"The New Statesman" Wednesday 12th December 2001
Special Report - The great Koran con trick
Martin Bright (Monday 10th December 2001)
Scholars claim that Islam's holy book is not quite what it seems.
By Martin Bright
The news that a recent scientific paper on the common genetic roots of Jews and
Palestinians had been suppressed by learned journals, because of the political
sensitivity of its conclusions, made for depressing reading. Findings that might
have provided reason for hope, or even for solidarity between the Arab and
Israeli peoples, were instead considered too hot to handle.
The furore over the geneticists' discoveries will have come as no surprise to
other academics in the Middle East and the Muslim world, where even the most
apparently dispassionate research can be swept up in the blinding ideological
sandstorms that choke reasoned dialogue. Such is the intensity of feeling that
many who work in highly charged areas of scholar- ship - history and
archaeology, for example - choose to keep a low profile, circulating their work
only in trusted academic circles. Thus the censorship that plagues the Middle
East seeps into every corner of intellectual life.
Nowhere is this more true than in the study of the origins of Islam, where some
of the conclusions being drawn are potentially even more explosive than the
argument that Israelis and Palestinians have common ancestors. Tucked away in
the journals and occasional papers of the world of Islamic studies is work by a
group of academics who have spent the past three decades plotting a quiet
revolution in the study of the origins of the religion, the Koran and the life
of the Prophet Mohammad. The conclusions of the so-called "new historians" of
Islam are devastating: that we know almost nothing about the life of the Muslim
prophet Mohammad; that the rapid rise of the religion can be attributed, at
least in part, to the attraction of Islam's message of conquest and jihad for
the tribes of the Arabian peninsula; that the Koran as we know it today was
compiled, or perhaps even written, long after Mohammad's supposed death in
632AD. Most controversially of all, the researchers say that there existed an
anti-Christian alliance between Arabs and Jews in the earliest days of Islam,
and that the religion may be best understood as a heretical branch of rabbinical
Judaism.
The work of John Wansbrough, Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, Andrew Rippin and
Gerald Hawting, which emerged initially from the University of London's School
of Oriental and African Studies in the 1970s, questions not only Islam's own
version of its origins; this "new history" of Islam takes as its starting point
a problem that has long troubled scholars - the almost total lack of
contemporary Islamic sources.
According to the Muslim tradition, Islam emerged from Arabia in around 611AD,
when the Prophet Mohammad received a revelation from the Angel Gabriel that he
was the last prophet. He began preaching a monotheistic creed to the people of
Mecca and, when he made no headway, moved with a small group of followers to
Yathrib (modern Medina), a mixed Jewish and Arab community 200 miles to north.
This emigration (Hijra) in 622AD marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar.
Mohammad later returned to conquer his home city, and by the time of his death
he had established an Islamic empire in Arabia. Within 100 years of the first
revelations to Mohammad, the Arab conquests had swept aside the ancient empires
of Byzantium and Persia and created an Islamic empire stretching from Spain to
India.
The traditional version of events has remained remarkably robust, even among
modernist thinkers in the Muslim world. In Introducing Islam, a beginner's guide
to the faith (which was revised this year in the light of the 11 September
attacks on America), the British Muslim writer (and frequent NS contributor)
Ziauddin Sardar repeats this view of the religion's history: "The Life of
Mohammad is known as the Sira and was lived in the full light of history.
Everything he said or did was recorded." What Sardar fails to explain is how, if
that is the case, nothing has survived. He says the Prophet himself was
illiterate, but was surrounded at all times by 45 scribes who wrote down
everything he did and said. These scribes also noted Mohammad's utterances on
correct Islamic behaviour (the Hadith), which they wrote on bones, pieces of
rock, parchment and papyrus. These, too, were later collected and used to
complement Koranic authority. According to Sardar, we therefore know what
the Prophet ate, how he treated women, children and animals, and his behaviour
in battle. In reality, we know nothing of the sort - everything Sardar claims as
historical truth is based on hearsay, on the words passed down by Mohammad's
followers. The explanation of the new historians is that later generations
created a coherent scriptural basis for Islam to suit the needs of a
sophisticated empire.
The first biography (Sira) of the Prophet comes from the end of the eighth
century, at least 150 years after the supposed founding of the religion, when
the Islamic empire had spread west into Spain and east into India. For
historiansworking within the Enlightenment tradition, this hiatus provides a
serious barrier to providing an authoritative picture of Islam's beginnings.
