Islamic origins and early awareness of Christianity

In the original version of the Cambridge History of the Bible, C. F. Evans described the uniqueness of Christianity among world religions as like its being born with a Bible in its cradle. Extending the metaphor, Islam's own singular feature was to be born into the family of Abraham, the youngest of three siblings. The fact is celebrated in the Qurʾān: ‘We sent Jesus, son of Mary, in their footsteps, to confirm the Torah that had been sent before him: We gave him the Gospel with guidance, light and confirmation of the Torah already revealed – a guide and lesson for those who take heed of God’ (5: 46). In another passage (9:111), the Qurʾān, the Gospel and the Torah are mentioned together, each said to bear and fulfil the true promise of the almighty. These verses depict a historical sequence of sacred texts revealed or inspired by the one, unique, divine source. Notwithstanding the supposed unity of the grand monotheistic tradition, it is hardly surprising that family differences would break out between (and even among) descendants of the primordial three. The present chapter explores the more prominent controversies between the two younger members of the family, Christianity and Islam.

Scholarly debates over recent years concerning the origins of Islam require first a brief outline of some of the issues raised as they affect (or do not affect) the initial stage of controversies between Christians and Muslims. Two broad strands of thought are usually identified, the traditionalist and the revisionist. Because the debates arise over scholars’ different evaluations of the earliest Arabic historical sources that purport to record the origins of Islam, the two sides have also been designated ‘sanguine’ and ‘sceptical’ respectively.

Introduction: the inheritors

The fourth/tenth-century traveller and geographer al-Muqaddasῑ (d. c. 390/1000) observed laconically that the inhabitants of central Arabia were both ‘frugal and emaciated, so little nourished are they by food’. In the account of his travels through nineteenth-century Arabia Deserta, Doughty noted that the ‘Arab can live for long months so slenderly nourished that it seems to us they endure without food’. While one cautions against assuming that conditions remained static over the intervening millennium, both comments strikingly reflect a mood found in Muslim ‘recollections’ of their early community. This introduction, impressionistic as it must be, attempts to capture basic features of the Arab food culture before the rise to prominence of the major urban centres of the emerging Islamic tradition in the provinces of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Persia and beyond.

First, central Arabia in the Prophet’s lifetime experienced a relative scarcity of food resources, and hence its fellow traveller, hunger. The Prophet Muḥammad was once asked, ‘We live in a land where we are afflicted by hunger, so when may we eat animals which have died a natural death?’ The tradition (ḥadῑth) is making a legal point concerning meat not ritually slaughtered. Implicitly it also touches on a familiar problem of scarcity and necessity. The Prophet answered, ‘As long as you have neither a morning or evening drink [presumably milk] or gather vegetables you may eat them.

The reader who comes fresh to the subject of Islam, with or without a prior interest in any of the great contemporary religious traditions, will find the literature on Islam bewildering in its sheer quantity and varied in its quality and apparent aim. Any casual reader of the dailypress, or television viewer for that matter, will realize that Islam plays an important role in many parts of the globe, whether in the trouble-torn former republic of Yugoslavia, in the Muslim states of Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, and Algeria, or even in the (post-Christian?) secular society of modern-day Britain in the aftermath of the so-called Rushdie Affair and the decree of the late Ayatullah Khumayni against the author and the publishers of The Satanic Verses. Over the past fifteen years or so, books on Islamic history and thought and on the current phenomenon of Islam in politics have become a growth sector in the publishing world. Only a tiny portion of this output can be cited in the notes and list of further reading below. In this excursus discussion is restricted to a selection of works in English dealing with the question of Islamic origins, since much important, original – and controversial – work has been done in recent years on this subject.

