The Rest Is History - 60. Muhammad

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

Who was Muhammad, where did he come from and what was the historical context for his life? Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discuss one of the most influential religious, social, and political leaders in history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger. So runs the profession of faith familiar to some two billion people worldwide. But who was Muhammad? Where did he come from? When did he live? And what can we as historians know about him? Tom Holland, difficult questions, but a fascinating subject. It's such a fascinating subject. And it's one that I spent

about five years of my life wrestling with. And to be honest, it was so challenging. It was kind of challenging intellectually, but also challenging because, of course, when you're writing about Muhammad, it's not like you're studying Nero or Alexander the Great. You're studying someone who is incredibly important to, as you said, 2 billion people. So you are dealing with very, very profound issues. And so I felt slightly tense about returning to this subject, I've got to say. But I think it's incredibly worth doing because I think it is fascinating in and of itself, but also because I think it raises really interesting questions about the relationship of history to belief, to the dimension of the supernatural, to all kinds of things like that. So really, I mean, the idea that we're going to do this in under an hour seems optimistic, I think.

But I think we should try and do our best. We should do our best. I mean, what's interesting is obviously Mohammed is clearly one of the, you know, two, three, four people who have most shaped the course of human history. I mean, if you if we did, did you there was a book that was kind of like the hundred greatest, the hundred most influential people in history. Did you have that? Was he number one? He was number one. And it was kind of slightly mad book because I remember it had the Earl of Oxford.

The guy who wrote it was convinced the Earl of Oxford. Oh, really? I did a similar exercise when I was at school. You know, when I was about 12, we had to rank the 10 top people in history. Do you know who mine was? James Callaghan. No, it's Martin Luther. That would appeal to you.

Anyway, this is a bit of a sidetrack. Mohammed, so obviously neither of us are Muslims. No. So we're approaching this, it should be said at the outset for Muslim listeners, we are approaching this from the perspective of Western non-believing historians, aren't we? Because I remember when I began looking at this, I kind of felt, well, I'm neutral because I don't

believe this. But of course, my position of non-belief is not a neutral position at all. No. And the assumptions that I assume that an angel did not speak to Muhammad, I assume that the Quran is not of divine origin. And therefore, my understanding, I'm sure your understanding of Muhammad is predicated on that. But of course, that's not a neutral perspective at all. So I think it's important to flag that up before we start. There are a lot of very respected scholars of early Islam who are not themselves Muslims. I mean, we'll probably be talking about some of them later in the program. So people who are not themselves Muslims. I mean, we'll probably be talking about some of them later in the program.

So people who are fascinated by the history of Arabia and by the way in which Islam spread from its beginnings across the Mediterranean world, across the Asian world and so on, but they're not necessarily themselves Muslims. So I think you can reasonably want to talk and write about it without being a believer yourself. Anyway, listeners will be the judge of that, I suppose. So why don't we start, since it's such fascinatingly sort of mysterious, but also contentious territory, why don't we start by you giving us a short kind of rundown

for listeners who aren't familiar with the material of the traditional account of the life of Muhammad. So if I go into an encyclopedia, what am I going to find about Muhammad's life? So the context is the 7th Christian century, beginning of it. The context is a world where the Near East is divided between the two great superpowers of Persia and Rome.

Rome, of course, now ruled from Constantinople. Muhammad is born in a city called Mecca, which lies in an area of the Arabian Peninsula called the Hejaz, a thousand miles from the Roman frontier in Palestine. um he is uh a merchant um he is married to uh a woman who who is herself a merchant she he acts as her agent um he comes to the age of 40 and and 40 in antiquity is the it's the age where you have your midlife crisis and muhammad has perhaps the most epical midlife crisis in history when he starts hearing voices and this unsettles him because hearing voices in mecca where he's growing up is is potentially a mark that you've been seduced by a demon but he gets reassured that actually he's being addressed by an angel angel gabriel i think his name is gab Gabriel and he is being hailed as the last of the prophets

the seal of the prophets and he is stands in a line of descent going back through Jesus through Moses all the way to Adam and his revelations are essentially the the the last the last chance that humanity has to live according to God's rules. So Muhammad starts to say this. Lots of people in Mecca think he's mad, but some don't. Among them is Khadija, his wife, and various other people start to rally around him. Khadija dies, but Muhammad continues with his prophetic mission. And in time, hostility to his growing number of followers becomes such that he and his followers are forced to emigrate, to undergo what in Greek is an exodus, and in Arabic is a hijrah. And they go to a town called Yathrib.

So that's modern day Medina. Well, because it comes to be called, so Medina is a city, it comes to be called the city of the prophet. And in Medina, Muhammad essentially, guided by these divine revelations, sets up a community, a state. He takes over the running of the city. He expels those or slaughters those who do not subscribe to his teachings and his revelations. He defeats the Meccans. And by treaty, he's allowed back into Mecca. And when he comes into Mecca, he topples the huge number of idols that exist everywhere. And he establishes Mecca, which reaches back to the beginning of time. It's been a holy place since the origins of time.

It's a shrine that was established by Abraham and his son Ishmael right back in the beginnings of time. And so Medina and Mecca are consecrated as these two cities that are hallowed by the role that they play in the life of the prophet. He dies, but his followers then take his message out into the world and inspired by these revelations that in time will be bundled together to form a single Quran, a single text of revelations um people who come to be known as muslims swallow the persian empire whole dismember a huge chunk of the roman empire spread westwards to the atlantic spread eastwards as far as the gates of china um and the result is the muslim world that we have today yeah very good and so that is why, he could be voted the most influential human being who's ever lived.

