Atheism and Faitheism by Robert M. Price

Atheism and Faitheism by Robert M. Price

Author:Robert M. Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00


III. MUHAMMAD

For a long time scholars have considered Islamic origins as basically unproblematic. It seemed fairly straightforward: the founder was a figure of relatively recent history, amply documented, and many of his own writings and sayings survived. True, there had been a frenzy of fabrication, but early Muslim scholars themselves had seen this early on and moved to weed out spurious hadith (traditions of the founder’s sayings and deeds). What was left seemed ample enough, as did the text of the Koran, the revelation of Allah to Muhammad. Even if one could not confess with Muslims a belief in the divine inspiration (actually, dictation) of the Koran, one still agreed the text preserved the preachments of Muhammad. The most recent generation of students of Islam, however, have broken with this consensus. Günter Lüling is joined by many in his opinion that Western scholars of Islam and the Koran had simply accepted the official party line of Muslim jurists and theologians regarding the sources for Muhammad and early Islamic history. The game was certainly simpler that way, just as Church history had been before F.C. Baur. In fact, Western Islamicists had done everything but accept the Koran as the revealed Word of God. In retrospect one wonders why they balked at this last step! Perhaps the most systematic and explosive reconstruction of Islamic origins appeared over twenty years ago, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook (Cambridge UP, 1977). I will summarize their account here.

Islamic sources offer us a sanitized, party-line account of Islamic origins, one designed to provide a pedigree for a subsequent orthodoxy. Hence the tracks have been covered. If we want to get a critical look at Islamic origins we need to start with the evidence of contemporary non-Muslim reports and then see what light these sources throw on anomalous data surviving in Islamic sources.

It seems that Muhammad first appeared as the prophetic herald of ‘Umar (later revered and redefined as the second caliph after Muhammad) as the messiah. So we are told in two contemporary Jewish apocalypses. Some Jews were happy to recognize ‘Umar as the messiah, even though he was an Arab (an identification not unprecedented). He would shortly drive out the Byzantine/Roman/“Edomite” occupiers of Palestine, which, Crone and Cook maintain, was liberated, contra later traditions, already in Muhammad’s time.

The self-designation “Muslim” appears first on the Dome of the Rock in 691 CE and nowhere else till the late eighth century. Earlier sources call Muhammad’s believers the Magaritai (Greek papyrus 642) or Mahgre or Mahgraye (Syriac papyrus 640s). The Arabic would be muhajirun. The early believers were known as Hagarenes because they were engaged in a Hegira/Hijra, an Exodus like that of Moses from Arabia to Palestine, the Promised Land where the messiah must manifest himself. They were organized according to the biblical twelve tribes of the Ishmaelites. The land belonged to Abraham and his seed, which naturally meant Ishmael as well as Isaac, so an alliance of Jews and Arabs in a messianic conquest was natural.



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