by Reza Aslan
But the most glaring problem with this theory is not how little credit it gives to Muhammad, but how much credit it gives to Medina’s Jews. As mentioned, the Jewish clans in Medina—themselves Arab converts—were barely distinguishable from their pagan counterparts either culturally or, for that matter, religiously. This was not a particularly literate group. The Arabic sources describe Medina’s Jewish clans as speaking a language of their own called ratan, which al-Tabari claims was Persian but which was probably a hybrid of Arabic and Aramaic. There is no evidence that they either spoke or understood Hebrew. Indeed, their knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures was likely limited to just a few scrolls of law, some prayer books, and a handful of fragmentary Arabic translations of the Torah—what S. W. Baron refers to as a “garbled, oral tradition.”
So limited was their knowledge of Judaism that some scholars do not believe them to have been genuinely Jewish. D. S. Margoliouth considers the Jews of Medina to have been little more than a loose band of monotheists—not unlike the Hanifs—who should more properly be termed “Rahmanists” (Rahman being an alternative title for Allah). While many disagree with Margoliouth’s analysis, there are other reasons to question the extent to which Medina’s Jewish clans would have identified themselves with the Jewish faith. Consider, for example, that by the sixth century C.E., there was, as noted by H. G. Reissener, complete agreement among Diaspora Jewish communities that a non-Israelite could be considered a Jew only if he was “a follower of the Mosaic Law … in accordance with the principles laid down in the Talmud.” Such a restriction would immediately have ruled out Medina’s Jewish clans, who were not Israelites, and who neither strictly observed Mosaic law nor seemed to have any real knowledge of the Talmud. Moreover, there is a conspicuous absence in Medina of what should be easily identifiable archeological evidence of a significant Jewish presence. According to Jonathan Reed, certain archeological indicators—such as the remnants of stone vessels, the ruins of immersion pools (miqva’ot), and the interment of ossuaries—must be present at a site in order to confirm the existence there of an established Jewish religious identity. As far as we know, none of these indicators have been unearthed in Medina.
Naturally, there are those who continue to assert the religious identity of Medina’s Jewish clans. Gordon Newby, for example, thinks Medina’s Jews may have comprised distinct communities with their own schools and books, though no archeological evidence exists to confirm this hypothesis. In any case, even Newby admits that with regard to their culture, ethics, and even their religion, Medina’s Jews were not only quite different from other Jewish communities in the Arabian Peninsula, they were practically identical to Medina’s pagan community, with whom they freely interacted and (against Mosaic law) frequently intermarried.
Simply put, the Jewish clans of Medina were in no way a religiously observant group; they may not even have been Jews, if Margoliouth and others are correct. So it is highly doubtful that they would have engaged in complex polemical debates with Muhammad over the Quran’s correlation to Hebrew Scriptures that they neither could read, nor likely even owned.
The fact is that nothing Muhammad either said or did would necessarily have been objectionable to Medina’s Jews. As Newby writes in A History of the Jews of Arabia, Islam and Judaism in seventh-century Arabia operated within “the same sphere of religious discourse,” in that both shared the same religious characters, stories, and anecdotes, both discussed the same fundamental questions from similar perspectives, and both had nearly identical moral and ethical values. Where there was disagreement between the two faiths, Newby suggests it was “over interpretation of shared topics, not over two mutually exclusive views of the world.” To quote S. D. Goiten, there was simply “nothing repugnant to the Jewish religion in Muhammad’s preaching.”
Even Muhammad’s claim to be the Prophet and Apostle of God, on the model of the great Jewish patriarchs, would not necessarily have been unacceptable to Medina’s Jews. Not only did his words and actions correspond perfectly to the widely accepted pattern of Arabian Jewish mysticism, but Muhammad was not even the only person in Medina making these kinds of prophetic claims. Medina was also the home of a Jewish mystic and Kohen named Ibn Sayyad, who, like Muhammad, wrapped himself in a prophetic mantle, recited divinely inspired messages from heaven, and called himself “the Apostle of God.” Remarkably, not only did most of Medina’s Jewish clans accept Ibn Sayyad’s prophetic claims, but the sources depict Ibn Sayyad as openly acknowledging Muhammad as a fellow apostle and prophet.
