Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (5 page)

When the
candidatus
[that is, a member of the Byzantine imperial guard] was killed by the Saracens
[Sarakenoi]
, I was at Caesarea and I set off by boat to Sykamina. People were saying “the candidatus has been killed,” and we Jews were overjoyed. And they were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens, and that he was proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come. I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him: “What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?” He replied, groaning deeply: “He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a
sword. Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist. Indeed, Isaiah said that the Jews would retain a perverted and hardened heart until all the earth should be devastated. But you go, master Abraham, and find out about the prophet who has appeared.” So I, Abraham, inquired and heard from those who had met him that there was no truth to be found in the so-called prophet, only the shedding of men's blood. He says also that he has the keys of paradise, which is incredible.
⁴

In this case, “incredible” means “not credible.” One thing that can be established from this is that the Arabian invaders who conquered Palestine in 635 (the “Saracens”) came bearing news of a new prophet, one who was “armed with a sword.” But in the
Doctrina Jacobi
this unnamed prophet is still alive, traveling with his armies, whereas Muhammad is supposed to have died in 632. What's more, this Saracen prophet, rather than proclaiming that he was Allah's last prophet (cf. Qur'an 33:40), was “proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come.” This was a reference to an expected Jewish Messiah, not to the Jesus Christ of Christianity
(Christ
means “anointed one” or “Messiah” in Greek).

It is noteworthy that the Qur'an depicts Jesus as proclaiming the advent of a figure whom Islamic tradition identifies as Muhammad: “Children of Israel, I am the indeed the Messenger of God to you, confirming the Torah that is before me, and giving good tidings of a Messenger who shall come after me, whose name shall be Ahmad” (61:6).
Ahmad
is the “praised one,” whom Islamic scholars identify with Muhammad: The name
Ahmad
is a variant of
Muhammad
(as they share the trilateral root h-m-d). It may be that the
Doctrina Jacobi
and Qur'an 61:6 both preserve in different ways the memory of a prophetic figure who proclaimed the coming of the “praised one” or the “chosen one”—
ahmad
or
muhammad.

The prophet described in the
Doctrina Jacobi
“says also that he has the keys of paradise,” which, we're told, “is incredible.” But it is not only incredible; it is also completely absent from the Islamic tradition, which never depicts Muhammad as claiming to hold the keys of paradise. Jesus, however, awards them to Peter in the Gospel according to Matthew (16:19), which may indicate (along with Jesus' being the one who proclaims the coming of
ahmad
in Qur'an 61:6) that the figure proclaiming this eschatological event had some connection to the Christian tradition, as well as to Judaism's messianic expectation. Inasmuch as the “keys of paradise” are more akin to Peter's “keys to the kingdom of heaven” than to anything in Muhammad's message, the prophet in the
Doctrina Jacobi
seems closer to a Christian or Christian-influenced Messianic millennialist than to the prophet of Islam as he is depicted in Islam's canonical literature.

Was That Muhammad?

In light of all this, can it be said that the
Doctrina Jacobi
refers to Muhammad at all? It is difficult to imagine that it could refer to anyone else, as prophets who wielded the sword of conquest in the Holy Land—and armies acting on the inspiration of such prophets—were not thick on the ground in the 630s. The document's departures from Islamic tradition regarding the date of Muhammad's death and the content of his teaching could be understood simply as the misunderstandings of a Byzantine writer observing these proceedings from a comfortable distance, and not as evidence that Muhammad and Islam were different then from what they are now.

At the same time, there is not a single account of any kind dating from around the time the
Doctrina Jacobi
was written that affirms the canonical Islamic story of Muhammad and Islam's origins. One other possibility is that the unnamed prophet of the
Doctrina Jacobi
was one of several such figures, some of whose historical attributes were later subsumed into the figure of the prophet of Islam under
the name of one of them, Muhammad. For indeed, there is nothing dating from the time of Muhammad's activities or for a considerable period thereafter that actually tells us anything about what he was like or what he did.

One apparent mention of his name can be found in a diverse collection of writings in Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic common in the region at the time) that are generally attributed to a Christian priest named Thomas and dated to the early 640s. But some evidence indicates that these writings were revised in the middle of the eighth century, and so this may not be an early reference to Muhammad at all.
⁵
Nonetheless, Thomas refers to “a battle between the Romans and the
tayyaye d-Mhmt
” east of Gaza in 634.
⁶
The
tayyaye
, or
Taiyaye
, were nomads; other early chroniclers use this word to refer to the conquerors. Thus one historian, Robert G. Hoyland, has translated
tayyaye d-Mhmt
as “the Arabs of Muhammad”; this translation and similar ones are relatively common. Syriac, however, distinguishes between
t
and d, so it is not certain (although it is possible) that by
Mhmt
, Thomas meant
Mhmd
—Muhammad. Even if “Arabs of Muhammad” is a perfectly reasonable translation of
tayyaye d-Mhmt
, we are still a long way from the prophet of Islam, the polygamous warrior prophet, recipient of the Qur'an, wielder of the sword against the infidels. Nothing in the writings or other records of either the Arabians or the people they conquered dating from the mid-seventh century mentions any element of his biography: At the height of the Arabian conquests, the non-Muslim sources are as silent as the Muslim ones are about the prophet and holy book that were supposed to have inspired those conquests.

Thomas may also have meant to use the word
Mhmt
not as a proper name but as a title, the “praised one” or the “chosen one,” with no certain referent. In any case, the Muhammad to which Thomas refers does not with any certainty share anything with the prophet of Islam except the name itself.

