Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages

2. A Mangled Corpse: The Polemical Dismemberment of Muhammad

 2  AMangledCorpse The Polemical Dismemberment of Muhammad “The Greeks and Latins,” wrote Edward Gibbon, “have invented and propagated the vulgar and ridiculous story, that Mahomet’s iron tomb is suspended in the air at Mecca, by the action of equal and potent lodestones. Without any philosophical inquiries, it may suffice, that, 1. the prophet was not buried at Mecca; and. 2, That his tomb at Medina, which has been visited by millions, is placed on the ground.”1 That Gibbon takes such pains to refute this strange legend implies that it was given some credence in 1776. Where did it come from? Why was it believed? I intend in this article to look at the origins of this peculiar story in the twelfth century and its development until Gibbon rejects it in 1776. In particular, I want to examine the purpose this legend served in the construction of an image of the Saracen other. Muhammad’s floating coffin at Mecca becomes, for certain Christian authors, the fictive center of the Muslim world, imbued with a terrifying magical power, an object of fear and loathing. Muhammad’s death and what happened to his corpse preoccupied many of the polemical Christian biographers of Muhammad. Their biographies denigrate Islam (and hence attempt to assure their readers of the superiority of Christianity) by portraying Muhammad as a scoundrel. He is variously shown to be a pervert, drunkard, epileptic, magician, heretic, swindler, murderer , Machiavellian political schemer, and intimate of Satan. These biographies originated in the work of Christians of the eighth and ninth centuries, 20 / Sons of Ishmael who—appalled to see their brethren converting to Islam in droves—tried to paint the Muslim prophet in the most negative terms possible in order to stem the tides of conversion. These biographies—written in Arabic, Greek, or Syriac—often formed parts of larger polemical texts aimed at convincing Christians that Islam was but a twisted caricature of the true faith, Christianity . Similar hostile biographies of Muhammad (most of them quite brief) were written into polemical texts and chronicles of ninth- and tenth-century Spain by Christians writing in both Latin and Arabic.2 Hostile and inaccurate as these texts are, none of them contain the strange story about Muhammad’s floating coffin; that particular legend is a product of the Rhineland in the twelfth century, as we shall see presently. It is in the twelfth century that northern Europe begins to take an interest in Islam, due to its expanding contact with the Muslim world, through crusade , increased trade, and a growing influx of philosophical and scientific texts translated from Arabic into Latin. More distant from Islam than their eastern and Spanish brethren, northern European authors could take these hostile legends about Muhammad and twist them at times beyond recognition . Seeking to explain Islam’s role in the divine plan and unhampered by any real knowledge of Islam, they could make of Muhammad what they wanted: an incarnation of error and evil, an inverted image of Christ and the saints. An ignominious death for Muhammad, followed by the desecration of his corpse, was usually part of these polemics. These legends become widespread in texts about Islam written in Latin and the European vernaculars from the twelfth century to the eighteenth, texts as various as religious polemics, crusader chronicles, travelogues, etc. In the following pages I will examine the various purposes these stories about Muhammad’s death served and how they helped both explain and denigrate Islam to a Christian audience. Rather than moving in strictly chronological order and tracing the sources of each permutation of these legends (an impossible and perhaps not very interesting task), I will look at them typologically . First I will look at texts that merely assert that Muhammad met an ignominious end, then at texts that try to place his demise into a Christian eschatology, and finally at how the legend of Muhammad’s floating coffin (or in some versions, a floating idol of Muhammad), usually believed to be in Mecca, comes to provide not only an eschatological explanation of Islam but a concrete (if entirely fictional) locus of Muslim power and an The Polemical Dismemberment of Muhammad / 21 objective for Christian hatred: an object of both fear and hope, for various texts assert that the destruction of Muhammad’s floating coffin in Mecca will result in the end of Islam itself. Finally, we will see that the demise of...