This is one of the most-visited posts from the predecessor blog to this one (originally posted 01/22/2003)
Source Criticism: A book I’ve had on my desk for the past few months is Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. With its publication in 1977, Crone and Cook scandalized the world of Islamic studies by adopting as their operating thesis that no Islamic sources for the study of the early history of Islam could be trusted, being irretrievably corrupted with apologetics and hagiography, and setting out to construct an alternate history based solely on external (Greek, etc.) sources. The results were, as you might guess, extremely controversial.
In their first chapter, “Judeo-Hagarism,” the authors examine the first two non-Muslim references to the rise of Islam: the Doctrina Iacobi (circa 634 C.E.) and the Armenian Chronicle (circa 660 C.E.) attributed to Bishop Sebeos. The gist of their argument is well summed up in the following passage from The Bible and the Koran by Jay Smith, online at the Muslim-Christian Debate Website, sponsored by the London-based Hyde Park Christian fellowship:
Therefore we must go back to the seventh century itself and ascertain what documents are available with which we can corroborate the reliability of the Qur’an.
(1) Doctrina Iacobi and 661 Chronicler: Two seventh century documents at our disposal are helpful here:
a) the Doctrina Iacobi, the earliest testimony of Muhammad and of his “movement” available to us outside Islamic tradition; a Greek anti-Jewish tract which was written in Palestine between 634 and 640 A.D. (Brock 1982:9; Crone-Cook 1977:3), and
b) a chronicle supposedly written by Sebeos in 660 A.D. Both of these documents deal with the relationship between the Arabs and Jews in the seventh century.
The Qur’an implies that Muhammad severed his relationship with the Jews in 624 A.D. (or soon after the Hijra in 622 A.D.), and thus moved the direction of prayer, the Qibla at that time from Jerusalem to Mecca (Sura 2:144, 149-150). The early non-Muslim sources, however, depict a good relationship between the Muslims and Jews at the time of the first conquests (late 620s A.D.), and even later. Yet the Doctrina Iacobi warns of the Jews who mix with the Saracens,’ and the danger to life and limb of falling into the hands of these Jews and Saracens’ (Bonwetsch 1910:88; Cook 1983:75). In fact, this relationship seems to carry right on into the conquest as an early Armenian source mentions that the governor of Jerusalem in the aftermath of the conquest was a Jew (Patkanean 1879:111; Sebeos 1904:103).
What is significant here is the possibility that Jews and Arabs (Saracens) seem to be allied together during the time of the conquest of Palestine and even for a short time after (Crone-Cook 1977:6).
If these witnesses are correct than one must ask how it is that the Jews and Saracens (Arabs) are allies as late as 640 A.D., when, according to the Qur’an, Muhammad severed his ties with the Jews as early as 624 A.D., more than 15 years earlier?
To answer that we need to refer to the earliest connected account of the career of the prophet, that given in an Armenian chronicle from around 660 A.D., which is ascribed by some to Bishop Sebeos (Sebeos 1904:94-96; Crone-Cook 1977:6). The chronicler describes how Muhammad established a community which comprised both Ishmaelites (i.e. Arabs) and Jews, and that their common platform was their common descent from Abraham; the Arabs via Ishmael, and the Jews via Isaac (Sebeos 1904:94-96; Crone-Cook 1977:8; Cook 1983:75). The chronicler believed Muhammad had endowed both communities with a birthright to the Holy Land, while simultaneously providing them with a monotheist genealogy (Crone-Cook 1977:8). This is not without precedent as the idea of an Ishmaelite birthright to the Holy Land was discussed and rejected earlier in the Genesis Rabbah (61:7), in the Babylonian Talmud and in the Book of Jubilees (Crone-Cook 1977:159).
Here we find a number of non-Muslim documentary sources contradicting the Qur’an, maintaining that there was a good relationship between the Arabs and Jews for at least a further 15 years beyond that which the Qur’an asserts.
