In recent decades
it has become common in certain circles—often academic, sometimes popular—to
challenge the historicity of famous figures and seminal events. The most
well-known expression of this trend can be seen in those circles, skeptical and
sometimes openly atheistic, that have taken the “search for the historical
Jesus” to an extreme, calling into question whether a historical Jesus existed
at all. The “Jesus Seminar” is a perfect example of this skeptical and even
sensationalist approach. The general argumentation of this sort is centered on
attacking the early Christian sources, citing the temporal distance of the
Gospels and other writings from the early first century and the heavily biased
nature of these texts as reasons to doubt the very existence of Jesus and to
suspect he was merely a character invented to justify a particular theology,
rather than the actual progenitor of it.
The skeptical
cacophony has reached enough of a crescendo that Bart Ehrman, a leading New
Testament scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill, recently published Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
(HarperOne, 2012), a defense of the historical existence of Jesus. Ehrman is
certainly no fundamentalist—in fact, he has publicly identified himself as an
agnostic—and in this new work he is fully aware of the biases and pitfalls
inherent in the early Christian sources. Yet despite these obvious issues he
still demonstrates the overwhelming evidence for the historicity of Jesus, even
if he does portray a rather different figure than the one depicted in the
Gospels.
A similar series
of works have appeared that attempt to work the same kind of radical historical
revisionism on the early history of Islam, focusing on the person of Muhammad
and the text of the Qur’an, including Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd R. Puin’s The
Hidden Origins of Islam, Hans Jensen’s Mohammed:
Eine Biographie, and an entire body of work by Ibn Warraq. The present work
under consideration, Robert Spencer’s Did
Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins (ISI, 2012) is the
latest and perhaps most provocative of these books.
Spencer is a
controversial figure, being the founder of Jihad Watch and author of a number
of works deeply critical of Islam, including The Truth about Muhammad, The
Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, and The Idiot’s Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). In many ways, this
new book is a continuation of his early forays against Islam, and is also a
direct outgrowth of many of the similar works listed above. The very title of
the work is quite provocative given the stature Muhammad has as a historical
figure, much less his critical religious importance to global Islamic
communities. Yet this is in keeping with the tenor of Spencer’s previous forays
into Islamic studies; he has been bold, brash, and unafraid to make unpopular
assertions before, and this work does not deviate from that mold.
Spencer justifies
the need for his book by claiming that the history of Islam’s origins has not
been subject to “historical criticism on any significant scale” (p. 3). This claim
is somewhat bewildering. It is true that the Qur’an and the other early Islamic
sources have not been subject to the voluminous historical-critical studies
that have examined the Old and New Testaments over the past three centuries,
but the body of Western scholarly literature on the Islamic sources is still
extensive and ever-expanding. Critical treatments of the Qur’an and other early
Islamic sources began to appear in Germany and Belgium in the mid-19th century,
a trend that continues through our own day. A number of excellent scholarly
works have appeared recently, including ones by such scholars as Fred Donner,
Robert Hoyland, Walter Kaegi, and Chase Robinson, among many others. Spencer’s
list of works for further reading (pp. 239-40) provides only a tiny fraction of
the scholarly work currently in print. So his charge that his book’s critical
approach is something new is unfounded. Critical studies of Islamic sources
have long existed; what is new is Spencer’s particular conclusion about those
sources.
What can we know about the past?
Much like those
skeptical and atheist critiques of
the historicity of Jesus, Spencer’s arguments about Muhammad hinge upon a
serious reevaluation of the earliest sources of Islam. (I do not mean to imply
that Mr. Spencer is an atheist or agnostic; from what I understand, he is an
avowed Catholic. I only intend to note that his methodology is quite similar to
those used by those atheist and agnostic critics of early Christianity.) His
coverage of those sources is, laudably, quite comprehensive, making use of
relevant textual, archaeological, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence. Yet the
problem with Spencer’s approach is not the sources that he uses, but how he
goes about using them. This work is fatally flawed by numerous logical
fallacies and poor source criticism.
