Do we know anything about Muhammad or the origins of Islam?

I am reading Tom Holland's book In the Shadow of the Sword which I should probably not have bought had I taken the time to look through the pages and see that it is a popular history, written to make the paperback bestseller lists. But this would, on the whole, have been my loss. Some of the book's themes are important and should be widely discussed.

The book is exasperating and quite exceptionally badly and vulgarly written.  I cannot remember ever reading anything that insults the reader quite so much and yet Mr Holland has won several literary prizes, which I find completely incredible. The book contains many hundreds of sentences as bad as this one:

'He [Muhammad] had experienced history's most epochal mid-life crisis.'  

Historians are discombobulated. A sultan with halitosis can 'slay flies with a single breath'. Holland sounds like a history teacher trying to amuse his fifth form class and the whole book seems to be written for serialisation in the Daily Mail. The stories about the Empress Theodora's prepubescent sexual life, which are completely off the subject, are repeated with unnecessary detail and given undue credence. The book is, as Gerald Manley Hopkins described Locksley Hall, an ungentlemanly row, but the subject matter is fascinating.

Holland convinces me that we know virtually nothing about Muhammad, including whether or not he had a religious conversion at the age of forty. This is largely because of a lack of a written culture in the Arabia of the period. Compare what we know about fifth century Britain: we know much more simply due to Gildas and the Venerable Bede. The Koran tells us almost nothing about Muhammad. There are no more than four references to him in the Koran and two fleeting references to him by name in near-contemporary Christian writers. The Teaching of Jacob, a Greek Christian apocalyptic text written between 632 and 640, which Holland does not specifically mention, might be the oldest reference to Muhammad in existence. It does not name Muhammad, but puts the Christian case against him poignantly and pithily: 

I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him: "What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?" He replied, groaning deeply: "He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword. Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist."

The hadiths, sayings attributed to Muhammad, and the biographies of him probably have no value at all as historical evidence, being written far too late. This lack of evidence should always have been obvious (Gibbon pointed it out in a footnote to the Decline and Fall) but only became reasonably widely accepted in the last thirty-odd years, though it is still fiercely disputed. We do not know, for sure, if Muhammad visited Mecca. The battles he is thought to have won, over which historians have spilt much ink, are probably as factual as the Battle of Camlann at which Mordred defeated King Arthur.

Thomas Carlyle's famous essay praising Muhammad and Sir William Muir's Life suggesting he may have been a psychopath possessed by Satan seem equally houses based on sand. The most important fact that we know for sure about the early history of Islam is that Muslims conquered half the known world in the seventh century, including the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, before being defeated at the Battle of Tours in 732. We do not know for sure if Islam enabled the Arabs to conquer so much of the world or whether Islam was a by-product of this remarkable explosion. The late Bishop Kenneth Cragg said: 

Muhammad, in expanding his empire, managed to start a religion.

However, we do not know for sure if Muhammad himself led the Muslims to victory. Some have even argued that Mohammad did not exist, as others have done about Jesus of Nazareth, of whom much more is reliably known. 

Holland is certain (perhaps too certain) that the Koran originates in the early seventh century, basing his argument on one verse, which he thinks refers to the Persian conquest of Palestine in 614. He rejects, in a couple of sentences, the idea that the Koran was composed using material from various sources, including Christian hymns, as others have asserted. This is a question that deserved much more space in a long book that includes many long and irrelevant digressions. I suspect that it is elided for fear of the reaction from Muslims.

Two scholars were allowed to examine parchment fragments of the oldest known Koranic manuscript which were found forty years ago in a mosque in Sana’a, in Yemen. One, Gerd- Rudiger Puin, decided that the Koran had evolved over time using material from various sources. The Yemeni authorities were understandably angry and no further research has been published. This is also the theory of other scholars, including Patricia Crone and 'Christoph Luxenberg' (the latter writes under a pseudonym for fear of violent reprisals).  Holland, however, agreeing with the scholarly consensus, is convinced that the variations in texts are not of great importance and their similarities point to an early origin. These scholarly disputes require a good working knowledge of Arabic and classical Syriac or Middle Aramaic. Holland, so I have read, does not have these languages.

Of course, for Christians the idea that the Koran we know today does have an early origin is rather disappointing, although they hate it when biblical scholars undermine the historicity of the Gospels. Still, there is very much that is very mysterious about the Koran. It is fascinating to learn that many hadiths insist that the punishment for adultery should be death by stoning, but the Koran stipulates 'a hundred lashes'. How does this square with the Koran being much older than the hadiths? It tells us that the scribes who copied out the Koran did not adjust the text to accord with the hadiths but also that those who wrote down the hadiths did not know the Koran in the version we have it.

The Koran is almost the only evidence that we have for the origins of Islam, yet the Koran tells us virtually nothing about history. According to Holland, we do not even know if it originates in the Arabian peninsular (Arabia) or elsewhere in the Arab world - Iraq has been suggested by Patricia Crone as an alternative site.

Some light on this mysterious period in Arabian history is also shed by this book about the Jewish kingdom of Himyar (very roughly what is now Yemen), where Jews oppressed Christians. The suppression of Himyar by the Ethiopians provides Holland with the opening chapter of his book, though it is not very relevant to the origins of the Muslim religion. My visit to Ethiopia and to the Yazidi holy place, Lalish, in Iraq have whetted my appetite to know more about this period and part of the world. I look forward to going to Sana'a, though possibly when it is a little less dangerous.



Here is a very good article in Standpoint by Nick Cohen, about Tom Holland's book.