In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
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The stakes, then, could hardly have been higher. Establish the hadiths as genuine, and the present would be grappled impregnably to the past. Naturally, it was essential that the struts and supports deployed for this purpose—the “isnads,” as they were termed in Arabic—be strong enough to hold firm across the centuries. Only an unbroken succession of authorities, each traceable to the next across the generations, culminating in a personal report of the Prophet himself, could be fit for purpose. Fortunately, there was no shortage of such chains of transmission. The links of the isnads held true. Five hundred years on from the death of Muhammad, and it seemed to many Muslim scholars that there was barely an aspect of human life that had not, thanks to all their titanic efforts, been safely secured and fettered to some salutary hadith. There was now not the slightest risk that the faithful might lose sight of the Prophet’s example. Just the opposite: the moorings that bound past to present could hardly have been rendered any the more secure. The isnads, like a tracery of filaments forged across time, seemed as infinite as they were unbreakable. Far from receding out of view, Muhammad’s life had been preserved in an almost pointillist depth of detail.
Nor, of course, was that the limit of the legacy left by the Prophet to the faithful. No matter all the many wonders and prodigies increasingly attributed to him by his biographers, the Muslim people knew, deep down in their hearts, that there had been only the one transcendent miracle. “We have made the Book to descend upon you, a clear explanation for all things.”28 So God had assured Muhammad. The “Book” was, of course, the sum of all the many revelations granted to the Prophet over the course of his life; and these, written down by his followers, had then, after his death, been assembled to form a single “recitation”—a “qur’an.” Quite how and by whom this great project of memorialisation had been undertaken would subsequently be much debated; but it gradually came to be accepted that the man responsible had been Uthman, the third of the Caliphs. As a result, the word of God, which had first been gasped out by the Prophet all those years before in the cave outside Mecca, was preserved in written form, to the eternal benefit of mankind: “a mercy and a remembrance to those who have faith.”29 To the Muslim people, this “recitation” was a prize beyond compare. Not a word of it, not a letter, but it was touched with the fire of God. Undimmed, undimmable, the Qur’an offered to all those who dwelt on earth something infinitely precious: nothing less than a glimpse of the radiance of heaven.
A prize such as this, it seemed to many, could only ever have existed uncreated, beyond the dimensions of time and space: for to imagine that God might somehow be distinct from His word was, of course, to commit the mortal offence of shirk. Quite how this insight was to be reconciled with the undoubted fact that Muhammad had received his revelations over a period of several years was a question requiring much delicate and ingenious investigation: not surprisingly, many centuries would pass before the problem was finally resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Deep waters—and only a Muslim whose entire life had borne witness to his piety, wisdom and learning could presume so much as to dip his toe into the infinitude of such an ocean. If the writing of a commentary on the Qur’an—“tafsir,” as it was known—ranked as the most praiseworthy activity known to scholarship, then so also was it easily the most hedged about by danger. No Muslim, but he knew that “torment upon torment” awaited those who “obstructed the path to God.”30 Peril awaited the unwary student of the Qur’an at every step. The consequences of error might be fatal indeed.
And yet the challenge, over the centuries, did succeed in being met—and gloriously so. A whole ornate scaffolding of commentary, rising in ever more spreading detail, came to be constructed around the luminous core that was the Qur’an itself. One particularly notable achievement was the identification of the process by which the Prophet, step by step, had received the word of God: no simple matter, to be sure. The divine purpose, after all, had been to send a message to humanity—not to scatter clues around for the benefit of Muhammad’s biographers. As a result, allusions to the life of the Prophet within the holy text were so opaque as to verge on the impenetrable. Muhammad himself, for instance, was mentioned by name a bare four times.31 The places associated with him received only fleeting and ambiguous reference. Not even the most dramatic episodes in his career—his confrontation with the Quraysh, his flight to Medina, his purification of the Ka’ba—received direct corroboration. Far from providing a roadmap of the Prophet’s life, the Qur’an was so dense, so allusive, so elliptical, as to require almost a roadmap itself. Fortunately for the Muslim people, however, it was precisely such a roadmap that the tafsirs were able to provide. Armed with these, the faithful could trace what would otherwise have been untraceable: the precise stages by which the Qur’an had been received by Muhammad. Only by reading the holy text with a commentary was it possible, for instance, to distinguish between the various revelations given in Mecca, and those given in Medina; to identify the precise verses that had followed the Battle of Badr; to recognise allusions to the Prophet’s concealment in a cave during the course of the hijra, or to his villainous uncle, or to the domestic arrangements of his wives. Authentication, as with all the other fruits of Muslim scholarship, was provided by unimpeachable witnesses. Isnads stretched back resplendent to the moment of each original recitation. Proofs bristled everywhere. Immortal and uncreated the Qur’an may have been; but it had also been firmly tethered to the bedrock of the human past. God had spoken to Muhammad—and Muhammad had belonged to the world. Islam was to be regarded both as eternal, and as born of a specific moment in time, a specific place, a specific prophet.