Well, that was a bravura performance, Tom. So we're talking a life that runs from about 570 to 632 or so, I think are those the conventional dates, aren't they? Right. Well, yes. But those dates are inevitably contested. Yeah. Yes, but those dates are inevitably contested because there are all kinds of historical questions that surround this narrative. So we have a question from Diogo Mugado who asks, what can be ascertained with some confidence about Muhammad's life?

And that's a question to which there is a whole range of answers. And at one extreme, you have people who say that the traditional accounts can be completely trusted. And at the other end, you have people who say that basically we can't know anything about him. In fact, there are even some who argue that he didn't even exist. And the reason for that is that essentially, if we want a narrative account of Muhammad's life, we're dependent on texts that were first written down, or at least surviving texts that were written down. They date to about two centuries after the lifetime of Muhammad himself. This is like Ibn Ishaq, is it? Eighth century or so? Yeah, so there's a guy called Ibn Ishaq who lives at the end of the eighth century

and he gets kind of redacted by a guy called Ibn Hisam. And that's the version that we have. That's the earliest kind of narrative account. So the question is, what is the relationship of those accounts of his life to the historical Muhammad? But there are fragments, aren't there, from the time? So I've got a couple of them here.

There's a Syriac fragment from 636. Many villages were ruined with killing by the Arabs of Muhammad. So that's from within the sort of Roman world. There's a guy called Thomas the Presbyter, who again mentions the Arabs of Muhammad, 640. And then the most famous one is from the 660s so that's we're talking about what what's that about 30 years after Muhammad conventionally said to have died now this is by an Armenian bishop and he tells the story the sons of Ishmael there's a guy whose name was Muhammad a merchant he taught

them to recognize the God of Abraham especially because he was learned and informed in the history of Moses. He told them, love only the God of Abraham, go and seize the land which God gave you to your father Abraham. No one will be able to resist you in battle because God is with you. So those are sources that appear to allude to the Muhammad that we know, but they're written from outside the Muslim tradition. So these are guys who are maybe hundreds of miles away. There is one that seems to be written during Muhammad's own lifetime. And so if that's the case, then Muhammad is the only founder of a great religious tradition of whom that can be said. Well, that's a fascinating point. So in other words, Muhammad is far from Muhammad being, well, okay, we can talk about

the sources about Muhammad, but what's clear, he's not unusual. I mean, Jesus, there are virtually no sources from the life of Jesus, I think. No, there are no sources from Jesus' life, but there are sources. So we have Paul's letters that are written a decade or so after, and then the Gospels are written a few decades after that. The problem is, is that we don't have the equivalent of Gospels. We don't have the equivalent of narrative lives of the prophet until much later. So it would be analogous to the kind of Gnostic Gospels that are being written around 200 A.D. And no one looks at those and thinks that they are a kind of authentic account of what happened in first century A.D. Judea. So that's the question. But having said that, yes, we do have these kind of early sources that clearly, I mean,

it seems to me, I can't imagine how anyone really can argue that Muhammad didn't exist. Yeah. He clearly did. These early texts, I mean, this is pretty solid evidence for it. And as I say, we have this one source called the Doctrina Jacobi, and it describes how Saracens, Arabs, led by a prophet, have invaded Roman Palestine and defeated the Romans. And it's hard to think who this is a reference to. It doesn't name Muhammad, but it's hard to think who this is referring to, if not Muhammad. But there is a problem and there are two problems with it one is that it's dated to 634 and the tradition as you as you said is that Muhammad

dies in 632 so how do we square that the other is that it describes Muhammad leading an invasion and the Muslim tradition is absolutely clear that he did not do that that he dies before the invasion of Palestine which is the first target there's probably a good way of answering that though isn't that tom which is that well i mean one good way of answering it would be he's still alive and he's leading the invasion but another one would be that the guy who's who's uh what's it called the teaching of jacob or whatever yeah that jacob or whoever it is is a jacob who's writing it is that right is that his name it's complicated it's okay well whoever it is i mean who cares who it is whoever he is, is a Jacob who's writing it. Is that right? Is that his name? It's complicated. Okay, well, whoever it is. I mean, who cares who it is?

Whoever it is, he's repeating a garbled story that he's heard in an age when information travels slowly and incompletely, and he might just have got it wrong, or his interlocutor might have got it wrong. I think there's a more interesting explanation, which is that the prophet, the biblical figure who is named more than any other in the Quran is Moses. And I've already mentioned that the Hidra, the exile, the exodus. I mean, that's what Moses does. He leads his people from Egypt to the promised land.

And that's essentially what Muhammad does when he leads his people from Mecca to Medina. The other thing for which Moses is famous is that he dies before the children of Israel enter the promised land. And essentially, this is a problem if you were casting Muhammad as the new Moses, which I think is basically what's going on. So you can see how that tradition would be erased. And you start to construct a tradition in which Muhammad is described as like Moses dying before his people enter the promised land. And this focuses attention on something that also that's very interesting, which is that it's clear that Palestine, Jerusalem, the Holy Land, the sense of belonging to this biblical tradition, going back through Jesus, through Moses, to Abraham, is incredibly important. And the fact that Palestine is the first target of the invasions doesn't seem to be a coincidence. So I think that what happens is that

if you look at these early sources, you can kind of work out a way in which there is an emphasis on the Holy Land that in due course comes to fade because the Arab Empire comes to embrace a vast range of territories. And essentially what begins perhaps as a movement that is more Jewish, that is more ethnocentric, that is more focused on a Holy Land, comes to be more Christian, comes to be more universalizing. And what emerges as Islam, and I think that Islam is not kind of something that's served up on a plate by Muhammad to his followers and they then take it out. I think it's something that emerges over the course of the Arab conquests and the decades that follow, that it emerges to provide the new rulers of this vast empire with an explanation for why God has given them this

empire and why they deserve to continue ruling it. That's why I didn't ask because I think we should give a bit of a sense of context because I think we can understand Muhammad and that movement to Palestine and all the rest of it more completely if we understand what's going on. Quite often I think you'll read in books will say you know it's Rome and it's Persia and then suddenly in the mid-7th century almost out of nowhere out of the desert these guys who no one knew about erupt with this new message of Islam that has just come out of nowhere and it's this great shock and all the rest of it and I was always thinking that's not very um not a very persuasive or or indeed compelling account of what happened.

