I was quite eager to read the sources, indeed I was prepared to reason out a mythicist Muhammad, but that is not where the evidence led me. I'm glad the revisionists tried, though, because someone did need to make an exploding diagram of everything and reexamine it all from first principles rather than receive the wisdom. This raised my confidence in my conclusions.
That said: why isn't the Qur'an in Nabatean script if it all started at Petra? I think the desert Ishmaelites developed a culture of secretive literacy around a script that could be drawn in the sand or dust and erased by a hand, or by the wind. The Qurayshi script is great for secret literacy. I suspect Muhammad was not in fact illiterate, but at least literate enough to have studied the relevant non-canonical texts. Feigned illiteracy seems to have been a kind of ritual humility that was common in the Hejaz; we know of Arabs who owned books and had their collections burned upon death. Reading was apparently not something poets or prophets or respectable men were supposed to do.
Ironically, we have no early copies of the Qur'an as a result. Tradition holds that the war against Musaylimah and the Lakhmids killed so many of the men who had memorized the Qur'an that the Umma had to start keeping written copies. I read this as an apocryphal story, the grain of truth in it being this abandoned taboo. As you note, logistics and communications across those vast distances are very slow, which is why the dates of key early battles and other events are so sketchy. A message transmitted that far must be perfectly memorized, or else written down.
Always so difficult to peel back the layers of Tradition, and once you do to feel your way through the darkness to replace it with a new version. Tend to think you're right that Yamama is an important episode, probably not as a historical battle, but as a stage in the creedal development.
Great study. Will go back and reread it at some point with an eye for more inquiries. For now, one question looms. What do you think of the Muawiya Coins with the Cross? I know people have used it to argue for the non-existence of Muhammad, but that seems like a bit of a thin argument at this point.
Thank you! The argument that Muhammad did not exist requires such a contortion of the evidence that I have never seen it done convincingly and frankly I suspect bad faith in most of the attempts. That said, the disappearance of Muhammad between the 630s and mid-680s is really striking and I think is linked to the Muawiya issue.
My reading is that the Ishmaelite creed evolves from a more Jewish weltanschauung at the time of the conquests and in the early Imperial phase, to something more Christian once the Empire extends through the whole Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and Persia. The evidence can be read as saying that for Muawiya, the Christian framework is, if not literal, something close to. His coronation in Jerusalem, for example.
The analogy might be with someone like Theodoric, a "Barbarian" successor King to the Romans at the other end of the Empire, who retains a lot of the frameworks of Roman rule, the assumptions of power and markers of prestige, including Christianity, but distinguishes himself by adopting a variant form. You get hints of this in the Islamic Tradition itself, which casts the Umayyads as "Caesars" and flatly concedes that the reforms towards an identifiably Arab Empire - adopting Arabic as the language of administration, issuing coinage, etc. - only happen in Abd al-Malik's time.
There does not seem to be much doubt the hijra was to Medina as we know it in 622 AD. I am with you that the trek from the Fertile Crescent to Medina is a difficult part of the story. That said, it was always an oasis town, so very different to Mecca, and it is 300 miles north of Mecca, in an area and on a route much more tied in to the northern Arabian world where monotheism was already seeping in - as even the Tradition concedes, with the presence of the Jewish tribes. The Tradition also contains traces, in the mention of Muhammad's feuds with tribes that are in the northern Saudi-Jordan borderlands, of a possible explanation why he had to move further south for refuge.
The ultimate truth is we just do not know and never will why it happened that way. There's basically as many different views on all this as there are people writing about it (or, indeed, reading about it). I can only say that for me the evidence, direct and contextual, that Muhammad's original ministry and the first shrine were in/around the Holy Land as Jews and Christians use that term is simply overwhelming.
On the local memory issue, I do not think one can put any serious weight on that. Whether you look at Rome (in the pagan and Christian periods), Zoroastrian Persia, or the development of Rabbinic Judaism, historians have identified sudden, sharp rupture points in doctrine and practice, none of which provoked major resistance in real-time and in all cases the former Tradition was buried and replaced by a widespread perception that the innovation was eternal. It was just something you could do in a time where literacy and lifespan were so much lower.
I was quite eager to read the sources, indeed I was prepared to reason out a mythicist Muhammad, but that is not where the evidence led me. I'm glad the revisionists tried, though, because someone did need to make an exploding diagram of everything and reexamine it all from first principles rather than receive the wisdom. This raised my confidence in my conclusions.
