Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (16 page)

The clearest evidence of this comes from the Qur'an's repeated assumption that the messenger who received its revelations was not a miracle worker. The unbelievers demand a miracle: “And they that know not say: Why does God not speak to us? Why does a sign not come to us?” (2:118; cf. 6:37, 10:20, 13:7, 13:27). Allah tells his messenger that even if the prophet did come to the unbelievers with a miracle, they would reject him anyway: “Indeed, We have struck for the people in this Koran every manner of similitude; and if thou bringest them a sign, those who are unbelievers will certainly say, ‘You do nothing but follow falsehood’” (30:58). Elsewhere in the Qur'an, Allah delivers a similar message: “Yet if thou shouldst bring to those that have been given the Book every sign, they will not follow thy direction
[qibla
, “direction for prayer”]; thou art not a follower of their direction; neither are they followers of one another's direction. If thou followest their caprices, after the knowledge that has come to thee, then thou wilt surely be among the evildoers” (2:145). The repetition of this theme suggests that one of the primary criticisms the unbelievers brought against the prophet was that he had no miracles
to perform; the Qur'an was intended to be sufficient sign in itself: “What, is it not sufficient for them that We have sent down upon thee the Book that is recited to them? Surely in that is a mercy, and a reminder to a people who believe” (29:51).

Yet the Muhammad of Ibn Ishaq's biography is an accomplished miracle worker. Ibn Ishaq relates that during the digging of the trench that ultimately thwarted the Meccans' siege of the Muslims in Medina, one of Muhammad's companions prepared “a little ewe not fully fattened” and invited the prophet to dinner. Muhammad, however, surprised his host by inviting all of those who were working on the trench to dine at the man's home. The prophet of Islam solved the problem just as Jesus in the Gospels multiplied bread and fish: “When we had sat down we produced the food and he blessed it and invoked the name of God over it. Then he ate as did all the others. As soon as one lot had finished another lot came until the diggers turned from it.”
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On another occasion, Ibn Ishaq writes, one of the companions seriously injured his eye, so that it actually hung from its socket; Muhammad “restored it to its place with his hand and it became his best and keenest eye afterwards.”
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In other stories, Muhammad drew water from a dry waterhole and called down the rain with a prayer.
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There are many, many such stories in Ibn Ishaq. If any of them had been known at the time the Qur'an was written, it is inexplicable that Muhammad would have been portrayed in his own holy book as a prophet with a book alone and no supporting miracles. It is remarkable that a man who could heal the sick, multiply food, draw water from dry ground, and shoot out lightning from the strike of a pickax would nonetheless be portrayed as a prophet whose message was unsupported by miraculous signs.

Ibn Ishaq also includes stories of how Muhammad was repeatedly identified as a future prophet when he was a mere child. In one, Muhammad was taken as a child to Syria, where a Christian monk named Bahira studied him, “looking at his body and finding traces of his description (in the Christian books).” Ibn Ishaq affirms that
Bahira found the boy to be a stout monotheist, although his people were polytheists; young Muhammad told the monk that “by Allah nothing is more hateful to me” than al-Lat and al-Uzza, two goddesses of the Quraysh. Bahira also “looked at his back and saw the seal of prophethood between his shoulders in the very place described in his book.” Accordingly, the monk gave Muhammad's uncle a warning that foreshadowed, or echoed, the later demonization of the Jews in Islamic tradition: “Take your nephew back to his country and guard him carefully against the Jews, for by Allah! If they see him and know about him what I know, they will do him evil; a great future lies before this nephew of yours, so take him home quickly.”
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Johannes Jansen explains the motivation behind such stories:

The storytellers intended to convince their public that Muhammad has indeed been a prophet from God. In order to do so, they assured their public that already Christians, even monks, had recognized him as such. They had no real memory of such an event, but they wanted to convince their public that to recognize Muhammad as the prophet of God was a good thing. If a neutral, Christian authority had already recognized Muhammad, they must have argued, how much more should others do so!

In this case, the storytellers could only get their message across if they could create a setting in which Muhammad might have actually met a monk. Hence, they tell several stories of how Muhammad as a child went to Syria, together with one of his uncles. There he met his monk, and the monk recognized him. The many stories about Muhammad's travels to Syria are not the product of real historical memory, however vague, but a creation that was made necessary by the theological need to have Muhammad recognized as a prophet by Christians, preferably a monk.

The story about the meeting of Muhammad and the monk is improbable, it appears in many contradictory versions, but it served its purpose.
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Such stories are also strange in light of the opposition that Muhammad faced among his own people, the Quraysh, once he did proclaim himself as a prophet: If he really fulfilled the prophecies of a prophet who was to come, why were the Quraysh so slow and obstinate about recognizing that fact? In this the life of Muhammad resembles that of Jesus, whom the Gospel of Matthew in particular depicts as fulfilling the prophecies of the coming Messiah and yet being rejected by the religious leaders most familiar with those prophecies. This close resemblance indicates that the stories of Muhammad's being identified as a prophet while a youth have a typological, legendary cast.

The legendary character of these accounts is especially obvious in light of their absolute incompatibility with other Islamic traditions about how surprised and terrified Muhammad was by the first visitation of the angel Gabriel. Ibn Ishaq himself reports that this encounter left Muhammad in such extreme agitation that he said to his wife: “Woe is me poet [i.e., one who receives ecstatic visions and may be insane] or possessed.”
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If Muhammad had been repeatedly identified as a prophet when he was a child and a young man, one might be forgiven for thinking that he should have seen it coming.

