lack of any mention by ancient geographers, foreign trading partners, or Roman recruiters; or reason to think its population would have been familiar with Jewish or Christian religious texts; and the total implausibility of its having economic raison d'etre to sustain any significant population, (all mentioned above) lead revisionists to look elsewhere for the actual homeland of Muhammad and the Quran.

Tom Holland gives a number of arguments for the original "House of God" of Muhammad being in Palestine/Israel/Syria/Jordan, (rather than Mecca), specifically on the southern desert fringes. (Another suggested location for the Quran and Muhammad in north-western Arabia (based on the Quran and later traditions is somewhere around Petra in Jordan.)

• that stories of Abraham in late antiquity mention him in deserts near Palestine, (a contrary to the traditional Islamic account) never in Western Arabia.
• Arabs worked with Roman and Persian empires as mercenaries and absorbed much of the culture of the empires.
• "... all the targets of Muhammad's campaigning, all the objects of his military ambitions, "with the single exception of Mecca itself, are said to have lain in this region [namely] the stretches of desert that the Romans' Arab allies had always traditionally patrolled." i.e just south of Palestine.
• A "number of leading Qurayshi dynasts" were said to have bought estates in Syria "despite supposedly being based in Mecca", i.e. more than 1200 km away -- a situation highly impractical in a time of animal drawn transportation and unprecedented in the Roman empire.
• the Quran speaks of Jesus in a number of verses, suggesting the trinity (which it describes as totally false) includes the mother of Jesus;(Quran 5:116-118) Jesus did not die on the Cross (a doctrine described as true). But these heretical beliefs were not found in Christian lands in the Muhammad's time. In fact, old heretical Christian (and Jewish) doctrines such as these were stamped out sufficiently thoroughly that modern peoples only know about them because their texts were found buried in the Egyptian desert. This suggests (to Holland), that the desert frontier of Roman Palestine was an area that exiled heretical Christians (and Jews) might well have been exiled into, and where Muhammad encountered them.

• Verse of the Quran (Crone and Holland believe) allude to the land where it was revealed
  • Romans are “fighting in a nearby land” (30:2-3)(Quran 30:2-3) Mecca was not nearby but the frontier of Palestine was.
  • Mushrikun raise cattle, tend vines, grow olives, grapes and wheat -- none of which were found in the deserts of mecca. Olives were specifically a Mediteranean crop. Wheat and grapes are also staples of the Mediterranean.
  • In preaching to the unbelievers: “Remember when we delivered Lot … destroyed the others … you pass by them morning and night”. (Quran 37:133-138) a reference to the destruction of Sodom in the Bible . Sodom is thought to have been located on the southern tip of Dead Sea where a Chapel was built in the early 7th Century to commemorate its destruction.

Michael Cook argues Jerusalem, not Mecca, is the geographic focus of Muhammad's religious movement rather than just the area Muslims first expanded into after establishing control of Mecca. Cook cites an Armenian chronicler of the era who writes that Muhammad told the Arabs that "as descendants of Abraham through Ishmael, they too had a claim" to Palestine, which "God had promised the to Abraham and his seed".

An explanation for why written Classical Arabic adopted the twenty two-letter Aramaic script -- when a much more suitable South Arabian script with 28-29 letters was already being used by Arabic speaking Jahili Peninsular tribes (Tamudians, Safaites, Lihyanites) nearer to Mecca -- is that the Arabic speaking alphabet adopters actually lived closer to Aramaic writers (i.e. somewhere in north-western Arabia) than to the Southern Arabian Arabs.

Nevo and Koren argue archaeologists have found a "wealth" of pagan shrines and stone stelae in an area in the central Negev desert (about 150 km south of Jerusalem and north of Arabia) -- indicating (also contrary to Islamic tradition), that "active pagans must have formed a considerable part of the Negev population right through the first one-and-a-half centuries of the Muslim era". "All these points together suggest ... that Classical Arabic in fact arose in Syria rather than the peninsula, and penetrated to the Hijaz only as part of Mu'awiya's colonization efforts in the 40s."

Hoyland writes that people on the margins of empires might be "proud of their ties with the empire" earning "high stipends and titles" as mercenaries, while others further out and less influenced by the empire (but aware of its riches) might look for weaknesses in its defenses to enrich themselves.

Doubts about Mecca

Wansbrough claims that Islamic traditions were often created (i.e. fabricated) "to demonstrate the Hijazi origins of Islam."

That Mecca was an international caravan trading city (though located in the desert many days journey from the Mediterranean Sea and Palestine) is part of the traditional narrative of Islam and at least some modern non-Muslim scholars have held that this had "important social consequences which somehow account for the appearance of the new religion and help to explain its success" (according to Herbert Berg)

P. Crone, M. Cook, J. Wansbrough, Reuven Firestone and Norman Calder and S. Bashear all argue that the traditional account of Islam originating in Hijaz (specifically Mecca) is fiction.

Crone argues for northwest Arabia as the location for Muhammad's career:

Qurashi trade sounds perfectly viable, indeed more intelligible, without its south Arabian and Ethiopian extensions, and there is a case for a Qurashi trading center, or at least diaspora, in the north. One might locate it in Ptolemy's Moka. Somewhere in the north, too, there was a desert sanctuary of pan-Arabian importance, according to Nonnosus ... Jewish communities are well attested for northwest Arabia. Even Abrahamic monotheism is documented there, and the prophet who was to make a new religion of this belief was himself a trader in northwest Arabia.

Gerald Hawting postulates Mecca became the Muslim sanctuary

It seems that the Muslim sanctuary at Mecca is the result of a sort of compromise between a preexising pagan sanctuary and sanctuary ideas which had developed first in a Jewish milieu. ...At a certain stage in the development of the new religion the need arose to assert its independence, and one of the most obvious ways in which this could be done was by establishing a specifically Muslim sanctuary.

• Islam did not rise among polytheistic pagans in the desert, but in a milieu where Jewish and Christian texts were well-known. The "infidels" were not pagan polytheists but monotheists who were polemically considered to deviate slightly from monotheism (doing something like praying to angels instead of only to God). Holland speculates the polytheists might have been guilty of praying to angels He also suggests the location might have been a place such as Avdat in the Negev desert -- which at the time of Muhammad was an Arab city where irrigation allowed for agriculture in the surrounding area and where ruins indicate Christianity was mixed with paganism -- could have been the location where pre-Medina Quran was set.

A conflicting revisionist explanation is that the Quran was not written/revealed in one location during one era, but is made up of fragments, some much older than the era of Muhammad.

How and why did Mecca become the birthplace of Islam

In other words, how, if Mecca was not the original holy city that the Quran was revealed in and that Muhammad and his companions emigrated from to Yatrib/Medina, how and why could a myth be created convincing Muslims that it was?

why was a new location thought to be needed?

As to why the traditional Islamic account would claim Mecca as Muhammad's home when it was several hundred km north, Crone states

It is difficult not to suspect that the tradition places the prophet's career in Mecca [which was unknown prior to the rise of Islam] 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.

She sees much promise for answering the question what was Muhammad "reacting to, and why was the rest of Arabia so responsive to his message?" in research of databases of hadith, in archaeology and in focusing on the context of the world of late antiquity.

Why choose Mecca in the southern Hijaz?

The location distanced "Islam from its Jewish roots in the north," and was only 100 km away from oasis of Ta'if, the location of area where Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan's father Marwan had been governor and where Abd al-Malik's top lieutenant al-Hajjaj had come from.

Nevo and Koren postulate that the failure of archaeologists to find sixth and early seventh centuries Arab or pagan remains in Hijaz, but plenty in Negev (whose northern reaches are about 50 km from Jerusalem), "suggests that the accounts of Jahili religion in the Hijaz could well be back-projections of a paganism actually known form later and elsewhere."

how could the history of such an important location be fabricated?

If Mecca was not the original holy city that Muhammad and his companions emigrated from to Yatrib/Medina, how could such an important location as the house of God be abandoned and moved over a thousand kms "from the center of Umayyad power" to a remote, barren location? Holland makes a number of points:

• Religious landmarks (totems, locations, icons, etc.) of doubtful authenticity and removed in time from the religious events they celebrate are not unique to Islam. The support for the traditional belief that Mecca was the home of Muhammad "first appeared" several generations after his lifetime. "In the first flush of Christian tourism to the Holy Land ... previously forgotten biblical landmarks" were provided by enterprising Palestinian landowners, and "no more likely to reflect authentic tradition" than Mecca. Another precedent for late determination of religious landmarks is Empress Helena's discovery of the True Cross leading to Christians attribute the location of the crucifixion to Golgotha, also long (about three centuries) after the fact.

• Evidence for Mecca as homeland is much more scarce than many assume. Holland argues that references to the "House of God" and the ka'ba (passed down in accounts of events like Ibn al-Zubayr and his civil war with the Umayyadin) were taken for granted to refer to Mecca by "Muslim historians, writing more than a century after the fact"; but in fact "nowhere in the writings of contemporaries" is the word Mecca used, nor is the location of the "House of God"/ka'ba, nor details or name indicated in the poetry, chronicles or gazetteers of the era; (revisionists like Holland arguing that this was because the l "House of God"/ka'ba they were referring to was not in Mecca but at a more northern location, closer to Palestine).
• that Kaaba/shrines/sanctuaries were not rare."There were kaabas reaching from Nabatea to Najran";
• that the abandonment of shrines/sanctuaries was also not uncommon "over the course of generations, sanctuaries had repeatedly been staked out as hallowed -- haram -- and then just as abruptly been abandoned," an example being found in 2:142 of the Quran where a reference is made to a moving of the Qibla i.e. direction of prayer: "The foolish people will say 'what has turned them away from the prayer direction they used to face'". This is traditionally thought to refer to a change in the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca, sometime after 622 CE.
• that an important feature of the Kaaba in Mecca was the black stone in the kaaba's eastern corner, which different traditions describe as having been moved around by Abraham, by Ishmael and Moses. That sacred items from sanctuaries were moved to new locations follows has precedent with the sacred protecting image of Palladium, which was taken from Troy to Rome to Constantinople.
• the Kaaba of early Islam was not ancient. In 683 the Kaba at "the house of God" was burned to the ground" as the Umayyad army of Yazid was laying siege to a rebel Ibn al-Zubayr and his followers. It was rebuilt shortly after.

when?