Because I think what happened is actually much more interesting. So you've got, I mean, if you think about these two superpowers. So you studied this, didn't you? Yeah, I did. So you studied this. So that was what, 80s? 90s, 90s. So what were you studying?

What were you being told? Well, I did a course that was famous at Oxford because it was the first course where you were allowed to read things in translation. So it was a course called The Near East in the Age of Justinian and Muhammad. And it's part of going to Oxford kind of history law, not that that's saying very much to people who don't care about Oxford history who listen to the podcast. But it was the first course. Previously, you could never do stuff at Oxford if you couldn't read the original sources. And a great Russian history of Byzantium, I think it was, Dmitry Obolensky, said, you know, this is completely unreasonable because no one's going to arrive at Oxford and be able to read like Armenian, medieval Armenian or something. So they agreed that you could do this course. And so you did this course, which was Justinian and Muhammad and the world of the Near East at the time of the fall of – the Empire in the West has fallen. Rome is becoming Byzantium.

It's going to become this new Islamic world. And what I learned – so for me, it was one of the most interesting – and it's why I really wanted to do this subject, actually, because it's one of the most interesting, and it's why I really wanted to do this subject actually, because it's one of the most interesting intellectual adventures, if I can call it that, that I've kind of been on. Because, of course, you first read the traditional accounts of Muhammad, and then there's this whole historiography, which even then was incredibly controversial.

So there was a guy called John Wansborough, American scholar of Islamlam and we read that and and he basically said you know the traditional version is wrong i mean you'll know all this tom that the quran that islam is a later creation than everyone thinks that the arab conquest kind of happened first and this is emerges out of the middle east and that yes exactly um that it emerges out of um you know once they've got the arab empire then they need to develop a creed for it basically i mean i'm really simplifying it and then two of his students as you will know patricia kroner and michael cook

took that on and it got came up with this argument called called book called haggarism where they basically argued that you know islam had begun as a jewish messianic movement and then developed a kind of arab component later on when they decided to ditch the jewishness but that was very controversial even in the 90s i mean i think when i was studying it we read that but then to kind of slightly it had already been slightly repudiated the authors themselves had said well actually maybe there was a was a Muhammad and there was the Quran. So, and I think actually, as far as I can tell from the historiography, and I'm not an expert

in this by any means, people have found engravings and so on, inscriptions. There's more evidence than people thought for a historic Muhammad. Would you agree with that? No. Well, I think essentially the process of the historiography is that you have these two very radical extremes.

Muhammad didn't exist. The Quran was compiled over the 7th and 8th century. That's particularly the ones preposition. And then you have the traditional account in which Mecca is kind of the Dubai of its day, spice trains and all that kind of stuff. And there's a crisis for capitalism. And basically, it's a 1970s back projection onto 7th century Arabia. And I think that both of those have kind of fallen by the wayside. But I think what's emerged is an attempt to situate Muhammad within the world of late antiquity as a holy man.

And late antiquity is a period where... Yeah, rich and holy men, very rich and holy men. Rich and holy men. But I'll tell you what we should say, Tom. It's rich and holy men because this is a world going through an astonishing trauma. Generally, isn't it? I mean, you've got...

So for people who aren't familiar with this incredibly interesting period of late antiquity, you know, tax bases are collapsing. Because of plague. There's been this massive plague in the 6th century. This devastating plague that people say, you know, has killed a third, half of the world. It may be exaggeration, but maybe in certain places not. Which I think only recently historians have really given the centrality it deserves.

And the interesting thing about that relative to what's happening in Arabia is that it hits cities disproportionately. And you have Arab accounts about it. So the plague is described as arrows shot by the jinn. So a bit like Apollo raining arrows on the Greeks in the Iliad. But these arrows only hit you if you come out of the desert. So perhaps there, there's a kind of interesting clue to what's going on, that for the first time, there's this kind of, you know,

the huge imbalance of population between those in the Fertile Crescent and those in the deserts beyond is starting to ease down. And then you have the Great War on top of that. Yeah, this massive war. So, I mean, what are we talking about? Rome and Persia have been the two superpowers for basically, what, 700 years? So they've divided that world between. 500 years, the Sasanians and the Romans.

Well, Persia more generally, though, I suppose, going back even further. So they launched this sort of 30 years war style from 602 to 628, I think it is, which seesaws incredibly. I mean, it's sort of Game of Thrones style war, which the Persians seem to carry all before them. And they capture these provinces. Including Jerusalem. Yeah, Egypt, Palestine, and so on, war which the persians seem to carry all before them and they capture these provinces including jerusalem yeah egypt palestine and so on that have been central to the roman world and then

heraclius this extraordinary roman general takes the reins of the emperor yeah well he takes the reins of the empire and then he goes on these campaigns where he you know he he he spends winter on campaign which is great really sort of groundbreaking. And he basically casts the Persians back, reconquers all this territory. And at that point, people often say, his biographers and people who've written about him say, if only he died. If only he died right then, he would be remembered as one of the absolute all-time great Roman emperors. But of course, he doesn't die. And what happens next? Suddenly, these fellows will appear out in the desert.

