That the coming of Islam was one of the supreme revolutions of world history is evident enough. All the more devastating to realise, then, that of written evidence composed before AD 800, the only traces we possess are either the barest shreds of shreds, or else the delusory shimmering of mirages.53 No empire can be raised amid a silence, of course; but what we chiefly hear now of the founding of the Caliphate is the merest sound and fury, tales told centuries later, and signifying, if not nothing, then very little. The voices of the Arab warriors who dismembered the ancient empires of Persia and Rome, and of their sons, and of their sons in turn—let alone of their daughters and grand-daughters—have all been silenced, utterly and for ever. Neither letters, nor speeches, nor journals, if they were ever so much as written, have survived; no hint as to what those who actually lived through the establishment of the Caliphate thought, or felt, or believed. It is as though we had no eye-witness accounts of the Protestant Reformation, or the French Revolution, or the two World Wars. No wonder, then, that a leading historian of the process by which Islam, in the ninth and tenth Christian centuries, finally came to construct an accepted past for itself, and to make sense of its rise to global power, should have lamented the “loss of the tradition’s earliest layers,” and pronounced it “nothing short of catastrophic.”54 Far from Islam having been born in the full light of history, its birth was shrouded in what has appeared, to an increasing number of scholars, an almost impenetrable darkness.
To be sure, there are very few scholars who would go so far as to claim that the Prophet never existed.55 Someone by the name of Muhammad does certainly appear to have intruded upon the consciousness of his near-contemporaries. One Christian source describes “a false prophet”56 leading the Saracens in an invasion of Palestine. This was written in AD 634—just two years after the traditional date of Muhammad’s death. Another, written six years later, refers to him by name. Over the succeeding decades, a succession of priests and monks would write of an enigmatic figure whom they described variously as “the general,” “the instructor” or “the king” of the Arabs. Yet these cryptic allusions—not to mention the fact that they were all made by infidels—merely highlight, once again, the total absence of any early Muslim reference to Muhammad. Only in the 690s did a Caliph finally get around to inscribing the Prophet’s name on a public monument; only decades after that did the first tentative references to him start to appear in private inscriptions;57 and only around 800, of course, did biographies come to be written of Muhammad that Muslims took care to preserve. What might have happened to earlier versions of his life we cannot know for certain; but one possibility is strongly hinted at by none other than Ibn Hisham. Much that previous generations had recorded of the Prophet, he commented sternly, was either bogus, or irrelevant, or sacrilegious. “Things which it is disgraceful to discuss; matters which would distress certain people; and such reports as I have been told are not to be accepted as trustworthy—all these things have I omitted.”58 As well he might have done. What was at stake, in Ibn Hisham’s devout opinion, was not merely his status as a reputable historian, nor even his good name as a Muslim, but something infinitely more precious to him: the fate of his soul.
Here, then, at least, is terra firma. What we can know with absolute confidence is that by the early ninth century, the precise details of what Muhammad might have said and done some two hundred years previously had come to provide, for vast numbers of people, a roadmap that they believed led straight to heaven. God had seized personal control of human events. The world had been set upon a novel course. To doubt this conviction was to risk hellfire. Given this perspective, it is scarcely surprising that any ambition to write history or biography as we might understand it should have paled into nothingness compared to the infinitely more pressing obligation to trace in the pattern of the Prophet’s life the wishes and purposes of the Almighty. That is why, in leaving the age of Ibn Hisham behind, and venturing back into the heaving ocean of uncertainty and conjecture that is the early history of Islam, today’s historians can find it such a struggle to identify reliable charts. Adrift amid the shadowy vastness, what prospect of finding landfall? There is always the Qur’an, of course—and yet the holy text itself, once stripped of all its cladding, all the elaborate scaffolding of commentaries built up around it with such labour and devotion from the ninth century onwards, can seem only to add to the voyager’s sense of being lost upon a darkling ocean. “It stands isolated,” one scholar suggests, “like an immense rock jutting forth from a desolate sea, a stony eminence with few marks on it to suggest how or why it appeared in this watery desert.”59 Or even, most shockingly, when. After all, if the entire colossal edifice of Muslim tradition depends upon isnads for its veracity, and if the isnads cannot be trusted, then how can we know for sure that the Qur’an dates from the time of Muhammad? How can we know who compiled it, from what sources, for what motives? Can we even be sure that its origins lay in Arabia? In short, do we really know anything at all about the birth of Islam?
Scholarship, like nature, abhors a vacuum. A number of historians, over the past forty years, have responded to the eerie silence that seems to shroud the origins of Islam by rewriting them in often unsettlingly radical ways. It has been argued that the wellspring of the Qur’an lay not in Arabia but in Iraq; that it was written originally not in Arabic but Syriac, the lingua franca of the Near East at the time; that “Muhammad” was originally a title referring to Jesus.60 By and large, when a book attempts to redraft the origins of a major world religion on quite such a jaw-dropping scale, the cover will feature a picture of the Knights Templar or the Holy Grail. A sensational argument, however, need not necessarily be an exercise in sensationalism. Far from aping Dan Brown, most of the scholars who have explored Islam’s origins seem to pride themselves on making their prose as dense with obscure vocabulary, and obscurer languages, as they possibly can. As a result, their speculations have rarely impinged on the public consciousness. Despite the fact that Western interest in Islam, over the past decade or so, has soared to unprecedented heights, the mood of crisis currently convulsing the academic study of its origins has received notably little airtime. Like some shadowy monster of the seas, it only ever rarely breaks for the surface, preferring instead to lurk in the deeps.
Nor is the inherent complexity of the subject the only reason for this. Just as Darwin was physically prostrated by anxiety over how his theories might be received by his family and friends, there are many today no less nervous about causing offence to people whose whole lives are grounded in their faith. For a non-believer to claim that the Qur’an might have originated outside of Arabia, or derived from Christian hymns, or been written in Syriac, is liable to be no less shocking to Muslims than has the Muslim denial of Jesus’s divinity always been to Christians. Unlike in nineteenth-century Europe, where it was disillusioned seminarians and the sons of Lutheran pastors who led the way in subjecting the origins of their ancestral religion to the full pitiless glare of historical enquiry, the contemporary Islamic world has not, it is fair to say, shown any great inclination to follow suit. No equivalent of Ernest Renan has emerged, to scandalise and titillate the Muslim faithful. The authorship of the Qur’an has not been questioned by the disillusioned offspring of imams. Those few Muslims who have sought to follow the trail originally blazed by nineteenth-century European scholars have generally opted to publish under pseudonyms—or have suffered the consequences. In the Arab world, at any rate, to doubt the traditional account of Islam’s origins has been to risk death threats, prosecution for apostasy, or even defenestration.61