| The Historical
Problem of Islamic Origins
The rise and rapid expansion of Islam during the seventh century C.E.
has long been recognized as one of the most crucial phenomena of world
history. Whether or not we wish to say, with the famous historian Henri
Pirenne, that the rise of Islam caused the "end of the ancient
world," it surely coincided with a profound transformation of that
set of political, cultural, and economic relationships that had formerly
tied the lands around the Mediterranean to one another. Politically, it
resulted in the truncation of the Byzantine empire, which lost Syria,
Egypt, and its North African territories. It caused the complete collapse
of the Sasanian empire that had for almost four centuries ruled Iran and
Iraq. It resulted in the establishment of a new and aggressively
expansionist imperial regime, centered first in Medina (in West Arabia)
and then in Syria, and dominated by people of Arabian origin who had
hitherto figured in the annals of history mainly as subjects, rather than
as rulers. The wealth of vast territories that once poured, in the form of
tax revenues, into the coffers of the Byzantine or Sasanian emperors now
moved in different directions and into these new hands. Campaigns of
conquest were sent in all directions, bringing, within a century, lands as
diverse and distant as Yemen, Armenia, Spain, the Oxus valley in Central
Asia, and parts of present-day Pakistan under at least the nominal (and
often the practical) control of the Muslim caliphs, or emperors.
The long-term cultural consequences of these changes
were even more far-reaching. They marked the crucial first stages in the
growth of the Islamic community, and so constitute the decisive events on
the basis of which all Muslims (today roughly a billion people, one-fifth
of the world's population) define their identity. The rise of Islam was
simultaneously the beginning of the decline (in the numerical sense, at
least) of Eastern Christianity, Near Eastern Judaism, and Zoroastrianism--long-established
faiths with powerfully developed religious traditions that, over the
subsequent centuries, were increasingly marginalized by the growing Muslim
community. Part of this process was the gradual elaboration of a rich new
Islamic cultural synthesis that combined in original ways basic teachings
of Islam's prophet, Muhammad (d. 632 C.E.) and its holy book, the Qur'an,
with elements of Arabian origin and those of the older Near Eastern
religious and civil traditions. This new cultural synthesis received a
distinctive stamp above all because it was couched in a new literary
language--Arabic, the language of the Qur'an.
The historical significance of the emergence of Islam,
hinted at in the preceding paragraphs, can thus hardly be overstated; and
its significance is equally great whether we confine ourselves to
considering its impact on the seventh-eighth centuries, or whether we
choose to focus retrospectively on its impact on subsequent centuries,
right down to the present.
Yet, despite its manifest importance, the rise of Islam
is relatively poorly understood as an historical phenomenon--or, to put it
more precisely, we are no longer as confident as we once were that we
understand it even in rudimentary fashion. For about a century (roughly
from the 1870s until the 1970s), mainstream Western scholarship on Islam's
origins subscribed to what we can term the orthodox or traditional
paradigm of the rise of Islam, a view derived from, and following in many
essentials, the picture of events provided by the Muslim sources
themselves. Nagging difficulties in the sources were periodically noted by
various scholars, and awkward issues of broader interpretation
occasionally identified, but generally the scholarship of this period was
marked by a complacent confidence that we knew "what had actually
happened" and, in large measure, understood what it meant.
This orthodox paradigm (or, at least, the complacency
sustaining it) was dealt a decisive blow in the late 1970s by several
epoch-making books that offered radically revisionist views of Islam's
origins. The greatest impact was provided by the publication in 1977 of
Hagarism by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. With compelling logic and
spare prose, Hagarism advanced the hypothesis that Western historical
scholarship on Islam's beginnings had essentially been misled by medieval
Muslim historical tradition into replicating its own dogmatically-based
view of the community's past. Having made this point, the authors then set
Muslim historical tradition aside and relied exclusively on more or less
contemporary evidence (most of it from outside the Muslim community) in an
attempt to reconstruct what they felt might be a more historically
accurate alternative vision of Islam's origins. The resulting
reconstruction was so fundamentally different from the traditional view,
however, that it was first met with incomprehension. Appearing at about
the same time were two books by John Wansbrough, Qur'anic Studies (1977)
and The Sectarian Milieu (1978). Wansbrough hypothesized that the Qur'an
text as we have it today is not in fact one that constituted a closed
corpus from an early date (as Muslim tradition and earlier Western
scholarship would have it), but rather one that crystallized slowly--over
two or even three centuries--within the Muslim community. Wansbrough also
expressed profound pessimism about the ability of the modern historian to
say anything meaningful about Islam's origins, which he considers to be
completely obscured by an impenetrable fog of later polemic and
redactional overlay. Wansbrough's ideas seem to have been partly
responsible for inspiring the work of Crone and Cook (all were associated
with the University of London in the mid 1970s); but Wansbrough's
contributions were much slower to penetrate the consciousness of the
scholarly community because they were written (intentionally, it seems) in
a prose style so uncooperative that many readers simply give up trying to
figure out what he actually intends to say. But, though difficult to
fathom, the implications of Wansbrough's theories were in principle just
as unsettling to the traditional paradigm of Islamic origins as was
Hagarism.
Further revisionist critiques followed these pioneering
efforts, so that for two decades the international community of scholars
concerned with the origins and early history of Islam has been in an
uproar, with hypotheses and counter-hypotheses appearing from many
quarters on a regular basis. After more than twenty years of intellectual
ferment, it is now evident that the revisionist critiques are not a
passing fad, but rather represent the beginning of a full-blown paradigm
shift. But, while it is clear that we live under conditions that may be
called "paradigm lost," it is not yet obvious what the new
paradigm will be, or even whether we will ever attain a new "paradigm
regained."
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