A few additional juicy details that Crone and Cook supply:
– the Doctrina Iacobi says that the “false prophet who has appeared among the Saracens . . . is proclaiming the advent of the anointed one who is to come.” (And yep, that’s xhristou in the Greek.) Most un-Islamic, but reminiscent of John the B. and the whole tradition of Jewish messianism.
And who could “the one who is to come” be? Crone and Cook point out another interesting detail:
‘Umar, the second caliph and the military leader who lead the victorious Arabs into Jerusalem, bore the epithet of al-faruq, which in Aramaic means . . . the Redeemer. When eventually the original Aramaic sense of the term had been successfully forgotten, it acquired a harmless Arabic and was held to have been conferred by the Prophet himself. An earlier view attempted a historical rather than an etymological evasion: it was the people of the book who called Umar “the faruq“, and the appellation somehow slipped onto the tongues of the Muslims.
(The details are consigned to the footnotes here, where they are incomprehensible to non-Arabophones anyway.) But, as Crone and Cook conclude, “If there is contemporary evidence that the Prophet was preaching the coming of the messiah, it can hardly be fortuitous that the man who subsequently came bears even in the Islamic tradition a transparently messianic title.”
The entirety of Sebeos’ History is available online here. The passage describing the appearance of Mohammed is in Chapter 30:
Twelve peoples [representing] all the tribes of the Jews assembled at the city of Edessa. When they saw that the Iranian troops had departed leaving the city in peace, they closed the gates and fortified themselves. They refused entry to troops of the Roman lordship. Thus Heraclius, emperor of the Byzantines, gave the order to besiege it. When [the Jews] realized that they could not militarily resist him, they promised to make peace. Opening the city gates, they went before him, and [Heraclius] ordered that they should go and stay in their own place. So they departed, taking the road through the desert to Tachkastan [Arabia] to the sons of Ishmael. [The Jews] called [the Arabs] to their aid and familiarized them with the relationship they had through the books of the [Old] Testament. Although [the Arabs] were convinced of their close relationship, they were unable to get a consensus from their multitude, for they were divided from each other by religion. In that period a certain one of them, a man of the sons of Ishmael named Muhammad, became prominent. A sermon about the Way of Truth, supposedly at God’s command, was revealed to them, and [Muhammad] taught them to recognize the God of Abraham, especially since he was informed and knowledgeable about Mosaic history. Because the command had come from on High, he ordered them all to assemble together and to unite in faith. Abandonning the reverence of vain things, they turned toward the living God, who had appeared to their father–Abraham. Muhammad legislated that they were not to [123] eat carrion, not to drink wine, not to speak falsehoods, and not to commit adultery. He said: “God promised that country to Abraham and to his son after him, for eternity. And what had been promised was fulfilled during that time when [God] loved Israel. Now, however, you are the sons of Abraham, and God shall fulfill the promise made to Abraham and his son on you. Only love the God of Abraham, and go and take the country which God gave to your father Abraham. No one can successfully resist you in war, since God is with you”.
Then all of them assembled together, from Havilah to Shur, which is opposite Egypt, and they set out from the P’arhan desert [being] twelve tribes [moving] in the order [of precedence] of the Houses of the patriarchs of their tribe. They were divided into 12,000 men, of which the sons of Israel were in their own tribes, 1,000 to a tribe, to lead them to the country of Israel. They travelled army by army in the order [of precedence] of each patriarchy: Nebaioth, Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Dumah, Massa, Hadad, Tema, Jetur, Naphish and Kedemah [Genesis 25. 13-16]. These are the peoples of Ishmael. They reached Moabite Rabbath, at the borders of Ruben’s [land]. The Byzantine army was encamped in Arabia. [The Arabs] fell upon them suddenly, struck them with the sword and put to flight emperor Heraclius’ brother, T’eodos. Then they turned and encamped in Arabia.
All the remnants of the sons of Israel then assembled and united, becoming a large force. After this they dispatched a message to the Byzantine emperor, saying: “God gave that country as the inherited property of Abraham and of his sons after him. We are the sons of Abraham. It is too much that you hold our country. Leave in peace, and we shall demand from you what you have seized, plus interest”. The emperor rejected this.
