The great Koran con trick

The news that a recent scientific paper on the common genetic roots of Jews and Palestinians had been suppressed by learned journals, because of the political sensitivity of its conclusions, made for depressing reading. Findings that might have provided reason for hope, or even for solidarity between the Arab and Israeli peoples, were instead considered too hot to handle.

The furore over the geneticists' discoveries will have come as no surprise to other academics in the Middle East and the Muslim world, where even the most apparently dispassionate research can be swept up in the blinding ideological sandstorms that choke reasoned dialogue. Such is the intensity of feeling that many who work in highly charged areas of scholar- ship - history and archaeology, for example - choose to keep a low profile, circulating their work only in trusted academic circles. Thus the censorship that plagues the Middle East seeps into every corner of intellectual life.

Nowhere is this more true than in the study of the origins of Islam, where some of the conclusions being drawn are potentially even more explosive than the argument that Israelis and Palestinians have common ancestors. Tucked away in the journals and occasional papers of the world of Islamic studies is work by a group of academics who have spent the past three decades plotting a quiet revolution in the study of the origins of the religion, the Koran and the life of the Prophet Mohammad. The conclusions of the so-called "new historians" of Islam are devastating: that we know almost nothing about the life of the Muslim prophet Mohammad; that the rapid rise of the religion can be attributed, at least in part, to the attraction of Islam's message of conquest and jihad for the tribes of the Arabian peninsula; that the Koran as we know it today was compiled, or perhaps even written, long after Mohammad's supposed death in 632AD. Most controversially of all, the researchers say that there existed an anti-Christian alliance between Arabs and Jews in the earliest days of Islam, and that the religion may be best understood as a heretical branch of rabbinical Judaism.

The work of John Wansbrough, Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, Andrew Rippin and Gerald Hawting, which emerged initially from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies in the 1970s, questions not only Islam's own version of its origins; this "new history" of Islam takes as its starting point a problem that has long troubled scholars - the almost total lack of contemporary Islamic sources.

According to the Muslim tradition, Islam emerged from Arabia in around 611AD, when the Prophet Mohammad received a revelation from the Angel Gabriel that he was the last prophet. He began preaching a monotheistic creed to the people of Mecca and, when he made no headway, moved with a small group of followers to Yathrib (modern Medina), a mixed Jewish and Arab community 200 miles to north. This emigration (Hijra) in 622AD marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. Mohammad later returned to conquer his home city, and by the time of his death he had established an Islamic empire in Arabia. Within 100 years of the first revelations to Mohammad, the Arab conquests had swept aside the ancient empires of Byzantium and Persia and created an Islamic empire stretching from Spain to India.

The traditional version of events has remained remarkably robust, even among modernist thinkers in the Muslim world. In Introducing Islam, a beginner's guide to the faith (which was revised this year in the light of the 11 September attacks on America), the British Muslim writer (and frequent NS contributor) Ziauddin Sardar repeats this view of the religion's history: "The Life of Mohammad is known as the Sira and was lived in the full light of history. Everything he said or did was recorded." What Sardar fails to explain is how, if that is the case, nothing has survived. He says the Prophet himself was illiterate, but was surrounded at all times by 45 scribes who wrote down everything he did and said. These scribes also noted Mohammad's utterances on correct Islamic behaviour (the Hadith), which they wrote on bones, pieces of rock, parchment and papyrus. These, too, were later collected and used to complement Koranic authority. According to Sardar, we therefore know what the Prophet ate, how he treated women, children and animals, and his behaviour in battle. In reality, we know nothing of the sort - everything Sardar claims as historical truth is based on hearsay, on the words passed down by Mohammad's followers. The explanation of the new historians is that later generations created a coherent scriptural basis for Islam to suit the needs of a sophisticated empire.

The first biography (Sira) of the Prophet comes from the end of the eighth century, at least 150 years after the supposed founding of the religion, when the Islamic empire had spread west into Spain and east into India. For historians working within the Enlightenment tradition, this hiatus provides a serious barrier to providing an authoritative picture of Islam's beginnings.

Writing in the Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World, Patricia Crone, the most forthright and accessible of the new historians, expresses the general puzzlement of her colleagues: "What sense can we make of all this? Mohammad is clearly an individual who changed the course of history, but how was it possible for him to do so? Unfortunately, we do not know how much of the Islamic tradition about him is true." The only source before 800AD is the Koran, she says, and that tells us more about the Old Testament prophets Abraham and Moses than it does about Mohammad.