Writing in the Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World, Patricia
Crone, the most forthright and accessible of the new historians, expresses the
general puzzlement of her colleagues: "What sense can we make of all this?
Mohammad is clearly an individual who changed the course of history, but how was
it possible for him to do so? Unfortunately, we do not know how much of the
Islamic tradition about him is true." The only source before 800AD is the Koran,
she says, and that tells us more about the Old Testament prophets Abraham and
Moses than it does about Mohammad.
With no contemporary Muslim sources to refer to, a group of young historians
working under the brilliant linguist Professor John Wansbrough at the University
of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the Seventies
developed new scholarly techniques, drawing heavily on earlier biblical
scholarship. Following Wansbrough's lead, they decided to look at the Koran as a
literary text, to compare it to other devotional writings of the period and to
look at internal clues to its origin. They found that it owed much to Judaism,
especially the Talmud, a collection of commentaries and interpretations of the
Hebrew Bible. They concluded, tentatively, that in the form that survives, the
Koran was compiled, if not written, decades after the time of Mohammad, probably
by converts to Islam in the Middle East, who introduced elements from the
religions previously dominant in the region. Patricia Crone and Michael Cook,
also working at SOAS at the time, provided an even more devastating analysis by
looking at the only surviving contemporary accounts of the Islamic invasion,
written in Armenian, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac by Middle Eastern witnesses to
the rise of Islam. They found that Islam, as represented by admittedly biased
sources, was in essence a tribal conspiracy against the Byzantine and Persian
empires with deep roots in Judaism, and that Arabs and Jews were allies in these
conquering communities.
Apparent support for their conclusions came from finds made during the
restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen, where labourers working
in the roof discovered fragments of Korans that are among the oldest in
existence. German scholars who studied the manuscripts discovered that some
of the Koranic writing diverges from the authorised version, which by tradition
is considered the pure, unadulterated
word of God. What's more, some of the
writing appears to have been inscribed over earlier, "rubbed-out" versions of the
text. This editing supports the belief of Wansbrough and his pupils that the
Koran as we know it does not date from the time of Mohammad. Andrew
Rippin, professor of Islamic history at the University of Victoria in Canada,
and the author of a revisionist history of Islam published by Routledge, said:
"The Sana'a manuscripts [are] part of
the process of filling in the holes in our
knowledge of what might have happened."
It is easy to see why the work of the
"new historians" causes such offence in
some Muslim circles, and there is no doubt that much of what they say is
deeply provocative. In 1987, two years before Ayatollah Khomeini issued a
fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie to death for blasphemy, Patricia Crone,
then based at Oxford, wrote the following words about Allah and Mohammad,
His earthly messenger: "Mohammad's
God endorsed a policy of conquest,
instructing his believers to fight against unbelievers wherever they might be
found. In short, Mohammad had to
conquer, his followers liked to conquer,
and his deity told him to conquer."
In Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, Crone argued that the early Muslim
converts turned to Islam because it promised an Arab state based on conquest,
rape and pillage. "God could scarcely
have been more explicit. He told the
Arabs that they had a right to despoil others of their women, children and land,
or indeed that they had a duty to do
so: holy war consisted in obeying."
Ziauddin Sardar is one of the few Muslim intellectuals genuinely to have
engaged with the new historians. He has called their work "Eurocentrism of the
most extreme, purblind kind, which assumes that not a single word written by
Muslims can be accepted as evidence".
Writing in the aftermath of the Rushdie
affair, Sardar placed the western revisionists firmly in the post-colonial
orientalist camp, from where colonial
"experts" have consistently told Muslims
that they know best about the origins
of their primitive, barbarian religion.
"The triumphant conclusion of Crone and
Cook," he says, "was that Islam is
an amalgam of Jewish texts, theology and ritual tradition."
Sardar points out that all of the academics responsible for the new Islamic
history emerged from the School of Oriental and African Studies, a colonial
institution that is noted for training generations of Foreign Office officials and
spies. In an interview with the American magazine Atlantic Monthly, Crone
expressed her irritation at such attacks on her work: "The Koran is a scripture
with a history like any other - except that we don't know this history and tend
to provoke howls of protest when we study it. Nobody would mind the howls
if they came from westerners, but westerners feel more deferential when the
howls come from other people: who are
you to tamper with their legacy. We
Islamicists are not trying to destroy
anyone's faith."
