An Introduction to Islam for Jews

CHAPTER 4. The Emergence of Islam

17 CHAPTER 4 The Emergence of Islam Tradition, History, and the Meaning of Narrative The first century of Islam was a busy time of expansion, conquest, and consolidation, when an obscure people burst forth from the Arabian desert and managed to subdue and control empires. It was a revolutionary time that would change human history forever, yet there are almost no contemporary sources that inform us of that critical period. Virtually all sources we have that treat the life of Muhammad, his prophetic mission, the revelation of the Qur’an, and the success of the Muslim movement were written at least 00 years later, and they were all written by Muslim religious scholars who were hardly objective historians. This fact has raised a good deal of controversy among some Western scholars, who have suggested many theories to account for the emergence of Islam. These range from considering Islam to have been a break-off from a Babylonian Jewish sectarian movement to suggesting that Muhammad was an imaginative creation of a religious community that actually emerged generations later. We have no intent to pursue these ideas here, though they call into question the reliability of our sources for early Islam. The problem of sources is not unique to Islam. It is equally problematic in Judaism and Christianity. For example, there are no contemporary literary sources that describe the biblical Patriarchs and Matriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the emergence of the religion of the Bible, or the conquest of Canaan. And there are no contemporary 18 A N I N T R O D U C T I O N T O I S L A M F O R J E W S sources that treat any aspect of the life of Jesus or his mission. In fact, for all three great monotheistic scriptural religions, we rely largely on the religious writings of the followers of the religions themselves. These sources were often written by people who had particular interests that might distort their perceptions and depictions of events, so scholars try to develop techniques that will help them sift through the data for information that they believe is historically accurate and sound. The result is always a variety of perspectives about the history of these emerging religions. No historian is certain exactly what happened and how it occurred. This is certainly the case with Islam, which emerged at a time before the Arabic language even had a functional writing system. However, the oral nature of pre-Islamic Arabian culture greatly admired storytelling, and epic stories and poems were remembered and recited regularly by experts. The first historical works written by Muslims retained much of this storytelling style, with literate individuals collecting and recording the memories of ancient days told by those who heard their narratives orally from their elders, who in turn heard them from their own. There remains a great deal of controversy over the accuracy of oral histories, even in our own day, when we take oral histories of Holocaust survivors or witnesses to events who are cross-examined in a court of law. Because this book is an introduction to Islam, we are less concerned with what actually happened than we are with what Muslims believe happened. We want to understand how Muslims view their own history and how that history impacts their lives as religious people. In what follows, therefore, we follow the basic outlines of early Islamic history as told by traditional Muslim sources. From Creation to Abraham Unlike either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, the Qur’an is not organized chronologically in any way. In fact, it seems that it is purposefully anti-chronological and contains very few references to occasions in the mission of its own prophet, Muhammad. On the other hand, it references Creation and many of the stories and personalities that are found in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, from Adam to Jesus. It also contains references to ancient tribes and prophets that are not found in the Bible, and these too appear without any kind of chronological order. Although the Qur’an is not interested in chronology, the earliest Muslim historians were. They reorganized the qur’anic references to individuals and events in their great universal histories, beginning with Creation and ending with the major events in their own generation. They also took the huge and constantly growing compendium of oral traditions among 19 C H A P T...