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Written by Dr. Jack
Wheeler |
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Monday, 24 September 2001 |
The most sacred spot on
earth to all members of the Islamic
religion is the Holy City of Mecca,
revered as the birthplace of Mohammed.
It is one of the five basic requirements
incumbent upon all Moslems that they
make (if their health will allow it) a
pilgrimage to Mecca once in their lives
(the other four: Recognize that there is
no god but Allah and that Mohammed is
Allah's prophet, observe the month of
Ramadan, ritually pray five times a day,
and give alms to the poor).
The founding events of Islam are
Mohammed's activities in Mecca and
Medina, a city north of Mecca. The life
of Mohammed, known as the Sira, is
popularly accepted to be fully
documented historically, that everything
he did and said was accurately recorded.
According to one hagiographer, although
Mohammed "could not read or write
himself, he was constantly served by a
group of 45 scribes who wrote down his
sayings, instructions and activities.
... We thus know his life down to the
minutest details.”
The evidence for this is "the earliest
and most famous biography of Mohammed,”
the "Sirat Rasul Allah" (The Life of the
Prophet of God) of Ibn Ishaq. The dates
given for Mohammed's life are 570-632
AD. Ibn Ishaq was born about 717 and
died in 767. He thus wrote his biography
well over 100 years after Mohammed
lived, precluding his gaining any
information from eyewitnesses to the
Sira, as they would have all died
themselves in the intervening years.
However, no copies exist of Ibn Ishaq's
work. We know of it only through
quotations of it in the History of al-Tabari,
who lived over 200 years after Ibn Ishaq
(al-Tabari died in 992). Thus, the
earliest biography of Mohammed of which
copies still exist was written some 350
years after he lived.
It is curious, therefore, that there
seems to have been so little serious
scholarly research of the historical
evidence for how Islam came to be. Yet
what seems to be isn't so. A number of
professional academic historians, both
Western and Moslem, have produced a
large body of research on the origins of
Islam. For reasons best known to the
pundits and reviewers who should be
aware of it, this research remains
publicly unknown.
Dr. Patricia Crone, who received her
doctorate under Prof. John Wansbrough at
the University of London's School of
Oriental and African Studies, was
Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Oxford
and Cambridge and is currently History
Professor at Princeton University, is an
example. In her book, "Meccan Trade and
the Rise of Islam," Dr. Crone
demonstrates that Islam did not
originate in Mecca.
Mecca is located in the Hejaz region of
what is today Saudi Arabia. It is
portrayed by traditional belief as a
wealthy trading center, full of
merchants trading goods by caravan from
Yemen in the south and Syria and the
Byzantium empire in the north. Crone
shows that Mecca was in fact way off the
incense route from Yemen to Syria, which
bypassed where Mecca is today by over
100 miles. Further, there is no mention
whatever of Mecca in contemporary
non-Moslem sources:
It is obvious that if the Meccans
had been middlemen in a long-distance
trade of the kind described in
(traditional Islamic) literature, there
ought to have been some mention of it in
the writings of their customers … who
wrote extensively about the south
Arabians who supplied them with
aromatics. (Despite) the considerable
attention paid to Arabian affairs there
is no mention at all of Quraysh (the
tribe of Mohammed) and their trading
center (Mecca), be it in the Greek,
Latin, Syraic, Aramaic, Coptic, or other
literature composed outside Arabia
(p. 134).
An exhaustive examination of all
available evidence and sources leads
Crone to conclude that Mohammed's career
took place not in Mecca and Medina or in
southwest Arabia at all, but in
northwest Arabia.
Agreeing with her is Islamic historian
Mohammed Ibn al-Rawandi. He observes
that it took some 150-200 years after
the Arab Conquest, which began in the
620s, for places that had gone
unremarked and unregarded to become
places of reverence associated with the
prophet. Mohammed's supposed birthplace
in Mecca, for example, was used as an
ordinary home until al-Khayzuran, the
mother of the first Caliph of Baghdad
Harun al-Rashid, made it a house of
prayer some 150 years after Mohammed's
death.
For an increasing number of Islamic
historians, the tradition of Mohammed
being the source and explanation of the
Arab Conquest, wherein Arab tribesmen on
horseback emerged out of the Arabian
deserts to conquer Syria, Mesopotamia,
Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and
Spain in less than 80 years (636-712),
stands history on its head.
They demonstrate that the story of
Mohammed uniting various Arab tribes as
Genghiz Khan did for the Mongols, and
providing them with the religious fervor
to conquer in the name of Islam, is
"sacred history," rather than real
history. Historian Gordon Newby
explains:
The myth of an original orthodoxy
from which later challengers fall away
as heretics is almost always the
retrospective assertion of a politically
dominant group whose aim is to establish
their supremacy by appeal to divine
sanction.
This applies to the Arab Conquest, says
al-Rawandi, because for some 200 years
the Arab conquerors were a minority
amongst a non-Moslem majority. For al-Rawandi,
Islam is an invention for the purpose of
providing a religious justification for
Arab imperialism. The Conquest is the
reason and explanation for Islam, not
the other way around.
While there may well have been a
historical individual named Ubu'l Kassim
who was later entitled Mohammed ("The
Praised One"), who raised followers and
participated in the initiation of the
Arab Conquest, he likely came from
northeast Arabia in what is now southern
Jordan. The deity that Ubu'l Kassim
chose to follow was Allah, a contraction
of al-Lah, the ancient Arab God of the
Moon [note: which is why the symbol of
Islam to this day is the crescent moon].