And they take all the provinces that the Romans had captured back and the Persians are paying Arabs to essentially kind of serve as buffer zones along the borders. So there's two regimes, aren't there? The Hassanids and the Lachmans. And because both empires are short of money, essentially they're franchising out the patrolling of the frontier to these Arabs. When the Romans get kicked out of Palestine, those Arabs have no money coming in. And this is exactly the period at which tradition places Mohammed and the emergence of this kind of huge army waiting to take over. Now, it's possible that essentially what you have in Palestine after the expulsion of the Persians is kind of like French Vietnam, you know, after the Second World War the Persians is kind of like French Vietnam,

you know, after the Second World War, that the French are coming back in trying to resurrect their rule. But essentially, their prestige has been demolished. And there are very few kind of French troopers there. And essentially, what is cast by the later tradition as a kind of great invasion may just be a kind of slow implosion in which Arab people, Arabs who previously had been employed as mercenaries, essentially kind of move in and don't need the Romans and they just take it over. So it's possible that that is what is going on. But it's also true, isn't it, Tom, that there's much more interplay between the Arab world and the Roman and Persian worlds than people often think. So the common version, which is there's this sort of veil of sand

behind which these guys have been lurking for hundreds of years and no one's cared about, and suddenly they erupt, and they're this incredible new force, sort of like the Dothraki arriving in Westeros to go out to our Game of Thrones. But that's not really the case at all. They've been trading with the Romans. They've been working for them. People have been traveling back and forth. I mean,

they all knew. And that's where the ideas, the religious ideas, I mean, there are Christians. There are Arab Christians, aren't there? There are. So this is, over the past decades, this has been the main focus of trying to understand who or what Muhammad might have been, is to recognize, is to try and situate him in that world, in the world of Persia and Roman rivalry, but also a world that is absolutely teeming with Christian, with Jewish, even with Zoroastrian elements, and perhaps, just perhaps, with traditions that have faded elsewhere, but are still current in the deserts beyond Palestine. Now, because if you look at the traditional accounts of Muhammad, these biographies that over the course of the 9th into the 10th

century, they become more and more elaborate the further away you go. So they're clearly being, you know, extraneous information is being added to it. A bit like Arthurian romances don't tell you anything really about the context of, you know, late Roman Britain or post-Roman Britain. So likewise, these biographies of Muhammad do not tell you very much about they don't they're not really grounded in a recognisable world of late antiquity. You know, there's the odd Christian, there's the odd, you know, there's a tribe of Jews who get dealt with at Medina. There's kind of mentions of Heraclius. But by and large, it's not a world that is rich in mentions that we can recognize as being late antique. So the fascination is to try and situate Muhammad in a context that makes sense of him as an early 7th century figure, rather than as someone who has been constructed basically to explain things and to justify things that the

Muslim rulers and indeed Muslims more generally in the later centuries need him to do. And so that's the challenge is, do you jettison the Islamic tradition completely? And do you only draw on texts that originate within or in the decades after his life? Or are there elements within the Muslim tradition that you can draw on and construct a model for? And there is one key question, I think, which really underlies the whole problem. And it's only a problem for non-Muslims. So for Muslims, it's not a problem to explain where the Quran comes from. It comes from God. That's the essence of what a Muslim believes.

But if you're not a Muslim, you have to explain how it was that where does the Quran come from? The ones for thesis that the Quran emerged over the eighth and ninth century has been conclusively disproved, I think. I think it's clear that the Quran is associated with someone called Muhammad. And although it takes time for it to be compiled, it's clear that there are prophetic utterances that together will constitute the Quran. So therefore, the Quran does provide, I think, evidence for the kind of world

in which the historical Muhammad was living. But of course, you still have to explain how and why it is that these texts emerge. Well, Tom, why don't you do that after the break? Well, because I just want to set up that this is a problem because there is no other account we have of where the Quran comes from except the traditional Muslim one. And I remember being struck by what a problem this is for secular historians, where I went to an exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum in New York about Byzantium in early Islam. And the labels, the kind of cancer in the Byzantine

rooms were all very secular. So the descriptions of Christian practices were not from a Christian point of view. It was very, very objective, very, very secular. Then you got to the Islam room, and there was a collection of early Korans. and there was a kind of billboard talking about the Korans. And it said the Koran was revealed, you know, the revelations that were given to Mohammed by by God and that came to him by the angel. And that was it. There was no context. There was no attempt to explain what this might mean for someone who doesn't believe in God or doesn't believe in angels or even doesn't believe in the specific fact that Muhammad is a prophet of God. And likewise, this is something that you will find in books by very, very reputable academics. So there's a book written by Glenn Bowersock, a very distinguished ancient historian who wrote a book called The Crucible of Islam, which is full of brilliant analysis of religious traditions. I mean, he does a brilliantly kind of

sceptical account of the traditional accounts of the fall of Jerusalem to the Persians and the way that the Romans take it back. But when he's writing about Muhammad, he's got this bold line, the revelations that Gabriel brought to Muhammad came in Mecca. Doesn't elaborate on that. Doesn't, he's asking, you know, he's saying Muhammad gets it from an angel and leaves it at that. Well, this is a bit like when I did, so when I did that course, The Near East in the Age of Justin and Muhammad,

I remember saying to my tutor, so not about the Islamic element, but actually about icons. There was a point at which a source says an icon repelled an army or something. And I said, but surely I don't, I'm not meant to believe that, am I? I mean, I don't believe icons can repel armies. And I suppose it's the same, but a more fraught problem, I think.

