[This is part three in a three-part series on Koranic exegesis. Part one is here and part two is here]
It was Gustav Weil in his Mohammed der prophet, sein Leben und sein Lehre (Stuttgart, 1843) who first applied the historico-critical method to the writing of the life of the Prophet.
However, his access to the primary sources was very limited, though he did manage to get hold of a manuscript of the oldest extant biography of the Prophet by Ibn Hisham; but it is only some years later with the discovery and publication of the works of Ibn Sa’d, Al-Tabari, and the edition of Ibn Hisham in 1858 by G.Wustenfeld, that scholars had the means for the first time to critically examine the sources of the rise of Islam and the life of its putative founder Muhammad. Weil translated Ibn Hisham into German in 1864. Waqidi’s Kitab al Maghazi was edited in 1856 by Alfred von Kremer, and printed at Calcutta. An abridged translation of the latter work by Julius Wellhausen appeared in Berlin in 1882. Parts III and IV of Al-Tabari were published in the 1880s. The Tabaqat of Ibn Sad ( vols.I & II ) was edited by a team of orientalists, Mittwoch, Scahau, Horovitz and Schwally, at the beginning of the 20th century.
The biography of the Prophet made great advances in the writings of Sir William Muir, Aloys Sprenger, and Theodor Noldeke.
Muir’s “Life of Mahomet” appeared in four volumes between 1856 and 1861. It is worth examining Muir’s methodological assumptions since they seem to have been shared by many Islamologists to the present time. Muir brought a highly critical mind to bear on the hitherto recalcitrant material on the life of the Apostle of God. He recognized the purely legendary nature of much of the details, he realized the utter worthlessness of the tales contributed by the storytellers, and he was equally skeptical of the absolute value of the Traditions, “...Even respectably derived traditions often contained much that was exaggerated and fabulous.” Muir then continues by quoting Weil approvingly, “Reliance upon oral traditions, at a time when they were transmitted by memory alone, and every day produced new divisions among the professors of Islam, opened up a wide field for fabrication and distortion. There was nothing easier, when required to defend any religious or political system, than to appeal to an oral tradition of the Prophet. The nature of these so-called traditions, and the manner in which the name of Mohammad was abused to support all possible lies and absurdities, may be gathered most clearly from the fact that Al-Bukhari who travelled from land to land to gather from the learned the traditions they had received, came to conclusion, after many years’ sifting, that out of 600,000 traditions, ascertained by him to be then current, only 4000 were authentic! And of this selected number, the European critic is compelled without hesitation to reject al least one-half.” [Weil, Gesch.Chalifen, ii. 290; I .Kh. ii. 595]
A little later, Muir passes an even more damning judgment on traditions, while written records would have fixed “the terms in which the evidence was given; whereas tradition purely oral is affected by the character and habits, the associations and the prejudices, of each witness in the chain of repetition. No precaution could hinder the commingling in oral tradition of mistaken or fabricated matter with what at the first may have been trustworthy evidence. The floodgates of error, exaggeration, and fiction were thrown open; ...”
Muir even takes Sprenger to task for being too optimistic about our ability to correct the bias of the sources, “It is, indeed, the opinion of Sprenger that ‘although the nearest view of the Prophet which we can obtain is at a distance of one hundred years, ‘and although this long vista is formed of a medium exclusively Mohammadan, yet our knowledge of the bias of the narrators ‘enables us to correct the media, and to make them almost achromatic.’ The remark is true to some extent; but its full application would carry us beyond the truth.” One would have thought that these considerations would have induced extreme skepticism in Muir about our ability to construct a life of Muhammad out of such crooked timber. Not a bit of it! It was all a matter of “a comprehensive consideration of the subject, and careful discrimination of the several sources of error, we may reach at least a fair approximation to the truth.” Muir also accepted totally uncritically the absolute authenticity of the Koran as a contemporary record; and he had unbounded confidence in the accuracy of the early historians, particularly, Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham, Al ‘Waqidi, Ibn Sa’d, and Al Tabari. The result was the massive four volume “Life of Mahomet.” Even a cursory glance at Muir’s labours makes one wonder just what he has discarded from the traditions, since he seems to have taken at face value and included in his biography of the Prophet countless details, uncritically garnered from Al Waqidi, that are of dubious historical value, from long speeches to the minutiae of Muhammad’s appearance and dress.
