All of which, to anyone pondering how a Near East divided between two venerable empires might have ended up Muslim, opens up an intriguing and suggestive line of enquiry. Is it possible that Islam, far from originating outside the mainstream of ancient civilisation, was in truth a religion in the grand tradition of Judaism and Christianity—one bred of the very marrow of late antiquity?
The Sectarian Milieu
Gabriel—or Jibril, as he is called in Arabic—is not entirely absent from the Qur’an. One verse confirms him as the agent who has been bringing down revelations into the heart of God’s chosen messenger; a second, somewhat bathetically, describes him as primed to intervene in a domestic squabble between the Prophet and two of his wives.71 Clearly, then, wherever and whenever the Qur’an may have been composed, its target audience was perfectly familiar with the most celebrated angel in the Bible. Clinching proof of this is provided by the detailed coverage given by the Prophet to what, for Christians, had always ranked as the ultimate in annunciations: Gabriel’s visitation to Mary, the mother of Christ. The episode is given a notably starry role as well in the Qur’an—where it is retold not once, but twice. Mary was evidently a person much on the Prophet’s mind. Not only is she the one woman in his revelations to be mentioned by name, but she features as well in a whole range of incidents quite aside from the Annunciation. Details left unrecorded by the New Testament—for instance, that she went into labour beneath a palm tree, where her son, speaking from within her womb, encouraged her to snack on a date or two—are given pride of place in the Qur’an. Gratifying evidence, so it appeared to Muslims contemptuous of the Christian scriptures, that they were far better informed about the life of Jesus than were those who, in their folly and delusion, presumed to worship him as a god.
But how had the Prophet come by these various stories? To Muslims, of course, the question was a waste of breath. Muhammad had been visited by the divine. Just as Christians believed that Mary, by giving birth to her son, had delivered what they termed the Logos, or the “Word,”72 so Muhammad’s followers knew that his revelations, gasped out with “the sweat dripping from his forehead,”73 were the veritable speech of God. Muslims were no more likely to ask whether the Prophet had been influenced by the writings of other faiths than were Christians to wonder whether Mary had truly been a virgin. What the stiff-necked Jews and the obdurately blinkered Christians had failed to realise, in the opinion of the Muslim faithful, was that every single prophet mentioned in the Bible had actually been a follower of Islam. Hence the starring roles granted to so many of them, from Adam to Jesus, in the Qur’an. And to Mary too, of course. That stories of the Virgin being succoured by a friendly palm tree had actually been a Christian tradition for centuries, and seem in turn to have derived from a legend told by the pagan Greeks, was blithely ignored—as, of course, it was bound to be.74 No Muslim scholar could possibly have countenanced a notion that the Prophet might have been in the business of filching anecdotes from infidels. The Qur’an, after all, did not derive from outside sources. Rather, it was the Jews and the Christians, by allowing their holy books to become corrupted, who had ended up with distorted, second-hand scriptures. Only in the Qur’an had the awful purity of the divine revelation been properly preserved. Every last word of it, every last syllable, every last letter, came directly from God, and from God alone.
Perhaps it was only to be expected, then—despite the profoundly ambiguous testimony of the holy text itself—that a tradition should gradually have grown up, which in due course hardened into orthodoxy, that Muhammad himself had been illiterate.g Even had the Prophet wished to curl up with an infidel book or two, in other words, it would have been beyond him to decipher them. Yet reassuring a reflection though this certainly provided to the faithful, it still did not rank, perhaps, as the surest evidence that the Qur’an had truly descended from the celestial heights. Even more infallible a proof was witnessed by the circumstances of Muhammad’s upbringing. Mecca, after all, had been inhabited by pagans, not Jews or Christians—and it stood right in the middle of an enormous and empty desert. The ancient capitals of the Near East, which for more than four thousand years had served as the cockpits of civilisation, immense petri-dishes teeming with peoples of every conceivable faith, dense with temples, and synagogues, and churches, were a colossal distance away. Even to the borders of Palestine, where Abraham had built his tomb, and Solomon reigned, and Jesus been crucified, it was a full eight hundred miles. What likelihood, then, the Muslim faithful demanded to know, that a prophet born and raised so far from such a milieu could conceivably have been influenced by its traditions and doctrines and writings? The sheer prophylactic immensity of the desert that surrounded Mecca, impenetrable to outsiders as it was, appeared to render the answer obvious. Just as it was the blood and muscle of Mary’s virgin womb that had, in the opinion of Christians, nurtured the coming into the world of the divine, so likewise, in the opinion of Muslims, was it the spreading sands of Arabia which had served to preserve the word of God, over the course of its protracted delivery, in a fit condition of untainted purity.
But the emptiness into which Islam had been born was more than physical. The void had been a spiritual one as well. Muslim scholars termed it Jahiliyyah—the “Age of Ignorance.”75 The Arabs, who had drunk, and stolen, and brawled, and thought nothing of burying unwanted children in the sands, nor of practising the most unspeakable sexual abominations, nor of conducting the most interminable feuds, had been lost, it appeared to their heirs, in that pitchest blackness which was the lack of knowledge of God; and this it was that had made the coming of the Prophet all the brighter, all the more dazzling and refulgent a dawn. The contrast between Islam and the age that had preceded it was as clear as that between midday and the dead of night. Yet, it was not only Arabia that had been lost in darkness. The whole world had laboured in the shadows of jahl—“ignorance.” God, however, was great. The old order had been gloriously toppled, and a Caliphate established in its place. Everything had been brought to change. The white radiance of Islam, blazing beyond the borders of Arabia to the limits of the globe, had served to bring all humanity into a wholly new age of light.
This, however, was to redraft history in a quite stunningly radical way. Never before had the past been dismissed with such utter and imperious disdain. Even to Christians, the cycles of time redeemed by the birth of Christ had served as a preparation for the coming of the Messiah. To Muslims, however, everything that had preceded the revelations of their Prophet, all its manifold splendours and achievements, had been the merest phantom show, a shirk-haunted wasteland, to which Islam owed precisely nothing. The effect of this presumption was to prove incalculable. To this day, even in the West, it continues to inform the way in which the history of the Middle East is interpreted and understood. Whether in books, museums or university departments, the ancient world is invariably presumed to have ended with the coming of Muhammad. It is as though everything that had made antiquity what it was came to a sudden and crunching halt around AD 600. The inherent implausibility of this is rarely considered. Instead, at a time when most historians are profoundly suspicious of any notion that great civilisations might emerge from nowhere, owing nothing to what went before, and transforming human behaviour in the merest blinking of an eye, Islam continues to be portrayed as somehow exceptionaclass="underline" lightning from a clear blue sky.