Comments on: Source Criticism

By: Alan Cook

Alan Cook — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 21:52:25 +0000

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:

By stating that a certain possibility is hardly the received version of events is to assert that one is fully familiar with â€œthe received versionâ€ or its modalities.

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.

The matter of terms betraying a sort of bias; for example your reference to a â€œmixed Arab-Jewishâ€ 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 â€˜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 â€œmixed Muslim-Jewishâ€ force which is another thing altogether.

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?

Wansbroughâ€™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.

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.

By: Kamal Southall

Kamal Southall — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 00:37:08 +0000

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.

By: Justin McDermott

Justin McDermott — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 13:32:42 +0000

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.
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.