Julius Wellhausen in his pioneering work on the Old Testament, which he began publishing in 1876, showed that the Pentateuch was a composite work in which one could discern the hand of four different “writers,” usually referred to by the four letters J, E, D, and P. A century later, his Biblical Higher Criticism is still considered valid and very influential. Wellhausen then turned his critical mind to the sources of early Islam. Towards the end of the 19th century, Wellhausen tried to disentangle an authentic tradition from the snares of a deliberately concocted artificial tradition; the latter being full of tendentious distortions. The authentic tradition was to be found in Abu Mikhnaf, al-Waqidi, and al Madaini, while the false tradition was to be found in Sayf b.’Umar. For Wellhausen the “value of the isnad depends on the value of the historian who deems it reliable. With bad historians one cannot put faith in good isnads, while good historians merit trust if they give no isnad at all, simply noting that ‘I have this from someone whom I believe.’ All this permits a great simplification of critical analysis.” As Patricia Crone says, “one might have expected his ‘Prolegomena zur altesten Geschichte des Islams’ to have been as revolutionary a work as was his ‘Prolegomena zur altesten Geschichte Israels.’ But it is not altogether surprising that it was not. The Biblical redactors offer us sections of the Israelite tradition at different stages of crystallisation, and their testimonies can accordingly be profitably compared and weighed against each other. But the Muslim tradition was the outcome, not of a slow crystallisation, but of an explosion; the first compilers were not redactors, but collectors of debris whose works are strikingly devoid of overall unity; and no particular illuminations ensue from their comparison. The Syrian Medinese and Iraqi schools in which Wellhausen found his J, E, D and P, do not exist: where Engnell and other iconoclasts have vainly mustered all their energy and ingenuity in their effort to see the Pentateuch as a collection of uncoordinated hadiths, Noth has effortlessly and conclusively demonstrated the fallacy of seeing the Muslim compilers as Pentateuchal redactors.”
The next great step in the critical examination of our sources for Muhammad and the rise of Islam was taken by the great scholar Ignaz Goldziher in his “Muhammedanische Studien” (Halle, 1889, 1890) who showed that a certain amount of careful sifting or tinkering was not enough, and that the vast number of hadiths were total forgeries from the late 2nd and 3rd Muslim centuries. This meant, of course, “that the meticulous isnads which supported them were utterly fictitious.” Faced with Goldziher’s impeccably documented arguments, conservative historians began to panic and devised spurious ways of keeping skepticism at bay, by, for instance, postulating ad hoc distinctions between legal and historical traditions. But as Humphreys says, “ In terms of their formal structures , the hadith and the historical khabar [Arabic, pl. akhbar, discrete anecdotes and reports] were very similar indeed; more important, many 2nd/ 8th and 3rd/9th century scholars had devoted their efforts to both kinds of text equally. Altogether, if hadith isnads were suspect, so then should be the isnads attached to historical reports.”
In 1905, Prince Caetani in his introduction to his monumental ten folio volumes of Annali dell’ Islam (1905 - 26), came to “the pessimistic conclusion that we can find almost nothing true on Mahomet in the Traditions, we can discount as apocryphal all the traditional material that we possess.” Caetani had “compiled and arranged (year by year, and event by event) all the material which the sources, the Arab historians offered. The resultant conclusions based on the facts, which took into account the variant forms in which they were found in the sources, were accompanied by a critical analysis that reflected the methodological skepticism which Langlois and Seignobos had just set forth as absolutely indispensible for the historian.” But like Muir, Weil, and Sprenger before him, Caetani failed to push to their logical conclusion the negative consequences of his methodology, and like his predecessors, thought it was all a matter of critically sifting through the mass of Traditions until we arrived at some authentic core.
The methodological skepticism of Goldziher and the positivist Caetani was taken up with a vengeance by Henri Lammens, the Belgian Jesuit. Though born in Ghent in 1862, Lammens left for Beirut at the age of fifteen to join the Jesuit order there, and made Lebanon his home for the rest of his life. During the first eight years of his studies, Lammens “acquired an exceptional mastery of Arabic, as well as of Latin and Greek, and he appears also to have learnt Syriac. In 1886 he was assigned to teach Arabic at the Beirut Jesuit College, and he was soon publishing his own textbooks for the purpose. His first work of Orientalist scholarship appeared in 1889: a dictionary of Arabic usage ( Kitab al-fra’id fi’l-furuq ), containing 1639 items and based on the classical Arabic lexicographers.” He travelled for six years in Europe, and twice edited the Jesuit newspaper, al-Bashir. He taught Islamic history and geography at the College, and he later used his lectures notes when he came to publish his studies on Pre-Islamic Arabia, and the Umayyads. “With the establishment of the School of Oriental Studies at the Jesuit College in 1907, Lammens began his career as an Orientalist in earnest; and his appointment as professor at the newly-founded school enabled him to devote his whole effort to study and research. His well-known works on the Sira appeared during the first seven years following his appointment.”