And you can guess how things started turning out after this.
But suddenly the men in the ambuscades sprung from their places and fell upon them. Awe of the Lord came over the Byzantine troops, and they turned in flight before them. But they were unable to flee because of the quicksand which buried them to the legs. There was great anxiety caused by the heat of the sun and the enemy’s sword was upon them. All the generals fell and perished. More than 2,000 men were slain. A few survivors fled to the place of refuge.
[The Arabs] crossed the Jordan and encamped at Jericho. Then dread of them came over the inhabitants of the country, and all of them submitted. That night the Jerusalemites took the Cross of the Lord and all the vessels of the churches of God, and fled with them by boat to the palace at Constantinople. [The Jerusalemites] requested an oath [from the Arabs] and then submitted.
Let’s get this straight. The army that took Jerusalem from the Eastern Roman Empire was a combined Arab-Jewish force. Hardly the received version of events.
Comments 3
This is, on the face of it, a perfectly reasonable account of the origins of Islam in relation to Jewish sects and heresies. This was, after all, the origin of Christianity too, a few hundred years earlier, as Gibbon pointed out. The geopolitics of it are also quite convincing.
Posted 24 Dec 2005 at 8:32 am ¶What at first seems surprising is the thought of Israelites returning to the borders of Arabia and converting the desert tribes. But a moment’s reflection on Islam confirms it exactly: the role of the Prophet was to act as an intermediary between the Arabs and the God of their brothers the Israelites, by proving that Ibrahim was their common ancestor. So they could assert their economic rights over the lands of Palestine, by decisively defeating the Greco-Roman empire and seizing the province.
Back in 100 CE something weirdly similar had happened in the transformation of another Jewish heresy (the Ebionites, followers of Jesus) into recognisable Christianity, via St Paul of Tarsus, the Jew and Roman citizen. Instead of a military conquest, Christianity had spread as a social movement within the Roman Empire, and was treated as subversive and worse, rather like Jansenism in 17th C France, or Freemasonry in the 18th. But much weirder, to our taste, and to Gibbon’s. We digress.
The interesting similarity between the ealy histories of the two great religions is not just that they both arose from Jewish sects or heresies, but the way both religions went about writing their Scriptures, and producing the authorised versions: the New Testament’s four Gospels and the Epistles; and the Qu’ran and Hadith. Note the interesting status of four variants of the life of Jesus: although many other accounts were discarded, it is strange and revealing that the three synoptic gospels were given equal status, when they could so easily have been reduced to a single authoritative text; proof only that there must have been social groups (regional communities) with equal power to insist on the authenticity of their own favourite text. In the Koran and Hadiths we see a different process, but responding to the same essential dynamics — having to become a State religion. There is only one authorised text, and indeed its status is so exalted (being the very Word of God, merely dictated through the Prophet, PBUH) that it achieves a finality never accorded to the Gospels. In Christianity the debate moved quickly away from the episemological status of sacred texts to furious dispute over strange novelties never suspected by Jesus himself, such as his partipation in the Triune Godhead.
With the Koran, this incorruptibility is guaranteed by the Traditions, each of which contains its own pedigree, back to the Prophet and his Companions. But the Traditions, once analysed by the scientific methods applied to the Bible since the 19th century, dissolve into mere tendentious assertion in defence of political realities that we can only guess at (just as we can hardly reconstruct the feel of the arcane disputes on Christology that raged in the 200s). It is a pity that this kind of dispassionate historical analysis is apparently impossible at the moment within the Islamic world itself, for essentially political reasons. Of course, Gibbon could not have published his history of Christianity (ch 15 and 16 in the Decline and Fall) in the 1740s in Naples or Spain under the Catholic authorities. He would have been arrested and executed quite unpleasantly if he failed to recant. So no sneering at the Islamic and Arab predicament today, you Europeans.