One of the basic
problems of historical studies is epistemological; what can we know about the
past? Leopold von Ranke, the 19th-century German scholar and founder of modern
historical studies, posited that the goal of history is to determine “what
actually happened,” and with his contemporaries believed that historical
investigation could objectively determine all manner of historical fact to a degree
of scientific precision. This search for an absolute, objective knowledge of
the past has proven elusive, largely due to the nature of the evidence. Historical
sources are unlike evidence produced by scientific experimentation, since we
cannot control the nature of the sources we possess as one can control certain
aspects of a physical experiment. Historians must contend with a number of
potential problems with their sources, especially those related to the most
ancient past. We only possess a tiny fraction of written works produced in the
ancient world, and in many cases what we have is fragmentary and has been
changed and varied during the course of transmission.
Often these
materials reflect various aspects of human fallibility; the authors possess
conscious or unconscious biases, have limited knowledge or perspective, or
simply make mistakes. Sometimes the sources give us a wide view of contemporary
events, but in many cases they provide only a small, fleeting glimpse of a
historical episode, and these episodes must be integrated into a larger
historical framework. In short, the job of a historian is not an easy one, and
requires very careful treatment of the surviving evidence. But this task is not
impossible. Despite whatever distortions may exist within the source material,
there is real historical data that may be gleaned. Bias does not equal
fabrication, and imperfections do not negate an entire text.
Such limitations
are particularly acute in the period Islam developed. The seventh century saw a
procession of cataclysms throughout the Mediterranean world, a “world-crisis,”
as historian James Howard-Johnston has rightly named it. The century began with
a titanic war between the Byzantine and Persian Empires (602-628), with the
Islamic Invasions immediately subsequent. The Persian Empire, itself highly
cultured and a worthy rival to the Byzantines, disappeared under the deluge of
Arab armies, and the Byzantine Empire only barely survived, losing 60 percent
of its territory and undergoing a major social, political, and military
transformation in the process. It was truly a Dark Age in every sense, so it is
little wonder that we possess only a small amount of evidence, and what
evidence we have reflects the confusion and chaos inherent in the period.
Misused sources, mistaken conclusions
Spencer takes
many of these limited sources and uses them in an illogical manner. In the first
several chapters of the book, Spencer’s favored methodology is the “argument
from silence”: if Muhammad, Islam, and the Qur’an are not specifically
mentioned in the contemporary sources, then they must not have existed in any
recognizable form. Yet, as the old cliché goes, absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence. A prominent example of his poor source criticism involves
the Doctrina Jacobi, a Christian
anti-Semitic work dateable from the mid to late 630s, the exact period that
Arab armies were conquering Palestine. It contains a brief reference to
violence done by the Arab marauders, and most significantly, to an unnamed
prophet who had riled up the Arabs into their assault into Christian territory.
Most scholars regard this as a direct reference to Muhammad, but Spencer notes
that the name “Muhammad” does not appear in the text, and that there are a
number of other details that do not match up with the traditional story and
theology of early Islam.
For example, the Doctrina implies that this prophet was
still alive, though Muhammad reportedly died in 632, before the Doctrina’s composition. The text also states that the unnamed prophet possessed “the keys of
paradise,” a doctrine not present in Islamic theology (pp. 21-22). Spencer uses
these issues to call into question the traditional Islamic story, when it is
more logical to question the Doctrina!
In the context of the sudden and surprising Arab invasions, can we really
expect a Christian writer to know the full details of contemporary Arabian
affairs, or accurately relate the theology of some prophet appearing out the
deepest deserts of Arabia?
This same kind of
problem manifests itself in all of the other seventh-century Christian sources
that Spencer uses, from Sophronius of Jerusalem, to the Armenian History of
Pseudo-Sebeos, to John of Nikiu. They are all near-contemporary to Muhammad,
but none of them mention Muhammad, Islam, or the Qur’an by name. What
references to Islam they include are oblique and do not seem to match up with
the traditional Islamic story. But again, it is it reasonable to expect
Christian writers to have an accurate knowledge of contemporary Islamic history
and thought? Or to expect they would be objective and accurate if they did
possess such knowledge? Given the chaotic nature of the age, it seems not.
Spencer’s use of
inscriptions is likewise flawed. If an early Islamic inscription does not
mention Muhammad, then in Spencer’s mind he must not have existed. But these
inscriptions are extremely episodic in nature, and are designed to bring praise
to a particular Islamic ruler, so why would we expect Muhammad to be mentioned
in this setting? So our sources for the seventh century are few and imperfect,
but they do not give us any immediate reason to doubt the existence of
Muhammad.