Though he had what Rodinson calls a “holy contempt for Islam, for its ‘delusive glory’ and its works, for its ‘dissembling’ and ‘lascivious’ Prophet,” and despite his other methodological shortcomings, to be discussed below, Lammens, according to F. E. Peters, “whatever his motives and style ...has never been refuted.” Lawrence Conrad makes a similar point that despite Lammens’ well-known hostility to Islam, he offers a “number of useful insights.” Rodinson also concedes Lammens’ partiality, but once again realizes that Lammens’ “colossal efforts at demolishing also had constructive results.” “They have forced us to be much more highly demanding of our sources. With the traditional edifice of history definitively brought down, one could now proceed to the reconstruction.” Finally, as Salibi summarizes, “although the Sira thesis of Lammens did not remain unquestioned, it continues to serve as a working principle. The modern reaction in favour of the authenticity of the Sira, represented by A. Guillaume and W. Montgomery Watt, has modified this working principle in some details without seriously affecting its essence. Lammens certainly provided Sira scholarship with an important clue to the riddle of Muhammad; and many of his own conclusions, as well as his technique, have been adopted and developed by later scholars,”
In the first of the three works translated here for the first time into English, Lammens, influenced both by Goldziher’s analysis of hadith, and Snouck Hurgronje’s emphasis on the importance of the Koran for the Sira, “asserted that the traditional Arabic Sira, like the modern Orientalist biographies of the Prophet, depended mainly on hadith, whereas the Quran alone can serve as a valid historical basis for a knowledge of the Prophet’s life and career. The historical and biographical hadith, far from being the control of the Sira or the source of supplementary information, is merely an apocryphal exegesis of the historical and biographical allusions of the Quran. The value of an hadith regarding the Prophet’s life or career, he argued, would lie in its independence from the Quran, where such independence can be clearly demonstrated. As a rule, he adds, a hadith which is clearly exegetical of the Quran should be disregarded.”
Lammens is often criticized for accepting uncritically any material that disparaged the Prophet, and conversely, for applying rigorous criticism when the source material tended to praise the Prophet. In his defense, Lammens pleaded that “pious Traditionists and Sira writers could not have invented information that reflected poorly on Muhammad; and therefore, any such information which may have slipped in must be true.” But at other times, Lammens adhered to the principle that we ought not to judge Muhammad from modern European standards of right and wrong, since traits in the Prophet’s character, found to be unacceptable by Europeans may have been highly thought of by the early Muslims.
In the third of his works in the present volume, Fatima et les Filles de Mahomet (Fatima and the daughters of Muhammad), “Lammens set out to prove that Fatima was not the favourite daughter of Muhammad, and that the Prophet had never planned his succession through her progeny. All hadith and Sira material favourable to Fatima, Ali, and their sons, al-Hasan and al-Husayn, is subjected to a searching criticism, with interesting and often valid results.” But rather inconsistently, Lammens accepted uncritically all the anti-Ali material which showed that Muhammad cared neither for Fatima nor Ali. Given Lammens’ hostility to Islam and the character of Muhammad, one is inclined to accept the argument that a biography of the Prophet completed by Lammens was never published by express orders from Rome; its publication would have caused considerable embarrassment to the Holy See. In any case, in this post-Rushdie world that we all inhabit now, there is probably only one publisher in the world who would risk it, and if it is ever published, it should be, as Jeffery puts it, “epoch-making.”
The ideas of the Positivist Caetani and the Jesuit Lammens were taken up by a group of Soviet Islamologists, whose conclusions sometimes show a remarkable similarity to the works of Wansbrough, Cook, and Crone. N. A. Morozov propounded the theory that until the Crusades, Islam was indistinguishable from Judaism and that only then did Islam receive its independent character, while Muhammad and the first caliphs were mythical figures. Morozov’s arguments, first developed in his “Christ” (1930), are summarized by Smirnov, “In the Middle Ages Islam was merely an off-shoot of Arianism evoked by a meteorological event in the Red Sea near Mecca; it was akin to Byzantine iconoclasm. The Koran bears the traces of late composition, up to the eleventh century. The Arabian peninsula is incapable of giving birth to any religion - it is too far from the normal areas of civilisation . The Arabian Islamites, who passed in the Middle Ages as Agars, Ishmaelites, and Saracens, were indistinguishable from the Jews until the impact of the Crusades made them assume a separate identity. All the lives of Muhammad and his immediate successors are as apocryphal as the accounts of Christ and the Apostles.”
