The Quest for the Historical Muḥammadby Mikhayah ben David



בשם יהוה הרחמן הרחם/بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

To Muḥammad, what would come to be called “Islām,” was not an extra-Judaic “religion.” The actions of submission (aslama), is described in the Qur’ān just as any other verb. The earliest sources make no mention of the Arabs who followed Muḥammad calling themselves Muslims or being called such by others.¹ As we will see, third party sources identified the Arabs who conquered Greater Syria (Bilad al-Shām) in the first half of the 7th century not only as allies of the Jews, but in some sources indistinguishable from them. In all cases, “Islām” does not appear until much later to describe this Ishmaelite movement which Christians called Mahgraye from the Qur’ānic “Muhājirīn,” a term I will demonstrate refers to a massive movement of converts or Ha’Gerīm in Hebrew, along with Himyarite descended Jews (the dominant state in Arabia until 525 CE), representing the two Qur’ānic groups of proto-Muslims: the Muhājirūn and the Anṣār.

To that end, this thesis will argue a radical, but certainly not unprecedented position that Muḥammad’s movement emerged out of the milieu of Jewish sectarianism and saw itself simply as a competing form of Judaism that accepted rabbinic tradition, made prolific use of the Talmud and Midrash in general within the Qur’ān, vehemently mandated the keeping of Shabbat, and returned to the proselytism common in the Second Temple Era. The Qur’ān emphasized Shabbat, retaining the name Yawm al-Sabt (يوم السبت) which is used for Saturday till this day. Friday was the day of “community gathering” (يوم الجمعة) in the afternoon precisely because it was right before Shabbat began. Just as one would expect of a Jewish Ummah (Nation), the Qur’ān says commands that on Friday afternoon – not Thursday at Sunset – there is a congregational prayer when one must cease all business activity and remember God (Qur’ān 62:9) “And when the prayer is ended” the Qur’ān says, “disperse in the land and seek of God’s bounty, and remember God much, that you may be successful.” (Qur’ān 62:10) That is, business is still to be left off and remembrance of God is to be continued as people then disburse to their homes.

Throughout the Qur’ān there is firebrand sermonizing against people who break Shabbat. “We cursed the violators of Shabbat (Sabt), and what God has said will be carried out.” (4.47) How could one imagine the orator of this ‘āyah to be a rejecter of Shabbat himself? Today, Muslim reader don’t have any real clear explanation for why the orator of the Qur’ān would be so vehement about this issue in a book that wasn’t at the same time commanding Shabbat.

Prior to the Umayyad Caliphate, proto-Muslims and Jews were a single Ummah (Nation).² There is an astonishing preponderance of evidence that the proto-Muslims saw themselves not as followers of a new or distinct religion, but as a competing interpretation of Judaism. In some fashion, this radical position has been advanced by the school of John Wansbrough, and thus Andrew Rippin, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook,³ as well as Christoph Luxenberg, who has explored alternate Aramaic readings of the Qur’ān.⁴ Additionally, we see similar conclusions from Shelomo Dov Goitein, and Qumran scholar Chaim Rabin, along with many others.⁵Long before their work, however, Orientalists were noting the presence of Jewish source material in the Qur’ān. Fred Donner cites in Muḥammad and the Believers, that a little over a century ago, renowned French scholar Ernest Renan (1823-1892) wrote this summation of his findings on Islāmic Origins and history:

We arrive, then, from all parts at this singular result: that the Mussulman movement was produced almost without religious faith; that, putting aside a small number of faithful disciples, Mahomet really worked with but little conviction in Arabia, and never succeeded in overcoming the opposition represented by the Omeyade party.⁶

