It was then I realized they were playing a dangerous game. They were essentially finding ways to pick and choose from the ancient records which accounts were reliable and which were not, creating a Muhammad that they felt comfortable with.
I did not want to do that. I wanted to know who Muhammad really was and whether I should follow him as my prophet, not to create a Muhammad in my mind that was worth following. I decided to reconsider my approach and study Muhammad using the historical method instead of uloom al-hadith. What were the earliest accounts written about Muhammad, and how soon were they written?
It was then that I discovered some shocking facts about early Islam. First, people were not writing books in Arabic during Muhammad’s time. The first Arabic book to have been written was the Quran, and even that was turned into a written book only after Muhammad died. There was no such thing as written Arabic literature, only oral. This is because, second, people were still figuring out how to write Arabic. Arabic script was far from standardized, having been invented only a century or two before Muhammad’s time. For these reasons and others, third, no one wrote a biography of Muhammad’s life until about 140 years after Muhammad died. By that time, there were certainly no eyewitnesses of Muhammad’s life, and people were generations removed from the events they discussed. Could we trust such an account to be an unfiltered and accurate depiction of Muhammad?
The first biography, Sirat Rasul Allah, was written by a man named Ibn Ishaq, but the book itself has actually been lost. Ibn Ishaq taught a man named al-Bakkai, who made his own edition of Ibn Ishaq’s book, and al-Bakkai taught a man named Ibn Hisham, who edited al-Bakkai’s edition, and it is this edition that we have today. Why did these men each make their own editions? Ibn Hisham tells us in his introductory remarks: “Things which it is disgraceful to discuss, matters which would distress certain people, and such reports as al-Bakkai told me he could not accept as trustworthy—all these things I have omitted.”1 In other words, the earliest biography of Muhammad’s life was reputed to contain fabrications, disgraceful material, and distressing facts.2 What we have today has been filtered many times, both for fabrications and for difficult truths.
It is because of such intentional editing that historians do not consider late accounts as trustworthy as early accounts, all else being equal. The earlier accounts have not been as filtered, and therefore are more likely to be true. Also, people are more prone to forget information over time, especially information that does not fit with the narrative at large. When it comes to the records of Muhammad’s life, we simply do not have such early or unfiltered data. Everything has been filtered through multiple generations.
Even though the earliest biography went through layers of filtering, it still contains shocking material. Muhammad personally oversaw the beheadings of up to nine hundred men on a single day, digging trenches in the marketplaces so that their corpses could fall into mass graves upon being decapitated;3 he ordered the assassination of an old man who had composed poetry complaining about Muhammad;4 a woman lamented the old man’s death in poetry, so Muhammad ordered her assassination, and her blood splattered on her children as she breastfed;5 Muhammad ordered the torture of a city treasurer to extract the location of the money, so his men kindled a fire with flint and steel on the treasurer’s chest until he was nearly dead, ultimately beheading him;6 when Muhammad was about to execute a man, the man pleaded, “Who will look after my children?” to which Muhammad responded, “Hell!”7 Just by scratching the surface of the earliest biography we find many troubling accounts of Muhammad.
By the time hadith were written under men like Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim, many of these accounts were filtered out of Muhammad’s biography, just as Ibn Hisham and al-Bakkai had filtered the accounts that they received. For this reason, selective filtration, the whole body of hadith is inherently flawed: They contain only those accounts that multiple generations of early Muslims each chose to save. As we have seen, even those that were kept are often considered flawed and fabricated.
WHAT CAN WE REALLY KNOW ABOUT MUHAMMAD?
For this reason, non-Muslim scholars of early Islam are very hesitant to trust the information about the life of Muhammad. Almost none accept the science of hadith criticism as it stands, most just hoping to extract historical kernels of truth from the hadith. Some scholars have even abandoned hope of that much success, saying virtually nothing can be known about Muhammad. These scholars are from a variety of religious and nonreligious backgrounds. One Muslim scholar concluded that, given the nature of the evidence, Muhammad may not have even existed.
Muhammad Sven Kalisch completed his PhD in Islamic jurisprudence in 1997 and became Germany’s first professor to hold a chair in Islamic theology. When he arrived at Münster University in 2004, he struck some as too conservative on account of his zeal for sharia. But then, according to the Wall Street Journal, Kalisch “wanted to subject Islam to the same scrutiny as Christianity and Judaism.”8 At first he defended the historicity of Muhammad in print, but the more he studied, the more he realized there were significant problems with the record. The word Muhammad appears only four times in the Quran, and it is unclear whether it is a name or a title. Quran 61.6 appears to say that the Prophet’s name was Ahmad, not Muhammad.9 There is no other evidence of Muhammad’s existence until the turn of the eighth century, when coins bearing his name were produced. “The more I read, the historical person at the root of the whole thing became more and more improbable,” says Muhammad Kalisch.