Under the influence of Morozov, Klimovich published an article called “Did Muhammad Exist?” (1930), in which he makes the valid point that all the sources of our information on the life of Muhammad are late. Muhammad was a necessary fiction since it is always assumed that every religion must have a founder. Whereas another Soviet scholar, Tolstov , compares the myth of Muhammad with the “deified shamans” of the Yakuts, the Buryats, and the Altays. “The social purpose of this myth was to check the disintegration of the political block of traders, nomads, and peasants, which had brought to power the new, feudal aristocracy.” Vinnikov also compares the myth of Muhammad to “shamanism,” pointing to primitive magic aspects of such ritual as Muhammad having water poured over him. While E. A. Belyaev rejects the theories of Morozov, Klimovich and Tolstov which argued that Muhammad never existed, he does consider the Koran to have been concocted after the death of the Prophet.
Ignaz Goldziher’s arguments were followed up nearly sixty years later by another great Islamicist, Joseph Schacht, whose works on Islamic law are considered classics in their field. Schacht’s conclusions were even more radical and perturbing, and their full implications have not yet sunk in.
Humphreys has summed up Schacht’s theses as: “(1) that isnads going all the way back to the Prophet only began to be widely used around the time of the Abbasid Revolution - i.e. the mid-2nd / 8th century; (2) that, ironically, the more elaborate and formally correct an isnad appeared to be, the more likely it was to be spurious. In general, he concluded, no existing hadith could be reliably ascribed to the Prophet, though some might ultimately be rooted in his teaching. And though he devoted only a few pages to historical reports about the early Caliphate, he explicitly asserted that the same strictures should apply to them.”
Here is how Schacht sums up his won thesis: “It is generally conceded that the criticism of traditions as practised by the Muhammadan scholars is inadequate and that, however many forgeries may have been eliminated by it, even the classical corpus contains a great many traditions which cannot possibly be authentic. All efforts to extract from this often self-contradictory mass an authentic core by ‘historic intuition,’ as it has been called, have failed.” Goldziher, in another of his fundamental works [Muh.St.ii pp 1 - 274] has not only voiced his “sceptical reserve” with regard to the traditions contained even in the classical collections, but shown positively that the great majority of traditions from the Prophet are documents not of the time to which they claim to belong, but of the successive stages of development of doctrines during the first centuries of Islam. This brilliant discovery became the corner-stone of all serious investigation of early Muhammadan law and jurisprudence, even if some later authors, while accepting Goldziher’s method in principle, in their natural desire for positive results were inclined to minimize it in practice.
“This book [Schacht’s own work, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence] will be found to confirm Goldziher’s results, and to go beyond them in the following respects: a great many traditions in the classical and other collections were put into circulation only after Shafi’i’s time [Shafi’i died 820 C.E.]; the first considerable body of legal traditions from the Prophet originated towards the middle of the second [Muslim] century, in opposition to the slightly earlier traditions from Companions and other authorities, and to the “living tradition” of the ancient schools of law; traditions from Companions and other authorities underwent the same process of growth, and are to be considered in the same light, as traditions from the Prophet; the study of isnads often enables us to date traditions; the isnads show a tendency to grow backwards and to claim higher and higher authority until they arrive at the Prophet; the evidence of legal traditions carries us back to about the year 100 A.H.[8th Century C.E.] only ....”
Schacht proves that, for example, a tradition did not exist at a particular time by showing that it was not used as a legal argument in a discussion which would have made reference to it imperative if it had existed. For Schacht every legal tradition from the Prophet must be taken as inauthentic and fictitious expression of a legal doctrine formulated at a later date: “... We shall not meet any legal tradition from the Prophet which can positively be considered authentic.”