I mean, you don't have a problem as a historian saying that an icon can't repel an army, or you don't believe that Jesus could do miracles, or you don't believe in every word of the Acts of the Apostles. But it is more difficult for a historian to say that of early Islam because you're worried about giving offence, effectively. Effectively, but also, I think it's not just offence, but I think upsetting people for whom the Qur'an is the revelation that's come from God. And if you start putting it on the slab of historical inquiry and dissecting it

and chopping it up and, you know, against other things, then obviously that, that, that's a stressful thing to do. But I think that's not a reason not to do it because it, I'm sure,

you know, I mean, I know for a fact that most Muslims are happy to accept that if you're not a Muslim, then of course you have to arrive at an alternative explanation for where the Quran comes from. And I think it's an expert And I think there are explanations for where it comes from. And I think they're not divorced from Mohammed. So we'll come to that after the break. Let's come back after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about the life of Muhammad and early Islam. And Tom Holland, you posed before the break this question about the Quran

and where the Quran comes from. So there are Quranic fragments, aren't there, which have been carbon dated. So there is one in Birmingham, I think it is. Let me get my notes. The Birmingham fragment is no later than the 640s or so. There's one in Tübingen in Germany, 650s or 660s. So we know that elements of the Qur'an... But you see, even they are problematic because that's the latest date.

But the earlier dates are well into the 6th century, so before supposedly muhammad has been born so that's that's a problem uh and the obvious suggestion would the obvious solution to that is that it's it's the manuscript you know it's the parchment that's being tested not the ink so yeah this could be fragments the the problem is whenever you were trying to find absolute kind of solidity absolute certainty in this field is it's like wading through through sinking sands and every time you think you found kind of solid ground you found it giving it away again it gives away again but

historians of the quran generally believe don't they that the quran was um as it were, sort of enshrined. It was set in stone, as it were, later. There were bits of it that possibly come from... There were different versions of the same passage, for example, at different points in the text, that the text was edited at some point after Muhammad's death. That must be the case there are probably as as many um different versions of of how and why the quran emerged the way it did as there are historians writing about it um in fact i thought that this would come up so i armed myself with um a copy of a book called the quran in its historical

context um and it's the the it's an introductory essay by the great scholar of early Islam, Fred Donner, who's at Chicago. I'll read it. It's a paragraph, but I think it's worth reading because this is the perspective of an absolutely accepted, standard-bearing scholar of this subject. And he opens it by saying, Quranic studies as a field of academic research

appears today to be in a state of disarray. Those of us who study Islam's origins have to admit collectively that we simply do not know some very basic things about the Quran, things so basic that the knowledge of them is usually taken for granted by scholars dealing with other texts. They include such questions as, how did the Quran originate? Where did it come from? And when did it first appear? How was it first written? In what kind of language was, is it written? What form did it take? Who constituted its first audience? How is it transmitted from one generation to another, especially in its early years? When, how, and by whom was it codified? Those familiar with the Quran and the scholarship on it will know that to ask even one of these questions immediately plunges us into realms

of grave uncertainty and has the potential to spark intense debate, which is, you know, putting it mildly. Yes. So because the traditional account of Muhammad's life is the only version that we have, the moment you question that or you move away from that, essentially, you have to construct a model for what might have happened. You're putting fragments together. You're trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle in which large bits are missing, and you can't even be certain what the jigsaw puzzle originally looked like. And so it's not surprising that basically there are as many different accounts of how and

why the Quran might have emerged and how that might relate to Muhammad and how Muhammad might relate to the context of late antiquity as there are scholars writing about it. And that is what makes this, I think, uniquely challenging to study. I mean, that's why I basically, the five years I spent on this, my brain ached the whole time. But when you finish, so your book is The Shadow of the Sword, isn't it? You know, fascinating book. And you did a TV program or two programs, I think. Was it two programs?

Just one. Just one, accompanying it. You know, incredibly rich subject that you clearly had great fun doing, although it was a challenge. But you must have come out of it with a sense, however provisional, that you – I put you on the spot and said, what do you think the story is? What would you say? Okay, I think that Muhammad was a merchant.

So I think that part of the tradition is true. We're told that by this very early source that you mentioned. He sees himself as standing in the line of Abrahamic prophets. So he's probably got that because Judaism is floating around Mecca or the Arabian Peninsula. There's a sort of stew of ideas come to that in a minute perhaps come to that in a minute um things that we can be certain about he i think he he engages in a hydra an exodus i think the the ideal of the kind of emigration is is fundamental to his history and to uh to the quran so i think that's that's i think that um yathrib is where he sets up a community

and that's both because yathrib is is repeatedly mentioned in the contemporary sources by you know bishops or whoever who have no particular reason to to lie about that to distort that um and also because um in uh the earliest biographies, Muslim biographies of Muhammad, there are preserved fragments of what's conventionally called the Constitution of Medina, which is clearly very early texts. That's a state building kind of exercise. Yes, state building. So I think that Yathrib is clearly central. As you said, there are inscriptions that do seem to kind of tie in with some of the Muslim accounts about this that have been found. I think that this community

was interested in expanding. I think it had a kind of post-biblical vision that it was interested in spreading. I think Mohammed led the invasion of Palestine. I think that he died and I think his body was taken back to Medina. And I think that he then essentially got forgotten for a bit. And we'll come to the reasons why for that perhaps a bit later. But the issue then is if he's lead if he's founding this this biblically enthused informed community um where does his knowledge of of the bible come from what will be at least these biblical traditions if as the tradition says he's growing up in mecca which is an entirely pagan city you know a thousand miles

away from where christians and jews are and it seems to me that the story of of muhammad growing up in mecca or what the place we now call mecca is the equivalent of christians saying that jesus is the son of of a virgin that in both cases it's an attempt to insulate the vehicle of the divine in the case of muhammad the the you know the essence of the divine in the case of jesus from the of the divine in the case of Jesus, from the charge that these are frauds, that Jesus is the son of a centurion or something, that Mary got pregnant in a perfectly normal manner, or Muhammad, that he's influenced by the context of the world that he's living in.