With no contemporary Muslim sources to refer to, a group of young historians working under the brilliant linguist Professor John Wansbrough at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the Seventies developed new scholarly techniques, drawing heavily on earlier biblical scholarship. Following Wansbrough's lead, they decided to look at the Koran as a literary text, to compare it to other devotional writings of the period and to look at internal clues to its origin. They found that it owed much to Judaism, especially the Talmud, a collection of commentaries and interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. They concluded, tentatively, that in the form that survives, the Koran was compiled, if not written, decades after the time of Mohammad, probably by converts to Islam in the Middle East, who introduced elements from the religions previously dominant in the region. Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, also working at SOAS at the time, provided an even more devastating analysis by looking at the only surviving contemporary accounts of the Islamic invasion, written in Armenian, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac by Middle Eastern witnesses to the rise of Islam. They found that Islam, as represented by admittedly biased sources, was in essence a tribal conspiracy against the Byzantine and Persian empires with deep roots in Judaism, and that Arabs and Jews were allies in these conquering communities.

Apparent support for their conclusions came from finds made during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen, where labourers working in the roof discovered fragments of Korans that are among the oldest in existence. German scholars who studied the manuscripts discovered that some of the Koranic writing diverges from the authorised version, which by tradition is considered the pure, unadulterated word of God. What's more, some of the writing appears to have been inscribed over earlier, "rubbed-out" versions of the text. This editing supports the belief of Wansbrough and his pupils that the Koran as we know it does not date from the time of Mohammad. Andrew Rippin, professor of Islamic history at the University of Victoria in Canada, and the author of a revisionist history of Islam published by Routledge, said: "The Sana'a manuscripts [are] part of the process of filling in the holes in our knowledge of what might have happened."

It is easy to see why the work of the "new historians" causes such offence in some Muslim circles, and there is no doubt that much of what they say is deeply provocative. In 1987, two years before Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie to death for blasphemy, Patricia Crone, then based at Oxford, wrote the following words about Allah and Mohammad, His earthly messenger: "Mohammad's God endorsed a policy of conquest, instructing his believers to fight against unbelievers wherever they might be found. In short, Mohammad had to conquer, his followers liked to conquer, and his deity told him to conquer."

In Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, Crone argued that the early Muslim converts turned to Islam because it promised an Arab state based on conquest, rape and pillage. "God could scarcely have been more explicit. He told the Arabs that they had a right to despoil others of their women, children and land, or indeed that they had a duty to do so: holy war consisted in obeying."

Ziauddin Sardar is one of the few Muslim intellectuals genuinely to have engaged with the new historians. He has called their work "Eurocentrism of the most extreme, purblind kind, which assumes that not a single word written by Muslims can be accepted as evidence". Writing in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair, Sardar placed the western revisionists firmly in the post-colonial orientalist camp, from where colonial "experts" have consistently told Muslims that they know best about the origins of their primitive, barbarian religion. "The triumphant conclusion of Crone and Cook," he says, "was that Islam is an amalgam of Jewish texts, theology and ritual tradition."

Sardar points out that all of the academics responsible for the new Islamic history emerged from the School of Oriental and African Studies, a colonial institution that is noted for training generations of Foreign Office officials and spies. In an interview with the American magazine Atlantic Monthly, Crone expressed her irritation at such attacks on her work: "The Koran is a scripture with a history like any other - except that we don't know this history and tend to provoke howls of protest when we study it. Nobody would mind the howls if they came from westerners, but westerners feel more deferential when the howls come from other people: who are you to tamper with their legacy. We Islamicists are not trying to destroy anyone's faith."

Christians are used to reading multiple narratives of the life of Christ, with the Scriptures themselves providing four versions in the form of the Gospels. But more significantly, in the Christian faith, Jesus himself represents the word of God, a function provided in Islam by the Koran. Suggesting that the Koran is fallible is therefore rather like questioning the divinity of Jesus. One of the attractions of Islam is that the Prophet was mortal: his life is intended as a model for the rest of humanity precisely because he was a human being, like the rest of us, who none the less managed to lead an exemplary life.