“The believers were done a favour,” so the Qur’an informed its readers, “when God sent among them a messenger, of their number, reciting to them His verses, purifying them and teaching them the Book and Wisdom, when before they had been in manifest error.”32 Here, in this ringing assertion, lay the very essence of how the Muslim people saw the origins of their faith. Origins that were to be interpreted not merely as a matter of historical record, but as indubitable and irrefutable proof of the shaping hand of God Himself.
Airy Nothings
It was hardly surprising that the great labour of fashioning the Sunna took Muslim scholars so long. Such was the compendious quantity of sayings attributed to the Prophet that only in the eleventh Christian century, some four hundred years after his death, could jurists plausibly claim to have bagged the lot. Even then, however, they could not relax. An even greater challenge awaited them: defining precisely what it was that God, speaking through His Prophet, had bestowed upon the Muslim people. Naturally, fathoming the purposes of an omnipotent and omniscient deity was no simple matter. As one ninth-century scholar, in a tone of awed defeatism, had put it: “Imagination does not reach Him, and thinking does not comprehend Him.”33 In the event, it would take six hundred long years of bitter and occasionally murderous argument before scholars of the Sunna could finally be brought to agree on the nature of the Qur’an: that it was eternal, not created, and divine, not a reflection of God. There were certain problems altogether too critical, too sensitive, too awkward to be rushed.
Muslim theologians were not the first to wrestle with the implications of this. Long before the words of God manifested themselves in the mouth of Muhammad, Christians too had struggled to explain how a deity who transcended time and space might conceivably have descended from heaven to earth. That they identified this intrusion of the divine into the realm of the mortal with a person rather than a book had done nothing to lessen the challenge. Indeed, Christians had wrangled over the nature of Christ for quite as long as Muslim scholars would go on to debate the nature of the Qur’an. Admittedly, in the early years of the Christian faith, these arguments had hardly been such as to disturb the councils of nations; but during late antiquity, when emperors and kings started to wrestle with them too, whole empires were transformed by the arcana of such debates. Just as the civilisation of Islam would be transfigured by the m
usings of philosophers, so would Christendom. East and west, much of the world was destined to bear witness to what had been, perhaps, the most startling discovery of late antiquity: that pondering how God might have manifested Himself on earth could serve to transform the way entire peoples behaved and thought.
Nevertheless, while Muslims and Christians faced very similar knots, their respective attempts to unravel these set them on radically different courses. Clearly, if God were to be identified with words in a book, then those words were bound to defy all attempts at rational analysis. Even to contemplate such a project was blasphemy. Devout Muslims were no more likely to question the origins of the Qur’an than devout Christians were to start ransacking Jerusalem for the skeleton of a man with holes in his hands and feet. This was because the nearest Christian analogy to the role played in Islam by the Prophet’s revelations was not the Bible but Jesus—the Son of God. The record of Christ’s life, for all that it lay at the heart of the Christian faith, was not considered divine—unlike Christ Himself. Although Christians certainly believed it to be the word of God, they also knew that it had been mediated through eminently fallible mortals. Not only were there four different accounts of Christ’s life in the Bible, but it contained as well a whole host of other books, written over a vast expanse of time, and positively demanding to be sifted, compared and weighed the one against the other. As a result, the contextualising of ancient texts came to be second nature to scholars of the Bible, and the skills required to attempt it hard-wired into the Christian brain.
