Here, then, for anyone committed to believing that what Muslim tradition taught about the origins of Islam might actually have been the literal truth, was a most unsettling possibility. “If all Hadith is given up,” as a noted Pakistani liberal, Fazlur Rahman, reflected a decade after Schacht’s momentous study, “what remains but a yawning chasm of fourteen centuries between us and the Prophet?”44 His tone of anguish was hardly surprising. Rahman well appreciated that it was not only the lawyers of the early Caliphate who had sought to bridge the “yawning chasm” between themselves and the age of Muhammad through the promiscuous deployment of isnads. Historians had done so as well. How, for instance, had Ibn Hisham been able to substantiate his story of the spectacular contribution made by angels to Muhammad’s victory at Badr? He was certainly not the first to write about it. Indeed, he positively gloried in his plagiarism, freely acknowledging that his whole book was a reworking of a biography written half a century earlier by a man named Ibn Ishaq—a child of the grandchildren of the generation of the Prophet. But that, of course, merely begs a further question: how had Ibn Ishaq obtained his own information?
“Remember when you prayed fervently to your Lord,” it was written in the Qur’an, “and He answered you: ‘I shall reinforce you with a thousand angels, coming in waves.’ ”45 This, Muslim scholars had settled, could only have been an allusion to the Battle of Badr. Eye-witnesses too, their testimony copied by Ibn Hisham from Ibn Ishaq’s book, had confirmed this verdict. “If I were in Badr today and had my sight,” one of them was said to have reminisced, “I could show you the glen from which the angels emerged. I have not the slightest doubt on the point.”46 Here, then, surely, was sufficient evidence to satisfy even the most hardened sceptic? And yet, and yet … Both proofs relied on isnads. It was an isnad which confirmed that the verse in the Qur’an did actually refer to the victory at Badr; it was an isnad that confirmed the testimony of the veteran. Remove them, and there was no evidence at all. No wonder, then, that Fazlur Rahman should so have dreaded the “yawning chasm” that he saw the bleak and ravening scepticism of the West as opening up before his faith. “In the vacuity of this chasm not only must the Qur’an slip from our fingers … but even the very existence and integrity of the Qur’an and, indeed, the existence of the Prophet himself become an unwarranted myth.”47
His forebodings were well founded. Over the past forty years, the reliability of what the Muslim historical tradition can tell us about the origins of Islam has indeed come under brutal and escalating attack—to the degree that many historians now doubt that it can tell us anything much of value at all. To be sure, there are still those who will recount the Battle of Badr as though it were an episode as rooted in history as, say, the Battle of Waterloo, carefully analysing Muhammad’s strategy, calculating the size of his forces, and illustrating his tactics with arrows on maps.48 Yet this, to many others, appears a spectacular misreading of the evidence, a confusion of history with something very different: literature. “Clientship and loyalty, plunder and pursuit, challenges and instances of single combat”:49 these were the themes of Ibn Hisham in his account of the Battle of Badr, just as they were similarly the themes that the Greek poet Homer, a millennium and a half earlier, had explored in his great epic of warfare, the Iliad. The one features angels; the other gods. Why, then, should we believe that the account of the Prophet’s first great victory is any more authentic than the legend of the siege of Troy?
Certainly, it can come as a jolt to discover that, with a single exception, we have no extant descriptions of the Battle of Badr that date from before the ninth century AD. We do not even have Ibn Ishaq’s original biography of Muhammad—only revisions and reworkings. As for the material on which Ibn Ishaq himself drew upon for his researches, it has long since vanished. Set against the triumphal hubbub raised by Arab historians in the ninth century, let alone the centuries that followed, the silence is deafening and perplexing. The precise state of play bears spelling out. Over the course of almost two hundred years, the Arabs, a people never noted for their reticence, and whose motivation, we are told, had been an utterly consuming sense of religious certitude, had set themselves to conquering the world—and yet in all that time, they composed not a single record of their victories, not one, that has survived into the present day. How could this possibly have been so, when even on the most barbarous fringes of civilisation, even in Britain, even in the north of England, books of history were being written during this same period, and copied, and lovingly tended? Why, when the savage Northumbrians were capable of preserving the writings of a scholar such as Bede, do we have no Muslim records from the age of Muhammad? Why not a single Arab account of his life, nor of his followers’ conquests, nor of the progress of his religion, from the whole of the near two centuries that followed his death?
Even the sole exception to the rule—a tiny shred of papyrus discovered in Palestine and dated to around AD 740—serves only to compound the puzzle.50 Reading it is like overhearing a game of Chinese whispers. Over the course of only eight lines, it provides something truly startling: a date for the Battle of Badr that is not in the holy month of Ramadan. Why should this come as a surprise? Because later Muslim scholars, writing their learned and definitive commentaries on the Qur’an, confidently identified Badr with an otherwise cryptic allusion to “the day the two armies clashed”51—a date that fell in Ramadan. Perhaps, then, on this one point, the scholars were wrong? Perhaps. But if so, then why should they have been right in anything else that they wrote? What if the entire account of the victory at Badr were nothing but a fiction, a dramatic just-so story, fashioned to explain allusions within the Qur’an that would otherwise have remained beyond explanation? A battle on a valley’s edge won against terrifying odds; angels swooping down to strike at infidel necks; plunder seized from routed caravans: the holy text certainly alludes to all these things. Yet, aside from a single name-check, Badr itself is never mentioned.52 There is certainly no confirmation that a great battle—such as the one described by Ibn Hisham—was ever fought there. Whatever else it may be, the Qur’an is no work of history. Startlingly, were it not for all the commentaries elucidating its mysteries, all the biographies of the Prophet, and all the sprawling collections of hadiths—none of which, in the form we have them, pre-dates the beginning of the third century after the hijra—we would have only the barest reason to associate it with a man named Muhammad at all.