While the traditional belief is that qiblas were changed from pointing towards Jerusalem to pointing toward Mecca not long after 622 CE at the instructions of Muhammad, Holland writes that it was more like 60 years after Muhammad's death (around 690 CE) that a very similar change took place, i.e. following Abd al-Malik's 694 CE pilgrimage to Arabia , if "calculations of mosque renovations can be trusted". Qibla's in mosques throughout his caliphate were reoriented away from the original direction -- somewhere "between Medina and Palestine" -- to one toward Mecca. He quotes one Muslim as complaining, 'At the time of the prophet, may God save him and give him peace, our faces were all turned in one direction -- but after the death of the prophet, we turned ourselves hither and thither".

Development of Islam

One of the arguments of revisionists is rather than an abrupt change from Christian/Roman and Zoroastrian/Persian culture, to Arabic language and rule by the Quran and Sunna of Muhammad, the transition brought by the Arab conquest was much more gradual and much more influenced by the conquered people than is indicated by the traditional narrative.

Gradual nature

evidence for

Much evidence (see above) calls into question a straight path of Islamic practice from the time of Muhammad through the Umayyad caliphate. Evidence such as lack of Islamic iconography on coins until the reign of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (646-705 CE), no use of the name of Muhammad on Arab-Sassanian coins until sometime after 685 CE, the failure of the conquered Christians to mention the "rightly guided caliphs" or any of the legendary futūḥ battles (i.e. the early Arab-Muslim conquests which facilitated the spread of Islam and Islamic civilization, to describe the Muslim leaders in religious rather than secular or political (kings, princes, rulers) terms, normally referring to Muhammad simply as the first of the Arab kings, and by the title "prophet" or "apostle",

The fact that the immigrants/invaders included Christians, that when they did talk of religion they did not mention the "Quran", "Islam", or that the immigrants/conquerors were of a new religion, any mention any offers by the Arabs to Persians and Byzantines to avoid conquest by converting to Islam,

The ignorance of Mecca by ancient Roman and Greek diplomats, geographers, historians, or traders, mercenary recruiters, and even the conquered peoples (at least "for a long time").

The use (prior to the changes made by legal scholar Al-Shafi‘i - died 820 CE) in the legal system of the "pre-Islamic sunnah" of Arabia, the mixed custom-administrative law of the distant provinces", and later the "living traditions" of the newly formed Islamic schools; where caliphs were "free to make and unmake Sunnah as they wished",

Scholars advocating

A number of scholars have emphasized that the establishment of an Islamic empire was not sudden. Holland, for example, states he doesn't think Islam came fully into being until about the mid eighth century, Fred Donner believes “Islam” became distinct from Christianity and Judiasm in the late 7th century, Robert Hoyland thinks "there is probably some truth to the idea that Muslim did not initially see their faith as totally distinct from other monotheist confessions.") Rather than conquests being motivated by a missionary desire to spread Islam, the establishment of Islam was motivated by conquest, the conquerors seeking divine justification for the conquest of land and creation of an empire -- not unlike the concept of "manifest destiny" in America.

Suliman Bashear argues that it is unlikely that the Arab invasion and conquest could have effected "such changes in world affairs within so short a span of time" that the diversity in "languages, ethnicities, cultures, and religions" were "suddenly swallowed up by Arabian Islam in the early seventh century" as Arabic historical sources of the third AH/ninth CE. century described. And that it is much more likely that Arab invasion preceded "Arabian Islam as we know it" and that Islam was fused with the Arab polity sometime after "the beginning of the second/eighth century".

G.R. Hawking thinks that the theory of gradual development with great influence of conquered people would explain why the origin of the Islamic empire did not (seem to) follow the path of other conquests of more developed "civilized" cultures by fierce nomad warriors -- such as invasions of China and of Roman Western Europe and China -- where the conquerors dominated militarily and politically, but often adopted "the religion and to some extent, the language of the conquered". (In other words, despite appearances, the Islamic empire did follow that path in part.)

Hoyland also finds it unlikely that the Arab conquest was a "watershed" between one society and a "totally different" one.

MERGE TWO PARAGRAPHS BELOW

Explanations for gradualness

Hoyland notes, among other things, that there were "many non-Muslims" in the ranks of the 7th century Arab conquerors so that the discriminatory policies were between conqueror and conquered. Discrimination between Muslim and non-Muslim came later after "most of the non-Muslims in the imperial armies had converted to Islam". Neva and Koren claim a "striking ... lack of evidence, outside the Muslim literature, for the view that the Arabs were Muslim at the time of the Conquest."

Hoyland argues that the distinction between conquerors and conquered gradually evolved into one of Muslims and non-Muslims, as the (minority) non-Muslims among the conquerors converted to Islam. The "many privileges and access to power" that the conquerors enjoyed and conquered lacked provided strong desire by the conquered to join the rulers, and Islam "served as a medium whereby non-Arabs could join the conquest elite".

• Hoyland estimates that the Arab (though not all Arab or Muslim) invaders numbered around 250,000-300,000, while the conquered were some 25-30 million. making the ruling class about 1% of the ruled. Hoyland recons that while for the first fifty year the Arabs lived apart from their subjects in garrison towns, they shared these with prisoners of war non-Arab slave or servants, tutors, scribes, wives, concubines. As the first generation of conquerors died off, their descendents grew up far away from their father's homeland in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran among the non-Arabs who outnumbered them. Consequently "it was not long before blood was mixed, boundaries blurred, and religion and society fast transformed," with the new converts "shaping the culture and ideology" of Islam more than passively accepting it.

• Hoyland argues that another non-religious reason that "the Arab conquests were not particularly destructive" was "the leadership already had close acquaintance with the empires and they wanted to rule it themselves, not destroy it".

Rather than being removed from the influence and corruptions of Roman and Persia, many Arab warriors worked as mercenaries protecting the empires from other invading tribes.

• Fred Donner thinks it may have been because the first Arab invaders were leading a “believers movement”, a general “monotheist revival movement” with (ecumenical) multi-faith membership that gradually evolved into Islam. This would explain a lack of violence in the Arab takeover as the Arabs would not feel a need to crush (or wipe clean) the existing social/political/religious system, nor Christians to resist the new rulers; it would also explain archeological evidence of a couple of churches (including St. John in Damascus) having both Christian and Muslim worship characteristic.

Islamic law

According to J. Wansbrough, the Quran did not precede sharia (Islamic law), but "it was only after the articulation of law as divinely decreed that a scriptural canon [i.e. the Quran] was established".

Patricia Crone argues that Sharia law was founded not on traditions of rasul allah, the messenger of God, Muhammad, but on the law "of the Near East as it had developed under Alexander. The Muslim sifted and systematized this law in the name of God, imprinting it with their own image in the process." This provincial law that "the Umayyad caliphate in general and Mulawiya in particular" employed, became what we now call sharia after a "long period of adjustments by the ulama".

SEE ABOVE

Robert Hoyland argues that certain Umayyad documents about the designation of royal heirs and an inscription by Muawiyah I in West Arabia (that includes a plea for God's forgiveness, strength, and support and "to let the faithful profit by him", without any mention of Muhammad) indicate an Umayyad belief that "the era of prophets was at an end and that caliphs now acted as God's agent's on earth."

CRITICISM OF HADITH

Hoyland also argues that claims that the doings and sayings of Muhammad were carefully noted and carefully transmitted to later ulama by the salaf generations are belied by quotes of early Islamic scholars who specifically denying common use of hadith of Muhammad:

• "I spent a year sitting with Abdullah ibn Umar (son of the second Caliph, d.693) and I did not hear him transmit anything from the prophet";
• "I never heard Jabir ibn Zayd (d. ca. 720) say 'the prophet said ...' and yet the young men round here are saying it twenty times an hour".

Historian Tom Holland argues that Islamic law was not passed down without interruption from Muhammad to the schools of fiqh where it was developed and refined. Instead prior to the late Ummayad era the Caliph was dominant. It was this ulama who built up "a body of law capable of taming the extravagances and injustices of the age ... without reference to the Caliph" and the ulama who grounded the law "and very publicly so, in the life and times of the Prophet himself" to trump the authority of the Caliph. According to Holland, the early Ulama (the class of guardians, transmitters and interpreters of religious knowledge in Islam) were overwhelmingly comprised of conquered peoples -- namely Zoroastrians and Jews -- who converted to Islam. The actual conquering Arab warriors were overwhelmingly illiterate, while there was a strong scholarly tradition among the conquered Zoroastrians in the form of Mobad, and rabbis among the conquered Jews. Holland argues the ex-Jewish and Zoroastrian scholars were strongly motivated to applying their scholarship to develop religious law to curtail the power of the "haughty Arab elite" and "trump the forbidding authority of the Khaifat Allah". To this end they transform a "jumble of beliefs and doctrines" into a systematic Islamic law.

ULAMA

NEEDS TO BE REWRITTEN, SHORTENED

• In the beginning, secular and spiritual power were united in the person of the caliph. There were no special religious scholars. Religious scholars came into being only later and conquered the spiritual power from the caliphs.

According to Hoyland, "many of these converts -- and even more so their descendants, who had been born into Islam -- wanted to explore and expound their new religion and to reconcile it with their former faith and culture." Exploration in the form of scholarship was also "a way for newcomers and the lowborn to attain respect and status". Some of the most famous of these scholars (who were all born during the "Islamizing" period of the reigns of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan and Al-Walid I) included

• Muqatil ibn Sulayman (d.767), "a captive from Bakh, author of the earliest extant Quran commentary";
• Yazid ibn Abi Habib (d.746), "son of a captive from Nubia, the top legal authority in Egypt of his generation";
• Ibn Ishaq (d.767), "grandson of a captive from 'Ayn al-Tamr in Iraq, author of the most famous biography of Muhammad";
• Ibn Jurayj (d.767), "grandson of a captive from Anatolia, a prolific collector of sayings of Muhammad";
• Abu Hanifa (d.767), "grandson of a captive from Kabul, eponymous founder of a law school";
• Hammad Ar-Rawiya (d.772), "son of a captive from Daylam, an expert on ancient Arabic poetry".

Hoyland relates a tale of Caliph Abd al-Malik bemoaning the fact that non-Arab religious expertise was such that they would "predominate over the Arabs to such an extent that they will preach to them from the pulpits, with the Arabs down below listening".