And in due course, into brains that were barely Christian at all. By the eighteenth century, the Church had long ceased to hold the monopoly on subjecting its holy texts to scholarly enquiry. The model of history promoted by Eusebius—which traced in the past the working of the purposes of God—had started to devour itself. In his massive account of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the English historian Edward Gibbon subjected some of the most venerated compositions of late antiquity to a pathologist’s scalpel: “The only defect of these pleasing compositions is the want of truth and common sense.”34 So he dismissed, with his customary solemn sneer, the writings of one prominent saint. Yet his tone of irony was to prove a mere presentiment of the far more naked scepticism that would increasingly, from the nineteenth century onwards, see almost every tenet of the Christian faith subjected to the most merciless dissection. The shock, to a still devout European public, was seismic. In 1863, when a lapsed seminarian by the name of Ernest Renan presumed to publish a biography of Jesus that treated its subject not as a god, but as a man like any other, it was condemned in horrified terms by one critic as nothing less than a “new crucifixion of Our Lord.”35 The book promptly became a runaway bestseller. Scandalous it may have been, but the European public, it appeared, was not entirely averse to being scandalised.
Of course, it was not only the life of Christ that was being put under the microscope. Four years before the publication of Renan’s tome, Charles Darwin had brought out his epochal study On the Origin of Species—with devastating implications for any notion that the biblical account of the Creation might somehow embody a literal truth. The genie of scepticism was now well and truly out of the bottle. Time would demonstrate that there was to be no going back, in the Christian West, on the habit of subjecting to scientific enquiry what had for millennia been regarded as the sacrosanct word of God. Throughout the nineteenth century, in the hushed and sombre libraries of German theology departments, scholars would crawl and teem over the pages of the Bible, gnawing away at the sacred text like termites. Its first five books, they demonstrated, far from having been written by Moses, as had always traditionally been taught, seemed instead to have been stitched together from multiple sources.e Not only that, but these same sources had almost certainly been written centuries after the events that they purported to describe. Moses, it appeared, had been made into a mouthpiece for laws that he might very well never have pronounced—if, that was, he had even existed in the first place. Here was an unravelling of the scriptural tapestry so destructive that even some scholars themselves began to fret over the implications. “It is to suspend the beginnings of Hebrew history,” as one German theologian noted grimly, “not upon the grand creations of Moses, but upon airy nothings.”36
Meanwhile, as scholars in Europe were busy prodding and yanking at the mighty fabric of their ancestral scriptures, their counterparts in the Islamic world had attained a whole new plateau of complacency. Back in the eighteenth century, at around the same time as Gibbon was embarking on his great history of Rome, Muslim jurists were concluding that they had at last learned every lesson to be gleaned from the example of the Prophet, and that the “gate of interpretation”37 was therefore closed. Even Gibbon, the inveterate sceptic, had been impressed by the reams of evidence that the would-be biographer of Muhammad seemed able to draw upon. To him, and to other European scholars, the depth and detail of Muslim writings on the origins of Islam came as a revelation; nor did they ever doubt that Muhammad’s career and character could authentically be known. “It is not the propagation but the permanency of his religion that deserves our wonder,” Gibbon wrote. “[T]he same pure and perfect impression which he engraved at Mecca and Medina, is preserved, after the revolutions of twelve centuries, by the Indian, the African, and the Turkish proselytes of the Koran.”38 In comparison with the great figures of the Bible, Muhammad seemed possessed of a striking and enviable solidity. As Renan—a diligent Arabist when not putting the cat among Christian pigeons—memorably put it: “Islam was born, not amid the mystery which cradles the origins of other religions, but rather in the full light of history.”39 Ibn Hisham could not have put it any better.