Traditions were formulated polemically in order to rebut a contrary doctrine or practice; Schacht calls these traditions ‘counter traditions.’ Isnads “were often put together very carelessly. Any typical representative of the group whose doctrine was to be projected back on to an ancient authority, could be chosen at random and put into an isnad. We find therefore a number of alternative names in otherwise identical isnads ....” Another important discovery of Schacht’s which has considerable consequences only appreciated recently by Wansbrough and his followers is that “Muhammadan [Islamic] law did not derive directly from the Koran but developed ...out of popular and administrative practice under the Umaiyads, 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 distinguished French Arabist Regis Blachere, translator of the Koran and historian of Arabic Literature, undertook to write a critical biography of the Prophet taking fully into account the skeptical conclusions of Goldziher and Lammens. His short study appeared in 1952, two years after Schacht’s pioneering work. Blachere takes a highly critical view of the sources, and he is particularly pessimistic about our ability to reconstruct the life of Muhammad prior to the Hijra in 622 C.E. His preliminary reappraisal of the sources ends on this very negative note: “The conclusions to be drawn from this survey will appear disappointing only to those more smitten with illusion than truth. The sole contemporary source for Muhammad, the Koran, only gives us fragmentary hints, often sibylline, almost always subject to divergent interpretations. The biographical Tradition is certainly more rich and more workable but suspect by its very nature, it poses, in addition, a problem of method since for Muhammad’s apostolate it originates from the Koran which it tries to explain and complete at the same time. In sum, we no longer have any sources that would allow us to write a detailed history of Muhammad with a rigorous and continuous chronology. To resign oneself to a partial or total ignorance is necessary, above all for everything that concerns the period prior to Muhammad’s divine call [ c. 610 C.E.]. All that a truly scientific biography can achieve is to lay out the successive problems engendered by this pre-apostolate period, sketch out the general background atmosphere in which Muhammad received his divine call, to give in broad brushstrokes the development of his apostleship at Mecca, to try with a greater chance of success to put in order the known facts, and finally to put back into the penumbra all that remains uncertain. To want to go further is to fall into hagiography or romanticization.”
And yet, the biography that emerges despite Blachere’s professed skepticism is dependent upon the very traditions that Goldziher, Lammens, and Schacht had cast into doubt. Blachere’s account of the life of the Prophet is far less radical than one would have expected, it is full of the recognizable events and characters familiar from the Traditional Biography, though shorn of the details.
Some of the most discussed works published in the 1950s were the three publications of Harris Birkeland, a Swedish Orientalist: “The Legend of the Opening of Muhammad’s Breast,” “Old Muslim Opposition against Interpretation of the Koran,” and the third, “The Lord Guide , Studies on Primitive Islam,” which examines five Suras that he considers the earliest stratum of the Koran, and which express, so he contends, the early ideas of Muhammad. In The Lord Guides, Birkeland argues that, “Goldziher’s method to evaluate traditions according to their contents is rather disappointing. We are not entitled to limit our study to the texts (the so–called matns). We have the imperative duty to scrutinize the Isnads too…and to consider the matns in their relation to the isnads… For it is very often the age of the contents that we do not know and which we, consequently, wish to decide. The study of the isnads in many cases gives us valuable assistance to fulfill this wish, despite the fact that in principle they must be held to be spurious. However fictitious they are, they represent sociological facts.”
Birkeland expends a vast amount of energy “in collecting, differentiating and thoroughly scrutinizing all traditions and comments concerning a certain passage of the Quran or some legend about the Prophet.” But the German scholar Rudi Paret, for one, finds the results “rather disappointing.” Birkeland maintains that “the Muslim interpretation of the Quran in the form it has been transmitted to us, namely in its oldest stage as hadith, does not contain reliable information on the earliest period of Muhammad in Mecca.” Nevertheless Birkeland continues, “The original tafsir of Ibn Abbas and possibly that of his first disciples must, however, have contained such information ….An exact, detailed and comparative analysis of all available materials, of isnads and matns and exegetical–theological tendencies, in many instances enables us to go behind the extant texts and reach the original interpretation of Ibn Abbas, or at least that of his time, thus obtaining a really authentic understanding of the Koranic passage.” Rudi Paret remains very skeptical, “to tell the truth: I cannot make this optmistic outlook my own. Nor can I quite agree with Birkeland as to his evaluation of the so-called family isnads.”
Even the most conservative scholars now accept the unreliability of the Muslim sources, but an increasing number also seem to confirm, however indirectly, the more radical conclusions of Wansbrough, Cook, and Crone. One of the most remarkable of the latter was Dr. Suliman Bashear, a leading scholar and administrator at the University of Nablus (West Bank). His generally radical and skeptical views about the life of the Prophet and the history of early Islam often got him into trouble not only with the University authorities but also with the students, who, on one occasion, threw him out of a second storey window (luckily he escaped with minor injuries). Bashear lost his post at the University after the publication of his “Introduction to the Other History” (in Arabic) in 1984, whereupon he took up a Fulbright fellowship in the United States and returned to Jerusalem to a position in the Hebrew University in 1987. He fell seriously ill in the summer of 1991, was told to rest, but continued his research nonetheless. He died of a heart attack in October 1991 just after completing his book, “Arabs and Others in Early Islam.”