However, according to one Umayyad-era rabbi named Rav Yehudai, of the Talmudic school of Sura, many Mobads who had `converted to the religion of the Ishamelites [i.e. Muslims],` ... were still not entirely clear of the trace of their former beliefs, even down to the third generation: for part of their original religion still remains within them.'" Holland argues this could explain the tenants of Islamic Sharia and/or Sunna not in the Quran, but found in:

• Zorastrianism -- such as that apostates should be executed, ... that prayers should be offered up five times a day (not just three), or that pious Muslim should use miswak --- a twig of the arak tree -- to brush their teeth; or
• Judiaism -- such as the tendency of Jewish law (halakha) "to regulate every dimension and aspect of human existence"; the practice -- that "only rabbis, had every previously deployed" -- of authenticating prophetic sayings of the Oral Torah by creating a chain of transmission listing who passed down the prophet's saying to the present (known as isnad in Islam); and prescribing capital punishment by stoning for adultery (the Quran calls only for lashing for adulterers).24:2
  • Hoyland describes the "structural similarity with Judiaism" of sharia as "a comprehensive religio-legal system regulated by scholars on the basis of scripture and oral tradition from a prophet"

Holland believes that Jewish influence would also explain why "the earliest and most influential school of Islamic law" should have been founded barely thirty miles from "the great Talmudic school of Sura" near Kufa.

• Byzantine law -- Robert Hoyland argues sharia law followed the "model" of the Byzantine empire in making three different classes in religion:
  • a class for the state religion (Christianity in Byzantium, Islam in the Arab Empire),
  • another for tolerated religions (Jews in Byzantium who were -- in theory -- protected, but forbidden under Roman law to do things like build new synagogues, give testimony against Christians, defame Christianity, etc.; in the Arab Empire "people of the book" (Ahl al-Kitab) were protected but subject to a special tax and regulations similar to Roman ones)
  • one for "illicit" religions (pagans faced "severe constraints" in Byzantium and in the Arab Empire were in theory compelled to either convert to Islam or die).
• Sasanian Persian regulations -- Hoyland argues that the "raw materials" for sharia law ban on non-Muslims imitating Muslims came in part from Sasanian Persian regulations to distinguish between commoner and noble (commoners being forbidden to imitate the headgear, overcoats, belts, shoes, and hairstyles" of the nobles).
• Hoyland emphasizes that "The laws that were in place in the Middle East the day before the Arab conquests were still in use the day after, and this pre-existing corpus of laws -- a mixture of ancient Middle Eastern and Roman law -- remained current in the Umayyad period, supplemented by ad hoc emendation made by caliphs and their agents." But "many rulings that we think of as very Islam, like amputation of the hand for theft and the death penalty for apostates" are "ancient Middle Eastern and Roman law ... were applied in the region long before Islam ... this corpus of law remained current after the Arab conquests and was taken over and reworked by Muslim scholars. .... Some of these item were maintained while other, such as the adoption of children and contracts involving earnest money (non-refundable deposits) were rejected; in both cases the acceptances and rejections were attributed to Muhammad himself."

 ADD TO CRIT OF HADITH
QUOTATIONS

Jewish influence in Islamic law and sunna

Ulama to trump influence of Caliphs

Jews and Zorastrians had the scholarly tradition that mostly illiterate Arab warriors did not, but of course they were conquered subjects. How to even the playing field.

"Only establish that an opinion had truly been voiced by this same Prophet of God, and it would immediately come to possess the full terrifying force of eternal law. Here for the restless and ever-growing number of Muslim who were unable to trace their origins back to the first generation of the conquest ... resentful of the haughty Arab elite [scholarship] was truly golden opportunity ... only by compiling the sayings of the Prophet could they possibly hope to trump the forbidding authority of the Khaifat Allah. If a Sunna -- a body of law capable of taming the extravagances and injustices of the age were indeed to be fashioned without reference to the Caliph, then its origins would need to be grounded, and very publicly so, in the life and times of the Prophet himself. No other source ... would possibly do".

How to authenticate Muhammad's sayings? Model for Isnad

Such was the question, a century on from the death of the Prophet, that confronted the first generation of a whole new class of scholars: legal experts whom Muslim would come to know as the ulama. Fortunately for them, just across the mudflats from Kufa --- where the yearning to forge a new understanding of Islam was at its most turbulent and intense -- the perfect role models were ready to hand. The rabbis of Sura, after all, had been labouring for many centuries to solve precisely the sort of problem that now confronted the ulama. The secret Torah, so it was recorded in the Talmud, 'had been recieved at Sinai by Moses, who communicated it to Joshua, who communicated it to the elders, who communicated it to the prophets' -- who , in turn, had communicated it to a long line of rabbis, right down to the present. Nowhere in the world, in consequence were there scholars better qualified to trace the chains of transmission that might link a lawyer and the sayings of a prophet than in the yeshivas of Iraq. Was it merely coincidence, then, that the earliest and most influential school of Islamic law should have been founded barely thirty miles from Sura? .... Initially, in the manner of rabbis citing their own masters, members of the ulama were content to attribute these hitherto unrecorded doctrines to prominent local experts; then, as time went by, they began to link them to the Prophet's companions; finally, as the ultimate in authorities, they fell to quoting the Prophet himself directly. ... Muslim scholars were following a trail that had been blazed long before. Islamic though the isnads were, they were also more than a little Jewish."

Historical progression

After Muhammad there were at least two phases which were of major importance for the formation of Islam in its later shape (according to a number of revisionist historians):

• Under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (reign 685-705 CE) the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was built. There the word "Islam" appears for the first time. Until this moment the Muslims called themselves simply "believers", and coins were minted in the Arabic empire showing Christian symbols. Abd al-Malik also plays a major role in the reworking of the Quranic text.
• It was during the Abbasid Caliphate (starting in 750 CE) that practically all Islamic traditional texts about Islam's beginnings were written. The Abbasids as the victorious party in the conflict with the Umayyads had great interest in legitimizing their rule. This motivation obviously crept into the traditional texts.

• In the beginning, secular and spiritual power were united in the person of the caliph. There were no special religious scholars. Religious scholars came into being only later and conquered the spiritual power from the caliphs.

NEEDS MAJOR REWRITING

Mu'awiya

Later, the caliph Mu'awiya did a number of things not at all in keeping with what we now call Islam. He "refused to go to the seat of Muhammad" to celebrate his accession as ruler, and instead did it in Jerusalem. He saw fit to please the Christians of the region by going on pilgrimage "around Jerusalem in the footsteps of Christ" where he 'went up and sat down on Golgotha' -- a site immediately outside Jerusalem's walls where it is widely believed Jesus was crucified -- 'and prayed there.' Furthermore, surviving inscriptions, documents and coins from the reign of Mu'awiya include no mention of Muhammad. According to late 7th century Christian chronicler John bar Penkaye, Mu'awiya "allowed everyone to live as they wanted".

But under Muawiyah I there were also signs Umayyads were interested in Arab identity and land. They tightened "their grip" on Hijaz by appropriating (scarce) arable land.

The first coins proclaiming Muhammad a "Messenger of God" were minted by a lieutenant of Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr -- a rival caliph to the Umayyad's from 683-692. Abdal Malik, in his fight with Christian Constantinople, further developed the new competing religion built the splendid Dome of the rock which also included the inscription that Muhammad was the messenger of God 382-3. But knowing that Muhammad had never gone to Jerusalem, and that the House of God was occupied by his rival Ibn al-Zubayr, Abd al-Malik sent an army to kill Ibn al-Zubayr and in the process destroyed the sanctuary. Holland argues that the dynastic rivalry between Ibn al-Zubayr and the Umayyads created a need to "buttress earthly power" by demonstrating a firm basis for "claiming the favor of God". Just as Constantine I had done with Christianity to strengthen his reign claim to the name of the Arabian monotheist prophet Muhammad.

Khalifa Allah

Revisionist scholars Crone and Hinds argue that the title Khalifa Allah ("Deputy of God")] "had already emerged during the Rashidun period", (Coeli Fitzpatrick believes it was first used during the Umayyad period).

Caliph Abd al-Malik

Doing even more to make Islam Islam (according to Holland and other revisionists) was Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, who initiated the "first public displays of Islam by the state" that there is evidence for. He "promoted Muhammad as founder of his religion", believing (Holland thinks) that Muhammad was "an authentic medium for the words of God"). The "Dome of the Rock he built in 691-2 CE on the site of the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was decorated with mosaic frieze inscriptions proclaiming Muhammad to be the messenger of God, and explicitly rejecting the divinity of Christ. ("Do not say 'three' ... God is only one god; he is too exalted to have a son") but differing "to some degree" from standard versions of the Quran. (Attempts by the Umayyads to conquer the Christian power of Constantinople may have strengthened their feeling of competition with Christianity and/or they may have felt a need "focus their attention" away from the wounds of the "acrimonious civil war" of 683-92 towards their "chief surviving competitor".) The script is believed to be the first time Islam (submission) was used as a proper noun.

During his reign reports of conversion to Islam "start to become common in our contemporary sources.

Under Abd al-Malik all traces of Roman and Persian heritage were replaced on Umayyad coins. Latin and Persian script was replaced by Arabic on passports contracts, tax returns, and receipts. A sign of movement of God house being part of arabization.

In 694 CE Abd al-Malik made a point of making a pilgrimage to "what posterity would commemorate as the Ka’ba of Mecca" and honoring it as the house of God.

Prior to Abd al-Malik, "We do not know of anyone who adjudicated on the basis of" what the Messenger of God (Muhammad) was reported to have done. "Sunnah" meant "good practice" in general, not the practice of rasul allah (Muhammad, the messenger of God). At the same time Abd al-Malik was not on the same page with classical Islam (revisionists like Holland and Crone argue), in accepting for the caliphate political, but not religious, power. His trusted lieutenant al-Hajjaj was allowed to declared that he (Abd al-Malik) "stood higher in God's view than did the angels and prophets", (what in later eras would be consider blaspheme). His coinage titled him "Khalifa Allah", ("Deputy of God" as opposed to "deputy of the Messenger of God"), and it was through him "that people might 'pray for rain'" Abd al-Malik and other Umayyad caliphs were described at the time as "Imam's of guidance", guiding the people away from error on the path to salvation.

The son and successor of Abd al-Malik, Al-Walid I, was the first to use the term Muslim to define himself. "In the version of history written by the ulama" the celebrated early khalifa Umar titled himself not "Khalifa Allah" ("Deputy of God") but the more modest title Khalīfat Rasūl Allāh ("Deputy of the Prophet of God") which emphasized the importance of Muhammad, (and has been the accepted definition of khalifa/caliph).

