A Revisionist Scenario
After the investigations of the preceding chapters, here is what we know about the traditional account of Muhammad’s life and the early days of Islam:
• No record of Muhammad’s reported death in 632 appears until more than a century after that date.
• A Christian account apparently dating from the mid-630s speaks of an Arab prophet “armed with a sword” who seems to be still alive.
• The early accounts written by the people the Arabs conquered never mention Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur’an. They call the conquerors “Ishmaelites,” “Saracens,” “Muhajirun,”
and “Hagarians,” but never “Muslims.”
• The Arab conquerors, in their coins and inscriptions, don’t mention Islam or the Qur’an for the first six decades of their conquests. Mentions of “Muhammad” are nonspecific and on at least two occasions are accompanied by a cross. The word “Muhammad” can be used both as a proper name and as an honorific.
• The Qur’an, even by the canonical Muslim account, was not distributed in its present form until the 650s. Contradicting that standard account is the fact that neither the Arabians nor the Christians and Jews in the region mention the Qur’an until the early eighth century.
• The Qur’an contains numerous characters and stories that have been taken over from Judaism, Christianity, and other sources.
• The Qur’an contains a great many words that make little or no sense in Arabic, but are clearly derived from Syro-Aramaic, or become clear when they are read as Syro-Aramaic. Even the Arabic words for the Five Pillars of Islam are derived from Syriac and Hebrew.
• During the reign of the caliph Muawiya (661–680), the Arabs constructed at least one public building whose inscription was headed by a cross.
• We begin hearing about Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, and about Islam itself in the 690s, during the reign of the caliph Abd al-Malik. Coins and inscriptions reflecting Islamic beliefs begin to appear at this time also.
• Around the same time as the reign of Abd al-Malik, Arabic became the predominant written language of the Arabian empire, supplanting Syriac and Greek.
• Abd al-Malik claimed, in a passing remark in one hadith, to have collected the Qur’an, contradicting Islamic tradition that the collection was the work of the caliph Uthman forty years earlier.
• Multiple hadiths report that Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, governor of Iraq during the reign of Abd al-Malik, edited the Qur’an and distributed his new edition to the various Arab-controlled provinces—again, something Uthman is supposed to have done decades earlier.
• Even some Islamic traditions maintains that certain common Islamic practices, such as the recitation of the Qur’an during mosque prayers, date from orders of Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, not to the earliest period of Islamic history.
• While the canonical Islamic account holds that Muhammad was born in Mecca, which was a thriving center for trade and pilgrimage, the extant records show that during the time Muhammad is supposed to have lived, it was not a city of any importance.
• Although the directive to Muslims to pray toward Mecca is supposed to have been revealed during Muhammad’s time, the earliest mosques were built facing Petra in Jordan, up until the early years of the eighth century. Some of these ancient mosques face Petra to this day.
• In the middle of the eighth century, the Abbasid dynasty supplanted the Umayyad line of Abd al-Malik. The Abbasids charged the Umayyads with impiety on a large scale. In the Abbasid period, biographical material about Muhammad began to proliferate. The first complete biography of the prophet of Islam finally appeared during this era—nearly 150 years after the traditional date of his death.
• The proliferation of hadith literature, including biographical material about Muhammad, reached its zenith in the ninth century, over two hundred years after Muhammad is traditionally said to have died.
• The biographical material that emerged situates Muhammad in an area of Arabia that never was the center for trade and pilgrimage that the canonical account of Islam’s origins depends on it to be.
In short, the lack of confirming detail in the historical record, the late development of biographical material about the Islamic prophet, the atmosphere of political and religious factionalism in which that material developed, and much more beyond suggest that the Muhammad of Islamic tradition did not exist, or if he did, he was substantially different from how that tradition portrays him.
How to make sense of all this? If the Arab forces who conquered so much territory beginning in the 630s were not energized by the teachings of a new prophet and the divine word he delivered, how did the Islamic character of their empire arise at all? If Muhammad did not exist, why was it ever considered necessary to invent him?
Any answer to these questions will of necessity be conjectural—but in light of the facts above, so is the canonical account of Islam’s origins.
The non-existence of Muhammad
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