Renan’s statement represents, Donner claims, an “extreme and harsh formulation” of his otherwise accurate observations. The notion that Muḥammad and his followers were motivated primarily by factors other than religion is certainly too dry and disengaged a conclusion. Donner calls it a “subtler guise” which has “been embraced by many subsequent scholars” in what has been associated with Orientalism. At the same time, however, “that the Umayyad family, which ruled from 661 to 750, were fundamentally hostile to the essence of Muḥammad’s movement, is even today widespread in Western scholarship,”⁷ and is the orthodox Shī`ī position, even today. To this end, my thesis will demonstrate came not in the Medīnan period but with the advent of the dynastic Caliphate of Muḥammad’s archenemy Abū Sufyān’s progeny which went to war with `Alī under Mu`āwīyah’s reign and massacred the last overtly Jewish remnant of Muḥammad’s followers on the Yōm Kippūr (ʻĀshūrā’) uprising of Husayn, the grandson of Muḥammad and son of `Alī, when they attempted to overthrow Yazīd ibn Mu`āwīyah and the dynastic Caliphate, around fifty years after the death of Muḥammad. A century after the Karbalā’ uprising we find a remarkable echo in the independent Jewish `Īṣunīyyah movement that rose against the Caliphate and what was a developing proto-Shī`īsm. In one of the only sustained studies on the `Īṣuniyīm, Israel Friedlaender noted fifteen “Shī`ītic elements” in this Jewish, anti-Caliphate movement.

The Divorce from Judaism and the Caliphate’s Qur’ānic Vulgate

John Wansbrough introduces his Qur’ānic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation with the revolutionary statement that “Once separated from an extensive corpus of prophetical logia, the Islamic revelation became scripture and in time, starting from the fact of itself of literary stabilization, was seen to contain a logical structure of its own.” It was from this “achievement of canonicity” that both the document and identity “was assured a kind of independence.”⁸

On the boundaries of the emerging identity associated with the verbal “Islām” – now reassigned as a noun – Annemarie Shimmel opens her work by commenting on a manuscript from Iran, dated to the twelfth century which “celebrates” the second half of the Shahādah “in a tangible way,” and highlighting “the central position of the Prophet in the religion of Islām.” The profession of the Unity of God, along with the rest of the Kufic script of Sūratu-l-Ikhlās is written in an otherwise beautiful calligraphy, but utterly inferior to that “celebrating” Muḥammad. In this way, we can map the beginnings of Muḥammad himself as defining the nationalistic borders of “Islām as a religion”.⁹ Over the course of the centuries, Schimmel asserts that the historical personality of Muḥammad had “almost disappeared behind a colorful veil of legends and myths; the bare facts were commonly elaborated in enthusiastic detail, and were rarely if at all seen in their historical perspective.”¹⁰To unearth then the Historical Muḥammad, we must proceed in a manner parallel to the scholarship of Christian Origins and the Historical Jesus, which similarly had the task of differentiating the Historical Jesus, from the mythic literary product of the Church. In the same way, we will find a movement and figure emerging from the milieu of Jewish sectarianism whose principal revivals would come to ascribed his name and movement to their own imperialist and anti-Jewish dynasty reinforced by the late creations of mythic literature which came to superseded the straightforward reading of the Qur’ān.

Harald Motzki writes, on “The Murder of Ibn Abi l-Huqaya: On the Origin and Reliability of Some Maghaazi-Reports,” that “from the viewpoint of historical source criticism, our sources for a biography of the Prophet Muḥammad must be classified as traditions.” Motzki explains what “every historian knows,” that the “informative value of the kind of sources termed traditions is blurred by several limitation.” He explains that this is not unique to the historical Muḥammad, but nevertheless this quest is not free of these universal limitations. “Traditions are subjective due to their choice of what they mention and what not; they put facts into a certain perspective, sequence and connection; and they use topoi or even create facts which have never existed or not in the manner that they describe them.” There are thus two approaches with tradition sources, whether related to Muḥammad or a similar figure. Motzki explains they are similar to “pieces of a broken mirror,” both in their inherent flaws and in that they “can be used to reconstruct historical reality.”

To that end, the Battle of the Trench, as it is conceived in Islāmic Historiography is part of this late literary genre, with no parallel accounts from Jewish or even Christian sources in this period. Moreover, it is a myth that itself traces to a narrator that even Textual Critics within the mainstream Islāmic tradition denounce as unreliable. The Qurˁān treats the battle of the Confederates/Trench much like any other battle, telling of no special significance of one of the tribes, the Banū Qurayẓah, or violating an oath of allegiance. However, around a century and a half later Ibn Isḥāq claimed that after this battle up to 900 Jews of Medīnah – every male who had been inspected for and proven to have pubic hair (and one woman) – were executed, unarmed, and after the fact of the battle. The original work of Ibn Isḥāq is lost, it survives only in the recension of Ibn Hishām (d. 833) and Al-Ṭabarī (838-923). Indeed, all accounts of Islāmic history, maghāzi battle narrations, and later, subsequent theological and historical critique, on this matter of the Banū Qurayẓah, trace back to this account which finds no earlier parallel, and most damning, no reference in Jewish histories until well after the wide circulation of the Sīrah, centuries later.