And the reason why that has to be guarded against is because it might imply that these traditions, these elements within the Quran might have come from the context of the broader world in which Muhammad has been born. Now, this is where the tension between history and belief kind of locks horns. Because if you you're a believer then of course it comes from god that's that's the essence of your belief but if you're not a believer then of course you know you're going to say well look at this text you know there are all these elements they they clearly come from christian jewish often you know even older traditions and then you have to ask yourself how and why did they did muhammad come to to absorb them so one of the words obviously the key things in this is mecca

is the idea is is what what where mecca fits in because mecca is a is a is a trading town um it has fairs it has markets people go but how do we know that well um this is a this is our guiding assumption anyway. Now, one of the things that people like historians like Patricia Croner pointed to in the Koran that they say they have raises questions is that Muhammad talks in the Koran about his foes being people who have, they grow, you know, vines, They have date palms. They have sheep and cows and things like that, that basically people probably didn't have in Mecca, which is a problem, right? Yes, it is a problem.

So some historians say, well, that suggests that the traditional assumption that all this is happening in Mecca must be wrong, that if they've got all these sheep and cows, it must be happening further north, which would bring it closer to the world of Palestine and the Roman world where the ideas could be coming from. And particularly olives. And the kind of olive that's referred to is

only grown kind of within the, much closer to the Mediterranean. So that, I think, is a problem. And I think also the fact that it was argued by Gerald Horting in a kind of epical book that people who are called the mushrakin in the Quran, who practice what's called shi'aq, which is kind of associating deities or perhaps angels with God. And this is their crime. And the tradition is that this is paganism, that they are worshipping gods and goddesses from pagan Arabia.

But Horting's argument is that actually Muhammad or the prophet or whoever the author of the Quran is, is calling them idolaters in the way that Protestants might call Catholics idolaters. You know, Protestants might call Catholics pagans. That doesn't mean that Protestant Catholics aren't both Christian. They clearly are. So the argument is that actually what the Quran bears witness to is essentially an argument about the biblical God that's over issues like, to what extent, what is the proper relationship of angels to God? And that this is what Muhammad is, or the prophet or whoever he is,

is getting exercised by. So there's a world of abrahamic religion and that this is an argument within that basically rather than it rather than importation of a abrahamic religion into a world where people are worshipping pagan idols of some other kind yes essentially um and so that raises a couple of questions that people asked about so some of our regularists and one of our liberalists stephan yensen has asked about muhammad's message and christian theology and sascript has asked about similarities between judaism and islam so it is perfectly obvious to anybody muslim or non-muslim that islam is is in well it's in the same sort of religious universe shall we say as as Judaism and Christianity. So Muslims, Abraham plays a part,

Moses plays a part, Jesus plays a part, although Muslims don't believe he was the son of God. So do you think, well, first, do you think Islam, do you think it's come out of, I mean, there's an argument that's come out of this sect, which are called the Jewish Christians, which is a very sort of, will seem very obscure to some of our listeners. Well, for Muslims, Islam provides a template by which to judge whether

Judaism and Christianity are corrupted. Because Jesus, Moses, Abraham are all Muslim. They all preach the same message. And the degree to which Jewish scripture and Christian scripture no longer accords to that is a reflection of the degree to which they've been corrupted. So for Muslims, you judge kind of backwards through time, which obviously is not a technique that historians generally use. For a historian, the fact that you have a body of text with Jewish and Christian elements obviously means that they have to come from Jewish and Christian sources. Now, the Jewish and Christian elements

within the Quran are often quite confusing to those brought up in Jewish and Christian traditions. And they seem to reflect perspectives that are often quite ancient. So the argument, say, about the divinity of Jesus is one that goes right the way back to the beginnings of Christianity. And again and again in the Quran, you find elements of theological battles that elsewhere in the world had basically been settled. That's why it's so hard to know where these elements are coming from. But I would say that seems completely, to a non-Muslim, to a sceptical historian, that would seem completely explicable.

This is a peripheral part of the Roman world. It's a world that has been, the rest of the world has been blighted by plague The empire has suffered serious traumas Syria, desert and so on Has been a place where holy men and sects And things have always flourished It would seem not weird at all to me That at the end of the What are we talking about, the end of the 6th century or whatever.