That said: why isn't the Qur'an in Nabatean script if it all started at Petra? I think the desert Ishmaelites developed a culture of secretive literacy around a script that could be drawn in the sand or dust and erased by a hand, or by the wind. The Qurayshi script is great for secret literacy. I suspect Muhammad was not in fact illiterate, but at least literate enough to have studied the relevant non-canonical texts. Feigned illiteracy seems to have been a kind of ritual humility that was common in the Hejaz; we know of Arabs who owned books and had their collections burned upon death. Reading was apparently not something poets or prophets or respectable men were supposed to do.
Ironically, we have no early copies of the Qur'an as a result. Tradition holds that the war against Musaylimah and the Lakhmids killed so many of the men who had memorized the Qur'an that the Umma had to start keeping written copies. I read this as an apocryphal story, the grain of truth in it being this abandoned taboo. As you note, logistics and communications across those vast distances are very slow, which is why the dates of key early battles and other events are so sketchy. A message transmitted that far must be perfectly memorized, or else written down.
Always so difficult to peel back the layers of Tradition, and once you do to feel your way through the darkness to replace it with a new version. Tend to think you're right that Yamama is an important episode, probably not as a historical battle, but as a stage in the creedal development.
Great study. Will go back and reread it at some point with an eye for more inquiries. For now, one question looms. What do you think of the Muawiya Coins with the Cross? I know people have used it to argue for the non-existence of Muhammad, but that seems like a bit of a thin argument at this point.
Thank you! The argument that Muhammad did not exist requires such a contortion of the evidence that I have never seen it done convincingly and frankly I suspect bad faith in most of the attempts. That said, the disappearance of Muhammad between the 630s and mid-680s is really striking and I think is linked to the Muawiya issue.
My reading is that the Ishmaelite creed evolves from a more Jewish weltanschauung at the time of the conquests and in the early Imperial phase, to something more Christian once the Empire extends through the whole Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and Persia. The evidence can be read as saying that for Muawiya, the Christian framework is, if not literal, something close to. His coronation in Jerusalem, for example.
The analogy might be with someone like Theodoric, a "Barbarian" successor King to the Romans at the other end of the Empire, who retains a lot of the frameworks of Roman rule, the assumptions of power and markers of prestige, including Christianity, but distinguishes himself by adopting a variant form. You get hints of this in the Islamic Tradition itself, which casts the Umayyads as "Caesars" and flatly concedes that the reforms towards an identifiably Arab Empire - adopting Arabic as the language of administration, issuing coinage, etc. - only happen in Abd al-Malik's time.
I'm wondering if you've read Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, and if so what you think of the thesis advanced there.
I am reading that currently - about 25 pages in. Can only say that I find his methodology and interpretations broadly plausible so far.
My issues with the Transjordanian Mecca thesis are:
1) seemingly no local memory at all
2)the location chosen seems completely random
3)The medina issue, if Medina was the place he retreated after fleeing Mecca, than is Medina too a displaced name or is it the real deal?
I think the simplest answer is that the current Medina is the real one & that current Mecca was chosen because it's near it.
There does not seem to be much doubt the hijra was to Medina as we know it in 622 AD. I am with you that the trek from the Fertile Crescent to Medina is a difficult part of the story. That said, it was always an oasis town, so very different to Mecca, and it is 300 miles north of Mecca, in an area and on a route much more tied in to the northern Arabian world where monotheism was already seeping in - as even the Tradition concedes, with the presence of the Jewish tribes. The Tradition also contains traces, in the mention of Muhammad's feuds with tribes that are in the northern Saudi-Jordan borderlands, of a possible explanation why he had to move further south for refuge.
The ultimate truth is we just do not know and never will why it happened that way. There's basically as many different views on all this as there are people writing about it (or, indeed, reading about it). I can only say that for me the evidence, direct and contextual, that Muhammad's original ministry and the first shrine were in/around the Holy Land as Jews and Christians use that term is simply overwhelming.
On the local memory issue, I do not think one can put any serious weight on that. Whether you look at Rome (in the pagan and Christian periods), Zoroastrian Persia, or the development of Rabbinic Judaism, historians have identified sudden, sharp rupture points in doctrine and practice, none of which provoked major resistance in real-time and in all cases the former Tradition was buried and replaced by a widespread perception that the innovation was eternal. It was just something you could do in a time where literacy and lifespan were so much lower.