My position maintains that a key narrative of Islāmic history is pure fabrication, catalyzed by an emerging reaction to Jewish Messianism of the `Īṣuniyīm¹¹ during the Abbāsid Caliphate (750–1258 C.E.).¹² This thesis maintains that this narrative of Ibn Isḥāq (d. 767, or 761) ,¹³ though initially met with ambivalence and rejection by the author’s contemporaries, was embraced as the attitude towards Jews deteriorated under the Abbāsid dynasty. In the centuries since, the problem has remained unchecked as the method of Lower or Source Criticism, has not only prevailed in Islāmic scholarship in the generations that followed, but had remained the outdated default methodology, even by modern scholars of Hadīth literature.

Ḥadīth Literature and Higher Criticism

Acknowledging the preference for the Qur’ān, the Encyclopaedia characterizes it as “the most difficult to utilize as a historical source,” for understanding Islāmic Origins. Joseph Schact similarly concludes that traditions “alleged to go back to the Prophet or to his Companions,” are the “product of legal, theological and political developments,” from the second century following Muḥammad. Therefore, he surmises, they lack “any historical value,” in legitimately documenting the historical Muḥammad or the events of his era.¹⁴

The aforementioned Sīrah Rasūl Allāh, composed by Ibn Isḥāq (d. ca. 767–770 CE), has traditionally been regarded as the earliest biography of Muḥammad. To effectively frame this within historical context, we might imagine the first biography of Abraham Lincoln having been written just after the fall of the Twin Towers.¹⁵ To complicate the matter further, imagine that there was no surviving copy of that biography, only later recensions that did not even agree on what this late biography said!

The Encyclopaedia of Islām authoritatively declares that early accounts of Muḥammad, requires “specialised knowledge and a variety of historical and literary critical methods in order to reach sound conclusions and plausible hypotheses”.¹⁶ In The Eye of the Beholder, Uri Rubin cites Josef Horovitz’s attempt to pinpoint the earliest dating for the legendary Muḥammad of the Sīrah accounts.¹⁷ Believing that the critical minded reader “could distinguish between the legendary and the real Prophet,” he asserted one could “get inside the mind” of the historical Muḥammad, determining how he “really thought and acted”.¹⁸ More recently, Rubin explains, Rudolf Sellheim published a literary analysis of Ibn Isḥāq’s Sīrah accounts, creating a “very clear-cut” differentiation between the creation of a literary character and the historical Muḥammad.¹⁹

Sellheim refines three major stages in the literary development of the story of Muḥammad’s life, each represented in a different literary “layer” or “schicht.” The “ground layer” is the most authentic, according to Sellheim, containing traditions which lead towards “actual events.” Next there is the “first layer.” in which the legendary image of Muḥammad evidently from reconfigured Jewish, Christian and Persian material. Finally, there is the “second layer” in which political interests of various Islāmic groups “manipulate” and “embedded” within the text.²⁰ This study then will seek to excavate the historical Muḥammad from these literary strata.

From Qumran to the Qur’ān

Mentioning Muḥammad’s uncle-in-law, the sage Waraqah (said to have been fluent in Hebrew), Watt is content to accept that he was some sort of Christian Arab. Nevertheless, he paradoxically acknowledges that “the average Christian Arab probably had no direct knowledge of the scriptures.” Indeed there was no Arabic translation of the Bible for more than a century later. If Christian Arabs were not thought to have direct knowledge of the Gospel accounts, does Waraqah actually fit the bill?

We might consider Rubin’s comment that “the Anṣār”²¹ of Muḥammad’s movement were “said to have been descendants of those Jewish rabbis” of the time of the Jewish ruler of Yemen, Tubān As`ad Abū Karib,<sup>22</sup>namely that they were anṣār or helpers from Himyarite Jewry.<sup>23</sup> The tradition from the Egyptian Yūnus ibn Yazīd (d. 776 CE), also cited by Rubin<sup>24</sup> that Waraqah “wrote Hebrew, and used to copy passages from the Injīl in Hebrew…” If this is true, then whatever sect Waraqah was, it is clear he was not of any known brand of Christianity, instead resembles the `Īṣunīyyah,²⁵ possibly a Diaspora Essene sectarian form of Judaism which Rabin assigns to Muḥammad.