Beginning of the 7th, yeah. Yeah, there are all kinds of ideas floating around that might seem very old fashioned to people in Constantinople, like Jesus was not actually the son of God. But these are massively, massively heretical. And also they confuse confuse jewish and christian traditions and what's happened over the course of late antiquity essentially is a process of of both rabbis and bishops and church fathers digging trenches and pulling people back from the no man's land and what you seem to get with the quran is a text where these trenches have been erased and these different traditions are mixing and mingling again um but

you've got to ask well you know how and why are these traditions suddenly kind of coming to life i mean it's like you know it's like discovering a kind of jurassic park of of theologies you know these these they shouldn't really be around um so and there's a question from uh polite parrot splendidly named was muhammad really literate so this is the tradition um there's a verse in the quran that implies that he might be but equally it can be reinterpreted it and what you do get through the quran is a massive respect for for texts yeah um the whole of creation is described as a text um and it it may be that you know that there are kind of people scholars have found echoes of the dead sea scrolls for instance in the quran you know are people digging up these scrolls you know

are they finding scrolls in the the deserts beyond i mean it's so difficult i mean you feel that you're straying into dan brown territory with this kind of but it's very difficult to know and you know i think essentially you have to kind of throw your's very difficult to know and you know i think essentially you have to kind of throw your hands up and say i mean i think i mean i think i mean my scenario would be you know it's a very it's a it's a world that seems to have lost its mornings to some extent which is apocalyptic and that's the other thing about the quran is that yeah it's very apocalyptic it's an ap world. It feels like the end of days. The two great powers that have really structured this world,

not just for as long as anyone can remember, I mean, stretching back hundreds of years, these two great powers are in kind of meltdown. There's been a plague which people can probably remember. It's ongoing. They can remember that. Yeah, I i mean so the end of the world feels like it's around muhammad is as you said in your brilliant sort of overview he's a business agent for a well-to-do business woman he's traveling that that's late but we know he's a merchant

let's imagine that he is he's traveling he's hearing a lot of different ideas he gets to 40 and you know either he receives a divine revelation, which you believe if you're a Muslim, or if you're a sceptical historian, secular historian, you think he puts all this together, all these ideas that are floating around. He's convinced that he is a prophet. I mean, I think there's no doubt about that.

I think he must believe that he's a prophet. And what's clear is that the people around him think he's a prophet. But there's also, what's interesting is that the time around him think he's a prophet. But there's also what's interesting is that the time is right. The market is there because, you know, the Arabs have always been brilliant, mobile sort of cavalry, but never been united. Spent a lot of time fighting each other. They've been hiring themselves as effectively for mercenaries, for the Romans and the Persians. Suddenly the Romans and the Persians have fallen apart. And if only the Arabs can kind of get their act together and unite around something that makes them transcend their

differences, you know, the world is their oyster. And I think it may be even more complicated than that. So I think that some of the Arabs may be directly inspired by Muhammad's teaching, but I think others may be, you know, they're just kind of moving in and taking what they can get. But why wouldn't you? I mean, Palestine is right there. Absolutely. And so is Iraq. So is Syria. And you kind of just move and suddenly then Egypt's fallen and you find that you've got, it's like kind of overboiled chicken falling off the bone. It's just, you know, you're just picking it off.

And then you have to explain how this has happened, because this is an age where nothing happens without god wanting it to happen and what's what's fascinating about the early years of of um the arab rule of of the fertile crescent and beyond is that muhammad then vanishes so he he does not get mentioned he doesn't appear on he doesn't appear on coins nobody seems to talk about him and then what happens is that you have a civil war and basically people are fighting over the empire. Who's going to claim the mantle of God? God's established himself as God's favorite, God's deputy.

And you have a guy called Ibn al-Zubayr who we're told occupies the house of God somewhere in the desert. And one of the guys in the civil war is a bloke called Ibn al-Zubayr. And we're told by a contemporaneous source, he came to a certain locality in the south where they're the Muslims. Their sanctuary was and lived there. So it doesn't specify where it was, but somewhere in the desert. And this sanctuary gets destroyed in a siege uh

ibn al-zabaya fights on uh the sanctuary gets destroyed again um but at some point one of ibn al-zabaya's allies in iran issues a coin and on that coin is the first mention of Muhammad that you get in an Arabic text. So what date is this roughly? This is about 685-686. Okay. And by doing this, Ibn al-Zubayr is able to claim a divine sanction for himself because he's able to say, I am following the footsteps of the prophet of God. And by doing that, he immediately dignifies his kind of sectarian role, basically. Meanwhile, there's another guy in Palestine, in Syria, and specifically in Jerusalem, called Abdul Malik. And Abdul Malik picks up on this and recognizes that, you know, it's great to lay claim to this mantle. And he casts himself as, so he builds the Dome of the Rock,

the first kind of emergent Muslim building to have survived, really. And there are these inscriptions on it that are very anti-Trinitarian, so opposed to the idea that, you know, Jesus is the son of God, that one is three, three is one. Proclaiming Muhammad as this one god's prophet uh and he starts to issue coins as well that um that that mentioned muhammad and abdul malik casts himself as um the deputy of god the caliph uh and seems you know i mean a man of of immense self-confidence, pretty convinced that he is as significant a figure as Muhammad himself is. But he wins in the civil war, defeats Ibn al-Zubayr, establishes a kind of a universal rule over the Arab empire.

And it's under Abdul Malik that you start to get the massive proclamation of Muhammad as a prophet of God. It seems the codification of the Quran. It seems the initial proclamation of the place that we would now call Mecca as having been Mecca, as having been the site of the sanctuary of God. And all of this kind of package, it's from the reign of Abdul Malik that you can start to see something

that we will recognize as Islam emerging and taking the form that it's had ever since. And this is at a time, though, Tom, when there would have been people who could remember Muhammad, right? I mean, if they were old, they were very old. So we're talking about, you're talking about what, 680s, did you say? Or so? Yes.

