Islam:Untold Story.

donaghs

Fascinating new book out recently on the origins of Islam. Not really a new idea as such, e.g. tracing origins of Christianity (Judaism, Paganism, etc) has been widely covered. But to bring a similar inquiring mind to Islam has become riskier in recent decades.
This is the UK Guardian review: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/05/shadow-sword-islam-tom-holland-review?newsfeed=true

The author is very familiar with that period and the region, great previous book on Ancient Rome, Greece and Persia.

This book is literally overflowing with topics for discussion! I guess the main point of it though is the divergence between religious faith/dogma, and scholarly/intellectual inquiry.

I considered posting this in History, book is about Islam and its origins, it had to be posted here.

Fascinating how the main regional powers before the rise of Islam were Byzantium and Zoroastrian Persia, and the struggles between them.
But the most interesting revelation in the book for me was that there was no written mention of the Qur'an in the period immediately following Muhammad, nor any commentary on it until the eighth century.

wes

Well its an interesting book, but I haven't read it, so can't comment, but just to mention that the Koran was passed orally, and wasn't written down until much later. So there would be a lack of a written record of it, and that is also mentioned in the review. Oral history is in fairness problematic for historians.

donaghs

The author Tom Holland was hosting a TV show last night, taking some themes from the book, Channel 4 "Islam: The Untold Story". Interesting stuff. I felt he was holding back a bit on his main theses, as if afraid to offend too many people. Pity as it was just a scholarly investigation of facts.

studiorat

Interesting program on the box last night. Tom Holland undertakes to explain nothing less than the origin of Islam, or at least describes his search in the program.

Apart from there being no contemporary accounts to verify the commonly accepted knowledge Holland presents a couple of interesting and possibly provoking arguments.

Namely :

Islam was carried on the back of the Arabic expansion, that is the original Arab invaders of the Islamic Empire (AD 600ish) were not in fact Muslims, their conversion took place afterwards. The belief that the expansion was inspired by Islam was added to the story only later. Namely that Islam (the religion), as we know it today, is a political fabrication by the caliphs. Much in the same way as the Emperor Constantine, a Roman emperor, used Christianity as a uniting force for his subjects.

Secondly the story that the Prophet Mohammed was from Mecca was possibly created as a political move and in fact he was from a city north of Jerusalem.

This argument backed up by the descriptions in the Koran of Vines and Olives etc. is not a description of the land around Mecca. Furthermore early mosques and contemporary christian authors provide evidence of early Muslim's facing north during prayer.

Here's a review of the book : http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/04/in-shadow-of-sword-tom-holland

Has anyone read the book? Got any ideas on the apparent lack of contemporary parallels for the "official story". Not the actual Koran but the story around it...

hivizman

On holiday at the moment, so I'll write more fully later.

I'm actually about one-third into Tom Holland's book, and haven't got to the Islam bit yet. But it looks very like a rehash of the views of a small group of heterodox academics including John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone and, to a lesser extent, Michael Cook. Their position on the origins of Islam is strongly resisted by the mainstream within Islamic studies, who accept the historiographical validity of the tradition-based histories of early Islam.

By the way, I've merged this thread with the other one recently opened on Tom Holland's book and TV programme.

wes

Something I saw on Al Jazeera a few weeks ago, that could give some insight into this:

Ancient mosque unearthed in Bangladesh

The mosque dates back to the 7th century, and it was established relatively soon after the Prophet (pbuh) death. Also, they found stone tablets of the Koran.

donaghs

wes wrote: »

Something I saw on Al Jazeera a few weeks ago, that could give some insight into this:

Ancient mosque unearthed in Bangladesh

The mosque dates back to the 7th century, and it was established relatively soon after the Prophet (pbuh) death. Also, they found stone tablets of the Koran.