Supporting this theory, Chaim Rabin takes this connecting-the-dots-to-Judaism, one step further in the first essay in Andrew Rippin’s The Qur’ān: Style and Contents (the original work being from a concluding chapter of: Qumran Studies; based on a lecture given at the Institute of Jewish Studies in Manchester). A researcher in the sectarian milieu of the Second Temple Era, and the “Essene” community, Rippin ties the language of the Qur’ān directly to that found throughout the Dead Sea Scrolls. Rabin does not advance this theory without precedent.

The possibility of the main Jewish influence on Muḥammad having been that of a heretical Jewish sect was first put forward by S.D. Goitein in 1933, and elaborated in 1953, when he specified this sect as one ‘strongly influenced by Christianity.’ In his Columbia University lectures of the same year, he suggested that Muḥammad was in his debate with the Jews of Medina merely carrying on an internal Jewish controversy, being supplied with arguments by his heretical teachers, and also seriously weighed the possibility of these teachers coming from “an offshoot of the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” But [Goitein] rejected this, because if it were so, it would not have had such close affinities with the Talmūdic literature to which the Ḳur’ān bears such eloquent testimony.²⁶
Rabin, attempting to “to remove that objection,”²⁷ reasons that Muḥammad was linked with the Diaspora “Essene” sect of Judaism though he has not made the connection with the `Īṣunīyyah movement. The difficulty from Goitein, that the Qur’ān is so replete with the sort of Talmūdic references that a connection with Qumran seems difficult, only rears its head if we presume that the Qumran exiles did not assimilate and cross-pollinate with rabbinic tradition, beginning in the second century.

It has been widely acknowledged that the Qur’ān is filled with accounts of a Biblical origin. The lesser known fact is that it is also replete with Talmūdic and otherwise Midrashic expansions. The Qur’ān assumes the listener is already familiar with the stories of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). It thus uses a common Jewish form of exegesis – Midrash – to demonstrate the moral of the story, relative to contemporary events. Indeed, the “corrections” and “contradictions” of the Torah, presumed by the Muslim world to be an implicit rejection of Jewish doctrines within the Qur’ānic text, are of the sort we normally find between the Torah and Talmūdic (and otherwise Midrashic) exegesis.²⁸

Whilst apparently maintaining their own sectarian flavor and identity, there is simply no reason to imagine this, or that some of the traditions in the Talmūd did not actually pre-date it. It is, to this end, worthy of reminding the reader that the Essenes were not restricted to Qumran. Contrary to this popular view, they were said to have operated in the thousands in surrounding cities,²⁹ a point that would have greatly strengthened Rabin’s thesis. With this missing information on the Essenes Diaspora “Essene” Jewish community emerges with a higher degree of probability.

Rabin tells us, in his Qumran Studies, that “the Qumran sect had proselytes among its ranks,”³⁰ cited as ha’nilwīm `alehem, literally “those who join to them.”<sup>31</sup> The term “proselytes” is itself a Greek equivalent of the word “Hebrew” or evrī, meaning “one who crosses over.”<sup>32</sup> The Arabic equivalent of this term, Rabin asserts, like pseudonymous author Christoph Luxenberg, is ḥanafa, which he defines as “to incline, turn;” synonymous with the Arabic lawā, he notes. Torrey deduces that the Arabic word means “one who ‘turned away’ from the surrounding paganism.”<sup>33</sup> The apt student of the aḥādīth attributed to the proto-Shī’īte imāmī sect will note the words of Ja`far al-Ṣādiq, when asked “Why are the people of Moses called ‘Yahūd’,” that this refers to the Qur’ānic attribution to the people of Moses, “Verily, we turn (hudna) unto You.” Thus, Rabin sees the term “ḥanīf,” as a synonym for proselyte, or Hebrew, a “homonym as ‘those who incline,” meaning with the Essenes those who incline “towards the teaching of the sect;” more specific than general conversion to Second Temple Palestinian Jewry.³⁴

MuhājiriyyahThe Doctrina Iacobi, is an Anti-Jewish, Greek work, written in the form of a dialogue between Jews set in Carthage in the years 634 CE.³⁵ At one point, reference is made in the argument therein, to the then current Arab military campaign in Palestine. “These happenings today are works of disorder,” the text says, as it instructs Abraham, a Christian convert from Judaism, to go and “find out about the prophet who has appeared.”³⁶