On this basis alone, the historical reliability of Ibn Ishaq is severely compromised. The material he includes in his biography must have arisen long after the collection of the Qur'an. Even in that case, it is odd that he would have included so much material that clearly contradicts the testimony of the Qur'an, a book with which Ibn Ishaq was familiar at least in some form, as he frequently quoted passages that appear in it.

If Ibn Ishaq's biography of Muhammad is largely or even wholly pious fiction, all the information about Muhammad that is generally regarded as historical evaporates. Ibn Ishaq's overarching intention is to demonstrate to his readers that Muhammad is indeed a prophet. But in doing so, he recounts so many legends that fact cannot be separated from fiction. There is no reliable way to distinguish the miraculous material in Ibn Ishaq's account from that which appears to be more straightforwardly historical.

Jansen administers the coup de grâce to any claims that Ibn Ishaq's biography is historical. He points out that “for every event which took place in the life of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq meticulously recorded in his
Sira
in which month it took place,” and “this meticulous and systematic dating by month which is Ibn Ish
q's wont, is, of course, one of the main reasons why Western historians classified his book as historiography in the normal sense of that word.” Yet this supposedly painstaking record keeping simply does not line up with the Arabic calendar. The pre-Islamic Arabic calendar, like the Islamic calendar, was lunar, consisting of 354 days rather than the 365 days of the solar calendar. To make up this difference, Arabians added leap months—one every three solar years. They discontinued that practice in the year 629; the Qur'an actually forbids adding leap months (9:36–37). But by that point, Muhammad had acted as a prophet for almost twenty years, according to the standard Islamic account. “How then,” asks Jansen, “is it possible that not a single one of the numerous events Ibn Ishaq describes and attaches a date to, took place during a leap month? If his narrative of the life of Muhammad would be based on historical memories and on real events, however distorted, but remembered by real people, how can half a solar year (or more) remain unmentioned and have disappeared from the record?”

Ibn Ishaq's biography, Jansen observes, “can only date from a period in which people had forgotten that leap months had once existed.”
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That period would have to have been a considerably long time after Muhammad is supposed to have lived. “These stories by Ibn Ishaq,” concludes Jansen, “do not attempt to describe memories of events that took place in the past, but they want to convince the reader that the protagonist of these stories, Muhammad, is the Messenger of God.”

Having It Both Ways with Ibn Ishaq

Nonetheless, the twentieth-century scholar of Islam W. Montgomery Watt (1909–2006) purported to separate the historical from the
legendary in Ibn Ishaq in his two-volume biography of the prophet of Islam,
Muhammad at Mecca
and
Muhammad at Medina.
He did so simply by ignoring the miraculous elements of Ibn Ishaq's work and presenting the rest as historically accurate, a procedure that is, in the final analysis, completely arbitrary: There is no reason to give any more credence to the nonmiraculous elements of Ibn Ishaq's biography than to the miraculous ones. Neither the miraculous nor the nonmiraculous accounts are attested by any other contemporary source, or any source closer to the actual lifetime of Muhammad.

Patricia Crone explains some of what is wrong with Watt's methodology: “He accepts as historically correct the claim that Muhammad traded in Syria as Khadija's agent, even though the only story in which we are told as much is fictitious. It is similarly, to him, a historical fact that Abd al-Muttalib dug the well of Zamzam in Mecca, though the information is likewise derived from a miracle story.”
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Watt informs his readers with impressive precision that “the siege of Medina, known to Muslims as the expedition of the Khandaq or Trench, began on 31 March 627 (8/xi/5) and lasted about a fortnight.”
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He does not say anything about the lightning that shot from Muhammad's pickax during the digging of the trench, or note that his source for the precise start of the siege was al-Waqidi, whose ahistorical elaborations on Ibn Ishaq's already legendary narrative we have seen. Why Watt believes the precise dating for the start of the siege to be historically reliable, but not Muhammad's portentous pickax, he does not explain.

Neither Watt nor other historians who depend on Ibn Ishaq for their knowledge of Muhammad can have it both ways. And if Ibn Ishaq cannot be counted on as a reliable historical source, there is nothing else. Essentially every biography of Muhammad down to this day depends at least to some degree on Ibn Ishaq. Johannes Jansen observes: “Later books about Muhammad essentially limit themselves to retelling Ibn Ishaq's story. Sometimes they are a little more detailed than Ibn Ishaq, but the extra details they supply do not inspire much confidence in modern skeptics. The modern Western biographies of
Muhammad, too, all completely depend upon Ibn Ishaq. Equally, all encyclopedia articles about Mohammed, whether popular or academic, are nothing but summaries of Ibn Ishaq's narrative.”
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So if Ibn Ishaq is not a historically trustworthy source, what is left of the life of Muhammad? If nothing certain can be known about him, Islam stands as a momentous effect in search of a cause. If there was no warrior prophet teaching jihad warfare against unbelievers and presenting this teaching as the perfect and eternal word of the only true God, then how and why did the great Arab conquests of the seventh century and thereafter really come about? What was the energizing force behind them, if they were not inspired by a fiery prophet's promise of reward in this world and the next for his warriors?

If Islam did not develop as Muslims believe it did and as the earliest Islamic sources explain, then how and why did it develop at all?

A clue to this comes from the anomalies surrounding Islam's Arabian setting.