Ubu'l Kassim died, however, some years
before the Arab Conquest was fully under
way (the traditional date is 632). Al-Rawandi
summarizes what then happened:
Once the Arabs had acquired an
empire, a coherent religion was required
in order to hold that empire together
and legitimize their rule. In a process
that involved a massive backreading of
history, and in conformity to the
available Jewish and Christian models,
this meant they needed a revelation and
a revealer - a Prophet - whose life
could serve at once as a model for moral
conduct and as a framework for the
appearance of the revelation. Hence (Ubu'l
Kassim was selected to be the Prophet),
the Koran, the Hadith (Sayings of the
Prophet), and the Sira were contrived
and conjoined over a period of a couple
of centuries. Topographically, after a
century or so of Judaeo-Moslem
monotheism centered on Jerusalem, in
order to make Islam distinctively Arab …
an inner Arabian biography of Mecca,
Medina, the Quraysh, the Prophet and his
Hegira (flight from Mecca to Medina
alleged in 622, Year One in the Islamic
calendar) was created as a purely
literary artifact. An artifact,
moreover, based not on faithful memories
of real events, but on the fertile
imaginations of Arab storytellers
elaborating from allusive references in
Koranic texts, the canonical text of the
Koran not being fixed for nearly two
centuries. (p.104)
Al-Rawandi concludes that the Sira, the
life of Mohammed in Mecca and Medina, is
a myth, a "baseless fiction." This is
the conclusion of a substantial number
of serious academic historians working
in Islamic studies today. They include
Mohammed Ibn al-Warraq, Mohammed Ibn al-Rawandi,
John Wansbrough, Kenneth Cragg, Patricia
Crone, Michael Cook, John Burton, Andrew
Rippin, Julian Baldick, Gerald Hawting,
and Suliman Bashear. Yet they and their
research are virtually unknown.
Not any longer. In committing The
Atrocity of September 11, Islamic
terrorists did far more damage to their
religion than to New York City or the
Pentagon. As U.S. Special Forces teams
hunt them down and put them to death,
they and all the bin Ladens of the
Moslem terrorism network should know
that the world is soon to learn about
the Myth of Mecca.
We don't know about the Myth of Mecca
because we are afraid to. We, Americans
and Westerners and participants of
civilization, have been intimidated and
frightened into examining the historical
truth regarding Islam. Dare to criticize
Islam and some crazed ayatollah will
issue a fatwah calling for your death.
Well, if there is one thing that we must
learn from The Atrocity is that we
cannot, we dare not, be afraid any
longer. The Atrocity was committed
exclusively by Moslems in the name of
Islam. True enough, President Bush, in
his magnificent speech to Congress, said
their actions blaspheme and insult
Islam.
But throughout the Arab world, from
cafes in Beirut and Cairo to the streets
of Nablus and Gaza, people laughed and
celebrated their religion's slaughter of
thousands of Americans. So we should
feel no need to refrain from exposing
that this slaughter was committed in the
name of a make-believe myth.
The Moslem terrorists who committed The
Atrocity have put all of their fellow
Moslems on the defensive. We see
full-page ads in newspapers taken out by
Moslem governments and Moslem
organizations, expressing their sympathy
and condolences. These are welcomed and
their sincerity need not be questioned.
But words are not enough. Actions are
what count. What is required of
Arab-Americans is not words but for them
to locate the several thousand agents of
bin Laden and the Moslem Terrorist
Network reputed to be in this country,
and turn them in to the FBI. What is
required of Moslem communities the world
over is the same: Identify, locate and
turn in advocates of terrorism to the
appropriate authorities.
Yet much more is now required of the
adherents of Islam: the reinvention of
their religion. No longer can the words
of the Koran be considered inerrant,
infallible, those of Allah himself. The
words must be read thoughtfully and
critically, and the wisdom they contain
extracted with reflection, not
reflexively.
Christianity emerged from its Dark Ages
when its sacred texts were considered
infallible and criticism condemned
(often to death) as heresy, to subject
itself to historical examination and
rational discussion. It is stronger for
it. For a religion's strength does not
lie in fanatical belief, in an
unquestioned assumption that
disagreement or criticism of it is an
incomprehensible perversion. A
religion's strength lies in the goodness
it does for people's souls.
As Al-Rawandi puts it:
The claims of Islam do not depend on
historical origins, but on an inner
knowledge of God, the accompaniment and
reward of piety. What makes Islam true
is the spiritual life of Moslems, not
religious history but religious
experience.
These are the teachings of a school of
Islamic thought known as Sufism. How
Islam must reinvent itself to emerge out
of the Islamic Dark Ages it has
inhabited for the last several hundred
years, and join and flourish in the
civilized world, is to combine the
teachings of Sufism with those of
Jadidism, the attempt by Central Asian
Islamic scholars 100 years ago to make a
revitalized Islam compatible with the
modern world.
While Jadidism was snuffed by the
Soviets, its revival, combined with the
inner peace and truths provided by
Sufism, could reinvent an Islam prepared
to participate and prosper in the 21st
century.
The combined synergy of Sufism and
Jadidism would be the salvation of
Islam. Today it stands in dire need of
being saved. I hope that dedicated
Islamic scholars will appear on the
scene to create such a salvatory
synergy. In the meantime, none of us any
longer needs to be afraid or intimidated
by the Myth of Mecca.
References:
Al-Rawandi, I.M. Origins of Islam: A
Critical Look at the Sources.
Prometheus, 2000.
Crone, P.M. Meccan Trade and the Rise of
Islam. Oxford, 1987.
Newby, G.D. The Making of the Last
Prophet: A Reconstruction of the
Earliest Biography of Mohammed.
Columbia, 1989.
Wansbrough, J. Quranic Studies: Sources
and Methods of Scriptural
Interpretation. Oxford, 1977.
Warraq, I.M. The Quest for the
Historical Muhammad. Prometheus, 2000.
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