The earliest full
accounts of Muhammad’s life do not appear until well into the eighth century,
over a century after the death of the Prophet. The most important of these is
Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat rasul Allah, which,
in its ninth-century redaction, became the standard source for information
about the life of Muhammad. Spencer is deeply skeptical of any source that is
not contemporary or near-contemporary to the events described, such as Ibn
Ishaq, or al-Tabari, the author of an important 10th-century chronicle.
Spencer makes the
mistake of assuming that temporal distance equals historical distortion within
the text. This is a standard polemical trope, one often used as an atheist critique
of the Christian Gospels. However, there are numerous cases in the ancient
world where our only sources were written decades and centuries after the fact,
but still contain a great deal of accurate material. This is due to the fact
that many ancient authors had access to sources that have not otherwise
survived. Al-Tabari had access to a number of very good sources regarding
pre-Islamic and early Islamic history that no longer exist. The same seems true
for Ibn Ishaq, who relied upon a number of earlier biographic works on
Muhammad.
This is not to
say there are not serious difficulties regarding these sources. Both al-Tabari
and Ibn Ishaq rely heavily on hadith,
traditional sayings and actions attributed to the Prophet and largely passed
down via oral transmission. Spencer rightly notes that hadith were often distorted for partisan purposes, and the accuracy
of oral tradition can legitimately be questioned. The incorporation of
legendary tales, such as miracle stories, is also troubling for Spencer, and he
determines that the inclusion of such tall-tales means these sources are not
“straight-forward historical records” (p. 121) and are “folk tales” (p. 122). He
also makes the obvious point that such stories are told to set apart Muhammad
as an “exceptional human being” (p. 123), an indication of a clear bias towards
Muhammad and his divinely appointed mission. This much is certainly true. But
Spencer would take these natural difficulties and use them to mark such sources
as “unreliable,” and throw them out completely. If this were a reasonable
historical standard then all the ancient sources we possess are suspect, and we
can know nothing about the past. Being critical of these sources is perfectly
appropriate, but casting them aside completely is not reasonable.
A revisionist, dubious history of early
Islam
Having disposed
of the traditional Islamic sources, and Muhammad with them, Spencer then turns
toward creating a revisionist history of early Islam. He first explains the
Qur’anic text away as an Arabic redaction of a Syriac Christian lectionary, not
a wholly original work composed in Arabic. Here he is, quite admittedly,
following the philological work of Christoph Luxenberg. However, Luxenberg’s
work has been widely panned by the larger scholarly community as being
methodologically faulty. Spencer then attempts to re-date the codification of
the Qur’an from the caliphate of Uthman (644-656) to that of the Umayyad caliph
Abd al-Malik (685-705), based upon several minority hadiths. All of this is with an ultimate view to placing the emergence
of an identifiable Islamic theology and history well into the mid-eighth
century, over a century after the Prophet’s death. Spencer argues that Islam
(and Muhammad) as we know it only appeared as a means of providing a
theological explanation for the political and military successes of the Arabs
in the preceding century, a kind of theology-after-the-fact (p. 214).
But none of this
answers a fundamental question: what exactly happened to transform the Arab
peoples from a series of disparate, un-advanced tribes into the unified
juggernaut that laid low the Byzantine and Persian Empires in the seventh
century? The traditional Islamic narrative provides an explanation, albeit a
problematic one. Spencer’s revision, other than some notion of a vague “Abrahamic
monotheism” does not provide an adequate answer. But that is not his purpose
here; rather, he seeks to tear down a historical figure and his story, not
build one up.
The issues
mentioned here are only a few of the more glaring shortcomings in this work. In
short, Spencer explains away the canonical story of Muhammad, the Qur’an, and
early Islam, and the very figure of Muhammad himself, by throwing out the large
number of supporting sources based upon poor source criticism, while offering a
thinly supported revisionist picture in return. There should be no doubt there
is much in the traditional story of Muhammad and the formation of Islam that is
questionable. The sources we possess are few, chaotic in nature, heavily
redacted, and often have an unquestionable bias, so there is much room for real
source criticism, scholarly debate, and historical revisionism. But this work
goes to an extreme in its disregard for proper source criticism, and its
arguments have more in common with those skeptical and atheist critics of early
Christianity than with the best of modern historical scholarship.
Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into
Islam’s Obscure Origins
by Robert Spencer
Intercollegiate
Studies Institute (2012)
254 pages