As a result, inevitably but regrettably, questioning the traditional narrative of Islam’s origins remains largely what it has always been: the preserve of Western scholars. Some of these, it is true, are themselves Muslim—and one of them, a professor at the University of Münster, has proved himself such a chip off the old Teutonic scholarly block that he too, like some of his more radical infidel colleagues, has gone on record as claiming Muhammad to be a figure of myth.62 None of which, unhappily, has done much to allay the suspicions of other Muslims that the probing of their most sacred traditions is not all some sinister conspiracy, most likely cooked up by Mossad, or perhaps the Vatican, or else American evangelicals. That the methods currently being deployed by Western scholars to place the Qur’an in its historical context were first honed upon the Bible has dented this conviction not a whit. One appalled Muslim scholar has argued that “even the crusaders’ fury pales to nothing” in comparison with modern academics’ “iconoclastic attack.”63 Implicit in this bellow of indignation is the presumption that non-believers have no business poking their noses into Islam’s origins. As one Saudi professor sternly tells his co-religionists, “Only the writings of a practising Muslim are worthy of our attention.”64
Taken to its logical extreme, of course, this would mean that only worshippers of Jupiter could legitimately write about the Romans, and only Odinists about the Vikings. Nevertheless, it is hardly necessary to be a Saudi theologian, or even a Muslim at all, to find something profoundly destabilising in the thesis that the stories told by Islam about its own origins might obscure as much as they reveal. The faithful, after all, are not alone in having a massive stake in the veracity of their inherited traditions. So too do plenty of non-Muslim historians. Whole centuries’ worth of scholarship have been founded on the presumption that the sources for early Islam can be trusted. To this day, they continue to be recycled endlessly, whether in popular biographies of Muhammad or in academic texts.65 It still tends to be taken for granted that they remain, for anyone wishing to construct a narrative of Islam’s origins, the only real building blocks to hand. Unsurprisingly, then, over the past century—and particularly over the past few decades—many scholars of early Islam have conducted an aggressive rearguard action to save these sources from total redundancy. Despite the increasingly widespread acknowledgement among historians of the period that it is “exceedingly difficult to know much about Islamic origins,”66 attempts to shore up the foundations continue. The building blocks fashioned by Ibn Hisham and his successors have certainly not been abandoned yet.
Paradoxically, however, these attempts to repair the damage done to the mighty edifice of Muslim tradition do more than anything else to highlight the full scale of the paradigm shift that is afflicting it. Clearly, when two scholars can devote their entire careers to studying the same languages and sources, and yet arrive at wholly contradictory conclusions, it is no longer possible to presume that there is anything remotely self-evident about the birth of Islam. Forty years ago, any querying what Muslim tradition taught about its own origins might have been dismissed as mere crankish trouble-making: one that no more merited a response from heavyweight experts than did, say, the attempt to ascribe Shakespeare’s plays to Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford. Nowadays, it is hard to think of any other field of history so riven by disagreement as is that of early Islam. One of the world’s leading Qur’anic scholars has gone so far as to speak of a “schism.” “The controversy about the Qur’an,” she has lamented—whether it is an authentic record of the Prophet’s utterances or an anthology, stitched together from various different sources—“permeates the entire field of Qur’anic studies.”67 Yet, even to speak of “schism” may be overly optimistic. The reality, perhaps, is even messier. In truth, it can often seem—the fragmentary nature of the evidence being what it is, not to mention the complexity and sensitivity of the issues at stake—that there are as many different interpretations of Islam’s origins as there are experts writing about it.68
All of which, in a non-specialist, can tend to inspire a peculiarly lurching sense of dizziness: the kind that might afflict someone studying a trompe-l’oeil in a hall of mirrors. No wonder, then, that it should sometimes feel tempting to back away from the problem altogether, to close one’s eyes to it, to pretend that it does not exist. Rehash the traditional Muslim sources, and follow the path of least resistance. After all, as one prominent hadith scholar has cheerily admitted, the entire “isnad debate” is not merely “long” but “tedious.” Nevertheless, as he then reminds the faint-hearted, “it is one in which scholars of Islamic origins must participate. There is no ignoring the debate in order to forge ahead with more important or more intriguing issues.” To avoid it is “at best naïve and at worst negligent.”69 History, unlike faith, cannot be built upon foundations of sand.
But where is solid bedrock to be found? When I first embarked on the project of writing this book, I had no idea that locating it would prove so problematic. My initial state of ignorance being what it was, I had vaguely assumed, based on my reading of numerous biographies of the Prophet, that I would find a whole wealth of sources dating from his lifetime just waiting to be quarried. It was therefore a bit of a blow to discover that the bulk of what we have constitutes, in the memorable formulation of one historian, “a monument to the destruction rather than the preservation of the past.”70 The same questions that have been confronting scholars of early Islam for the past forty years were now staring me full in the face. How, if the underpinnings of Muslim tradition are so unstable, is it possible to write anything at all about Islam’s origins? What hope, if the isnads and all the many writings that depend upon them are unreliable, of ever explaining the birth of one of the world’s great civilisations? Can it really be the case that the lack of a story is the only story?
Fortunately, amid all the confusion and obscurity, of one thing at least we can be confident: Islam did not originate in a total vacuum. Of the world into which Muhammad was born, with its rival superpowers and its formidable array of monotheisms, we are most decidedly not ignorant. To compare the would-be universal dominions of Persia and Rome with the empire that the Caliphate became, or to trace echoes of Jewish and Christian writings in the Qur’an, is to recognise that Islam, far from spelling the end of what had gone before, seems in many ways to have been its culmination. Even the belief to which Muslims have long subscribed, that the Prophet received his revelations not by means of human agency, but courtesy of an angel, in fact hints at just how deeply rooted are the doctrines of Islam within the subsoil of the ancient Near East. From where precisely does the tradition of Muhammad’s first terrifying encounter with Gabriel in a cave derive? There is no reference to it in the Qur’an; nor to the Prophet’s initial agony when receiving the revelations; nor even to the hearing of any supernatural voice. Across the lands conquered by the Arabs, however, it had long been taken for granted that angels visited those particularly favoured by God—and that the experience was often agonising. Coincidence? It seems most unlikely. Rather, it surely reflects the unique circumstances of the world that the Arabs, building on the foundations laid by the Persians and the Romans, had made their own: a world in which the yearning to fathom the purposes of a single god had become universal, and Gabriel a name on everybody’s lips.