Formation of Islam

G.R. Hawking things that gradual development with great influence of conquered people would explain why the origin of the Islamic empire did not follow the path of other conquests of more developed "civilized" cultures by fierce nomad warriors -- such as invasions of China and of Roman Western Europe and China -- where the conquerors dominated militarily and politically, but often adopted "the religion and to some extent, the language of the conquered". According to the traditional Islamic narrative, this did not happen with Islam, it was the conquered people of the Greek and Persian empires who took on the religion and (at least many of them) the Arab identity of their conquerors, this being credited to the "strong religious and linguistic identity" of the Arabs (not to mention Allah's "intervention in the historical process"). While this makes sense if Islam was "something brought out of Arabia by the conquering Arabs", revisionists (Carl H. Becker, G.R. Hawting) propose that it was not, and that the religion of Islam was developed after the invasion with the "contribution" of non-Arab conquered people to the new Islamic civilization "was probably of greater importance than that of the conquerors".

Slaughter and expulsion of Jews

Holland writes that according to traditional Islamic narrative, after Muhammad established the Muslims in Medina, "the three Jewish clans supposedly native to Medina who were said initially to have given their backing to the Prophet, and then after turning fractious", were "said to have been variously driven into exile (the Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir tribes) or massacred and dumped into pits" (the Banu Qurayza tribe).

But according to Holland the three clans "do not feature anywhere in the Constitution of Medina." The sources talking about this exile and slaughter "are all suspiciously late" and "date from the heyday of Muslim greatness" when "authors would have had every interest in fabricating the sanction of the Prophet for the brusque slapping down of uppity infidels." (When the Arabs first conquered Jerusalem they lifted the ban on Jews being allowed into the city. and allowed them to pray on the temple mount.)

(Hans Jansen, also believes the depictions of the slaughter of the Banu Qurayza tribe have a strong political and theological motivation: As the "treaty of Medina" shows, the Jews were initially part of the Umma and were addressed as "believers"; cf. the research of Prof. Fred Donner.)

REWRITE BELOW (MOVED TO HERE)

The connection between Muslims and Jews was very close in the early times of Islam. Jews too were called "believers" and were part of the umma. Antijewish texts such as, for example, the account of the slaughter of the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza came into being long after Muhammad when Islam had separated from Judaism.

Rashidun

Academic scholars have questioned the traditional view of the rashidun (and salaf). Robert Hoyland states that "writers who lived at the same time as the first four caliphs ... recorded next to nothing about them, and their names do not appear on coins, inscriptions, or documents. It is only with the fifth caliph ... Mu'awiya (661-680), that was have evidence of a functioning Arab government, since his name appears on all official state media."

Hoyland also questions the alleged morally superior of the rashidun (or at least Uthman and Ali) to their Umayyad successors, noting Ali was involved in the first civil war (First Fitna) and Uthman had "already inaugurated a nepotistic style of government" for which later Caliphs were condemned.

Hoyland hypothesises that idea of a divinely guided "golden age" of early Islam came from religious scholars who needed to establish the idea that those who passed down the "teachings and legal decisions" of Muhammad (i.e. Muhammad's companions, and in particular the first four caliphs) "to the next generation and the wider world", had done so "correctly and carefully". While the successors caliphs should defer in religious matters to the scholarly class. Consequently the companions were "given a makeover" as "model's of piety and beyond reproach".

REWRITE

of the eighth and ninth century who wanted to "demonstrate that they, and not caliphs, were the true heirs of the prophet and so had the sole right to serves as guardians of Muhammad's laws and to make new laws." The first four caliphates had either been close to Muhammad or had supporters the ulema did not want to alienate and so were made distinct from later caliphs. Hoyland estimates that it was not until the mid-ninth century when it was embraced by Ahmad ibn Hanbal that the idea of the rashidun being followed by tyrants caught on among Muslims who called themselves "Sunni".

Quran

According to scholar Fred Donner, while it is generally agreed the Quran was intended as "a source of religious and moral guidance" for its readers, Islamicist scholars not only disagree with the traditional/conventional origin story of the holy book but disagree among themselves on "things so basic" about the Quran as how it originated,

Where did it come from, and when did it first appear? How was it first written? In what kind of language was -- is -- it written? What form did it first take? Who constituted its first audience? How was it transmitted from one generation to another, especially in its early years? When, how and by whom was it codified?

• The Quranic text as is in use today shows many differences to the earliest existing manuscripts. A core part of the Quran may derive from Muhammad's annunciations, yet some parts of the Quran were definitively added later or were reworked later. In addition to this, many small deviations came into the text as with other ancient texts which were manually copied and copied again.
• The existence and significance of the prophet Muhammad as a historical person depends especially on the question whether any, and if so, how many, parts of the Quran can be attributed to his time, or whether all or most parts of the Quran came into being only after Muhammad's time. The researchers' opinions differ over this question. Fred Donner suggests an early date for the Quran.
• The Quran is not written in a "pure" Arabic as the Syriac language seems to have had a certain influence on the language of the Quran which was forgotten later. This could be a possible explanation of why a fifth of the Quranic text is difficult to understand.

Criticism of Revisionism

Muslim Islamic scholars are unsurprisingly opposed to revisionism. Seyyed Hossein Nasr calls criticism of Hadith by Wansbourgh and others "one of the most diabolical attacks made against the whole structure of Islam," that destroys "one of the foundations of Divine Law". Academic scholars who support "the position of the classical Islamic tradition that the Quran as it exists today is a seventh-century document,” point to the carbon dating of parchment and infrared photography of original ink of palimpsest parchment of the Birmingham Quran manuscript to the time of Muhammad, which "render[s] the vast majority of Western revisionist theories regarding the historical origins of the Quran untenable."

The consequent historical-critical analysis of early Islam met severe resistance in the beginning since then provocative theses with far-reaching meaning were published without sufficient evidence. Especially Patricia Crone's and Michael Cook's book Hagarism (1977) stirred up a lot of harsh criticism. Important representatives of Revisionism like Patricia Crone or Michael Cook meanwhile distanced themselves from such radical theses and uncautious publications.

Criticism is expressed by researchers like Tilman Nagel, who aims at the speculative nature of some theses and shows that some revisionists lack some scholarly standards. On the other hand, Nagel accepts the basic impulse of the new movement, to put more emphasis on the application of the historical-critical method. A certain tendency to take revisionists seriously becomes obvious e.g. by the fact that opponents address their criticism not any longer to "revisionism" alone but to "extreme revisionism" or "ultra-revisionism".

Gregor Schoeler discusses the revisionist school and depicts the early controversies. Schoeler considers revisionism to be too radical yet welcomes the general impulse: "To have made us thinking about this all and much more remarkable things for the first time -- or again, is without any doubt a merit of the new generation of the 'skeptics'."

François de Blois rejects the application of the historical-critical method to Islamic texts. He argues that this method was developed for Christian texts and thus there is no reason to apply this method to Islamic texts, too.

Concerning Holland's claims that a rabbi contemporary to the [Zoroastrian priests] who had ‘converted to the religion' of their conquerors the 'Ishmaelites,’ wrote that 'part of their religion [i.e. Zoroastrianism] still remains within them', Jonathan Brown writes that source is a forgery. Hollands source is "based on an unreliable nineteenth-century forgery of a supposedly twelfth-century work from France quoting an eleventh-century rabbi in Baghdad quoting an eighth century rabbi from near Kufa", according to Brown.

According to historian Andrew Rippin and religious scholar Herbert Berg lack of interest by non-Muslim scholars in the ideas of John Wansbrough and revisionism in general can be traced to the fact that Wansbrough strays from the path of least effort and resistance in scholarship by questioning the vast corpus of Islamic literature on the history of Islam, the Quran, and Muhammad; "destroying" what had been historical facts without replacing them with new ones; calling for using the techniques of Biblical criticism, requiring competency in other languages than Arabic, familiarity with "religious frameworks" other than Islam, and locations other "than Arabia on the eve of Islam". and treading on very sacred territory in Islam. Berg concludes quoting scholars who call for not "throw[ing] the scientific baby out with the colonialist bath water", avoiding "the sin" of anti-Islamic hostility of colonial Orientalists, without abandoning "the basic question" of science: "How do we know?"

A challenge for reflection and reform to Islam

DRASTICALLY TRIM OR DELETE

The relationship between religion and science had always been shaped by conflicts... It is always a painful process for any religion to realize that parts of its teachings were wrong: at the beginning, new scientific results are often considered to be an attack on religion itself; only later is it realized that religion can live with the new findings, so long as the religion's core is not affected, and things are sorted out in the way of religious reforms.

By nature new findings about the early times of Islam touch the identity of the Islamic religion. Thus it is a justified claim of religious people that any research concerning their religion has to progress with high diligence and cautiousness in order to avoid unnecessary irritations. At the same time it is a justified claim by academics that they can do their research freely and without any restraint, even if the results run contrary to religious teachings.

The gravity of irritation provided to Islam depends on the question whether core teachings of Islam are touched or not, especially the historicity of Muhammad and the attribution of the Quran to Muhammad. According to this question, the historical-critical school can roughly be divided into two groups (for details see the researchers' articles):

• As far as the research results do not deny the historicity of Muhammad and assume the Quran to have come into being mainly in Muhammad's time, the core essence of the Islamic religion is left untouched. This is the case e.g. for the following representatives of revisionism: Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, Fred Donner, Tom Holland, Günter Lüling.
• As far as the research results do deny the historicity of Muhammad and assume the Quran to have come into being mainly after Muhammad's time, the core essence of the Islamic religion is put into question. This is the case e.g. for the following representatives of revisionism: John Wansbrough, Hans Jansen, Karl-Heinz Ohlig, Yehuda D. Nevo.

Besides the discussion of the historicity of Muhammad as a historical person and the Quranic text attributed to him, Islam faces the following debates:

• Traditional texts which had shaped Islam for centuries - yet not from the beginning - are not true.
• The Quranic text has not been handed down to our times unchanged.
• Even in the Quran, God's word is in many respects clothed in human words.
• Muhammad did not live in Mecca.
• The relationship between Muhammad and Jews and Christians was different than always thought it had been.

Revisionism by non-specialists

Ibn Warraq, an author known for his criticism of Islam, has compiled several revisionist essays in his book, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. Fred Donner, reviewing the book, notes that by favoring Wansbrough's school of revisionism, the author presents a "one-sided selection" that fails to consider the challenges to this line of revisionism. The result is "a book that is likely to mislead many an unwary general reader."