Crone highlights that the most peculiar finding in the Doctrina is testimony that Muḥammad was “preaching the advent of the Anointed one who is to come.”³⁷ The core of Muḥammad’s message, in the earliest testimony available to us outside the Islāmic tradition, appears in the unmistakable form of “Judaic Messianism.” An echo of this is also found in a “confused reflection” within the Byzantine 8th-9th century historian Theophanes’ (c. 758/760 – 817/818) account of Islāmic Origins being the result of “Jews who take Muḥammad to be their expected Christ.”³⁸

The first Hijrah century Jewish sources also make it quite clear that the Arab conquest was widely hailed among contemporary Jews as intervention, by God on behalf of “His People,” and thus “as an event full of promise for the future.” Indeed, contemporary Palestinian Jews spoke appreciatively of the coming of `Umar al-Farūq (Aramaic, Luxenberg explain, for “The Redeemer”). He and his forces are referenced with no apprehension whatsoever, nor reference to anti-Jewish massacres which would emerge from Muslim sources centuries later.<sup>39</sup>An account attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai, writing during the period of the Arab conquest, describes `Umar as “a lover of Israel who repaired their breaches,” going on to insist that “The Holy One is only bringing the Kingdom of Ishmael in order to save you from this wickedness [of Christian oppression].”⁴⁰ This Jewish document widely circulated during the first century of Arab rule, before the Sīrah narrative crafted by Ibn Isḥāq, described the emergence of the Islāmic forces as “an act of God’s mercy.”⁴¹

In the account, the Angelic “Prince of the Face,” Metatron explains that this “Kingdom of Ishmael” was a “different” phenomenon than the Christian Empire, termed the “Children of Edom” in rabbinic parlance. Metatron explains, “the Holy One, blessed be He… raises up over them a Prophet according to His will and will conquer the land for them and they will come to restore it in greatness.”⁴² Corroborating these Jewish origins are trends in early imāmī proto-Shī`ism. In Motzki’s compilation of essays, Maher Jarrar notes, in his article “Sīrat Ahl Al-Kisā,” a report concerning the fifth Shī`ite Imām Muḥammad al-Bāqir “who was heard reciting Elijah’s prayer in Hebrew.”⁴³ Jarrar explains even that “some Persian scholars claimed that the [Shī`ah] Persians were descendants of Isaac”<sup>44</sup> indicating, as many anti-Shī`ah Muslim sources have always maintained, and as the Freidander indicated, that the origins of the sect were historically Jewish.⁴⁵

Conclusion

Crone and Cook note that “the warmth of the Jewish reaction to the Arab invasion attested by the Doctrina and exemplified by the Secrets is far less [evident] in later Jewish attitudes.” Furthermore, they note that it is “entirely absent” from any variation of Christian sectarianism.⁴⁶ This is hardly surprising, as the mission of the Arabs was nothing less than to recapture the land from the Christians, who had subjected Palestinian Jewry to abusive humiliations.

The Doctrina asserts that the group intermarried, apparently freely, with Palestinian Jewry, referencing the Jews “who mix with the Saracenes”⁴⁷ just as Ḳaraite sources would tell of centuries of marriage between the `Īṣunīyyah and Rabbanites in general. Indeed, the convert from Judaism to Christianity who wrote the Doctrina asserts that the Jews and “Saracenes” – still not using the term “Muslim” as a title of a separate religion, but referring to the peoples ethno-nationally – worked in tandem against Christianity.⁴⁸ To Crone and Cook, the invading force was Judaic, albeit heterodox:

There is nothing here to bear out the Islamic picture of a movement which had already broken with the Jews before the conquest, and regarded Judaism and Christianity with the same combination of tolerance and reserve.⁴⁹

Crone notes the indistinguishableness of Jews from the numerous other nameless Arab tribes in the “Constitution of Medina;” all described therein as one Ummah.^{50 & 51} The perhaps unfortunate term “Hagarism” – which Crone and Cook arrive at as the earliest title of the Muḥammadīyyah⁵² is due to the transliteration of Muhājirūn in the Greek and Syriac sources employing Magaritai and Mahgraye.⁵³ This derives from an unconvincing ascription of Muhājirūn (‎مهاجرون) to an Arabic root in the name Hājjar; rather than the etymology of this name being a transliteration of the verbal Hebrew Hegirahהגירה)⁵⁴). We should, however, grammatically expect a name like Hājjarūn, or the Hājjariyyah, for “Hagarism,” not Muhājirūn.