Trying to find more sources for that story, Al Jazeera seems the most reliable one so far. Lots of blogs and discussions forums. Any more out there? It's a fairly recent story though so probably best to await more confirmation.

donaghs

hivizman wrote: »

Their position on the origins of Islam is strongly resisted by the mainstream within Islamic studies, who accept the historiographical validity of the tradition-based histories of early Islam.

How exactly do you mean? Do you mean based on evidence or led by religious faith?

wes

donaghs wrote: »

Trying to find more sources for that story, Al Jazeera seems the most reliable one so far. Lots of blogs and discussions forums. Any more out there? It's a fairly recent story though so probably best to await more confirmation.

I have only seen Al Jazeera cover it so far. I have not really checked many other place, as I would think it something historian's will look over it, and I have no idea how long such things normally take.

whydoc

donaghs wrote: »

How exactly do you mean? Do you mean based on evidence or led by religious faith?

Many mistakes with false claims.
http://www.iera.org.uk/press_29aug2012.html
Hivizman can give more light on criticizing his work.

hivizman

donaghs wrote: »

How exactly do you mean? Do you mean based on evidence or led by religious faith?

I've now been able to catch up on Tom Holland's Channel 4 documentary Islam: The Untold Story. As I suspected, he relied heavily on the work of Patricia Crone, who was featured extensively.

The basic issue is "what counts as historical evidence?" The standard narrative history of the origins and growth of Islam is based on a large number of sources, such as biographies of Muhammad and his companions and successors, narratives of battles, and more general histories, such as al-Tabari's History of the Prophets and Kings. However, all of these sources derive from oral tradition, and the earliest manuscripts date from several centuries after the lifetime of Muhammad.

Conventional Western historiography puts considerable emphasis on the availability of contemporary (or near-contemporary) documentary evidence. This is not just written texts - it can include archaeological artefacts such as inscriptions and coins. As Tom Holland's programme discussed, the earliest such physical evidence consistent with the emergence of Islam dates to several decades after the period when Islam traditionally emerged. There are some references in passing in a few contemporary non-Islamic texts that are consistent with the standard Muslim narrative, but those historians who either reject altogether or are very sceptical about the authenticity and reliability of the oral tradition have very little left on which to build an alternative narrative of the emergence of Islam.

Another authority interviewed by Holland was Fred M Donner. His recent book, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Harvard University Press: 2010), suggests that Islam was originally more inclusive, embracing many Christians and Jews whose beliefs could be accommodated within the general teachings of Muhammad. However, over the 60 years after Muhammad's death, Islam became more clearly defined as a faith different from Christianity and Judaism.

I think that Holland's distillation of what is very much a minority view in Islamic historiography raises some interesting questions, but in the end I tended to side with the views expressed in the programme by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, that a complete rejection of the oral tradition is too extreme a move. It's not a question of "evidence versus faith" so much as a question of one type of evidence against another.

studiorat

whydoc wrote: »

Many mistakes with false claims.
http://www.iera.org.uk/press_29aug2012.html
Hivizman can give more light on criticizing his work.

I really can't believe someone seriously linked to that odious article. While the article in the link seems quite well written and researched at first, a quick bit of research proves it hypocritical in it’s accusations of Holland’s “cherry picking” of scholarship and evidence. In fact the more I have read it and checked it the more of a disgrace it becomes.


This author seems dead-set against the study of the history of Islam in anything but a theological framework. Furthermore, the irony of the accusations against Holland of “pushing an agenda” is clearly lost on a writer from the Islamic Research Academy particularly one who thinks that “Muslims reject the idea of freedom of speech, and even of freedom.” !!! Don’t even get me started on they people they choose to speak for them in a supposed educational framework.

As far as I'm concerned the linked article is a masterclass in cherry-picked evidence, mis-representative quotes and dis-ingenious scholarship not to mention a serious cut and paste job, including having the neck to actually cut and paste the bibliography from another source.


One particularly example is his examination of the Doctrina, where he leaves out the most important part of that particular tract. This says that this “false prophet”; if he actually was Muhammed, was in fact a the leader of a Jewish-Messianic cult. And certainly not the developed religion we see today.