See also

• Historicity of Muhammad
• History of the Quran

References

Bibliography

• Berg, Herbert (2000). "15. The Implications of, and Opposition to, the Methods and Theories of John Wansbrough". The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. New York: Prometheus Books. pp. 489–509.
• Brown, Jonathan A.C. (2014). Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy. Oneworld Publications. ISBN 978-1780744209. Retrieved 4 June 2018.
• Cook, Michael (2000). The Koran : A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192853449.
• Crone, Patricia (1987). Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (PDF). Princeton University Press.
• Crone, Patricia (1980). Slaves on Horses (PDF). Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 23 November 2019.
• Crone, Patricia; Hinds, Martin (1986). God's Caliph: Religious Authority In the First Centuries of Islam (PDF). Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 24 November 2019.
• Crone, Patricia; Cook, Michael (1977). Hagarism, the Making of the Islamic World (PDF). Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 18 March 2020.
• Donner, Fred (2010). Muhammad and the Believers. At the Origins of Islam. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-05097-6.
• Donner, Fred M. (2008). "The Quran in Recent Scholarship". In Reynolds, Gabriel Said (ed.). The Quran in its Historical Context. Routledge. pp. 29–50.
• Hawting, G.R. (2000). "16. John Wansbrough, Islam, and Monotheism". The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. New York: Prometheus Books. pp. 489–509.
• Holland, Tom (2012). In the Shadow of the Sword. UK: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-53135-1. Retrieved 29 August 2019.
• Holland, Tom (January 28–29, 2017). Tom Holland on The Origins of Islam (video). Rancho Mirage Writers Festival: youtube. eDQh2nk8ih4&t=1s. Retrieved 14 January 2020.{{cite AV media}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
• Holland, Tom (8 August 2015). Islam : The Untold Story (video). Channel 4. Documentary. j9S_xbjIRgE&t=. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
• Hoyland, Robert G. (2015). In God's Path: the Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Oxford University Press.
• Reynolds, Gabriel Said (2008). "Introduction, Quranic studies and its controversies". In Reynolds, Gabriel Said (ed.). The Quran in its Historical Context. Routledge. pp. 1–26.
• Nevo, Yehuda D.; Koren, Judith (2000). "Methodological Approaches to Islamic Studies". The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. New York: Prometheus Books. pp. 420–443.
• Ibn Warraq, ed. (2000). "2. Origins of Islam: A Critical Look at the Sources". The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. Prometheus. pp. 89–124.
• Schacht, Joseph (1950). The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence. Oxford: Clarendon. Retrieved 27 February 2020.
• Lester, Toby. "What is the Koran?". The Atlantic (January 1999). Retrieved 20 November 2019.
• Ibn Warraq, ed. (2000). "1. Studies on Muhammad and the Rise of Islam". The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. Prometheus. pp. 15–88.
• Wansbrough, J. (1978). Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (PDF). Oxford. Retrieved 27 February 2020.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

External links

• Carlos Segovia: J. Wansbrough and the Problem of Islamic Origins in Recent Scholarship: A Farewell to the Traditional Account, book chapter in: The Coming of the Comforter: When, Where, and to Whom? Studies on the Rise of Islam and Various Other Topics in Memory of John Wansbrough, ed. by Carlos A. Segovia and Basil Lourié, Gorgias Press, 2012, pp. xv–xxiv.

Category:Islamic studies Category:Asian studies Muhammad Category:Islamic texts Category:Religious texts * Category:Reform

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[from] History of Islam

Early sources and historiography

Put in a summary of PROBLEMS OF SOURCES

Main article: Historiography of early Islam

The study of the earliest periods in Islamic history is made difficult by a lack of sources. For example, the most important historiographical source for the origins of Islam is the work of al-Tabari. While al-Tabari is considered an excellent historian by the standards of his time and place, he made liberal use of mythical, legendary, stereotyped, distorted, and polemical presentations of subject matter -- which are however considered to be Islamically acceptable -- and his descriptions of the beginning of Islam post-date the events by several generations, al-Tabari having died in 923.

Differing views about how to deal with the available sources has led to the development of four different approaches to the history of early Islam. All four methods have some level of support today.

• The descriptive method uses the outlines of Islamic traditions, while being adjusted for the stories of miracles and faith-centred claims within those sources. Edward Gibbon and Gustav Weil represent some of the first historians following the descriptive method.
• On the source critical method, a comparison of all the sources is sought in order to identify which informants to the sources are weak and thereby distinguish spurious material. The work of William Montgomery Watt and that of Wilferd Madelung are two source critical examples.
• On the tradition critical method, the sources are believed to be based on oral traditions with unclear origins and transmission history, and so are treated very cautiously. Ignaz Goldziher was the pioneer of the tradition critical method, and Uri Rubin gives a contemporary example.
• The skeptical method doubts nearly all of the material in the traditional sources, regarding any possible historical core as too difficult to decipher from distorted and fabricated material. An early example of the sceptical method was the work of John Wansbrough.

Nowadays, the popularity of the different methods employed varies on the scope of the works under consideration. For overview treatments of the history of early Islam, the descriptive approach is more popular. For scholars who look at the beginnings of Islam in depth, the source critical and tradition critical methods are more often followed.

After the 8th century, the quality of sources improves. Those sources which treated earlier times with a large temporal and cultural gap now begin to give accounts which are more contemporaneous, the quality of genre of available historical accounts improves, and new documentary sources—such as official documents, correspondence and poetry—appear. For the time prior to the beginning of Islam—in the 6th century—sources are superior as well, if still of mixed quality. In particular, the sources covering the Sasanian realm of influence in the 6th century are poor, while the sources for Byzantine areas at the time are of a respectable quality, and complemented by Syriac Christian sources for Syria and Iraq. [end of section]

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Historiography of early Islam

The historiography of early Islam refers to the historiogaphic study of the early history of Islam during the 7th century, from Muhammad's first revelations in 610 until the disintegration of the Rashidun Caliphate in 661, and arguably throughout the 8th century and the duration of the Umayyad Caliphate, terminating in the incipient Islamic Golden Age around the beginning of the 9th century.

Primary sources

7th-century Islamic sources

• Between c. 568 and 645 Birmingham Quran manuscript
• Between c. 649 and 675 Tübingen fragment
• Between c. 578 and 669 Sanaa manuscript

• 692 – Qur'anic Mosaic on the Dome of the Rock.
• The Book of Sulaym ibn Qays, attributed to Sulaym ibn Qays (death 694–714). The work is an early Shia hadith collection, and it is often recognized as the earliest such collection. There is a manuscript of the work dating to the 10th century. Some Shia scholars are dubious about the authenticity of some features of the book, and Western scholars are almost unanimously skeptical concerning the work, with most placing its initial composition in the eighth or ninth century. The work is generally considered pseudepigraphic by modern scholars.

7th-century non-Islamic sources

There are numerous early references to Islam in non-Islamic sources. Many have been collected in historiographer Robert G. Hoyland's compilation Seeing Islam As Others Saw It. One of the first books to analyze these works was Hagarism authored by Michael Cook and Patricia Crone. Hagarism contends that looking at the early non-Islamic sources provides a much different picture of early Islamic history than the later Islamic sources do (some of the sources provide an account of early Islam which significantly contradicts the traditional Islamic accounts of two centuries later). The date of composition of some of the early non-Islamic sources is controversial. In 1991, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook disavowed a portion of the views that they presented in this book

• 634 Doctrina Iacobi
• 636 Fragment on the Arab Conquests
• 639 Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem
• 640 Thomas the Presbyter
• 640 Homily on the Child Saints of Babylon
• 643 — 25 April PERF 558
• 644 Coptic Apocalypse of Pseudo-Shenute
• 648 Life of Gabriel of Qartmin
• 650 Fredegar
• 655 Pope Martin I
• 659 Isho'yahb III of Adiabene
• 660 Sebeos, Bishop of the Bagratunis
• 660 A Chronicler of Khuzistan [2]
• 662 Maximus the Confessor
• 665 Benjamin I
• 670 Arculf, a Pilgrim
• 676 The Synod of 676
• 680 George of Resh'aina
• 680 The Secrets of Rabbi Simon ben Yohai
• 680 Bundahishn
• 681 Trophies of Damascus
• 687 Athanasius of Balad, Patriarch of Antioch
• 687 John bar Penkaye
• 690 Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius
• 692 Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ephraem
• 694 John of Nikiu
• 697 Anti-Jewish Polemicists

Epigraphy

Analysis of a sandstone inscription found in 2008, determined that it reads: "In the name of Allah/ I, Zuhayr, wrote (this) at the time 'Umar died/year four/And twenty." It is worthwhile pointing out that caliph Umar bin al-Khattāb died on the last night of the month of Dhūl-Hijjah of the year 23 AH, and was buried next day on the first day of Muharram of the new year 24 AH, corresponding to 644 CE. Thus the date mentioned in the inscription (above) conforms to the established and known date of the death of ʿUmar bin al-Khattāb.

Jerusalem 32 - An Inscription unearthed at the south-west corner of the Ḥaram al-Sharīf in Jerusalem during excavations conducted by Professor Benjamin Mazar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1968 from 32 AH / 652 CE mentions, "In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful...the protection of Allah and the guarantee of His Messenger... And witnessed it ʿAbd al-Raḥmān bin ʿAwf al-Zuhrī, and Abū ʿUbaydah bin al-Jarrāḥ and its writer - Muʿāwiya....the year thirty two"

An Inscription, at Taymāʾ, Saudi Arabia, c. 36 AH / 656 CE reads, "I am Qays, the scribe of Abū Kutayr. Curse of Allah on [those] who murdered ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān and [those who] have led to the killing without mercy."

Greek Inscription In The Baths Of Hammat Gader, 42 AH / 662-63 CE Mentioning Caliph Muawiyah

Greek Inscription In The Baths Of Hammat Gader, 42 AH / 662-63 CE mentions, "In the days of the servant of God Muʿāwiya (abdalla Maavia), the commander of the faithful (amēra almoumenēn) the hot baths of the people there were saved and rebuilt..."

Tombstone of a women named ʿAbāssa Bint Juraij, kept in Museum of Islamic Art Cairo, from 71 AH / 691 CE mentions,"In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. The greatest calamity of the people of Islām (ahl al-Islām) is that which has fallen them on the death of Muḥammad the Prophet, Peace be upon him..."