In one study Bashear examines verses 114 –116 of surah 2 of the Koran and their exegesis by Shams al-Din Suyuti (d.880) and others. Koran 2:114 reads, “Who is more wicked than the men who seek to destroy the mosques of God and forbid His name to be mentioned in them, when it behooves these men to enter them with fear in their hearts? They shall be held up to shame in this world and sternly punished in the hereafter.” Koran 2:115 –116 reads, “To God belongs the East and the West. Whichever way you turn there is the face of God. He is omnipresent and all-knowing. They say: ‘God has begotten a son.’ Glory be to Him! His is what the heavens and earth contain; all things are obedient to Him.”
Bashear was intrigued by verse 114 and Suyuti’s claim that it was revealed concerning the barring of Muslims by the Byzantines from the Jerusalem sanctuary. “Such a remarkable commentary in itself justifies further investigation. Moreover, 2:114 is followed by two verses (2:115-16) which could be taken as referring to the abrogation of the Jerusalem qibla and the argument surrounding the nature of the relation between God and Christ.”
“Two main questions are tackled here concerning the occasion of revelation of the verse [2:114]: who are those it blames, and where and when was the act of barring from, or destroying the mosques committed? The answers are split between four notions current in exegetical traditions and commentaries:
(i) The Jerusalem–Christian/Byzantine context;
(ii) The Meccan–Qurashi context
(iii) A general meaning without specific reference to any historical context ….
(iv) It was the Jews who tried to destroy the Kaba or the Prophet’s mosque in Medina in reaction to his change of qibla ….”
Bashear, after a meticulous examination of the commentaries, concluded that “up to the mid second [Muslim] century a clear anti-Christian / Byzantine sentiment prevailed in the exegesis of 2 :114 which overwhelmingly presented it as referring to the Jerusalem sanctuary – temple. We have also seen that no trace of sira material could be detected in such exegesis and that the first authentic attempt to present the occasion of its revelation within the framework of Muhammad’s sira [biography] in Mecca is primarily associated with the name of Ibn Zayd who circulated a tradition to that effect in the second half of the second [Muslim] century. Other attempts to produce earlier traditional authorities for this notion could easily be exposed as a later infiltration of sira material simply by conducting a cross–examination of sira sources on the occasions of both Quraysh’s persecution of Muhammad before the hijra and their barring of him at Hudaybiyya.… [T]he notion of an early Meccan framework cannot be attested before the first half of the second [Muslim] century.
“All in all, the case of verse 2: 114 gives support to Wansbrough’s main thesis since it shows that from the mid second [Muslim] century on Quranic exegesis underwent a consistent change, the main ‘impulse’ behind which was to assert the Hijazi origins of Islam . In that process, the appearance and circulation of a tradition by the otherwise unimportant Ibn Zayd slowly gathered prominence. Simultaneously, other ingenuous attempts were made to find earlier authorities precisely bearing Ibn Abbas’s name for the same notion while the more genuine core of the original tradition of Ibn Abbas was gradually watered down because it was no longer recognized after the ‘legend of Muhammad’ was established.”
Bashear also indirectly complements the work of G. Hawting and M. J. Kister when he claims that “on yet another level, literary criticism of the traditional material on the position of Jerusalem in early Islam has clearly shown that the stress on its priority was not necessarily a function of the attempt to undermine Mecca but rather was independent of the position of the latter since Islam seems not to have yet developed one firmly established cultic centre.”
Bashear then towards the end of his analysis remarks: “The present inquiry has shown how precisely around this period (mid second [Muslim] century) elements of a Hijazi orientation made their presence felt in the exegetical efforts to fit what became the canon of Muslim scripture into the new historical framework of Arabian Islam. From the literary scrutiny of the development of these efforts it becomes clear how such exegetical efforts affected the textual composition of 2:114-16 in a way that fitted the general orientation, attested from other literary fields, towards a Hijazi sira, sanctuary and, with them, scriptural revelation.”
In his study of the title “faruq” and its association with Umar I Bashear confirms the findings of Crone and Cook that “this title must be seen as an Islamic fossilization of a basically Jewish apocalyptic idea of the awaited messiah.” And a little later Bashear says that certain traditions give “unique support to the rather bold suggestion forwarded by Cook and Crone that the rise of Umar as a redeemer was prophesized and awaited.” Again as in his discussion of Koran 2:114 discussed above, Bashear thinks his analysis of the traditions about the conversion of Umar to Islam and Koran 4:60 has broader implications for our understanding of early Islam. Bashear tentatively suggests that certain traditions were fabricated to give an Hijazi orientation to events that probably took place outside it.