Except that there was the hint, just the nagging hint, of a problem. Like the tiniest patch of dry rot, it was not, perhaps, immediately apparent; and even those who did spot it were content, in the main, to turn a blind eye. When Gibbon, in a discreet footnote, coyly acknowledged that none of the historians he had consulted for his biography of Muhammad was a writer “of the first century of the Hegira,”40 he chose not to pursue the implications of this striking confession. A hundred years on, however, and in the wake of all the exacting criticism to which the origins of Judaism and Christianity had been subjected, the realisation was starting to dawn on certain scholars that Islam too, just perhaps, might have its own issue with its sources. The particular focus of their attentions was that vast network of struts and supports which underpinned the Sunna, and with it, most Muslims’ understanding of their Prophet: the hadiths. Perhaps this was only to be expected. In an age when Jewish and Christian scholars had presumed to question the most fundamental tenets of their own faiths, those among them who turned their gaze to Islam were almost bound to raise an eyebrow at the sheer volume of sayings posthumously attributed to Muhammad. The question they asked was a simple one, but no less devastating for that: were the hadiths actually genuine?
Now, as it happened, a number of towering Muslim scholars had fretted over the same identical issue a full millennium before. Their researches had been exacting, and their conclusions notably severe. They had freely acknowledged that innumerable hadiths had been faked; that Caliphs, lawyers and heretics had invented them willy-nilly to serve their various purposes; that many hadiths contradicted one another. Nevertheless, Muslim scholars had insisted, there did remain gold, priceless gold, out there amid the dross. Accordingly, concerned to identify which sayings of the Prophet could be enshrined as genuine and authoritative, and which were to be junked, they had toured all the various lands of the Umma, collecting hadiths wherever they could find them, and then subjecting each and every one to the most rigorous examination. Of al-Bukhari—the most proficient and celebrated hadith hunter—it was said that he had collected 600,000 supposed sayings of the Prophet, and dismissed all but 7225. His collection of hadiths—along with those of five other great scholars—was, in effect, what constituted the Sunna. As a result, to question their value was to question
the entire basis of Islamic law. It was also, in the ultimate reckoning, to question the truth of the portrait of the Prophet himself. The risk of heresy was palpable. Unsurprisingly, then, the vast majority of Muslims had always dreaded to take such a scandalous, such a blasphemous step.f
But this, of course, was hardly a consideration fit to rein in the exacting scepticism of the modern West. Beginning in 1890 and continuing to the present day, a succession of scholars have delivered a series of body-blows to the credibility of the hadiths as a record of what Muhammad himself might truly have said. Even the greatest collectors, even al-Bukhari himself, had failed to spot the clues. Heroic though all their efforts at panning for gold had undoubtedly been, yet their rigour had been largely in vain—for the ability to distinguish a fake will invariably require a certain measure of distance, both of sympathy and time. Modern scholars have been in a position to recognise, as al-Bukhari was not, how even the most seemingly authentic hadiths wear a glitter that is all too often that of fool’s gold. Far from bearing witness to the opinions of Muhammad, they in truth bear the unmistakable stamp of controversies that were raging two whole centuries after the hijra. Over and again, the Prophet had been made to serve as the mouthpiece for a whole host of rival, and often directly antagonistic, traditions. Many of these, far from deriving from Muhammad, were not even Arab in origin, but originated instead in the laws, the customs, or the superstitions of infidel peoples. What the jurists of the early Caliphate had succeeded in pulling off, by means of “a fiction perhaps unequalled in the history of human thought,”41 was the ultimate in lawyers’ tricks: a quite breathtaking show of creativity and nerve. Stitching together a whole new legal framework for the infant empire, it had become the habit of these ingenious scholars to attribute their rulings, not to their own initiative or judgement, but rather to that ultimate in authorities: the Prophet. The dry rot of fabrication, in short, was endemic throughout the Sunna. Joseph Schacht, a German professor schooled in the severest tradition of Teutonic textual criticism, and who in 1950 wrote a groundbreaking study of how precisely the hadith collections had come to be manufactured, was blunt in spelling out the implications. “We must abandon the gratuitous assumptions,” he declared flatly, “that there existed originally an authentic core of information going back to the time of the Prophet.”42 In other words—as a source for the origins of Islam, the hadiths were worse than useless.