An Inscription at Ḥuma al-Numoor, near Ṭāʾif from 78 AH / 697-698 CE mentions, "This was written in the year the Masjid al-Ḥarām was built in the seventy eighth year."

Traditional Muslim historiography

Further information: Muslim historiography

Science of biography, science of hadith, and Isnad

Further information: Science of hadith, Hadith terminology, Prophetic biography, and Biographical evaluation

Muslim historical traditions first began developing from the earlier 7th century with the reconstruction of Muhammad's life following his death. Because narratives regarding Muhammad and his companions came from various sources, it was necessary to verify which sources were more reliable. In order to evaluate these sources, various methodologies were developed, such as the "science of biography", "science of hadith" and "Isnad" (chain of transmission). These methodologies were later applied to other historical figures in the Muslim world.

Ilm ar-Rijal (Arabic) is the "science of biography" especially as practiced in Islam, where it was first applied to the sira, the life of the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, and then the lives of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs who expanded Islamic dominance rapidly. Since validating the sayings of Muhammad is a major study ("Isnad"), accurate biography has always been of great interest to Muslim biographers, who accordingly attempted to sort out facts from accusations, bias from evidence, etc. The earliest surviving Islamic biography is Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah, written in the 8th century, but known to us only from later quotes and recensions (9th–10th century).

The "science of hadith" is the process that Muslim scholars use to evaluate hadith. The classification of Hadith into Sahih (sound), Hasan (good) and Da'if (weak) was firmly established by Ali ibn al-Madini (161–234 AH). Later, al-Madini's student Muhammad al-Bukhari (810–870) authored a collection that he believed contained only Sahih hadith, which is now known as the Sahih Bukhari. Al-Bukhari's historical methods of testing hadiths and isnads is seen as the beginning of the method of citation and a precursor to the scientific method. I. A. Ahmad writes:

"The vagueness of ancient historians about their sources stands in stark contrast to the insistence that scholars such as Bukhari and Muslim manifested in knowing every member in a chain of transmission and examining their reliability. They published their findings, which were then subjected to additional scrutiny by future scholars for consistency with each other and the Qur'an."

Other famous Muslim historians who studied the science of biography or science of hadith included Urwah ibn Zubayr (died 712), Wahb ibn Munabbih (died 728), Ibn Ishaq (died 761), al-Waqidi (745–822), Ibn Hisham (died 834), al-Maqrizi (1364–1442), and Ibn Hajar Asqalani (1372–1449), among others.

Historiography, cultural history, and philosophy of history

Further information: Tarikh

The first detailed studies on the subject of historiography itself and the first critiques on historical methods appeared in the works of the Arab Muslim historian and historiographer Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who is regarded as the father of historiography, cultural history, and the philosophy of history, especially for his historiographical writings in the Muqaddimah (Latinized as Prolegomena) and Kitab al-Ibar (Book of Advice). His Muqaddimah also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of state, communication, propaganda and systematic bias in history, and he discussed the rise and fall of civilizations.

Franz Rosenthal wrote in the History of Muslim Historiography:

"Muslim historiography has at all times been united by the closest ties with the general development of scholarship in Islam, and the position of historical knowledge in MusIim education has exercised a decisive influence upon the intellectual level of historicai writing....The Muslims achieved a definite advance beyond previous historical writing in the sociology

— sociological understanding of history and the systematisation of historiography. The development of modern historical writing seems to have gained considerably in speed and substance through the utilization of a Muslim Literature which enabled western historians, from the seventeenth century on, to see a large section of the world through foreign eyes. The Muslim historiography helped indirectly and modestly to shape present day historical thinking."

In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun warned of seven mistakes that he thought that historians regularly committed. In this criticism, he approached the past as strange and in need of interpretation. The originality of Ibn Khaldun was to claim that the cultural difference of another age must govern the evaluation of relevant historical material, to distinguish the principles according to which it might be possible to attempt the evaluation, and lastly, to feel the need for experience, in addition to rational principles, in order to assess a culture of the past. Ibn Khaldun often criticized "idle superstition and uncritical acceptance of historical data." As a result, he introduced a scientific method to the study of history, which was considered something "new to his age", and he often referred to it as his "new science", now associated with historiography. His historical method also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of state, communication, propaganda and systematic bias in history, and he is thus considered to be the "father of historiography" or the "father of the philosophy of history".

World history

Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (838–923) is known for writing a detailed and comprehensive chronicle of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history in his History of the Prophets and Kings in 915. Abu al-Hasan 'Alī al-Mas'ūdī (896–956), known as the "Herodotus of the Arabs", was the first to combine history and scientific geography in a large-scale work, Muruj adh-dhahab wa ma'adin al-jawahir (The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems), a book on world history.

Until the 10th century, history most often meant political and military history, but this was not so with Persian historian Biruni (973–1048). In his Kitab fi Tahqiq ma l'il-Hind (Researches on India), he did not record political and military history in any detail, but wrote more on India's cultural, scientific, social and religious history. Along with his Researches on India, Biruni discussed more on his idea of history in his chronological work The Chronology of the Ancient Nations.

Famous Muslim historians

Main article: List of Muslim historians

• Urwah ibn Zubayr (died 712)
  • Hadith of Umar's speech of forbidding Mut'ah
• Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (died 742)
  • Hadith of Umar's speech of forbidding Mut'ah
  • Hadith of prohibition of Mut'ah at Khaybar
• Ibn Ishaq (died 761)
  • Sirah Rasul Allah
• Imam Malik (died 796)
  • Al-Muwatta
• Al-Waqidi (745–822)
  • Book of History and Campaigns
• Ali ibn al-Madini (777–850)
  • The Book of Knowledge about the Companions
• Ibn Hisham (died 834)
  • Sirah Rasul Allah
• Dhul-Nun al-Misri (died 859)
• Muhammad al-Bukhari (810–870)
  • Sahih Bukhari
• Muslim b. al-Hajjaj (died 875)
  • Sahih Muslim
• Ibn Majah (died 886)
  • Sunan Ibn Majah
• Abu Da'ud (died 888)
  • Sunan Abi Da'ud
• Al-Tirmidhi (died 892)
  • Sunan al-Tirmidhi
• Abu al-Hasan 'Alī al-Mas'ūdī (896–956)
  • Muruj adh-dhahab wa ma'adin al-jawahir (The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems) (947)
• Ibn Wahshiyya (c. 904)
  • Nabataean Agriculture
  • Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham
• Al-Nasa'i (died 915)
  • Sunan al-Sughra
• Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (838–923)
  • History of the Prophets and Kings
  • Tafsir al-Tabari
• Al-Baladhuri (died 892)
  • Kitab Futuh al-Buldan
  • Genealogies of the Nobles
• Hakim al-Nishaburi (died 1014)
  • Al-Mustadrak alaa al-Sahihain
• Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī (973–1048)
  • Indica
  • History of Mahmud of Ghazni and his father
  • History of Khawarazm
• Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (13th century)
• Ibn Abi Zar (died 1310/1320)
  • Rawd al-Qirtas
• Al-Dhahabi (1274–1348)
  • Major History of Islam
  • Talkhis al-Mustadrak
  • Tadhkirat al-huffaz
  • Al-Kamal fi ma`rifat al-rijal
• Ibn Kathir (1300-1373)
  • Al-Bidāya wa-n-Nihāya
  • Al-Sira Al-Nabawiyya
• Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406)
  • Muqaddimah (1377)
  • Kitab al-Ibar
• Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (1372–1449)
  • Fath al-Bari
  • Tahdhib al-Tahdhib
  • Finding the Truth in Judging the Companinons
  • Bulugh al-Maram

Modern academic scholarship

The earliest academic scholarship on Islam in Western countries tended to involve Christian and Jewish translators and commentators. They translated the readily available Sunni texts from Arabic into European languages (including German, Italian, French, and English), then summarized and commented in a fashion that was often hostile to Islam. Notable Christian scholars included:

• William Muir (1819–1905)
• Reinhart Dozy (1820–1883) "Die Israeliten zu Mecca" (1864)
• David Samuel Margoliouth (1858–1940)
• William St. Clair Tisdall (1859–1928)
• Leone Caetani (1869–1935)
• Alphonse Mingana (1878–1937)

All these scholars worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Another pioneer of Islamic studies, Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), a prominent Jewish rabbi, approached Islam from that standpoint in his "Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?" (What did Muhammad borrow from Judaism?) (1833). Geiger's themes continued in Rabbi Abraham I. Katsh's "Judaism and the Koran" (1962)

Establishment of academic research

Other scholars, notably those in the German tradition, took a more neutral view. (The 19th-century scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) offers a prime example.) They also started, cautiously, to question the truth of the Arabic texts. They took a source-critical approach, trying to sort the Islamic texts into elements to be accepted as historically true, and elements to be discarded as polemic or as pious fiction. Such scholars included:

• Michael Jan de Goeje (1836–1909)
• Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930)
• Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921)
• Henri Lammens (1862–1937)
• Arthur Jeffery (1892–1959)
• H. A. R. Gibb (1895–1971)
• Joseph Schacht (1902–1969)
• Montgomery Watt (1909–2006)

The revisionist challenge

In the 1970s the Revisionist School of Islamic Studies, or what has been described as a "wave of sceptical scholars", challenged a great deal of the received wisdom in Islamic studies. They argued that the Islamic historical tradition had been greatly corrupted in transmission. They tried to correct or reconstruct the early history of Islam from other, presumably more reliable, sources -- such as coins, inscriptions, and non-Islamic sources. They argue that "Islam was like other religions, the product of a religious evolution". The idea that there was an abrupt "discontinuity between the pre-Islamic and Islamic worlds", from Persian and Byzantine civilization to Islamic religion, governance, culture "strains the imagination", but if "we begin by assuming that there must have been some continuity, we need either go beyond the Islamic sources or ... reinterpret them".

The oldest of this group was John Wansbrough (1928–2002). Wansbrough's works were widely noted, but perhaps not widely read. Donner says:

Wansbrough's awkward prose style, diffuse organization, and tendency to rely on suggestive implication rather than tight argument (qualities not found in his other published works) have elicited exasperated comment from many reviewers.