Sophronius and Umar

No one who interacted with those who conquered the Middle East in the middle of the seventh century ever seems to have gotten the impression that a prophet named Muhammad, whose followers burst from Arabia bearing a new holy book and a new creed, was behind the conquests.
⁷

Consider, for example, a seventh-century Christian account of the conquest of Jerusalem, apparently written within a few years of that conquest (originally in Greek but surviving in a translation into Georgian). According to this account, “the godless Saracens entered the holy city of Christ our Lord, Jerusalem, with the permission of God and in punishment for our negligence.”
⁸
A Coptic homily from the same period characterizes the “Saracens” as “oppressors, who give themselves up to prostitution, massacre and lead into captivity the sons of men, saying: ‘We both fast and pray.’”
⁹

Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem who turned the city over to the caliph Umar after the Arabian conquest in 637, lamented the advent of “the Saracens who, on account of our sins, have now risen up against us unexpectedly and ravage all with cruel and feral design, with impious and godless audacity.”
¹⁰
In a Christmas sermon in 634, Sophronius declares that “we, however, because of our innumerable sins and serious misdemeanours, are unable to see these things, and are prevented from entering Bethlehem by way of the road. Unwillingly, indeed, contrary to our wishes, we are required to stay at home, not bound closely by bodily bonds, but bound by fear of the Saracens.” He laments that “as once that of the Philistines, so now the army of the godless Saracens has captured the divine Bethlehem and bars our passage there, threatening slaughter and destruction if we leave this holy city and dare to approach our beloved and sacred Bethlehem.”
¹¹

It is not surprising that a seventh-century Christian like Sophronius would refer to the invaders as “godless.” After all, even if those invaders had come brandishing the holy book of the deity they
proclaimed as the sole true creator of all things, Sophronius denied that god's existence. Still, he makes no mention, even in the heat of the fiercest polemic, of the conquerors' god, their prophet, or their holy book.

In all his discussion of the “Saracens,” Sophronius shows some familiarity with their disdain for the cross and the orthodox Christian doctrines of Christ, but he never calls the invaders “Muslims” and never refers to Muhammad, the Qur'an, or Islam. In a sermon from December 636 or 637, Sophronius speaks at length about the conquerors' brutality, and in doing so he makes some references to their beliefs:

But the present circumstances are forcing me to think differently about our way of life, for why are [so many] wars being fought among us? Why do barbarian raids abound? Why are the troops of the Saracens attacking us? Why has there been so much destruction and plunder? Why are there incessant outpourings of human blood? Why are the birds of the sky devouring human bodies?

The invaders are not randomly vicious but apparently have a particular contempt and hatred for Christianity:

Why have churches been pulled down? Why is the cross mocked? Why is Christ, who is the dispenser of all good things and the provider of this joyousness of ours, blasphemed by pagan mouths
(ethnikois tois stomasi)
so that he justly cries out to us: “Because of you my name is blasphemed among the pagans,” and this is the worst of all the terrible things that are happening to us.

Sophronius's sermon coincides with the Islamic rejection of the cross—a rejection that also made its way into the Qur'an, which asserts that the Jews “did not slay him [Jesus], neither crucified him” (4:157). And in speaking of pagans' blaspheming of Christ, Sophronius
could be referring to the denial of Christ's divinity and salvific sacrifice—denials that are part of Islamic doctrine.

Sophronius sees the Saracens as the instrument of God's wrath against Christians who have grown lax, although he describes the Saracens themselves are “God-hating” and “God-fighters,” and their unnamed leader as the “devil.” It is unclear whether Sophronius refers to the devil himself or to the caliph Umar, who conquered Jerusalem, or to Muhammad or to someone else. Sophronius declares:

That is why the vengeful and God-hating Saracens, the abomination of desolation clearly foretold to us by the prophets, overrun the places which are not allowed to them, plunder cities, devastate fields, burn down villages, set on fire the holy churches, overturn the sacred monasteries, oppose the Byzantine armies arrayed against them, and in fighting raise up the trophies [of war] and add victory to victory. Moreover, they are raised up more and more against us and increase their blasphemy of Christ and the church, and utter wicked blasphemies against God. Those God-fighters boast of prevailing over all, assiduously and unrestrainably imitating their leader, who is the devil, and emulating his vanity because of which he has been expelled from heaven and been assigned to the gloomy shades. Yet these vile ones would not have accomplished this nor seized such a degree of power as to do and utter lawlessly all these things, unless we had first insulted the gift [of baptism] and first defiled the purification, and in this way grieved Christ, the giver of gifts, and prompted him to be angry with us, good though he is and though he takes no pleasure in evil, being the fount of kindness and not wishing to behold the ruin and destruction of men. We are ourselves, in truth, responsible for all these things and no word will be found for our defence. What word or place will be given us for our defence when we have taken all these gifts from him, befouled them and defiled everything with our vile actions?
¹²

Such descriptions of violence and brutality are hard to reconcile with the better-known accounts of the Arabian conquest of Jerusalem. Those accounts depict Umar meeting Sophronius and treating him respectfully, even magnanimously declining to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre so that his followers will not be able to seize the church and convert it into a mosque.
¹³
Umar and Sophronius conclude a pact that forbids Christians from building new churches, carrying arms, or riding on horses, and that requires them to pay a poll tax,
jizya
, to the Muslims; but Christians are generally allowed to practice their religion and live in relative peace.
¹⁴
This is the foundation of the Islamic legal superstructure of dhimmitude, which denies equality of rights to non-Muslims in the Islamic state and is oppressive in numerous ways by modern standards, but which in the seventh century was comparatively tolerant.