It is the picture of Islam as a heretical offshoot of Judaism that has caused most offence to Muslims, especially where it concerns the holy cities of Mecca and Jerusalem. According to Muslim tradition, Mohammad changed the direction of Muslim prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca in the earliest years of Islam, after he fell out with the Jews when he was building his community of the faithful in Arabia. But the new historians refuse to accept this account. Using archaeological evidence from mosques built in the eighth century (that is, after the death of Mohammad), they have shown that many of the Muslim prayer niches point to the north, and not towards Mecca.

Why has the work of these academics received so little attention? In part, this must be due to the attitude of liberal intellectuals in the west and their counterparts in the Muslim world, who have failed to engage with their work, or tiptoed around it for fear of offending Muslim sensibilities. In so doing, they have left the field open to the radical right in the United States, where it has been used to justify a crusading, Christian fundamentalist approach to Islam. Daniel Pipes, a writer and former adviser to the State Department, has used the new history to justify the "clash of civilisations" theory, according to which the west is doomed for ever to come into conflict with the barbarian Muslim world, and the Arabs are doomed to destruction.

Politicalusa.com, one of a number of websites committed, since 11 September, to rooting out the liberal "traitors" who have dared speak out against US government policy, includes a series of pseudo-scholarly attacks on Islam. In one article entitled "The myth of Mecca", Jack Wheeler (an adviser to the Afghan mujahedin in the Reagan era) manipulates the new history to argue that Muslims must be forced to accept that their religion is based on a series of made-up ideas. "All the Bin Ladens of the Muslim terrorism network should know that the world is soon to learn about the Myth of Mecca . . . Much more is required of the adherents of Islam: the reinvention of their religion. No longer can the words of the Koran be considered inerrant, infallible and those of Allah himself."

The new historians themselves must take some responsibility for failing to bring their arguments into the mainstream. When I telephoned one of the main protagonists in the debate, a London University academic, to ask him about the way the work of the new historians had been hijacked by the radical right and Christian fundamentalists, he warned me against publication. Nor did he wish to be identified: "I would have thought the best thing was to allow this to remain in its decent obscurity," he wrote in an e-mail.

This fear of misrepresentation (or worse) is understandable. Salman Rushdie was condemned to death for "insulting" the Prophet by depicting him as just a little too fallible and human in The Satanic Verses - and that was fiction, not historical research. Penguin, the original publisher of the Satanic Verses, has postponed the publication of a controversial new history of Islam by Professor Gerald Hawting. And the founder of the SOAS revisionist school of thought found himself the target of Islamist demonstrations at the University of London when his views first received publicity in the Muslim world; he has chosen to live in obscurity in France since he retired from the university in 1992.

For devout Muslims, the tradition as passed down from the original companions of Mohammad and reinforced by nearly 1,400 years of Islamic scholarship is unlikely to be shaken by a small group of infidel academics based at British and American universities. So why is it that, in the acres of newsprint and during the hours of television time spent discussing Muslim issues since 11 September, there has been no debate on the Koran and the origins of Islam? According to Francis Robinson, who edited the Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World, it is important "not to let sensitivities for Muslim feelings override all other considerations". He also suggests that the new history remains in relative obscurity because "these historians have yet to find a single figure who can bring all these revolutionary ideas together in an accessible way. But believe me, that will happen. And it will be interesting to watch the reaction."

Martin Bright is home affairs editor of the Observer

Since millions of non-Jews who live its borders and under its occupation don’t have democratic freedoms, for America’s purposes it isn’t a democracy any more than the Soviet Union was a democracy because the Politbureau decided things by consensus.

All individuals who are citizens of Israel live in a democratic state.

The other allies have more to offer us than non-existent “intelligence” which you claim is the benefit of associating with Israel.

False.

In Logic 1A, you will learn that “All jihadists are Islamic” doesn’t equate to “All Islamics are jihadists” however you define that.

All Isalmicists are Jihadists. This is by definition. Not all Muslims are Jihadists but some are and many potentially are.

The “Open Door Notes” refer only to one country, China. America didn’t become a world power because it had free trade with China.

False. The immediate effect of the Open Door Policy as the implementation of the Open Door Notes concerned U.S. foreign policy with respect to the Philippines and Cuba.

“Open-Door Policy” is a universally-accepted synonym for free immigration. You equivocate on the definition of “Open Door Policy.”

It has a specific historical meaning in the context and as a corollary policy to the Open Door Notes. You are speaking ahistorically now. This was a foreign policy debate which occurred around 1898-1901 concerning the course of American foreign policy and pitting guys like William Jennings Bryan and Grover Cleveland (so-called "anti-imperialists") against the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge. If you deal with this ahistorically you will have missed this seminal American foreign policy decision.