It would be simplistic to argue that no polemical conflict existed between Muhammad and the Jews of his time. But this conflict had far more to do with political alliances and economic ties than with a theological debate over scripture. This was a conflict fueled primarily by tribal partnerships and tax-free markets, not religious zeal. And while Muhammad’s biographers like to present him as debating theology with belligerent groups of “rabbis” who show “hostility to the apostle in envy, hatred, and malice, because God had chosen His apostle from the Arabs,” the similarities in both the tone and manner of these events and the stories of the quarrels Jesus had with the Pharisees points to their function as literary topoi, not historical fact. Indeed, scholars have for centuries been aware of the intentional connection the early Muslims tried to draw between Jesus and Muhammad in an attempt to connect the mission and message of the two prophets.
Bear in mind, Muhammad’s biographies were written at a time when the Jewish minority in the Muslim state was Islam’s only remaining theological rival. It is not surprising, therefore, that Muslim historians and theologians would have buttressed their arguments against the rabbinical authorities of their time by planting their words in Muhammad’s mouth. If Muhammad’s biographies reveal anything at all, it is the anti-Jewish sentiments of the Prophet’s biographers, not of the Prophet himself. To understand Muhammad’s actual beliefs regarding the Jews and Christians of his time, one must look not to the words that chroniclers put into his mouth hundreds of years after his death, but rather to the words that God put into his mouth while he was alive.
The Quran, as a holy and revealed scripture, repeatedly reminds Muslims that what they are hearing is not a new message but the “confirmation of previous scriptures” (12:111). In fact, the Quran proposes the unprecedented notion that all revealed scriptures are derived from a single concealed book in heaven called the Umm al-Kitab, or “Mother of Books” (13:39). That means that as far as Muhammad understood, the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran must be read as a single, cohesive narrative about humanity’s relationship to God, in which the prophetic consciousness of one prophet is passed spiritually to the next: from Adam to Muhammad. For this reason, the Quran advises Muslims to say to the Jews and Christians:
We believe in God, and in that which has been revealed to us, which is that
which was revealed to Abraham and Ismail and
Jacob and the tribes [of Israel], as well as that which the Lord
revealed to Moses and to Jesus and to all the other Prophets.
We make no distinction between any of them;
we submit ourselves to God. (3:84)
Of course, Muslims believe that the Quran is the final revelation in this sequence of scriptures, just as they believe Muhammad to be “the Seal of the Prophets.” But the Quran never claims to annul the previous scriptures, only to complete them. And while the notion of one scripture giving authenticity to others is, to say the least, a remarkable event in the history of religions, the concept of the Umm al-Kitab may indicate an even more profound principle.
As the Quran suggests over and over again, and as the Constitution of Medina explicitly affirms, Muhammad may have understood the concept of the Umm al-Kitab to mean not only that the Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared a single divine scripture but also that they constituted a single divine Ummah. As far as Muhammad was concerned, the Jews and the Christians were “People of the Book” (ahl al-Kitab), spiritual cousins who, as opp
osed to the pagans and polytheists of Arabia, worshipped the same God, read the same scriptures, and shared the same moral values as his Muslim community. Although each faith comprised its own distinct religious community (its own individual Ummah), together they formed one united Ummah, an extraordinary idea that Mohammed Bamyeh calls “monotheistic pluralism.” Thus, the Quran promises that “all those who believe—the Jews, the Sabians, the Christians—anyone who believes in God and the Last Days, and who does good deeds, will have nothing to fear or regret” (5:69; emphasis added).
