28
Qur’an: 16.89.
29
Ibid.: 29.51.
30
Ibid.: 16.88.
31
Or five, if a verse that alludes to a Messenger called “Ahmad” is counted (61.6).
32
Qur’an: 3.164.
33
Al-Tahawi, quoted by Watt (1994), p. 48.
34
Gibbon, ch. 37, n. 17. The saint whose biographies of other saints are being dismissed is Jerome.
35
Quoted by Wilson, p. 174.
36
The great German theologian of the first half of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm M. L. de Wette, quoted by Friedman, p. 25.
37
Or, as it is more commonly phrased by scholars of Islamic law, “the gate of
ijtihad
”—
ijtihad
being, according to the definition of Hallaq, “the exertion of mental energy in the search for a legal opinion to the extent that the faculties of the jurist become incapable of further effort” (p. 3). As Hallaq has convincingly demonstrated, the conventional attribution of the phrase to the tenth century is mistaken.
38
Gibbon: Vol. 3, p. 230.
39
Quoted by Gilliot, p. 4.
40
Gibbon: Vol. 3, p. 190.
41
Schacht (1977), p. 142.
42
Ibid. (1950), p. 149.
43
Ibid. (1949), p. 147.
44
Rahman (1965), p. 70.
45
Qur’an: 8.9.
46
Ibn Hisham: p. 303.
47
Rahman (1965), pp. 70–1.
48
See, for instance, Gabriel, p. 94.
49
Wansbrough (1978), p. 25.
50
See Crone (1987a), pp. 226–30: a typically brilliant piece of detective work. The papyrus fragment is Text 71 in Grohmann (1963).
51
Qur’an: 8.41. It refers to the nameless battle as having been fought on “the day of the
furqan
,” or “deliverance,” which we know from 2.181 was in Ramadan.
52
The single name-check is Qur’an: 3.123.
53
Ibn Ishaq is just one of many writers whom we know only through later authors’ reworkings of their texts. Another is Malik ibn Anas, a jurist who was known, somewhat optimistically, as “The Proof of the Community.”
54
Robinson (2003), p. 51.
55
Although see Nevo and Koren.
56
Doctrina Iacobi
: 5.16.
57
Of more than four hundred private inscriptions from the Negev Desert in southern Palestine, carved in the eighth century AD, a mere eleven mention Muhammad by name. See Donner (1998), p. 88.
58
Ibn Hisham, p. 691.
59
Peters (1991), p. 292.
60
For these theories, see books by, respectively, Wansbrough, Luxenberg and Ohlig.
61
The paradigmatic example of the problems that can be faced by Muslim revisionists is the series of misfortunes that were suffered by an Egyptian academic, Nasr Abu Zayd, when he published a reading of the Qur’an as a work of literature that had evolved over the course of time. His book provoked a storm of outrage, and led to him being condemned as an apostate, having his wife declared divorced from him by virtue of his offence, and ultimately fleeing into exile. For a brief but suggestive account of how Abu Zayd himself views his intellectual pedigree, see his book,
Reformation of Islamic Thought
, pp. 53–9. At least, though, he was not defenestrated: the fate suffered by the unfortunate Palestinian historian Suliman Bashear.
62
Muhammad Sven Kalisch. See
http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-478/_nr-812/i.html
63
Manzoor, p. 34.
64
al-Azami (2003), p. 341. Interestingly, when it is the Bible which finds itself in the sights of revisionist scholars, the good professor suddenly becomes a great enthusiast for sceptical enquiry. He certainly never doubts the right of Muslims to deconstruct Jewish and Christian writings.
65
The biography most widely read by non-Muslims is probably the one by Karen Armstrong, which in turn is a redaction of earlier biographies by Rodinson and Watt. Remarkably, for a book written by someone who has written extensively about the grand tradition of biblical scholarship, it does not so much as mention the problematic nature of the sources for the life of Muhammad. Among eminent scholars who still hold the Muslim tradition to be acceptable as historical evidence, by far the most readable is Hugh Kennedy.
66
Donner (1998), p. 2.
67
Neuwirth, p. 1. See also Donner’s frank admission that, “Those of us who study Islam’s origins have to admit collectively that we simply do not know some very basic things about the Qur’an—things so basic that the knowledge of them is usually taken for granted by scholars dealing with other texts” (in Reynolds, p. 29).
68
For a taster of the range of opinions on offer, the interested reader could try sampling the mind-boggling perspectives on
isnad
authenticity to be found in al-Azami (1985), Motzki (2002) and Cook (1981). For a survey of all three studies, and many more, see Berg (2000), whose analysis of the entire “
isnad
debate” was particularly helpful in the writing of this chapter. Although Berg does not actually use the word “schism,” he sees academic opinion on early Islam as being riven down the middle. “Whether motivated by the need for positive results or the desire for methodological and theoretical sophistication, we are left with two very different, mutually exclusive, and to the outsider, almost equally plausible models of Islamic origins,” he writes. “Any conclusion drawn therefore will be a product of these underlying assumptions” (p. 226).
69
Berg (2000), p. 219.
70
Crone (1980), p. 7.
71
There are three mentions of Gabriel in the Qur’an, two of which appear in Qur’an: 2.97–8. The warning to two gossiping wives that Gabriel is ready to intervene on the Prophet’s side appears in Qur’an: 66.4.
72
John: 1.1.
73
Sahih Bukhari
1.1.2. The
hadith
is attributed to Aisha, Muhammad’s favourite wife. The Prophet is remembered in it as describing the experience of revelation as being “like the ringing of bell. This form of inspiration is the hardest of all.”
74
See, for instance,
Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew
, ch. 20. There are strong parallels generally between the Qur’anic account of Mary’s life and various Christian apocryphal writings. For more detail, see Horn. Suleiman Mourad, in a stimulating essay, has convincingly argued that the Christian legend of the palm tree that fed the pregnant Mary itself derives from the Greek myth of Apollo and Artemis, whose mother Leto was similarly nourished by a palm tree.
75
The word itself derived from the Qur’an
—
although the use to which Muslim scholars put it probably did not.
76
PERF 558—“PERF” being the standard abbreviation of the “Archduke Rainer Collection.” See Grohmann and Jones (1998). A full transcript of PERF 558 can be found at
http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Papyri/PERF558.html
. A second document, P Berol 15002, also gives us the date “Twenty-Two,” but it is fragmentary.
77
One partial exception is the treatment by Muslim historians of Persia, which does seem to preserve authentic native traditions. See Noth (1994), p. 39.
78
Averil Cameron, in Bowersock, Brown and Grabar, p. 16.
2 Iranshahr
1
Letter of Tansar
, p. 64.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid., p. 27.
4
Procopius:
History of the Wars
, 1.3.
5