THE TRAVELER

In the summer of 725/1325 a young man set out for Mecca from his birthplace, Tangiers, in present-day Morocco. The initial aim of the journey (rihlah) was to perform the pilgrimage. The traveler who undertook the rihlah often combined this religious objective with trade to finance the trip, with scholarly pursuits, or with professional posts such as that of judge or teacher in cities along the way. Rarely have such globe-trotters left accounts of their activities to posterity. In the present instance, however, the young scholar who would become celebrated in world travel literature as Ibn Battutah broke the mold of the traditional rihlah, combining his religious obligation with a remarkable thirst for adventure. He fulfilled his pilgrimage duty in the same year and then embarked upon a grand tour which did not bring him back to his native land until a quarter of a century later. He dictated his “description of the world” to a fellow scholar and died in Morocco in either 770/1368 or 779/1377.

Ibn Battutah possibly saw more of the eighth-/fourteenth-century world than any other traveler of his day. From North Africa his journeys took him to Mecca and Medina, thence to the Yemen, Mogadishu, and the trading posts of East Africa, Oman, and the Persian Gulf, across Asia Minor (or Anatolia) and then on through Persia and Afghanistan to Delhi, where he lived for several years.

TIME, ETERNITY AND THE GODS

The religious and moral values of the ancient Arabs are mirrored, however partially, in the verses of their poets. Among them was Zuhayr b. Abi Salma, who flourished in the last days of paganism before the emergence of Islam in central Arabia in the seventh century. Toward the end of a long and often turbulent life he recorded these cautionary words in a famous ode:

Zuhayr was reflecting upon the attempts of conciliators to terminate an eruption of inter-tribal bloodshed. Traditional accounts portray these conflicts, the so-called Days of the Arabs, as a common feature of Arabian society of the period. His warning to each side in the conflict was to enter an agreement in good faith, for the inevitable consequence of deception would be punishment of the betrayer.

The poet's reference to Allah (al-ilah = the God) contradicted neither his pagan values nor the poem's pessimistic pagan ethos. Elsewhere he remarks,

ALI'S PARTISANS

A few weeks before his death, the Prophet Muhammad set out for Mecca to perform the pilgrimage. This event is known in Islamic tradition as the Farewell Pilgrimage. On the return journey to Medina, he and his followers stopped at a place called Ghadir Khumm. Shaded by palm fronds from the mid-day sun, Muhammad addressed his companions. He took ʿAli b. Abi Talib by the hand, raised it before the assembly and said, “Everyone whose patron I am, also has ʿAli as a patron. O Allah, befriend every friend of ʿAli and be the enemy of all his enemies; help those that aid him and abandon all who desert him.” Ibn Ishaq does not mention Ghadir Khumm in his biography of the Prophet. The event is recorded several times, however, in Sunni Tradition literature, including the account given here transmitted by the great traditionist Ahmad b. Hanbal.

Muhammad's affection and support for ʿAli were evident to all. They were cousins and ʿAli was married to the Prophet's daughter, Fatimah. Muhammad, who had no surviving male heir, is said to have loved his two grandsons, al-Hasan and al-Husayn, dearly. Moreover, Ibn Ishaq notes that the youthful ʿAli had been brought up in Muhammad's care, and was the first male to believe in him and accept his message.

Work on the first edition of this volume began nearly a decade ago. My intention then was to portray the foundations, teachings and practices of the Islamic tradition in a manner which would provide the reader with insight into both the rich and complex tradition itself and the ways it has encountered the modern world and evolved along with it. That narrative of the long transformation of Muslim societies began in the eighteenth century and ended in the early 1980s following upon the Iranian revolution of 1979. The narrative was naturally incomplete as the historical transformation was by then, even as it is today, an ongoing, unfinished process.

Then 9/11 occurred. As a result many people said, “everything has changed,” “nothing will ever be the same.” What that reflected in practice, at least among populations living in Europe and North America, was fear for the immediate present and, as time has passed, a continued, perhaps growing, anxiety for the future – especially in the wake of further terrorist attacks in Bali, Kenya, and Moscow. Yet, driven from most peoples' minds was a memory of the years immediately preceding 9/11. At best, a highly selective recollection of events occurred. This included the traumatic seizure of western hostages in Iran and Lebanon or, more positively, the collapse of the Soviet Union that ended the Cold War with the West or the triumph over Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War following his invasion of Kuwait.