It was this conviction of the existence of a unified, monotheistic Ummah that led Muhammad to connect his community to the Jews, not that he felt the need to emulate the Jewish clans, nor that he wanted to facilitate their acceptance of him as a prophet. Muhammad aligned his community with the Jews in Medina because he considered them, as well as the Christians, to be part of his Ummah. Consequently, when he came to Medina, he made Jerusalem—the site of the Temple (long since destroyed) and the direction in which the Diaspora Jews turned during worship—the direction of prayer, or qiblah, for all Muslims. He imposed a mandatory fast upon his community, which was to take place annually on the tenth day (Ashura) of the first month of the Jewish calendar, the day more commonly known as Yom Kippur. He purposely set the day of Muslim congregation at noon on Friday so that it would coincide with, but not disrupt, Jewish preparations for the Sabbath. He adopted many of the Jewish dietary laws and purity requirements, and encouraged his followers to marry Jews, as he himself did (5:5–7).
And while it is true that after a few years, Muhammad both changed the qiblah from Jerusalem to Mecca, and set the annual fast at Ramadan (the month in which the Quran was first revealed) instead of Yom Kippur, these decisions should not be interpreted as “a break with the Jews,” but as the maturing of Islam into its own independent religion. Despite the changes, Muhammad continued to encourage his followers to fast on Yom Kippur, and he never ceased to venerate Jerusalem as a holy city; indeed, after Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem is the most sacred city in the whole of the Muslim world. Moreover, the Prophet maintained most of the dietary, purity, and marriage restrictions he had adopted from the Jews. And until the day he died, Muhammad continued to engage in peaceful discourse—not theological debate—with the Jewish communities of Arabia, just as the Quran had commanded him to do: “Do not argue with the People of the Book—apart from those individuals who act unjustly toward you—unless it is in a fair way” (29:46). Muhammad’s example must have had a lasting effect on his early followers: as Nabia Abbott has shown, throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran.
Certainly, Muhammad understood that there were distinct theological differences between Islam and the other Peoples of the Book. But he saw these differences as part of the divine plan of God, who could have created a single Ummah if he had wanted to but instead preferred that “every Ummah have its own Messenger” (10:47). Thus, to the Jews, God sent the Torah, “which contains guidance and light”; to the Christians, God sent Jesus, who “confirms the Torah”; and finally, to the Arabs, God sent the Quran, which “confirms the earlier revelations.” In this way, the ideological differences among the Peoples of the Book is explained by the Quran as indicating God’s desire to give each people its own “law and path and way of life” (5:42–48).
That being said, there were some theological differences that Muhammad considered to be intolerable innovations created by ignorance and error. Chief among these was the concept of the Trinity. “God is one,” the Quran states definitively. “God is eternal. He has neither begotten anyone, nor is he begotten of anyone” (112:1–3).
Yet this verse, and the many others like it in the Quran, is in no way a condemnation of Christianity per se but of Imperial Byzantine (Trinitarian) Orthodoxy, which, as noted, was neither the sole nor the dominant Christian position in the Arabian Peninsula. From the beginning of his ministry, Muhammad revered Jesus as the greatest of God’s messengers. Much of the Gospel narrative is recounted in the Quran, though in a somewhat abridged version, including Jesus’ virgin birth (3:47), his miracles (3:49), his identity as Messiah (3:45), and the expectation of his judgment over humanity at the end of time (4:159).
What the Quran does not accept, however, is the belief of those Orthodox Trinitarians who argued that Jesus was himself God. These Christians Muhammad did not even consider to be Peoples of the Book: “It is the unbeliever who says, ‘God is the third of three,’ ” the Quran declares. “There is only God the One!” (5:73). It was Muhammad’s belief that Orthodox Christians had corrupted the original message of Jesus, who the Quran contends never claimed divinity and never asked to be worshipped (5:116–18), but rather commanded his disciples to “worship God, who is my Lord and your Lord” (5:72).
At the same time, Muhammad lashed out at those Jews in Arabia who had “forsaken the community of Abraham” (2:130) and “who were trusted with the laws of the Torah, but who fail to observe them” (62:5). Again, this was not a condemnation of Judaism. The respect and reverence that Muhammad had for the great Jewish patriarchs is evidenced by the fact that almost every biblical prophet is mentioned in the Quran (Moses nearly one hundred and forty times!). Rather, Muhammad was addressing those Jews in the Arabian Peninsula—and only in the Arabian Peninsula—who had in both belief and practice “breached their covenant with God” (5:13). And, if the Jewish clans in Medina were any indication, there were many of them.