Markets “protected by force” are tyranny, not “free trade.”

Markets must be protected by force from time to time. That's why I said as of necessity.

Those other 114 countries, along with their inhabitants.

Circular discusion.

Realpolitik says to dump Israel. But that’s a little too harsh, so the next-best thing is to either make them conform to Western norms in every respect, or declare them a rogue state and take appropriate political, economic and ***other*** actions as necessary.

It's the other way around as this Administration is correctly asserting. The Pals and Arab Islamics must stop the violence, terrorism, Jihad and Intifada. Act civilized instead of like a bunch of medieval Jihadists. When the Arabs can conform themselves to social norms then there will be peace.

The UN created Israel. But when the UN castigates Israel for its inhumane behavior toward the people who were uprooted by that creation, Israel tells the benefactors (creators) to sit on it and spin...
America doesn't need Israel, nor does it need the UN to guarantee its existance.

This might be a cogent observation in a static world.
Unfortunately it's not. I happen to know that the UN that created Israel is not the UN that exists today.
Today's UN is a joke, and the UN of 1948 would blanche at the behavior and thrust of the present members.

Novel descriptions of allies you have there...
If we don't "need" a country we have no conceiveable reason to aid and assist it?
What a peculiarly Muslim-sounding concept! 100% self interest.

I happen to know that the UN that created Israel is not the UN that exists today.

Is that because they no longer support Israel's acts of agression in an occupied land? Like I said, as long as they're pulling Israel's wagon, they're the good guys. Kind of like having a tiger by the tail, aren't they?

Your pointy hat is showing.

In my case its just the hat.

To Beecharmer: Because every time a Muslim moves her lips she lies.

You mean I've been wrong about that for all these years? I didn't know all the lawyers were Muslims ?

All individuals who are citizens of Israel live in a democratic state

All Communist Party nomenklatura had greater privileges than the average Westerner. That doesn’t mean communism was a better system for those who weren’t.

False.

We import almost nothing, and we subsidize what we export with our own funds. A net loss on both sides of the ledger. The only “military cooperation” that happens is against its own enemies, not ours. Add the “intangibles,” the worldwide negative reaction against our single-minded obsession with that one country, and you have a huge minus.

Not all Muslims are Jihadists but some are and many potentially are

They “some” and “potentially” have increased exponentially since 1948. Before then, jihad was a concept from history books and a suicide bomber, unthinkable except perhaps the story of Sampson.

False. The immediate effect of the Open Door Policy as the implementation of the Open Door Notes concerned U.S. foreign policy with respect to the Philippines and Cuba

False yourself. As early as 1868, “Open Door Policy” referred to free immigration, and particularly free Chinese immigration. In 1899, it referred to free trade with China. In neither case was there any explicit backing up of free immigration or free trade with “force if necessary.”

OPEN-DOOR POLICY FOR CHINESE IMMIGRATION – 1868

1880 President Benjamin Hayes signs the Chinese Exclusion Treaty, which reverses the open-door policy set in 1868 and places strict limits both on the number of Chinese immigrants allowed to enter the United States and on the number allowed to become naturalized citizens.

It has a specific historical meaning in the context and as a corollary policy to the Open Door Notes…If you deal with this ahistorically you will have missed this seminal American foreign policy decision

”Earth to Lent - You are speaking ahistorically now”

I repeat, “Open Door Policy” began as a term in the 1860's for immigration, especially Chinese immigration, and ended up as a term for Chinese trade, and neither instance was “protected by force if necessary.”

Markets must be protected by force from time to time.

What the hell are you advocating? So jihadists are wrong to try to impose their religion, but industrialized and well-armed countries can impose their markets? Rubbish.

There is no single-minded obsession with respect to Israel. The only obsession I've seen which has caused the U.S. to impart its sons and daughters in a full-scale war was to defend the Arab Islamic regimes of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Now the U.S. maintains a $50 billion investment in keeping the area safe from Hussein.

They “some” and “potentially” have increased exponentially since 1948. Before then, jihad was a concept from history books and a suicide bomber, unthinkable except perhaps the story of Sampson.

The Jihad has been a consistent and intrinsic Islamic notion ever since Mohammed and perfected under the Ottoman Empire.