In “Abraham’s Sacrifice of His Son and Related Issues,” Bashear discusses the question as to which of the two sons was meant to be sacrificed by Abraham, Ishaq or Ismail. He concludes, “In itself, the impressively long list of mainly late scholars and commentators who favoured Ismail confirms Goldziher’s note that this view eventually emerged victorious. In view of the present study, however, one must immediately add that such victory was facilitated only as part of the general process of promoting the position of Mecca as the cultic center of Islam by connecting it with the Biblical heritage on the story of Abraham’s trial or, to use Wansbrough’s terminology, the reproduction of an Arabian–Hijazi version of Judaeo-Christian ‘prophetology.’” Bashear once again brings his examination to a close with the observation that it was only later traditionists who consciously promoted Ismail and Mecca for nationalist purposes to give an Hijazi orientation to the emerging religious identity of the Muslims: “For, our attempt to date the relevant traditional material confirms on the whole the conclusions which Schacht arrived at from another field, specifically the tendency of isnads to grow backwards. Time and again it has been demonstrated how serious doubts could easily be cast not only against traditions attributed to the Prophet and companions but a great deal of those bearing the names of successors too. We have actually seen how the acute struggle of clear national motive to promote the positions of Ismail and Mecca did flare up before the turn of the century, was at its height when the Abbasids assumed power and remained so throughout the rest of the second [Muslim] century.
“Though we did not initially aim at investigating the development of Muslim hajj rituals in Mecca, let alone its religious position in early Islam in general, our enquiry strongly leads to the conclusion that such issues were far from settled during the first half of the second [Muslim] century. While few scholars have lately arrived at similar conclusions from different directions, it is Goldziher who must be accredited with the initial note that Muslim consecration of certain locations in the Hijaz commenced with the rise of the Abbasids to power. Indeed we have seen how ‘the mosque of the ram’ was one of such locations.”
Bashear continues his research with his article “Riding Beasts on Divine Missions: An Examination of the Ass and Camel Traditions” where he tentatively suggests that “prominence of the image of the camel-rider was a function of the literary process of shaping the emergence of Arabian Islam.” Thus much of Bashear’s work seems to confirm the Wansbrough /Cook /Crone line that “Islam” far from being born fully–fledged with a water-tight creed, rites, rituals, holy places, shrines, and a holy scripture was a late literary creation as the early Arab warriors spilled out of the Hijaz in such dramatic fashion and encountered sophisticated civilizations; encounters which forced them to forge their own religious identity out of the already available materials, which were reworked to fit into a mythical Hijazi framework. This is further underlined by Bashear’s last major work published posthumously in 1997, Arabs and Others in Early Islam. The core of the latter work was adumbrated in Chapter VIII, Al-Islam wa-l-Arab, of his work published in Arabic in 1984, Muqaddima Fi al-Tarikh al –Akhar. In Arabs and Others in Early Islam, Bashear questions the a priori acceptance of the notion that the rise of the Arab polity and Islam were one and the same thing from the beginning. Furthermore he doubts the Hijazi origins of classical Islam, “The proposition that Arabia could have constituted the source of the vast material power required to effect such changes in world affairs within so short a span of time is, to say the least, a thesis calling for proof and substantiation rather than a secure foundation upon which one can build. One may observe, for example, that in spite of all its twentieth–century oil wealth, Arabia still does not possess such material and spiritual might. And at least as extraordinary is the disappearance of most past legacies in a wide area of the utmost diversity in languages, ethnicities, cultures, and religions. One of the most important developments in contemporary scholarship is the mounting evidence that these were not simply and suddenly swallowed up by Arabian Islam in the early seventh century, but this is precisely the picture that the Arabic historical sources of the third [Muslim] / ninth [C.E.] century present.” A little later, Bashear explicitly endorses the revisionist thesis that “the first/ seventh century witnessed two parallel, albeit initially separate processes: the rise of the Arab polity on the one hand, and the beginnings of a religious movement that eventually crystallized into Islam. It was only in the beginning of the second /eighth century and throughout it, and for reasons that have yet to be explained, that the two processes were fused, resulting in the birth of Arabian Islam as we know it, i.e. in the Islamization of the Arab polity and the Arabization of the new religion.” This Arabization of the new religion and the Islamization of the Arab polity is reflected in the attempts to stress the national Arabian identity of the prophet of Islam and of Arabic as the divine tool of revelation.
