Some comments by Morris from a discussion below this blogpost:
http://www.iandavidmorris.com/misspelling-muhammad-why-robert-spencer-is-wrong-about-thomas-presbyter/....
Moving on. The basic problem in early Islamic history isn’t that Muslim testimony is always and everywhere unreliable – though all testimony is tendentious. The problem is that we rely too much on very late sources, and too little on earlier sources. Hoyland’s right that non-Muslims shared space with ‘Muslims’ (or however we should call them) in the seventh century, so they must have been in conversation. That’s good news for “us historians”, surely: it dissolves the false categories of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ and offers hope that our earliest sources might not be too distant from the events they describe.
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It’s true that we know little about the ‘Muslims’ of the seventh century, so the ways that they constructed and interpreted their collective history are obscure to us. And yet we do have (near-)contemporaneous sources that agree on important ‘facts’ with later sources. One of those ‘facts’ is that there was a leader of the Arabs called Muhammad. He was glossed by pseudo-Sebeos as a militant preacher, and arguably by the Doctrina Iacobi as a militant prophet. These, taken together with later epigraphic and numismatic sources and even later literary sources, can be best – most parsimoniously – read as attesting the existence of a religio-political leader of the early Arab conquests. What he meant, and what exactly he did where and how, are all contestable, but I haven’t seen a compelling challenge to Muhammad’s existence tout court.
Hoyland’s article “Writing the Biography of the Prophet Muhammad” is a helpful overview, if I remember correctly.
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I don’t see how Bar Penkaye implies a bloodless conquest. I also don’t see why non-Arabic sources should invoke the word jihad specifically, though some of them do interpret the Arabs as fighting for a religious cause. It’s notable that many of our early sources call the Arabs muhajirun, ’emigrants’, cohering nicely with those archaic Arabic traditions that praise the twin duties of migration and jihad. Now, whether the word jihad was used at the time isn’t obvious – though I think it was –; but it’s reasonable to infer that a culture of militant colonialism did prevail in the seventh century, coded in a monotheistic idiom.
Carbon dating isn’t as reliable as you’re making out. Alba Fedeli gave a brilliant paper to a conference recently, insisting that – when done well, which it often isn’t – carbon dating should be applied alongside other kinds of evidence; she also criticised scholars and journalists for broadcasting preliminary results as though they were solid facts – because #science. (Hopefully that paper will be published in the proceedings.) It’s generally understood that our earliest fragments date to around ‘Abd al-Malik’s reign. François Déroche’s book, Qur’ans of the Umayyads, is useful on this topic.
Basic questions – who compiled the qur’anic texts, where to situate specific passages within Late Antique literature, how the corpus connects to Muhammad – are still unknown. I would like to react to that word ‘anterior’, though. While the qur’anic texts clearly do draw on older materials (how could they not?), they refashion these materials in interesting ways. In any case, they apparently represent a community or communities familiar with (para)biblical (oral?) literature, composing and redacting in Arabic, presumably during the seventh century: these texts can be located roughly in the broad sweep of history. And they do mention Muhammad, which isn’t nothing. But I’m fairly agnostic on how to interpret the Qur’an.
If you demand eyewitness testimony for historical figures, very well. Your history is then a vacuum haunted by empty discourses. You and I have nothing meaningful to discuss: I can’t follow you down that epistemological rabbit hole.
I have to stand up for the Arabic historical tradition here. It’s deeply flawed. It bears the marks of a long transmission, with excessive narrativisation and rationalisation. Yet it was not invented from nothing. It remembers people and tribes with a surprising degree of accuracy, coherent with numismatic, epigraphic and non-Arabic evidence. Political history is possible. In order to do away with Muhammad entirely, we’d have to undo the entire tradition. That’s neither proportionate nor parsimonious.
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Book 15 of Bar Penkaye describes the “sons of Hagar” as invaders whose “delight was in shedding blood without reason, and its pleasure laying hands on everything. Its passion was raiding and stealing, and its food hatred and anger; it was never appeased by offerings made to it. When it had prospered…, it had taken possession of all the kingdoms of the earth, had subjected brutally all the peoples and brought their sons and daughters into a bitter slavery, … and the blood of the martyrs of Christ shed…” etc.
The shorter statement at the end of Book 14 – “not with any war or battle” – exaggerates to convey the ease with which the Arabs seized territory: “How, otherwise, could naked men, riding without armour or shield, have been able to win, apart from divine aid[?]”, he asks. It’s a rhetorical question, as is the almost immediate counterpoint, “Who can relate the carnage they effected[?]”. This is an interesting literary device, so thanks for drawing my attention to it, but it’s not to be understood literally.