Still, you ask, what have they really got to be afraid of? There are six authoritative sets of Traditions (Hadith), with enough wild and subtle inconsistencies among them to keep whole schools of jurists happily at play for centuries. For a bracing experience, check out the Web site of the Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, and improve your grasp of comparative Canon Law, all you ex-Catholics.
A few thoughts, with all due respect.
There is sometimes a need to reexamine comfortable conclusions and assumptions. Revisionism can be useful as a purgative, however a tentative thesis may become touted about in topics that are emotional hot buttons.
By stating that a certain possibility is hardly the received version of events is to assert that one is fully familiar with “the received version” or its modalities. There is also the question of “received from whom” regarding a “received version” of history.
“The army that took Jerusalem from the Eastern Roman Empire was a combined Arab-Jewish force. Hardly the received version of events.”
There are some issues here, one being that of a polemic from a hostile source, obviously hostile to both Jews and Muslims, and the possibility of early Christian sources which were intended as polemics linking Jews and Muslims together in certain enterprises as a rhetorical polemical device.
The matter of terms betraying a sort of bias; for example your reference to a “mixed Arab-Jewish” force. I believe the choice of words could show a bias; after all the Jews in question would also have been, well, Arabs. They would have been Arab Jews, in that ‘Arab is as much a linguistic designation, and designation regarding a certain mode of living, and referring to geography. What I think that you mean is a “mixed Muslim-Jewish” force which is another thing altogether.
It is no secret that Jews, Christians, and other non Muslims may have, and actually did, fight alongside Muslims in these early days. That ARAB Christians, ARAB Jews, and ARAB Muslims may have cooperated on various levels at various times. There is nothing revolutionary or groundbreaking here. I’ve come across occasional mentions of non Muslim fighters in standard hadiths and khabar reports. If this isn’t emphasised in the history that comes to us from Muslims we have a few possibilities, the level of cooperation may have been so low as to be unremarkable, the fact that there was cooperation at this early stage before certain polemical attitudes on the Muslims’ part regarding the “ahl ul-kittab” was so unremarkable, and taken for granted, that it went largely (not totally) uncommented on, indeed the possibility that given the WIDE number of reports in the maghazi literature, Sira literature, Hadith and Tarikh literature, and the general lack of access to the totality of such literature in Western Academia, even today, that there could be oodles of reports floating around on these matters of which you, myself, and Crone, are unaware.
There is a need for humility in asserting prodigal claims.
There is a great need, I think, to be mindful of a tendentiousness, of certain possibilities of bias and tendencies towards reaching certain conclusions, in modern eyes as well as ancient eyes.
Our point is that, in order to make a point that may or may not have some validity, students of the material such as Crone, et al., might project modern biases upon the history and peoples they study and systematically ignore evidence to the contrary. There is also a possibility of willful conscious bias, a sublimated polemical attitude in opposition to the interests of “pure research”, a sort of academic tipping of sacred cows.
For example, the assumption that a “severance” of “good relations” with the Jews on Muhammad’s (as) part is a canonical assumption on the part of Muslim tradition may reflect both PRESENT day tensions between Jews and Muslims as well as polemical attitudes towards Jews that originated in the later centuries of the Islamic tradition after the fact.
The idea or cluster of ideas evoked by the term “good relations” and its rupture needs revisiting. We know that relations with SPECIFIC Jewish tribes took turns for the worse in Muhammad’s day.
We know that with the establishment of a pax Islamica within Arabia the fortunes of certain Jewish tribes, for various reasons (the Muslim account details alliances with the pagan enemies of the new Muslim state) had turns for the worse, at the same time we have historically attested claims to lands in Arabia by other Jewish tribes and the early usage of the term dhimmah as a mutually binding contract between the Muslims and Jews and Christians, entailing mutual responsibilities, and no real evidence that significant ill will existed after hostilities ceased.