In Hebrew, which both Hijrah and Hājjar derive, the name is composed of the definite article Ha, and the term for a “stranger,” literally meaning a “convert,” in its oldest sense: ger. Thus, Ha’gar (הָגָר) is appropriately the designation for Abraham’s consort.⁵⁵ Thus, “Muhājirūn” would literally, in a Qur’ānic-Arameo-Arabic understanding, mean “those who converted,” perhaps even implicitly “those who converted like Hājjar.” Had Crone and Cook considered this, they might have realized that “Hagarism” would be a different way of saying “Proselytism” or “Converting.” The only question then remains, “converting to what?”


Bibliography

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Arafat, Walid. "New Light on the Story of Banu Qurayza and the Jews of Medina." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Cambridge University Press), 1976: 100-107.

Baron, Salo Wittmayer. A Social and Religious History of the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952.

Ben-Zvi, Itzhak. The Exiled and the Redeemed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1957.

Crone, Patricia, and Michael Cook. Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. Malta: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Donner, Fred M. Muhammad and the Believers . Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press , 2010.

Duri, A. A. "Al-Zuhrī: A Study on the Beginnings of History Writing in Islam." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 1957: 1-12.

El-Ali, Saleh. "Muslim Estates in Hidjaz in the First Century A. H." Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, December 1959: 247-261.

Faizer, Rizwi. "Muhammad and the Medinan Jews: A Comparison of the Texts of Ibn Ishaq's Kitab Sirat Rasul."International Journal of Middle East Studies, November 1996: 463-489.

Fishbein, Michael. The History of al-Tabari: Volume VIII The Victory of Islam. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Goitein, Shelomo Dov. Jews and Arabs: Their Contact Through the Ages. 2005: Dover Publications, 1955.

Goldziher, Ignaz. Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Guillaume, A. The Life of Muhammad. Lahore: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Houtsma, M. First Encyclopaedia of Islam. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1913-1936 (1987).

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Katsh, Abraham. Judaism In Islam: Biblical And Talmudic Backgrounds of the Koran and Its Commentaries Suras II and III. New York: Bloch Publishing, 1954.

Lawson, Todd. The Crucifixion and the Qur'an: A Study in the History of Muslim Thought . Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009.

Lecker, Michael. "Zayd B. Thābit, "A Jew with Two Sidelocks": Judaism and Literacy in Pre-Islamic Medina."Journal of Near Eastern Studies, October 1997: 259-273.

Morony, Michael. "Muslims, Jews and Pagans: Studies on Early Islamic Medina by Michael Lecker." Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 1998: 508-509.

Motzki, Harald. The Biography of Muhammad: The Issue of the Sources. Boston: Brill, 2000.

Mutahhari, M. Jurisprudence and its Principles. Elmhurst, 1983.

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¹ For centuries there is no written record of the term “Muslim” being used to define a religion separate from Judaism. Indeed, when Jerusalem was retaken by the Arabs it was with Jewish approval and direct assistance. The invading forces were identified by their Arab identity rather than by a separate religious title. This was also the case in Andalusia where Jews and Arabs fought side by side. There is no record that these Arabs regarded their faith distinct from that of their Jewish comrades in arms (or, vice versa). For a survey of these third-party sources, see the first three chapters of Crone and Cook’s Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. Malta: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

 

² Remnants of this reality are even evidenced in the Arabic wording of Ibn Isḥāq’s record of the “Constitution of Medīnah.”

³ Crone and Cook 10. Though they accept that the Hagarenes were an expression of “Jewish messianism,” they do not make the deeper connections such as those we find from Chaim Rabin, that the Muḥammadī community was a sectarian expression of Judaism.

⁴ Though he is far from the first to do so, drawing from the work of Author Jeffreys, Luxenberg has taken this research to a new level.