Muhammad’s complaints in the Quran were not directed against the religions of Judaism and Christianity, which he considered to be nearly identical to Islam: “We believe in what has been revealed to us, just as we believe in what has been revealed to you [Jews and Christians],” the Quran says. “Our God and your God are the same; and it is to Him we submit” (29:46). His complaint was against those Jews and Christians he had encountered in Arabia who, in his opinion, had forsaken their covenant with God and perverted the teachings of the Torah and Gospels. These were unbelievers with whom the Quran warns Muslims not to ally themselves: “O believers, do not make friends with those who mock you and make fun of your faith.… Instead say to them: ‘O People of the Book, why do you dislike us? Is it because we believe in God and in what has been sent down to us [the Quran], and what was sent down before that [the Torah and Gospels], while most of you are disobedient?’ ” (5:57–59).
The point is that when Muhammad reminded the Jews of Arabia of the “favors [God] bestowed on you, making you the most exalted nation in the world” (2:47), when he raged against the Christians for abandoning their faith and confounding the truth of their scriptures, when he complained that both groups “no longer follow the teachings of the Torah and the Gospel, and what has been revealed to them by their Lord” (5:66), he was merely following in the footsteps of the prophets who had come before him. He was, in other words, Isaiah calling his fellow Jews “a sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers” (Isaiah 1:4); he was John the Baptist lashing out against “the brood of vipers” who assumed that their status as “sons of Abraham” would keep them safe from judgment (Luke 3:7–8); he was Jesus promising damnation for the hypocrites who “for the sake of tradition, have made void the word of God” (Matthew 15:6). After all, isn’t this exactly the message a prophet is supposed to deliver?
It is no coincidence that just as they reversed many of Muhammad’s social reforms aimed at empowering women, the Muslim scriptural and legal scholars of the following centuries rejected the notion that Jews and Christians were part of the Ummah, and instead designated both groups as unbelievers. These scholars reinterpreted the Revelation to declare that the Quran had superseded, rather than supplemented, the Torah and the Gospels, and called on Muslims to distinguish themselves from the People of the Book. This was largely an attempt to differentiate the nascent religion of Islam from other communities so it could establish its own religious independence, much as the early Christians gradually dissociated themselv
es from the Jewish practices and rituals that had given birth to their movement by demonizing the Jews as the killers of Jesus.
Nevertheless, the actions of these scriptural scholars were in direct defiance of Muhammad’s example and the teachings of the Quran. For even though Muhammad recognized the theological differences that existed among the Peoples of the Book, he never called for a partitioning of the faiths. On the contrary, to those Jews who say “the Christians are wrong!” and to those Christians who say “the Jews are wrong!” (2:113), and to both groups who claim that “no one will go to heaven except the Jews and Christians” (2:111), Muhammad offered a compromise. “Let us come to an agreement on the things we hold in common,” the Quran suggests: “that we worship none but God; that we make none God’s equal; and that we take no other as lord except God” (3:64).
It is a tragedy that after fourteen hundred years, this simple compromise has yet to overcome the sometimes petty yet often binding ideological differences between the three faiths of Abraham.
AFTER THE BATTLE of the Trench, with Medina firmly in his control, Muhammad once again turned toward Mecca, not as the Messenger of God but as something the Quraysh in their role as Keepers of the Keys could not refuse: a pilgrim.
In 628, Muhammad unexpectedly announced that he was going to Mecca to perform the pilgrimage rites at the Ka‘ba. Considering that he was in the middle of a bloody and protracted war with the Meccans, this was an absurd decision. He could not have thought the Quraysh, who had spent the past six years trying to kill him, would simply move out of the way while he and his followers circumambulated the sanctuary. But Muhammad remained undaunted. With more than a thousand of his followers marching behind him, he crossed the desert on his way to the city of his birth, shouting fearlessly along the way the pilgrim’s chant: “Here I am, O Allah! Here I am!”