How can we characterize the situation in the year 2000? Even in the early eighties, a certain skepticism of the sources was fairly widespread; M. J. Kister was able to round off his survey of the sira literature that first appeared in 1983, with the following words: “The narratives of the Sirah have to be carefully and meticulously sifted in order to get at the kernel of historically valid information, which is in fact meagre and scanty.” If we can consider the new edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam as some kind of a yardstick of the prevailing scholarly opinion on the reliability of our sources for the life of the Prophet and the rise of Islam, then the situation is clearly negative. W. Raven in the entry for “sira” (Vol IX), written in the mid-nineteen nineties comes to this conclusion in an excellent survey of the sira material:
“The sira materials as a whole are so heterogeneous that a coherent image of the Prophet cannot be obtained from it. Can any of them be used at all for a historically reliable biography of Muhammad, or for the historiography of early Islam? Several arguments plead against it:
(1) Hardly any sira text can be dated back to the first century of Islam.
(2) The various versions of a text often show discrepancies, both in chronology and in contents.
(3) The later the sources are, the more they claim to know about the time of the Prophet.
(4) Non-Islamic sources are often at variance with Islamic sources (see P. Crone and M. Cook, Hagarism)
(5) Most sira fragments can be classed with one of the genres mentioned above. Pieces of salvation history and elaborations on Kuranic texts are unfit as sources for scientific historiography …”
For And Against Wansbrough
John Wansbrough, despite his meager output, more than any other scholar has, as Herbert Berg says, undermined all previous scholarship on the first three centuries of Islam. Many scholars continue as though nothing had changed, and carry on working along traditional lines taking the historical reliability of the exclusively Islamic sources for granted. Others, sometimes known as the revisionists, find Wansbrough’s methodology, at least, very fruitful. Thus we are left with an ever-widening gap between the two camps, nowhere more apparent than when those opposed, or even hostile, to Wansbrough’s work refused to contribute to a collection of essays devoted to the implications and achievements of his work.
Space forbids us to devote too much time to those scholars who have extended or have been influenced by Wansbrough’s work, such as Hawting, Calder, Rippin, Nevo, van Ess, Christopher Buck, and Claude Gilliot, amongst others. It would be just as well to interject a word of caution here: the scholars who have been influenced by Wansbrough do not necessarily and uncritically endorse every aspect of his theories, nor all would agree with Wansbrough’s late date for the establishment of the canonical Koran, for instance. The so–called disciples of Wansbrough far from being epigones are formidable and original scholars in their own right; and in true Popperian fashion would be prepared to abandon this or that aspect of the master’s theories should contrary evidence materialize. Nor do the scholars who do not accept Wansbrough’s conclusions necessarily blindly accept the traditional Muslim account of the Sira, the rise of Islam or the compilation of the Koran; John Burton, Gerd Puin, and Gunter Luling are some of the scholars in this latter category.
But now perhaps I should say something about recent articles or books challenging Wansbrough’s basic assumptions. One debate revolves round the person of Ibn Abbas, the cousin of the Prophet, and source of a great deal of exegetical material. Rippin sums up the arguments on both sides with admirable clarity:
“Wansbrough drew attention to a series of texts ascribed specifically to Ibn Abbas, all of them of a lexicographical nature. One of the roles of the figure of Ibn Abbas within the development of tafsir, according to Wansbrough’s argument, was bringing the language of the Quran into alignment with the language of the “Arabs” … Identity of the people as solidified through language and became a major ideological stance promulgated in such texts.
“Such an argument, however, depended upon a number of preceding factors, including the emergence of the Quran as authoritative, before it could be mounted. Such an argument could not have been contemporary with Ibn Abbas, who died in 687 C.E., but must stem from several centuries later. The ascription to Ibn Abbas was an appeal to authority in the past, to the family of the Prophet and to a name which was gathering an association with exegetical activity in general.”
Issa Boullata examines one such text attributed to Ibn Abbas, and argues “that the tradition which aligns Ibn Abbas with lexicographical matters related to the Quran is early, although it was clearly subject to elaboration as time went on ….But Boullata raises the crucial issue: ‘J. Wansbrough believes that the reference of rare or unknown Quranic words to the great corpus of early Arabic poetry is an exegetical method which is considerably posterior to the activity of Ibn Abbas’ Wh