So if Muhammad died in 632, it's plausible there could be some old people would, or there would be sons of people who certainly could have remembered him but equally they're probably very few um and so that therefore enables people to kind of you know you have a slightly blanker palette than you might otherwise have done um you know and this is this is the the arabs at this stage are not writing stuff down or if they are it hasn't survived they're not writing accounts so it's these are all accounts uh and this is an age when um basically traditions can be started almost from scratch i mean this is you know the famous example is christians turning up in the holy land and kind of identifying all

these places as the bush you know the bush where Moses, you know, the burning bush or, you know, this house is where St. Peter lived or whatever. The same thing happens with Jewish traditions. The same thing happens with Zoroastrian traditions. And there seems no reason why the same thing can't have happened with what becomes Muslim traditions. Because the truth is, is that the first mention of Mecca isn't until the middle of the 8th century. And even then it's placed somewhere in the Fertile Crescent in Iraq. And the location of the House of God, which is clearly crucially important, is presumably where Muhammad went on Hijra from, is presumably the place that Ibn al-Zabara is going to. But we're told it gets destroyed. It gets destroyed twice over. So if it's been leveled, the task of rebuilding it

and perhaps locating it somewhere else in a place that the Umayyads, the family from which Abdul Malik comes from, becomes much easier. And I don't think that it would be a kind of deliberate fraud. It's just rather like Olympus was a place that kind of lots of, identified with lots of mountains before it settled on the mountain we now call Olympus

or Camelot, you know, lots of locations for Camelot. But there are lots of places, lots of different traditions, perhaps associated with Muhammad. Perhaps Muhammad did have an association with the place that comes to be Mecca. But essentially, it's a time, these decades from, you know, the lifetime of Muhammad through the kind of 50 years that follow are a period where everything is up for grabs, and the concrete is not yet set, and the guy who shapes and molds the story. So I think there's a question somewhere about, you know, is there someone who's equivalent of St. Paul? I mean, basically, Abdul Malik is the equivalent of St.ul and constantine he's the person who is establishing muhammad as the prophet of a god who has also given his

sanction to the rule of abdul malik and and the arabs over the over the empire of the world um but who is also kind of canonizing the story of Muhammad, the story of his relationship to a shrine and the story of his relationship to the Quran in a way that will then endure and pass down. And the early accounts get erased. Before we, we've already talked for probably far too long, but before we come to an end,

let's just talk a little bit about Muhammad's reputation later. So Muhammad obviously has run, you know, he's a figure who has resounded through history, not just for Muslims, but for non-Muslims too. And I know you've got a couple of good examples of people who wrote about Muhammad afterwards. So Carlisle, I think, is one of your examples, isn't it? Well, before that, for Christians, they have no sense of Muhammad as a prophet or a founder of a different religious tradition. They see him as a schismatic. So in Dante, that's the fate. He's sentenced to be torn to pieces, reassembled and torn to pieces again. At what point, Tom, did people stop thinking of Islam as a sort of...

Did Christians, sort of Romans, at what point did they stop thinking of Islam? Because at first they clearly thought of Islam as this sort of weird Jewish heresy. But at what point do they say, it's a religion in its own right that's got a rich tradition and all this sort of stuff? Yeah, beginning of the early modern period. And then through the Victorian period,

people get fascinated by Muhammad. So as you say, Kalil writes a life of him and kind of enshrines him as the model of a great man yeah uh and and then you also have other other historians who who kind of try and do the life and times style approach so putting muhammad in the context of the age but that's where you get all the traditions of him as a merchant living and mecca as a kind of great merchant city and all this kind of thing um which then gets picked up by Muslim scholars. So there's a sense in which the model of Muhammad today is quite a westernized one. And there are lots of Muslims, of course, who recognize that and who want to go back to an original, you know, script away, get out the paint stripper um but there's a there's a brilliant description

of what they're doing by um a scholar called kater ali who's written a wonderful book about the afterlife of muhammad and the way that both muslims and non-muslims have understood him and it says about the text written symbolically came to be read literally and i think that's that's the problem is that there's so much about muhammad that gets is now taken as a kind of literary literal historical account in the muslim tradition whereas in fact it it for most of of of islamic history muhammad is that you know he's the beloved of god he's the the man who that's why he's loved um and the kind of attempt to see him as a historical figure is much more of a western project so there is a kind of tension there i think and it's one that obviously is focused in western

countries it's quest for the historical jesus isn't it it's very not dissimilar i mean yes you know the attempt to historicize christ and so that whole tradition in a way is a kind of christian one because it's bred of the christian to make sense of Jesus and the Bible historically. And people then using those techniques, then apply it to the Muslim tradition, which is why, I mean, inevitably, I think it kind of can raise hackles among Muslims, because you're applying an alien tradition. I'm permanently in awe of your ability to, no matter what the subject, to seamlessly make a very convincing argument that it all comes back to your excellent book Dominion about the Christian tradition.

There you are. I've done the plug for you. Thank you. If only I could find a way to link all subjects to the second premiership of Harold Wilson in the 1970s. But of course, when and if you come to write your book on the latter years of the Thatcher premiership and into the major premiership, I hope you'll do that.

Then, of course, debates over the relationship of historical Mohammed to how people have interpreted and misinterpreted him absolutely becomes a part of contemporary British history because you've got the Stannic Verses and you've got everything that goes on from that. So I hope that you too will engage with this fascinating topic. The quest for the historic Margaret Thatcher.

Well, that's a religious subject to turn to on another occasion. Right. I hope you enjoyed it. We'd love to hear your comments. What are we doing next time, Tom? We're doing Magna Carta, I think. So King John's partisans will have very strong views about that. And let's hope we don't get cancelled for it. All right.

Bye-bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.