⁵ Rippin 3

⁶ Fred M. Donner. Muhammad and the Believers . (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press , 2010), xi

⁷ Donner xi

⁸ John Wansbrough. Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation. (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2004) 1

⁹ Annemarie Schimmel. And Muhammad Is His Messenger. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985) 3. Commenting to this effect, Wilfred Cantwell Smith hits the proverbial nail on the head, in saying that “Muslims will allow attacks on Allāh; there are atheists and atheistic publications, and rationalist societies; but to disparage Muḥammad will provoke from even the most ‘liberal’ sections of the community a fanaticism of blazing vehemence.” Schimmel 4.

¹⁰ Ibid 6

¹¹ A reaction to the perceived audacity of what was not less than the fourth Jewish Messianic revolt against the Caliphate.

¹² The Abbāsids were the third Caliphate of the Islāmicate Empire. The Abbāsids dynasty would build their capital in Baghdad following the overthrow of their Umayyad predecessors from all but Andalusian Spain.

¹³ Neither the date of his birth, nor of his death are agreed upon.

¹⁴ Harald Motzki. The Biography of Muhammad: The Issue of the Sources. (Boston: Brill, 2000) XII

¹⁵ Though it was originally written a century and a half after Muḥammad, the work has survived only through the recensions of Ibn Hishām (d. 833) and Al-Ṭabarī (838-923 CE). Much of the material is parallel in each source. Nevertheless, there are some significant differences. Ṭabarī, for instance, is the source of the infamous “Satanic Verses” account, and in both cases, Ibn Isḥāq tells of the controversial marketplace massacre against the Banū Qurayẓah.

¹⁶ Encyclopaedia of Islam Second Edition Vol. 7, Mif-Naz, (Edited by C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs and Ch. Pellat, Assisted by F.Th. Dijkema (pp. 1–384), P.J. Bearman (pp. 385–1058) and Mme S. Nurit, 1993) 361

¹⁷ Uri Rubin. The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muhammad As Viewed By The Early Muslims. (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995) 2; Rubin cites here Josef Horovitz, “Zur Muḥammadlegende,” Der Islām 5 (1914), 41-53

¹⁸ Rubin cites Horovitz, published in Gottingen in 1932. The English translation by Theophil Menzel is entitledMohammed, the Man and his Faith (London, 1936); Ibid

¹⁹ Ibid

²⁰ Ibid

²¹ The Medinan “helpers” of Muḥammad.

²² Rubin 45

²³ The leader of the Jewish Himyarite Kingdom, Tubān As`ad Abū Karib is, according to ḥadīth literature, the source of Ka`bah veneration in Late Antiquity.

²⁴ Rubin 106-7

²⁵ I have here selected an Arabization based upon the Jewish rendering of the word – both with Samech and a Nun rather than a Sin and Waw – in the belief that the Jewish community was aware of the identity of this group and thus called them by their proper name. Thus, the `Arabic `Īsāwiyyah, by which they were also known, was either a play on words, or simply a mistake by the Muslim community that assumed this was what the similar sounding name meant, due to their acceptance of Jesus (`Īsā) as a prophet, or affiliation with Abū `Īsā. This is, however, a large claim and one that is too big to address here, though it is worth mention that Chaim Rabin’s conclusion would fit exceedingly well with what I am proposing.

²⁶ Emphasis mine. Rippin 3

²⁷ Ibid

²⁸ These are often the very narratives that are accused of being Biblically “foreign.” In examining some of these, we will see that the Qur’ān was intended as a Midrash, fully within the context of Jewish sectarianism, rather than as a founding scripture of a new (or distinct) religion. The location of these Qur’ānic employments of Rabbinic Midrashīm will thus further strengthen the overall thesis of Muḥammad’s as a Jewish socio-religious movement.

²⁹ While we tend towards thinking of the Qumran Community as the whole of the Essene faction, Philo writes inEvery Good Man is Free, that there were over 4,000 Essenes in Palestinian Syria. He states therein that they live in villages and avoid cities. Pliny noted that Essenes live on the western shore of the Dead Sea above Engeddi. In addition to Philo’s claim that thousands of Essenes resided in various small villages, the Essenes mentioned by Pliny were not located at the site of Qumran adjacent to caves where some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Though the “Community Rule” makes no mention of women or children, and though all sources of Antiquity seem to point to celibacy, Josephus describes another group of Essenes who married (Joan E. Taylor,The Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism, pp 20) indicating that common pigeonholing, and infatuation with concise delineations of such groups, may be more wishful thinking than anything historically substantial. Like Philo, Josephus claims, in The Jewish War, that there were many Essenes in every town.