Christians are used to reading multiple narratives of the life of Christ, with the
Scriptures themselves providing four versions in the form of the Gospels. But
more significantly, in the Christian
faith, Jesus himself represents the word of
God, a function provided in Islam by the Koran. Suggesting that the Koran is
fallible is therefore rather like questioning the divinity of Jesus. One of the
attractions of Islam is that the Prophet was mortal: his life is intended as a
model for the rest of humanity precisely because he was a human being, like
the rest of us, who none the less managed to lead an exemplary life.
It is the picture of Islam as a heretical offshoot of Judaism that has caused most
offence to Muslims, especially where it concerns the holy cities of Mecca and
Jerusalem. According to Muslim
tradition, Mohammad changed the direction
of Muslim prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca in the earliest years of Islam, after
he fell out with the Jews when he was
building his community of the faithful
in Arabia. But the new historians refuse to accept this account. Using
archaeological evidence from mosques built in the eighth century (that is, after
the death of Mohammad), they have shown that many of the Muslim prayer
niches point to the north, and not towards Mecca.
Why has the work of these academics received so little attention? In part, this
must be due to the attitude of liberal intellectuals in the west and their
counterparts in the Muslim world, who
have failed to engage with their work,
or tiptoed around it for fear of offending Muslim sensibilities. In so doing, they
have left the field open to the radical right in the United States, where it has
been used to justify a crusading, Christian fundamentalist approach to Islam.
Daniel Pipes, a writer and former adviser to the State Department, has used the
new history to justify the "clash of
civilisations" theory, according to which
the west is doomed for ever to come into conflict with the barbarian Muslim
world, and the Arabs are doomed to
destruction.
Politicalusa.com, one of a number of websites
committed, since 11 September,
to rooting out the liberal "traitors"
who have dared speak out against US
government policy, includes a series of pseudo-scholarly attacks on Islam. In
one article entitled "The myth of
Mecca", Jack Wheeler (an adviser to the
Afghan mujahedin in the Reagan era) manipulates the new history to argue that
Muslims must be forced to accept that
their religion is based on a series of
made-up ideas. "All the Bin Ladens of
the Muslim terrorism network should
know that the world is soon to learn about the Myth of Mecca . . . Much more
is required of the adherents of Islam: the reinvention of their religion. No
longer can the words of the Koran be considered inerrant, infallible and those of
Allah himself."
The new historians themselves must take some responsibility for failing to
bring their arguments into the
mainstream. When I telephoned one of the main
protagonists in the debate, a London University
academic, to ask him about
the way the work of the new historians had been hijacked by the radical right
and Christian fundamentalists, he warned me against publication. Nor did he
wish to be identified: "I would have thought the best thing was to allow this
to remain in its decent obscurity,"
he wrote in an e-mail.
This fear of misrepresentation (or
worse) is understandable. Salman Rushdie
was condemned to death for "insulting" the Prophet by depicting him as just a
little too fallible and human in The Satanic Verses - and that was fiction, not
historical research. Penguin, the original publisher of the Satanic Verses, has
postponed the publication of a
controversial new history of Islam by Professor Gerald
Hawting. And the founder of
the SOAS revisionist school of thought found himself the target of Islamist
demonstrations at the University of London when his views first received
publicity in the Muslim world; he has chosen to live in obscurity in France since he
retired from the university in 1992.
For devout Muslims, the tradition as passed down from the original
companions of Mohammad and reinforced
by nearly 1,400 years of Islamic
scholarship is unlikely to be shaken by a small group of infidel academics
based at British and American
universities. So why is it that, in the acres of
newsprint and during the hours of television time spent discussing Muslim
issues since 11 September, there has been no debate on the Koran and the
origins of Islam? According to Francis Robinson, who edited the Cambridge
Illustrated History of the Islamic
World, it is important "not to let
sensitivities for Muslim feelings override all other considerations". He also
suggests that the new history remains
in relative obscurity because "these
historians have yet to find a single figure who can bring all these revolutionary
ideas together in an accessible way. But believe me, that will happen. And it
will be interesting to watch the
reaction."
Martin Bright is home affairs editor of the Observer
The Author New Statesman Ltd. 2001. All rights reserved.
Please contact the publisher. The New Statesman is registered as a
newspaper in the UK and the USA.
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