Origins of Islam

Once upon a time, everyone knew how Islam came into existence. As Tom Holland says (In the Shadow of the Sword), “Whole centuries’ worth of scholarship have been founded on the presumption that the sources for early Islam can be trusted. To this day, they continue to be recycled endlessly, whether in popular biographies of Muhammad or in academic texts. It still tends to be taken for granted that they remain, for anyone wishing to construct a narrative of Islam’s origins, the only real building blocks to hand.”

No longer. Holland speaks of a “mood of crisis” and quotes one Qur’an scholar who has spoken of a “schism” among scholars. Almost nothing of the traditional account seems secure anymore.

The problem is the lack of early sources for the life and teachings of Muhammed, the centrality of Mecca, and the distinctive teachings about Islam. Holland notes, “Over the course of almost two hundred years, the Arabs, a people never noted for their reticence, and whose motivation, we are told, had been an utterly consuming sense of religious certitude, had set themselves to conquering the world—and yet in all that time, they composed not a single record of their victories, not one, that has survived into the present day. How could this possibly have been so, when even on the most barbarous fringes of civilization, even in Britain, even in the north of England, books of history were being written during this same period, and copied, and lovingly tended? Why, when the savage Northumbrians were capable of preserving the writings of a scholar such as Bede, do we have no Muslim records from the age of Muhammad? Why not a single Arab account of his life, nor of his followers’ conquests, nor of the progress of his religion, from the whole of the near two centuries that followed his death?”

Virtually no sources from before 800 remain. The earliest appear nearly two centuries after Muhammed lived: “The voices of the Arab warriors who dismembered the ancient empires of Persia and Rome, and of their sons, and of their sons in turn—let alone of their daughters and grand-daughters—have all been silenced, utterly and for ever. Neither letters, nor speeches, nor journals, if they were ever so much as written, have survived; no hint as to what those who actually lived through the establishment of the Caliphate thought, or felt, or believed. It is as though we had no eye-witness accounts of the Protestant Reformation, or the French Revolution, or the two World Wars.”

Earlier, Christian, sources refer to Muhammed, sometimes as a “false prophet,” sometimes as “the general” or “the king” of invading Arabs. To Holland, this only deepens the mystery: “these cryptic allusions—not to mention the fact that they were all made by infidels—merely highlight, once again, the total absence of any early Muslim reference to Muhammad. Only in the 690s 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; and only around 800, of course, did biographies come to be written of Muhammad that Muslims took care to preserve. ”

Some scholars have suggested radical solutions to these puzzles: “It has been argued that the wellspring of the Qur’an lay not in Arabia but in Iraq; that it was written originally not in Arabic but Syriac, the lingua franca of the Near East at the time; that ‘Muhammad’ was originally a title referring to Jesus.”

Holland notes the irony that despite intense European and American interest in Islam, these debates about the foundations of Islam rarely receives any “airtime.”

(Colin Green provides a neat summary of the questions that historians have been asking about the traditional account of the origins of Islam.)