Other scholars are coming to similar conclusions on account of the holes in the historical records. Their concerns are more than an argument from silence; if the traditional understanding of Islam is true, it is indeed very problematic that we do not find more about Muhammad in the earliest historical records. If Muhammad was the prophet of the Arabs, and if they were energized and motivated by his teachings, why is it that the Arab conquests of the Middle East, North Africa, and Persia never mention his name? These conquests occurred in the middle of the seventh century, immediately after Muhammad’s death, yet none of the contemporary records mention Muhammad. In fact, none mention a holy book or even the word Muslim. It is not that there are no records; considering the communications of the conquerors and the writings of the conquered, there are abundant records, yet Muhammad is never named, a holy book is never discussed, and the conquerors are never called Muslims.
Other evidence also has historians scratching their heads: Although Mecca is reputed to be a trade center, it never appears in any trade routes until the turn of the eighth century; none of the earliest mosques faced toward Mecca (all faced toward either Jerusalem or Petra until about the turn of the eighth century); Mecca is mentioned only once in the Quran; the descriptions of the land in the Quran sound very little like Mecca, much more like northern Arabia; and the list goes on.
For these reasons, not just one Muslim scholar but many scholars doubt the traditional origins of Islam and even the existence of Muhammad, at least as the early Islamic records describe him. According to them, the truth about the origins of Islam is unfortunately veiled. There is almost nothing we can know with certainty about the historical Muhammad.10
CHAPTER 36
CONCLUSION
THE DILEMMA OF THE HISTORICAL MUHAMMAD
Both as a Muslim and now ten years later, I did not conclude that Muhammad did not exist. Given the sheer volume of stories and accounts, as well as their relative coherence, it seems more probable than not to me that Muhammad existed. But I do have to agree with the basic consensus of non-Muslim scholarship: We cannot know much about Muhammad with certainty.
The alternative, of course, is to trust the Islamic records of Muhammad’s life, the hadith and sirah. But if we consider their accuracy according to the standards of uloom al-hadith, we still find a Muhammad who is not compelling as a prophet of God. Perhaps he was a great seventh-century general and one who adhered to the cultural standards of his day, but he certainly was not the greatest moral exe
mplar of all time nor one to whom I would declare my allegiance. If we abandon the uloom al-hadith and use the historical method of assessing the earliest biographies and accounts of Muhammad’s life, we find an even more brutal and problematic picture of Muhammad.
This is the dilemma I had as a Muslim: Either I could trust the historical sources of Muhammad’s life and find a man I would never want to follow as a prophet, or I could question the sources and have no reason to consider him a prophet. Either way I could not conclude, based on the evidence, that Muhammad was a prophet of God.
A DISTURBANCE IN THE SHAHADA
Much like Professor Muhammad Sven Kalisch, I was confident in my Islam and in following Muhammad until I used the same critical standards to study his life as I did to study the life of Jesus. While critically studying Jesus’ claim to be God, I had been willing to discard John’s gospel because it was written fifty-five or sixty years after Jesus’ death, even though eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life would still have been alive at that time and in that community. If I treated the accounts of Muhammad’s life the same way, I would have to throw out absolutely everything, and I would have no basis to consider him my prophet.
But the records of his life left me with a dilemma: If I did believe the records to be reliable, then there was no way I could follow Muhammad as a prophet. His character was certainly not so excellent that it compelled us to believe he was a prophet. He had many spiritual shortcomings, and he was very violent throughout his ministry, among other concerns. Nor did the records indicate that God had sanctioned his ministry: He was not prophesied in the Bible and he did not have any remarkable depth of insight into science.
Crestfallen, I came to the conclusion that there was simply no way I could declare Muhammad a prophet of God based on the historical record. I could no longer recite the shahada without a sharp pang of doubt, and it haunted me.
The only way for me to continue following Muhammad was through the Quran. If it could be shown that the Quran is the Word of God, then the one who delivered it would have to be a messenger of God. I clung to the hope that my investigation of the Quran not only would vindicate Muhammad but also would completely outshine the evidence for Christianity.
PART 10
IS THE QURAN THE WORD OF GOD?
CHAPTER 37
THE POSITIVE CASE
THERE IS NO OTHER BOOK LIKE IT
The Quran is the jewel of Islam. The “why” of Muslim belief, it is the prize of Muhammad and the foundation of the faith. Its place in Islamic theology is that of Jesus in Christian theology, and as a Muslim, my confidence was built on nothing less than the text of the Quran and its excellence.
We inherited our high view of the Quran from the Muslims around us and our world of tradition. I grew up memorizing its chapters by hearing portions read aloud during the daily prayers and by being quizzed on it by my mother daily. That is how I had the last seven chapters of the Quran memorized by the age of five, and the last fifteen chapters memorized by the age of fifteen. While I was more acquainted with the Quran than most Muslims I knew, I certainly was not out of the ordinary. Some in our Islamic community had the entire Quran memorized by their teenage years.
We regarded the Quran more highly than any other physical object in the world. After all, we believed it was the Word of God.
When I began losing my historical confidence in the prophethood of Muhammad, I placed all my hope on the pillar of the Quran, believing it would stand firm enough to authenticate Muhammad’s prophetic status. In all honesty, I truly was convinced it would stand firm because I had heard many arguments for its inspiration.