Wansbrough's scepticism influenced a number of younger scholars, including:

• Martin Hinds (1941–1988)
• Patricia Crone (1945-2015)
• Michael Cook (1940- )

In 1977 Crone and Cook published Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, which argued that the traditional early history of Islam is a myth, generated after the Arab conquests of Egypt, Syria, and Persia to give a solid ideological foundation to the new Arab regimes in those lands. Hagarism suggests that the Qur'an was composed later than the traditional narrative tell us, and that the Arab conquests may have been the cause, rather than the consequence, of Islam. The main evidence adduced for this thesis consisted of contemporary non-Muslim sources recording many early Islamic events. If such events could not be supported by outside evidence, then (according to Crone and Cook) they should be dismissed as myth.

Crone defended the use of non-Muslim sources saying that "of course these sources are hostile [to the conquering Muslims] and from a classical Islamic view they have simply got everything wrong; but unless we are willing to entertain the notion of an all-pervading literary conspiracy between the non-Muslim peoples of the Middle East, the crucial point remains that they have got things wrong on very much the same points."

Crone and Cook's more recent work has involved intense scrutiny of early Islamic sources, but not their total rejection. (See, for instance, Crone's 1987 publications, Roman, Provincial, and Islamic Law and Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, both of which assume the standard outline of early Islamic history while questioning certain aspects of it; also Cook's 2001 Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, which also cites early Islamic sources as authoritative.)

In 1972 construction workers discovered a cache of ancient Qur'ans – commonly known as the Sana'a manuscripts – in a mosque in Sana'a, Yemen. The German scholar Gerd R. Puin has been investigating these Qur'an fragments for years. His research team made 35,000 microfilm photographs of the manuscripts, which he dated to the early part of the 8th century. Puin has not published the entirety of his work, but has noted unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography. He has also suggested that some of the parchments were palimpsests which had been reused. Puin believed that this implied an evolving text as opposed to a fixed one.

Karl-Heinz Ohlig has also researched Christian/Jewish roots of the Qur'an and its related texts. He sees the name Muhammad itself ("the blessed", as in Benedictus qui venit) as part of that tradition.

In their study of the traditional Islamic accounts of the early conquest of different cities -- Damascus and Caesarea in Syria, Babilyn/al-Fusat and Alexandria in Egypt, Tustar in Khuzistan and Cordoba in Spain -- scholars Albrecht Noth and Lawrence Conrad find a suspicious pattern whereby the cities "are all described as having fallen into the hands of the Muslims in precisely the same fashion". There is a

"traitor who, ... points out a weak spot in the city's fortification to the Muslim besiegers; a celebration in the city which diverts the attention of the besieged; then a few assault troops who scale the walls, ... a shout of Allahu akbar! ... from the assault troops as a sign that they have entered the town; the opening of one of the gates from inside, and the onslaught of the entire army."

They conclude these accounts can not be "the reporting of history" but are instead stereotyped story tales with little historical value.

Contemporary scholars have tended to use the histories rather than the hadith, and to analyze the histories in terms of the tribal and political affiliations of the narrators (if that can be established), thus making it easier to guess in which direction the material might have been slanted. Notable scholars include:

• Fred M. Donner
• Wilferd Madelung
• Gerald Hawting
• Jonathan Berkey
• Andrew Rippin

Scholars combining traditional and academic scholarship

A few scholars have managed to bridge the divide between Islamic and Western-style secular scholarship. They have completed both Islamic and Western academic training.

• Sherman Jackson
• Fazlur Rahman

See also

• Succession to Muhammad
• Timeline of early Islamic history
• Timeline of 7th-century Muslim history
• Timeline of 8th-century Muslim history
• List of biographies of Muhammad
• Islamic conquests

Bibliography

• Charles, Robert H. (2007) [1916]. The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu: Translated from Zotenberg's Ethiopic Text. Merchantville, NJ: Evolution Publishing. ISBN 9781889758879.
• Donner, Fred (1998). Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing. Darwin Press. ISBN 978-0878501274.
• Hoyland, Robert (1997). Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam. Darwin Press. ISBN 978-0878501250.
• Madelung, Wilferd (1997). The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64696-0.
• Vansina, Jan (1985). Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0299102142.

External links

• An Islamic view of the development of the academic study of Islam
• Muslim historiography an article by online Britannica
• Islamic Awareness Dated and Datable Texts Mentioning Prophet Muḥammad From 1–100 AH / 622–719 CE]

Category:Historiography of Islam Category:Medieval Islam

Other articles

Jizya

ADDED TO JIZYA ARTICLE

The Islamic Taxation Law Handbook describes jizya as "very successful in persuading many non-Muslims to convert to Islam", but also notes its importance in raising revenue as "during the first century after the Arab conquest of Syria and Palestine, conversion to Islam was not encouraged 'partly because the jizya consituted an important source of state revenue'."

At least in the early Islamic era of the Umayyad the levy of jizya was sufficiently onerous for non-Muslims and it's revenue sufficiently significant for rulers that there were more than a few accounts of non-Muslims seeking to convert to avoid paying it and revenue conscious authorities denying them this opportunity. Robert Hoyland mentions repeated complaints by fiscal agents of revenues diminishing as conquered people converting to Islam, of peasants attempting to convert and join the military but being rounded up and sent back to the countryside to pay taxes, and governors circumventing the exemption on jizya for converts by requiring recitation of the Quran and circumcision.

Patricia Seed describes the purpose of jizya as "a personal form of ritual humiliation directed at those defeated by a superior Islam" quoting the Quranic verse calling for jizya: "Fight those who believe not in Allah ... nor acknowledge the religion of truth ... until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued" (noting that the word translated as "subdued" -- ṣāghirūn -- comes from the root ṣ-gh-r (small, little, belittled, or humbled)). Seed calls the idea that jizya was a contribution to help pay for the "military defense" of those who paid not a rationale but a rationalization, one often found in societies were the the conquered paid tribute to conquerors.

Robert Hoyland describes it as a poll tax originally paid by "the conquered people" to the mostly Arab conquerors, but which later became a "religious tax, payable only by non-Muslims".

Muhammad in Mecca

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According to Islamic sources such as Sīra (prophetic biography) and Hadith (collections of prophetic sayings, doings, etc.), the Islamic prophet Muhammad was born and lived in Mecca in Western Arabia for the first 52 years of his life (570–632 CE). Orphaned early in life, he became known as a prominent merchant, and as an impartial and trustworthy arbiter of disputes. He married his first wife, the wealthy 40-year-old widow Khadijah at the age of 25. He would also marry Aisha and many others later in his life.

According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad began receiving revelations at the age of 40; some of his peers respected his words and became his followers, while others, including tribal leaders, opposed, ridiculed, harrassed, and eventually boycotted his clan, driving Muhammad and his followers into exile. Several attempts were made on his life. When his uncle and chief protector, Abu Talib, who was the head of the clan of Banu Hashim died, Muhammad migrated to Medina in 622, where he had many followers who agreed to help and assist him.

He remained there until returning to conquer Mecca in December 629 and died there in June 632.

Doubts

Islamic literary sources on Muhammad provide considerable detail on his life such that some authors maintaining that "everything he did and said was recorded", however, secular historians/scholars how much of this material is reliable, with at least one insisting that we do not have even "a scrap of information of real use in constructing the human history of Muhammad, beyond the bare fact that he once existed".

1. Sira and hadith are late
2. work of story tellers
3.not relitable
4.likely more reliable is Quran

TRIM BELOW

One scholar, Patricia Crone, writes that while, "we can be reasonably sure that the Qur'an is a collection of utterances that [Muhammad] made in the belief that they had been revealed to him by God", but thinks an area around the Dead Sea and eastern Mediterranean more likely the location of his revelation than Mecca and Medina: There is "not a single source outside Arabia mentions Mecca before the conquests", mentioning it as a pagan sanctuary or home to a tribe called the Quraysh.

Revisionist historians find no evidence non-Muslim sources placed Mecca "where the Mecca we know today is placed, that is to say in the southern Hijaz." Although even as recently as 1988, historians (like Newby) accepted the conventional/traditional Muslim account, stating "Mecca is known to the ancient geographers as Macoraba", in fact "The classical geographers, who devote considerable attention to Arabia, are apparently not acquainted with this settlement; for the Makoraba of Ptolemy (VI. vii.32) is derived from a different root" than Mecca. Examining the case for Macoraba as Mecca Crone states: "The plain truth is that the name of Macoraba has nothing to do with that of Mecca, and that the location indicated by Ptolemy for Macoraba in no way dictates identification of the two ... if Ptolemy mentions Mecca at al, he calls it Moka, a town in Arbia Petraea", i.e. near Petra in modern day Jordan.

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.

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ULAMA (article)

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Political and cultural history

Early Muslim communities

The second caliph, ʻUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, funded a group of Muslims to study the revelations, stories of Muhammed's life, "and other pertinent data, so that when he needed expert advise" he could draw it from these "people of the bench". According to Tamim Ansary, this group evolved into the Ulama

As Arab armies took over Byzantine region of Syria, and Persian region of Mesopotamia they came in possession of peoples who _____ estimates outnumbered them 100 to 1 and who included many scholars of religion and religious law.

Fiqh

The formative period of Islamic jurisprudence stretches back to the time of the early Muslim communities. In this period, jurists were more concerned with pragmatic issues of authority and teaching than with theory. Progress in theory began to develop with the coming of the early Muslim jurist Muhammad ibn Idris ash-Shafi'i (767–820), who codified the basic principles of Islamic jurisprudence in his book ar-Risālah. The book details the four roots of law (Qur'an, Sunnah, ijma, and qiyas) while specifying that the primary Islamic texts (the Qur'an and the hadith) must be understood according to objective rules of interpretation derived from scientific study of the Arabic language.

According to Feldman (2008), under many Muslim caliphate states and later states ruled by sultans, the ulama were regarded as the guardians of Islamic law and prevented the Caliph from dictating legal results, with the ruler and ulama forming a sort of "separation of powers" in government. Laws were decided based on the Ijma (consensus) of the Ummah (community), which was most often represented by the legal scholars.

 END OF EXISTING ARTICLE

According to Holland, the early Ulama (the class of guardians, transmitters and interpreters of religious knowledge in Islam) were overwhelmingly comprised of conquered peoples -- namely Zoroastrians and Jews -- who converted to Islam. The actual conquering Arab warriors were overwhelmingly illiterate, while there was a strong scholarly tradition among the conquered Zoroastrians in the form of Mobad, and rabbis among the conquered Jews. Holland argues the ex-Jewish and Zoroastrian scholars were strongly motivated to applying their scholarship to develop religious law to curtail the power of the "haughty Arab elite" and "trump the forbidding authority of the Khaifat Allah". To this end they transform a "jumble of beliefs and doctrines" into a systematic Islamic law.