Doctrina, pp. 86f

A false prophet has appeared among the Saracens … They say that the prophet has appeared coming with the Saracens, and is proclaiming the advent of the anointed one who is to come [tou erkhomenou Eleimmenou kai Khristou]. I, Abraham, went off to Sykamina […]

It seems that this particular prophet even if he was proclaiming a monotheistic message was also proclaiming a messianic one also.

The linked article is also disingenious in how it tries to quote other scholars out of context.

Professor Robert Hoyland from the University of Oxford highlights how conclusions similar to Holland's, including the view that Mecca was in a different place, is a result of not studying the Islamic material and developing scenarios not based on evidence:

Hoyland in his article asks many of the same questions that Holland did, that is whether the Muslims continued the administrative practices of the Byzantines and Persians or introduced new innovations themselves. And why recognizably Islamic messages do not appear in the material record before the reign of the caliph Abd al-Malik.

Note, Hoyland also says there is no material record before around 690 or thereabouts. And again the key phrase is "recognizable Islamic messages".

The thrust of Hollands argument is that the primary motivation for writers of late antiquity's history was theological, writers who needed to legitimise political and legal entities by creating a retrospective case history. By referring historical events as 'Gods will' those historians gave currency to them.

hivizman

studiorat wrote: »

The linked article is also disingenious in how it tries to quote other scholars out of context.

Another example of this is the quotation from Fred Donner's chapter "Modern approaches to early Islamic history" in The New Cambridge History of Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2010, Vol. 1, pp. 625-647). The passage quoted, on pp. 632-633, is not, in context, particularly dismissive of what Donner calls "the sceptical school" (by which he means in particular John Wansbrough and Patricia Crone). The preceding sentence to that quoted reads: "The sceptical school has raised many pointed and valuable questions about the reliability of the sources for early Islamic history and, threfore, what the appropriate attitude of the historian towards these sources might be."

Donner goes on to comment (p. 634): "Most alternative narratives based squarely on revisionist perspectives still seem too general or vague, and are often presented explicitly as a critique of the traditional narrative, knowledge of which on the part of the reader they therefore take for granted. For these reasons, scholars have not yet had much success translating the insights of tradition-critical work into a clear narrative of Islam's origins suitable for non-specialists that stands independent of most aspects of the traditional narrative."

Overall, Donner believes that the "sceptical school" has served a useful purpose in forcing scholars to consider more critically the traditional narrative (p. 643): "The dearth of truly documentary sources and the apparent plausibility of the traditional origins narrative meant that it was not until the problem of the sources for early Islam was tackled more intensively that progress could be made on constructing a truly historical picture of early Islam."

studiorat wrote: »

Hoyland in his article asks many of the same questions that Holland did, that is whether the Muslims continued the administrative practices of the Byzantines and Persians or introduced new innovations themselves. And why recognizably Islamic messages do not appear in the material record before the reign of the caliph Abd al-Malik.

The famous Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, writing snearly eight centuries after the events that he describes, discusses early financial administration under the early Caliphs. He notes that the early record-keeping systems adopted by the Caliph Umar were based on models taken from Syria (hitherto a Byzantine province) and Iraq (hitherto a Persian province), and that the records were kept in Persian and Greek until the reign of Abd al-Malik.

Although Ibn Khaldun does not cite specific sources (or they are not reproduced in the English edition I'm using), there was a significant literature in both Arabic and Persian on government administration, finance and taxation, dating back to around 250 years after the emergence of Islam. This literature, however, provides only tradition-based evidence of practices in the early Islamic period. Subsequent scholarship relies on the same sources, although often including inferences from archaeological and numismatic materials. For example, Michael G. Morony, in Iraq After the Muslim Conquest (Gorgias Press, 2005), suggests that there was a high degree of continuity between the Sassanid (Persian) administrative systems and those instituted by Umar for post-conquest Iraq.