THE LITERARY EXCELLENCE OF THE QURAN
A deeply held belief of devout Muslims is that the excellence of the Quran is unsurpassed, that it is inimitable in its literary quality. This is inherently true not only because it is an expression of Allah, the Word of God on earth, but also because the Quran says so. When people charged Muhammad to prove that the Quran was inspired by God, the response came: “This Quran could not be produced by any other than Allah . . . Do they say, ‘he has invented it’? Say, ‘then bring a surah like it’ ” (10.37–38).
Thus, the Quran challenges skeptics to try their hand at making something equal or better, asserting that no one but Allah could compose a recitation so excellent. They will never be able to do it, not even if they had the help of every man and every demon: “If mankind and jinn gathered to bring something similar to this Quran, they could not” (17.88). The basic challenge is repeated multiple times in the Quran.1
According to Muslims, this challenge was made to skeptical Arabs who were experts in poetry. They were never able to produce anything as excellent and compelling as the Quran, and the challenge thus stands to this day.
THE FULFILLED PROPHECIES OF THE QURAN
If the Quran can be shown to contain fulfilled prophecies, then we have good reason to believe it is from God. One of the clearest prophecies is found in sura 30, the chapter on the Romans. In it, the Quran mentions a recent loss of the Roman Empire, predicting that the Romans would ultimately regroup, defeating their enemies within the next few years (30.2–4). This is exactly what happened. The Persians defeated the Romans in 614, but Emperor Heraclius ultimately defeated the Persians in 622.
Other prophecies, more long-term in their predictions, have also come true. For example, the Quran says, “Their skins testify against them as to what they used to do” (41.20). Reading the verse, one would wonder how skin can testify against a man. Muhammad could never have known about fingerprint analysis, that people’s skin could testify against them. This verse is therefore a prophecy that has come true in modern times.
Many more prophecies such as these two, prophecies of events in both ancient and modern times, confirm that the Quran is the Word of God.
THE MIRACULOUS SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE IN THE QURAN
Muslims often argue that there is miraculous scientific knowledge in the Quran. In addition to the examples in chapter 33, Muslims often argue that the Quran speaks of the big bang in 21.30, which says, “Have the disbelievers not known that the universe was a singularity, and we tore it apart?” In addition to the miraculous astronomic insight, the verse goes on to show miraculous biological insight: “We made every living thing out of water.”
Muhammad could not have known about the big bang nor about the fact that water is essential to all forms of life. The best explanation of this miraculous scientific knowledge is that the Quran must have come from Allah.
THE MATHEMATICAL MARVELS OF THE QURAN
Although it was not an argument that I ever used, many Muslims argue that the Quran displays mathematical marvels that could only be the result of God’s authorship. One kind of mathematical marvel is numerical parallels: the word month appears twelve times in the Quran, the word day appears 365 times, the words man and woman appear an equal number of times, the words angels and Satan appear an equal number of times, and the words this world and the hereafter appear an equal number of times. Such numerical parallels could only be the result of a divine mind behind the text.
In addition to these patterns, there is a hidden code in the Quran. In 74.30, the Quran says “over it are nineteen.” When we analyze the text of the Quran for patterns, we start finding the number nineteen everywhere. For just a few examples, the total number of chapters in the Quran is divisible by nineteen; the first revelation of the Quran had nineteen words; and the first chapter chronologically revealed has nineteen verses and a total number of words divisible by nineteen. Dozens of such examples can be found, and the number nineteen is not a small prime number, making it very difficult for a text to exhibit this as a common pattern. Given the Quranic verse about the number nineteen, the oddity of the number, and the prevalence of the pattern, we can be confident that Allah is the author of this text.
THE PERFECT PRESERVATION OF THE QURAN
One argument more essential to Muslim faith than all the others is the perfect preservation of the Quran. E
very single word, every single letter, every single stroke of the Quran remains exactly as it was revealed, from Allah to Muhammad down to our day. It is an essential belief because of the view of the Quran in Islam: It is the eternal expression of Allah, so it can never change. Its immutability is also necessary because it is the foundation of sharia, a law for all time.
This is miraculous proof of the Quran’s inspiration because it was prophesied in the Quran: “Surely we have revealed the Reminder (Qur’an) and we will surely be its guardian” (15.9). And since we believed that every other holy book has been corrupted by its followers, this miracle is all the more potent.
CONCLUDING THE POSITIVE CASE
In our circles, the Quran really was above dispute. For multiple reasons, the Muslim community is convinced beyond any doubt that it is the Word of God: Its text is inimitably excellent, it foretells prophecies that have been fulfilled, it holds hidden scientific truths waiting to be discovered, its marvelously calculated text could only be the product of a divine mind, and the text has been preserved perfectly, down to the very stroke of the scribes’ pens.
Such were the arguments in which we had always placed our faith, and I had been convinced of their strength my entire life. When it became the only remaining pillar of my faith, though, I had to scrutinize these arguments with much more precision than ever before. They were now the sole foundation of my faith, and I had to be certain whether they could bear the weight of my entire Islamic worldview.
No God but One: Allah or Jesus?: A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity Page 24
