Jewish Influence and the Origins of Islam

The entry of Umar ibn al-Khattab into Jerusalem during the Arab conquest c. 637 | Nineteenth-century engraving.

There is by now little doubt that Islam is an outcome, not a cause, of the Arab Empire formed by the conquest of the eastern Roman/Byzantine provinces and Persia in the 630s and 640s AD after the two superpowers, already battered by plague, had exhausted themselves in a generational war. The first signs of Islam in its current form appear in the 690s, during the reign of the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik,¹ whose “role in Islam can be compared to that of [Saint] Paul and Constantine in Christianity”.² Following this trajectory, particularly after the Abbasid Revolution in 750 brought the Empire under greater Persianate influence, an exegetical project of lawyers and jurists (ulema) fashioned a legalistic creed that by the ninth century stood on the twin pillars of the Qur’an and the Sunna, an interpretive oral Tradition consisting of the purported sayings and example of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions.³ The obvious question is what the Arab creed looked like in its earliest phases.

Opaque as the origins of the Qur’an remain, it does genuinely seem to date from the time of Muhammad, and if viewed on its own terms—stripped of the Tradition later imposed on the text that portrays Muhammad’s mushrikun opponents as actual pagans—it shows a Messenger engaged in polemic within a community of Biblical monotheists.⁴ Without the Tradition of Muhammad receiving his revelations in Mecca, a doctrinally inspired claim that insulates the Prophet in a pagan wilderness deep in the Hijaz, there would be little mystery where to look for such a community, or how so much Biblical material ended up in the Qur’an.⁵ The seventh-century Levant was a heaving Jewish-Christian “sectarian milieu”.⁶

In such a milieu, the tendency was for peoples to cast themselves as Israelites,⁷ and the Arabs seemed to play to the script. When they made their move in the 630s, the Arabs’ first target was pointedly the zone around Jerusalem,⁸ the Promised Land where the Jews had created their State 1,800 and more years earlier, a sovereignty terminated by the Romans in 135 AD, though briefly recovered in a messianic convulsion (with Persian help) in 614-17.