Behind the Myths

It is significant that it was only at the end of the seventh century, coinciding with the reign of Abd Al-Malik, that the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed were elevated to the positions they hold to this day. The court industry which produced a holy book in Arabic (from a Syriac template overlaid with specifically Arab mythology and lore and more recent verses) was part of a process of establishing the primacy of that language as the source of religious revelation and therefore political legitimacy. The production of a clearly defined Scripture to rival the books of the Jews and Christians would also have paralleled the production of hadith about a life of the Prophet, although the vast majority of the hadith belongs to the later Abbasid period. Prior to the reign of Abd Al-Malik, Mohammed had been either absent or insignificant. The inscriptions that have been found from the first century of the Arab era are composed of a variety of pious phrases and references to God, but make no mention of the Koran or Mohammed. This would be unthinkable for the vast majority of scribes and writers of Islamic texts after the end of the century. Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds emphasise this point at some length: “It is a striking fact that such documentary evidence as survives from the Sufyanid period [the first Umayyad caliphs] makes no mention of the messenger of God at all. The papyri do not refer to him. The Arabic inscriptions of the Arab-Sassanian coins only invoke Allah, not his rasul [messenger]; and the Arab-Byzantine coins on which Muhammad appears as rasul Allah, previously dated to the Sufyanid period, have now been placed in that of the Marwanids. Even two surviving pre-Marwanid tombstones fail to mention the rasul, though both mention Allah, and the same is true of Mu’awiya’s inscription at Ta’if. In the Sufyanid period, apparently, the Prophet had no publicly acknowledged role.” Fred Donner makes much the same point, that despite their piety, early inscriptions are striking for what they don’t contain: “…missing are assertions of tribal chauvinism, expressions of rival political claims, overt expressions of an overt Islamic confessional identity, and statements of theological import beyond the very general assertion of God’s unity. Moreover, there are no references to Muhammad or to the sunna of the Prophet prior to 66 AH” This reference to 66 AH is to the inscription on the Dome of the Rock, but as some have argued, this may not even be a reference to a named person, but to Jesus, as ‘he who is praised’. Prior to Abd Al-Malik it was the caliphate that was central to Arab monotheism and it was only during this caliph’s reign that Mohammed was declared the Messenger of God and the Prophet of the Arab people; it was only from this point on that he appears in all texts and inscriptions. It goes without saying that a materialist view of history has no room for prophets with a direct line of communication with God. So where did the idea of the Prophet come from? Nevo and Koran take the view that Mohammed had been one of the early clan leaders or ‘kings’ in the tribal conflicts that followed the collapse of the Sassanid state, before a centralised Arab empire was consolidated. Robert G Hoyland, surveyed all the non-Islamic references of the period in his book, Seeing Islam As Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam. He takes the view that the writings of Thomas the Presbyter, a seventh century chronicler whose Syriac writings are still preserved in the British library of Syriac manuscripts, show the first recorded reference to Mohammed: “In the year 945, indiction 7, on Friday 7 February (634 CE) at the ninth hour, there was a battle between the Romans and the Arabs of Muhammad (tayyaye d-Mhmt) in Palestine twelve miles east of Gaza. The Romans fled, leaving behind the patrician Bryrd whom the Arabs killed. Some 4000 poor villagers of Palestine were killed there, Christians, Jews and Samaritans. The Arabs ravaged the whole region.” Citing this same source, Fred Donner comments that “This, at least, enables the historian to feel more confident that Muhammad is not completely a fiction of later pious imagination as some have implied; we know that someone named Muhammad did exist, and that he led some kind of movement.” But this is precisely the kind of stretching of evidence that is typical of so many historians. The account of Thomas the Presbyter, even if perfectly accurate, puts the raid in question two years after Mohammed’s death and well outside of his traditional raiding area – neither of which is contested within Islamic tradition. More to the point, the command of a raiding party does not imply leadership of a “movement”, which has altogether different connotations. In fact, although it is possible that some lingering oral tradition linked this clan leader to the later life-story of the Prophet, there is otherwise no concrete link at all between the raid on Gaza and the elaborate and sophisticated “pious fiction” written centuries later. No more link, in fact, than Joshua, the leader of Galilean bandits, might have to the New Testament Jesus. Christoph Luxenburg takes an altogether different view of the origins of Mohammed. We have already cited his work, The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran, in which he emphasises the derivation of many of the words in the Koran from Syriac. Without going into his detailed argument about Arabic gerunds and grammatical minutiae, the gist of what he writes is that the meaning of the word mohammed is not a proper noun, a personal name, but derives from the adjective “praiseworthy”, so its meaning was “one who should be praised”. Referring to the inscription on the Dome of the Rock, the Islamic translation ‘Mohammed is the servant of God and his messenger’, becomes for Luxenburg ‘praised be the servant of God and his messenger’. He argues, like Popp, that the depiction of Jesus in the inscription as Abd Allah, the servant of God, goes back to early Christianity and has its roots many centuries before Islam. Although the inscription is directed at the People of the Book, which in Koranic terms means Jews and Christians, Luxenburg argues that in this case the intended audience are the Christians. “By this teaching, Abd al-Malik defends his faith both in Christ as the ‘servant of God’ (Abd Allah) and also in the one God, over against the Trinitarian teaching of the followers of Nicaea. Abd al-Malik is defending hereby a pre-Nicaean Syrian Christianity, a version of Christianity that one should not refer to generally as ‘Jewish Christianity’ but rather, more accurately, as ‘Syrian-Arabian Christianity’.” Not only was Mohammad not meant as a personal name in the inscription, Luxenburg writes, but the word Islam too was meant in its general sense of submission to the will of God, a conformity with the Scripture, rather than Islam as a religious faith. “…it is a historical error to see in this expression (“islam”) and in this context the beginning of “Islam” as we know it…However much the Koran may have existed partially before the rise of historical Islam – a possibility that the inscription on the Dome of the Rock suggests – it seems to have been a liturgical book of a Syrian-Arabian Christianity. Even if written Christian sources from the first half of the eighth century speak of a ‘Mohammed’ as the ‘prophet of the Arabs’, this phenomenon is to be explained as that this Arabian name for Christ was simply not current among Aramaic or Greek-speaking Christians. Therefore this metaphor, which would have sounded strange to them, must have seemed to be the name of a new prophet.” In the discussion on the development of Christianity, we explained that the original name of Jesus,