There is scant but interesting clues implying that some Maghrebi Jewish tribes lended support to the invasion of Hispania. There is the fact that after the “pact of Umar” Jews did return to Jerusalem and Palestine in certain numbers (in spite of language in the pact at the Christian’s insistence preventing this).
All of this paints a possibility that for the early Muslims “good relations” with the Jews as a people under some dhimmah (in the older sense of the word, not the reified legal context the term later acquired) was no big deal.
There are sources showing cooperation between some Christian grounds and Muslim invaders as well, does Crone et al., make any sort of elaborate theory out of this? I don’t think so. By focusing on some narrow aberrations from the understanding of normative history as it reached them, in the Academy of the late 20th century Occident, and not looking at a broader context, Crone’s thesis (which I don’t do justice to, in interest of space) displays a bias regarding omission.
Intellectual honesty demands a rigor in examining the claims of both the early Muslim authors as well as early Christian, Magian, and Jewish sources, and finding a synthesis in context as well as looking for real archaeological evidence, and evidence from physical culture such as inscriptions, papyri fragments, embroidered text in surviving textiles, and looking at the internal harmony in so-called “canonical” (I assert that there is no such thing as a a true Muslim canon, simply standard widely used sources and not so widely used sources) textual sources as well as matters of dissonance in the same, and applying real honesty, in this way a responsible picture of history might be drafted.
Crone’s approach, Nevo’s, Baldwick’s and others seems to delight in taking an iconoclast approach to what Muslims say of their faith and its history. This is hardly responsible scholarship…
Wansbrough’s approach is, by his admission, conjectural and tentative. And, if I might add, somewhat discredited.
It reeks of tendentiousness, bias, and polemical zeal all sublimated under polite academic discourse.
Fairness requires a broad multi sourced approach, every academic has biases, the honest state their bias and challenge it and make their conclusions follow the facts, not clobber the facts into their conclusion.
Posted 09 Jul 2006 at 7:37 pm ¶Many thanks to Kamal for his lucid and informed commentary. He obviously knows a great deal more about the subject matter than I do; my recognition of my own incompetence in these matters, and an unwillingness to devote the time effort to acquire such competence when more intellectually congenial subjects beckon, is the main reason I haven’t blogged any more on this subject. I reposted this post because I recieved two or three comments on my original post from people who had been entirely unacquainted with Crone and Cook’s work, asking where they could obtain copies of Hagarism, etc. I continue to think that I’m performing a service by making this summary, inadequate as it may be, available on the internet, where relatively little information is (or was, a few years ago) available on the Crone/Cook thesis. But Kamal has greatly increased the usefulness of this post with his comments.
A few more specific thoughts:
Well, maybe. I don’t really want to get into a discussion of the semantics of a vague ordinary-language idiom like “received version.” Perhaps I should have said, “the version familiar to the ill-informed, like myself.” In partial defense, I will point out that there are a lot of sources in print that present a very simplistic picture of the events in question: A few decades after the death of the Prophet, the Bedouin hordes came charging out of the Arabian peninsula waving the Koran, wresting large portions of Asia Minor and North Africa from the control of Rome. It’s not at all uncommon for such simplistic pictures to maintain their currency in the popular imagination when all historians, as well as informed laypersons, know that the documentary history reveals the real story to be much more complex; and I have no problem believing that something like that is the case here.
I certainly see your point. One question, for clarification: How common was conversion to Judaism in the Mediterranean world at the time? Being Jewish was and is both a religious and an “ethnic” designation. Granted that there are all kinds of problems with the latter category, I would have thought that the vast majority of people in the late Roman Empire who regarded themselves as religious Jews were descended from inhabitants of the Hebrew kingdoms in Palestine (e.g., “Diaspora” Jews.) Is this the case for the Arabic-speaking Jewish tribes you refer to, or were they converts?
Well, it’s been so long that I’ve looked at it that I’m not in a position to comment; but I will say that, according to my recollection, it definitely reeks of pretensiousness and willful obscurity.
Posted 20 Jul 2006 at 4:52 pm ¶Post a Comment