According to Hoyland, "many of these converts -- and even more so their descendants, who had been born into Islam -- wanted to explore and expound their new religion and to reconcile it with their former faith and culture." Exploration in the form of scholarship was also "a way for newcomers and the lowborn to attain respect and status". Some of the most famous of these scholars (who were all born during the "Islamizing" period of the reigns of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan and Al-Walid I) included

• Muqatil ibn Sulayman (d.767), "a captive from Bakh, author of the earliest extant Quran commentary";
• Yazid ibn Abi Habib (d.746), "son of a captive from Nubia, the top legal authority in Egypt of his generation";
• Ibn Ishaq (d.767), "grandson of a captive from 'Ayn al-Tamr in Iraq, author of the most famous biography of Muhammad";
• Ibn Jurayj (d.767), "grandson of a captive from Anatolia, a prolific collector of sayings of Muhammad";
• Abu Hanifa (d.767), "grandson of a captive from Kabul, eponymous founder of a law school";
• Hammad Ar-Rawiya (d.772), "son of a captive from Daylam, an expert on ancient Arabic poetry".

Hoyland relates a tale of Caliph Abd al-Malik bemoaning the fact that non-Arab religious expertise was such that they would "predominate over the Arabs to such an extent that they will preach to them from the pulpits, with the Arabs down below listening".

However, according to one Umayyad-era rabbi named Rav Yehudai, of the Talmudic school of Sura, many Mobads who had `converted to the religion of the Ishamelites [i.e. Muslims],` ... were still not entirely clear of the trace of their former beliefs, even down to the third generation: for part of their original religion still remains within them.'" Holland argues this could explain the tenants of Islamic Sharia and/or Sunna not in the Quran, but found in:

• Zorastrianism -- such as that apostates should be executed, ... that prayers should be offered up five times a day (not just three), or that pious Muslim should use miswak --- a twig of the arak tree -- to brush their teeth; or
• Judiaism -- such as
  • the tendency of Jewish law (halakha) "to regulate every dimension and aspect of human existence";
  • the dichotomy in Rabbinic Judaism of two different types of revelation: a "written Torah" i.e. a holy book, and the "Oral Torah," (laws, statutes, and legal interpretations not found in the "written Torah" of Moses, but passed down orally in an unbroken chain until finally being committed to writing), resembling strongly Islam's holy book (the Quran, believed to have been committed to writing shortly after the death of Muhammad) and hadith of Islam (records of the words, actions, and approval of Muhammd that forms the basis of most of Islam's laws that was passed down orally and committed to writing only generations after Muhammad's death).
  • the practice -- that "only rabbis, had every previously deployed" -- of authenticating prophetic sayings of the Oral Torah by creating a chain of transmission listing who passed down the prophet's saying to the present (known as isnad in Islam);
  • and prescribing capital punishment by stoning for adultery (the Quran 24:2 calls only for lashing for adulterers).
  • Hoyland describes the "structural similarity with Judiaism" of sharia as "a comprehensive religio-legal system regulated by scholars on the basis of scripture and oral tradition from a prophet"

Holland believes that Jewish influence would also explain why "the earliest and most influential school of Islamic law" should have been founded barely thirty miles from "the great Talmudic school of Sura" near Kufa.

• Byzantine law -- Robert Hoyland argues sharia law followed the "model" of the Byzantine empire in making three different classes in religion:
  • a class for the state religion (Christianity in Byzantium, Islam in the Arab Empire),
  • another for tolerated religions (Jews in Byzantium who were -- in theory -- protected, but forbidden under Roman law to do things like build new synagogues, give testimony against Christians, defame Christianity, etc.; in the Arab Empire "people of the book" (Ahl al-Kitab) were protected but subject to a special tax and regulations similar to Roman ones)
  • one for "illicit" religions (pagans faced "severe constraints" in Byzantium and in the Arab Empire were in theory compelled to either convert to Islam or die).
• Sasanian Persian regulations -- Hoyland argues that the "raw materials" for sharia law ban on non-Muslims imitating Muslims came in part from Sasanian Persian regulations to distinguish between commoner and noble (commoners being forbidden to imitate the headgear, overcoats, belts, shoes, and hairstyles" of the nobles).
• Hoyland emphasizes that "The laws that were in place in the Middle East the day before the Arab conquests were still in use the day after, and this pre-existing corpus of laws -- a mixture of ancient Middle Eastern and Roman law -- remained current in the Umayyad period, supplemented by ad hoc emendation made by caliphs and their agents." But "many rulings that we think of as very Islam, like amputation of the hand for theft and the death penalty for apostates" are "ancient Middle Eastern and Roman law ... were applied in the region long before Islam ... this corpus of law remained current after the Arab conquests and was taken over and reworked by Muslim scholars. .... Some of these item were maintained while other, such as the adoption of children and contracts involving earnest money (non-refundable deposits) were rejected; in both cases the acceptances and rejections were attributed to Muhammad himself."

 ADD TO CRIT OF HADITH
QUOTATIONS

Jewish influence in Islamic law and sunna

Ulama to trump influence of Caliphs

Jews and Zorastrians had the scholarly tradition that mostly illiterate Arab warriors did not, but of course they were conquered subjects. How to even the playing field.

"Only establish that an opinion had truly been voiced by this same Prophet of God, and it would immediately come to possess the full terrifying force of eternal law. Here for the restless and ever-growing number of Muslim who were unable to trace their origins back to the first generation of the conquest ... resentful of the haughty Arab elite [scholarship] was truly golden opportunity ... only by compiling the sayings of the Prophet could they possibly hope to trump the forbidding authority of the Khaifat Allah. If a Sunna -- a body of law capable of taming the extravagances and injustices of the age were indeed to be fashioned without reference to the Caliph, then its origins would need to be grounded, and very publicly so, in the life and times of the Prophet himself. No other source ... would possibly do".

How to authenticate Muhammad's sayings? Model for Isnad

Such was the question, a century on from the death of the Prophet, that confronted the first generation of a whole new class of scholars: legal experts whom Muslim would come to know as the ulama. Fortunately for them, just across the mudflats from Kufa --- where the yearning to forge a new understanding of Islam was at its most turbulent and intense -- the perfect role models were ready to hand. The rabbis of Sura, after all, had been labouring for many centuries to solve precisely the sort of problem that now confronted the ulama. The secret Torah, so it was recorded in the Talmud, 'had been recieved at Sinai by Moses, who communicated it to Joshua, who communicated it to the elders, who communicated it to the prophets' -- who , in turn, had communicated it to a long line of rabbis, right down to the present. Nowhere in the world, in consequence were there scholars better qualified to trace the chains of transmission that might link a lawyer and the sayings of a prophet than in the yeshivas of Iraq. Was it merely coincidence, then, that the earliest and most influential school of Islamic law should have been founded barely thirty miles from Sura? .... Initially, in the manner of rabbis citing their own masters, members of the ulama were content to attribute these hitherto unrecorded doctrines to prominent local experts; then, as time went by, they began to link them to the Prophet's companions; finally, as the ultimate in authorities, they fell to quoting the Prophet himself directly. ... Muslim scholars were following a trail that had been blazed long before. Islamic though the isnads were, they were also more than a little Jewish."

See also

• Historicity of Muhammad
• History of the Quran

References

Bibliography

• Berg, Herbert (2000). "15. The Implications of, and Opposition to, the Methods and Theories of John Wansbrough". The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. New York: Prometheus Books. pp. 489–509.
• Cook, Michael (2000). The Koran : A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192853449.
• Crone, Patricia (1987). Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (PDF). Princeton University Press.
• Crone, Patricia (1980). Slaves on Horses (PDF). Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 23 November 2019.
• Crone, Patricia; Hinds, Martin (1986). God's Caliph: Religious Authority In the First Centuries of Islam (PDF). Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 24 November 2019.
• Crone, Patricia; Cook, Michael (1977). Hagarism, the Making of the Islamic World (PDF). Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 18 March 2020.
• Donner, Fred (2010). Muhammad and the Believers. At the Origins of Islam. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-05097-6.
• Hawting, G.R. (2000). "16. John Wansbrough, Islam, and Monotheism". The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. New York: Prometheus Books. pp. 489–509.
• Holland, Tom (2012). In the Shadow of the Sword. UK: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-53135-1. Retrieved 29 August 2019.
• Holland, Tom (January 28–29, 2017). Tom Holland on The Origins of Islam (video). Rancho Mirage Writers Festival: youtube. eDQh2nk8ih4&t=1s. Retrieved 14 January 2020.{{cite AV media}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
• Holland, Tom (8 August 2015). Islam : The Untold Story (video). Channel 4. Documentary. j9S_xbjIRgE&t=. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
• Hoyland, Robert G. (2015). In God's Path: the Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Oxford University Press.
• Donner, Fred M. (2008). "The Quran in Recent Scholarship". In Reynolds, Gabriel Said (ed.). The Quran in its Historical Context. Routledge. pp. 29–50.
• Reynolds, Gabriel Said (2008). "Introduction, Quranic studies and its controversies". In Reynolds, Gabriel Said (ed.). The Quran in its Historical Context. Routledge. pp. 1–26.
• Nevo, Yehuda D.; Koren, Judith (2000). "Methodological Approaches to Islamic Studies". The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. New York: Prometheus Books. pp. 420–443.
• Ibn Warraq, ed. (2000). "2. Origins of Islam: A Critical Look at the Sources". The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. Prometheus. pp. 89–124.
• Schacht, Joseph (1950). The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence. Oxford: Clarendon. Retrieved 27 February 2020.
• Lester, Toby. "What is the Koran?". The Atlantic (January 1999). Retrieved 20 November 2019.
• Ibn Warraq, ed. (2000). "1. Studies on Muhammad and the Rise of Islam". The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. Prometheus. pp. 15–88.
• Wansbrough, J. (1978). Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (PDF). Oxford. Retrieved 27 February 2020.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

External links

• Carlos Segovia: J. Wansbrough and the Problem of Islamic Origins in Recent Scholarship: A Farewell to the Traditional Account, book chapter in: The Coming of the Comforter: When, Where, and to Whom? Studies on the Rise of Islam and Various Other Topics in Memory of John Wansbrough, ed. by Carlos A. Segovia and Basil Lourié, Gorgias Press, 2012, pp. xv–xxiv.

Category:Islamic studies Category:Asian studies Muhammad Category:Islamic texts Category:Religious texts * Category:Reform