On the Nessana papyri, I agree with Rachel Stroumsa’s comments in her doctoral dissertation (pp. 6-7):
“‘A people without a history’ – so [C.J.] Kraemer [a modern editor] calls the inhabitants of Nessana, with more than a touch of disparagement (or even contempt). By that, Kraemer means that the papyri do not reflect or comment upon the great movements of armies and the change of the political map of the Levant and the Mediterranean in the seventh century. … This attitude is a corollary of the focus on great men and grand movements which dominated history in general and Classics in particular in the 1950’s. With the changes introduced by the French Medievalists of the so-called New History school, the emphasis changed to a focus on society as the proper subject of historical research, rather than events. This new focus obviously lent itself well to the wealth of documentary evidence pouring out of Egypt… Thus what to Kraemer and his contemporaries was a liability – namely, the internal, micro-historical nature of the Nessana documents – can be seen as an asset. Since the inhabitants of Nessana were not members of the higher echelons of Palestinian society – in contradistinction to the wealthy and more sophisticated burghers seen in the papyri of Petra – they give us a chance to glimpse lives which are often unknown, and to examine the importance attached to different allegiances and groupings in circles that did not fall under elite or highly literate influence.”
We shouldn’t expect local administrative documents to tell us about battles: that’s not what they’re for.
The problem of archaeological evidence deserves a real conversation, which I’m not able to have right now. It’s enough to make three points. First, the Middle East is a difficult region in which to excavate, so we’ve rather little to go on. Second, archaeologists have tended to privilege Roman layers, destroying Islamic layers in the process, so even those sites that have been excavated have turned up less than we might have hoped. And third, the Arabs – unlike the Sasanians in the early seventh century – had little strategic interest in the sort of military and urban activity that might have left a rich archaeological legacy. They took slaves and booty, but then it was more profitable to extract taxes than to raze cities; as mobile garrisons they settled in tented communities (a fustat is a tent!), but only slowly developed these into permanent cities.
I meant to imply that doctrines were among the materials reshaped in the process of composition and recension that produced the Qur’an. I’m not a specialist on the Qur’an, but I’ve never seen colleagues suggest that the qur’anic texts can be placed before 543. Have you? I suspect many of the intertexts we’ve identified are most comfortably situated in the seventh century.
Jeremy Johns argues that early professions of ‘Islamic’ religiosity were sponsored by the imperial state, which had only come to fruition under ‘Abd al-Malik; Robert Hoyland responds that an imperial state with the requisite resources did already exist, but simply had “no pressing need to proclaim publicly the tenets of their belief. ‘Abd al-Malik did so because he was fighting to hold the polity together, trying to rally the Muslim community behind him and to find a rationale for their continued existence together in the face of a debilitating civil war”. Either of these, or another explanation entirely, may explain the shortage of Arabic references to Muhammad. Pastoralist raiders don’t keep diaries. The argument from silence would be thin even if there were silence, which there isn’t: Muhammad is attested already by the mid-seventh century.
I’ve already explained that your impossible standard for evidence is one that effectively dissolves all of history into collective myth. Your answer was to restate your original position, with some Greek thrown in. I was not impressed: τὸ δὶς ἐξαμαρτεῖν οὐκ ἀνδρὸς σοφοῦ. I won’t be answering any more assertions along that vein.
You’ve not listened carefully to what Déroche says in that video (for which, thanks). He says we can date Qur’anic fragments from the third quarter of the seventh century, and he dismisses those numbers you’ve given for Sanaa – “c’est pas possible” – because he knows that carbon dating is often spurious, and that we should integrate its results with other kinds of evidence. He considers the Sanaa fragments to be Umayyad, which is why he treats them in Qur’ans of the Umayyads: “the problem may lie with the conditions (arid or semi-arid climate) under which the cattle, the hides of which were later turned into parchment, was raised. … I would therefore suggest on the basis of the various points I enumerated that the Codex Ṣanʿāʾ I was written during the second half of the first/seventh century and erased at the earliest by the middle of the following century.”
I’ve explained that carbon dating is iffy, and I’ve advised you to read what Déroche has to say on that matter in Qur’ans of the Umayyads. This right here is me underlining those points in the hope that you’ll seriously think about them.
Follow the link for links within the text (and the other side of the argument).
Topic: Qur'anic studies today