Your discussion on the Open Door is misplaced. You are not in the correct historical time period nor are you dealing with the issue I have stated. Why is that? Why is it a fact that you have miscontrued the historical issue and presumed that what you have been referring to is the issue? It is not. The only thing I can do is to encourage you to go to the library and find out about the Open Door Notes and the discussion and direction of American foreign policy at the END of the 19th century. Until then you are not dealing with the issue as I've stated it.

What the hell are you advocating? So jihadists are wrong to try to impose their religion, but industrialized and well-armed countries can impose their markets? Rubbish.

Why is it so hard to understand that countries must defend and advance the free flow of goods and services to keep the international economic wheels turning? To interfere with this process is an invitation to attack. You might consider the U.S.' acquisition of the Philippine Islands and the Treaty of Paris of no account but I see that process as the beginning of the extention of U.S. power internationally and the concurrent economic benefits accrued from these Pacific interests increasing the economic power domestically as well. That the U.S.' commitment in the far Pacific would also bring it into conflict later with the Japanese only indicates to me that if it wasn't the U.S. then the imperialist Japanese would have been our masters in their economic expansionism. I'm glad the U.S. won.

What were you or he asserting there?

He related "Open Door" to immigration issues in the middle of the nineteenth century. I too am going from memory but I think I'm clear about this issue. Maybe I'll have to check. But the Open Door Notes which I am speaking about leading eventually to the framing of American economic expansionism, principally being the notion of free competition with respect to trade and certain guarantees with respect to the territorial integrity of the trading nation - in this case it began as China. The Notes created the policy framework for economic expansionism. This was a late 19th century process as I noted above.

This is essentially the working through of the "Higher Criticism" that pointed out inconsistencies, mistranslations and mistakes in Scripture in the 19th Century. So now it's made it's way to the Koran. After a century and a half it's about time. But before we presume Islam is a fraud, we might cast our minds back to the Victorian era, when the "Higher Criticism," geology, evolution, and modern historiography caused many Westerners to lose their faith in the literal truth of the Bible and in God.

That religious books contain contradictions and untruths, that their texts have changed over centuries of copying, that political authorities use and manipulate religion to secure their own ends: there's nothing new or shocking in any of this. Islam will survive such revelations as Christianity and Judaism did. But the study of the relations among the various religions in the first millennium is valuable and promising.

The only obsession I've seen which has caused the U.S. to impart its sons and daughters in a full-scale war was to defend the Arab Islamic regimes of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Now the U.S. maintains a $50 billion investment in keeping the area safe from Hussein.

The only obsession is the West's oil supply, or as you so delicately put it "the free flow of goods and services to keep the international economic wheels turning." The only regime which gets US aid gratis is the Israeli one, which is not lost on the hundreds of millions of non-Jews of the region and the world.

The Jihad has been a consistent and intrinsic Islamic notion ever since Mohammed and perfected under the Ottoman Empire

I'm sure that's why the Ottomans invited the persecuted Jews who sruvived the Inquisition from Spain. Thanks for explaining that bringing Jews back to Palestine falls under "jihad."

Your discussion on the Open Door is misplaced. You are not in the correct historical time period nor are you dealing with the issue I have stated.

You have categorically stated an "Open Door Policy" was the vehicle of American expansionism. This is untrue. In fact "Open Door Policy" is generally acknowledged to (A)Pertain to free immigration, and/or (B) Pertain to free trade with China only. I have not seen any reference at all to "Open Door" pertaining to the Philippines and Cuba. And if you think it through, because Philippines and Cuba became American protectorates, there was no need for an "Open Door" because the US owned them lock, stock, and barrel and could and did exclude all other countries.

It is helpful in any discussion to use words in their commonly accepted contexts.

Why is it so hard to understand that countries must defend and advance the free flow of goods and services to keep the international economic wheels turning?

According to that pesky Declaration of Independence, governments are instituted among men "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." "The governed" clearly does not include foreign powers wishing to help themselves to a region's resources. And "everybody does it" is not an excuse.

America only belongs in countries where we have the strong support of the local population, and can make life better for them as they perceive "better," not as we do.

Again, what this is leading up to is you're hinting that it's perfectly OK for industrialized countries to help themselves to the resources and the lands occupied by Islamics. This in turn presupposes a need for some kind of Islamic bogeyman to justify continuous pre-emptive occupations and attacks in these strategic and resource-rich areas. Which means it's not even about Islam, ultimately, it's about neo-colonialism of the Western world.

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