³⁰ Rabin cites gerīm, CDC xiv. 6.

³¹ Rabin notes that this was also used for naturalized Jews of foreign origins – converts – in Isaiah xiv. I; lvi. 2, 6; Zech. Ii. 15

³² The term proselyte would have been no different than an English-speaking covert saying “Hebrew” in English instead of the Hebraic Evri.

³³ Abraham Katsh. Judaism In Islam: Biblical And Talmudic Backgrounds of the Koran and Its Commentaries Suras II and III. (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1954) 108

³⁴ Andrew Rippin. The Qur'an: Style and Content. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) 6-7; Also in Rabin

³⁵ Crone suggests it was written in Palestine within a few years of this date. She reasonably notes that the lack of knowledge of the outcome of the events argues for an earlier date. She cites F. Nau, “La Didascalie de Jacob,” in R. Graffin and F. Nau (eds) Patrologia Orientalis, Paris 1093-, vol. viii, pp 715f.

³⁶ Crone cites Doctrina 86f

³⁷ Crone and Cook 4

³⁸ Endnotes cite the Chronographia, A.M. 6122; Crone and Cook 153

³⁹ Examples of this are summarized in T. W. Arnold, The Preaching of Islām London, 1913, and S. D. Goitein,Jews and Arabs, Their Contacts Through the Ages New York: Schocken Books, 1964

⁴⁰ Baron, Salo Wittmayer. A Social and Religious History of the Jews. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952) 93

⁴¹ Goitein 63

⁴² Cited in Crone 5

⁴³ Citing Ṣaffār al-Qummī, Baṣā’ir ad-Darjāt, 335-54l Kulīnī, al-Kāfi, I, 227-8; Motzki 119

⁴⁴ Ibid

⁴⁵ Citing W.M. Watt, “Isḥāk,” in EI, 4, 109-10

⁴⁶ Crone 6

⁴⁷ Ibid

⁴⁸ He insists, as well, that he will not “deny Christ, the son of God,” even if the “Jews and Saracens” catch him and “cut him to pieces” for it! Ibid

⁴⁹ Ibid

⁵⁰ Crone 7

⁵¹ Indeed, the Qur’ān is interested in this term muslimūn as a description of those who do an activity, no different than the terms muttaqūn, or mu’minūn (مؤمنون, a clearly Jewish root and concept, as evidenced in Maimonides “Thirteen Principles:” מאמינים, e.g. “אני מאמין...”), in the positive instances, and negatively kāfirūn(كافرون, another Jewish concept – koferīm כופרים “those who conceal” – and Hebrew root), or the more ambiguousmunafiqūn (منافقون, “those who do nifāq”). An ambiguous word in pre-Classical, Qur’ānic Arabic, traditionally rendered “hypocrisy.”

⁵² As Schimmel, explains: “As much as the Muslims in general refuse to be called Muḥammadans, the expression Ṭarīqa Muḥammadiyya, ‘Muḥammadan Path,’ was used by quite a few premodern mystical groups who wanted to express, with this designation, their faithful adherence to the sunna of the Prophet to the exclusion of later usages that had been adopted into the mystical way of life.”

⁵³ Stated by Crone throughout.

⁵⁴ Interestingly, numerous proponents of the school reeling from Wansbrough, such as Christoph Luxemburg, and many others there besides (such as Author Jeffery), have written extensively on not only Hebrew and Aramaic borrowing in the Qur’ān, but of a likely primary reading of Qur’ānic Arabic as a form of Aramaic. With this understanding, we must look at the Hebrew meaning, not merely etymology, of the name Hagar.

⁵⁵ Thus, we would be prudent to recall the ḥadīth admonition that the vigilant mu’minūn should “pay glad tidings to the western strangers (ghurabā`),” for Islām “began as something strange and will be brought back to life as something strange (غريب, gharīb).” Though this narration was undoubtedly distorted and translated into the newly codified Arabic language, the Jewish usage of this term “strangers” would have been gerīm (גרים). Theḥadīth is irrelevantly concerned with the Western origins of these strangers, and thus appropriates the ghayin-ra’-ba’ root. This term was a likely later synonym for muhājirūn, due to the embracing of the Muḥammadīmovement by the Westerners (غرباء, ghurabā`), who were “foreigners.”