(Some Unscientific Notes)The Prophet Jesus as a Starting Point
I find it an appropriate starting point to remark that according to my private research the 'historical Jesus' is a near "total myth" (see Acharya S, The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ, 2001). Gautama The Buddha is too – a remarkable disclosure I should think, being as I am so deeply intimated with Bauddha tradition. I mean obviously, "a priest." Yet I would hope that my present ad libitum extensions of assumptions – apropos the quasi- and/or erstwhile historical figures being "just as literary" (if I may put it that way), or as "textual" as the beastly crucified Jesus – I would therefore hope to be granted a little standing as per the primmediacy of my puzzling motives. I mean really, if I'm so jolly willing to deprive my self of my own safe haven by biting, as it were, the very hand that feeds me - then please understand that I'm NOT out for scalps. This has nothing to do with wanton spite, but a savage impulse that yarns for veracity. And so I actually "appreciate" the fundamental literary fabric-ation of the Jesus fugure. And if subsequent research confirms early inkling – and as I only now begin to explore the Koranic heritage – I would neither be surprised nor disappointed; for as I have tired to extract in my Grafting Plato's Shadow Play: A Spray Can Version of Metaleptic Mimēsis (2005), 'tragedy' and 'myth' are deeper than 'truth.'
I generally move with the working assumption that the pat historicities of world religious figures are without exception extremely doubtful: Zarathustra, Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, and etcetera. It is not that these figures have never existed; this is only to affirm - and reconfirm – that such 'existences' are sheer textuality. And in this regard I tend to concur with Stanford researcher Steven Farmer (2000) who views these figures as invariably "late constructs, reflecting scattered data in rapidly growing textual canons (collected syncretically to generate figures who eventually reached cosmic dimensions)." In other words, stitched together from the 'self-serving claims of warring schools and other equally dubious sources.' In response Farmer counsels that 'strong cross-cultural models may be built to show how such biographies accrete over time.' While in the meantime, stripped of nothing more than their miraculous features, scholars continue to grant these figures moral credence and historical plausibility based solely on the fact that their myths have been endlessly repeated ("Buddha" before the Pali Canon?, Indology Archives, 18 Sep 2000).
The Hermeneutics of the Date Palm Hadith
Based further and purely on 'the hermeneutics of instinct,' I remark that to whatsoever extent one Muhammad has historically existed as a 'real' (non-literary) human figure, I am made to imagine that he was born in Medina, not Mecca. And further still, that Muhammad may have likely been a 'kind of Jew.' Thus concerning that famous Hadith that entails his mistakenly instructing some date palm worker on the proper care of the palm – then only to later admit that he was wrong, one is apt to see the busy hands of redactors at work to textually avert attention away from the possibility that Muhammad did indeed know a thing or two about date production, being after all a child of Yathrib. Yathrib (Medina) is known to have been at this early period a thriving agricultural oasis, and the region's chief centre for date production. It was furthermore 'mainly dominated by roughly twenty primarily Arab Jewish (convert) clans, as distinguished from the majority of Hijaz* Jews who were (non-convert) immigrants from Palestine' (Reza Aslan, No god but God, 2005: 53).
*Hijaz (also Hijaz, Hedjaz): name for the mountainous region of the Arabian Pennisula along the northeast coast of the Red Sea where both Mecca and Medina are located. At the time of Mohammed's birth, numerous rival Arab tribes populated the Hijaz.
The "New" History
The Koran as we know it was only brought to its completed form centuries after the presumed death of Muhammad. What is more, the particular language of the "No text but Text" recitation is not the language of the seventh century Meccan Arabs, i.e. the early manifestations of the Medinan Super-Tribe. Many scholars – especially those equipped with "new" history interpretive tools (see Crone, Cook, Wansbrough, Hawting below) feel that the highly refined and 'twenty-percent incompressible' language of the Koran is more related to that of the Levant Arabs, those Arabic-speaking communities bordering on the eastern Mediterranean Sea from Turkey to Egypt, thus including Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Thus Egyptian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid has supported the notion that the Koran be read, not literally, but 'literarily.' "The Koran is a text, a literary text," he states, "and the only way to understand, explain, and analyse it is through a literary approach." Mohammed Arkoun (1982) concurs with this approach. "[I]t is time [for Islam] to assume, along with all of the great cultural traditions, the modern risks of scientific knowledge," he asserts, adding, "the problem of the divine authenticity of the Koran can serve to reactivate Islamic thought and engage it in the major debates of our age," cited in Toby Lester, What is the Koran? (1999).
Speaking for myself, these studies seem to open to a relevant line of discourse. My growing bibliographic list includes already Algerian-born Mohammed Arkoun. See also his paper, "Present-Day Islam Between its Tradition and Globalisation" (2000), and his book (synopsis) The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought (2002). The Egyptian-born Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid is presently keeping Ayan Hirsi Ali company in the Nederlands. Another publication that I have only just heard about is Islam and Modernity: Muslim Intellectuals Respond, (Cooper, Nettler and Mahmoud, eds); see Ahmet T. Kuru, Review Article: Rethinking Islam in the Modern Conditions, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2001, pp. 174-177).
My bibliographic references also combine the so-called "New" History research. This includes Danish-born Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987), The Early Islamic World (notes, n.d.), also, P. Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977) pdf. See Crone's short bio-sketch in The Institute Letter (Institute for Advanced Study).
Another major scholar among this group is John Wansbrough, Qur'anic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation, Oxford (1977), The Sectarian Milieu (1978), et al. Wansbrough has controversially hypothesized that the Qur'an text as we know it today is not the traditionally alleged "closed corpus" text from the early date, but is rather one that took its shape slowly - over two or even three centuries. Wansbrough is furthermore deeply pessimistic about the capability of contemporary historians to portray the crux of Islam's origins, "which he considers to be completely obscured by an impenetrable fog of later polemic and redactional overlay" (Islamic Origins, University of Chicago, 1998-99). See also Sahas' (1999) review of Islamic Origins Reconsidered: John Wansbrough and the Study of Early Islam (Herbert Berg, editor), in Studies in Religion, A Canadian Journal Volume 28 Number 3 / 1999. Strange that I can't find a single work of Wansbrough's published online. My thanks thus go out to Prof. Alan Godlas for including in his own online annotated bibliography (The Qur'an and Qur'anic Interpretation / tafsir) Estelle Whelan's fine essay, Forgotten Witness: Evidence For The Early Codification Of The Qur'an in the highly regarded Journal of the American Oriental Society (Vol. 118, 1998: 1-14). In her gracious study Whelan adheres to academic protocol and amply bears out Wansbrough's key contention that the Qur'an was codified centuries after the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. On the basis of textual and linguistic analysis Wansbrough concludes that no substantiating evidence exists for a "canonical" version of the Qur'anic text before the very end of the eighth century at the earliest (1977). For balanace, however, I note that in her essay Whelan puts forth additional evidence that would seem to refute some of Wansbrough's assertions that the Qur'an was codified centuries after the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad."
In his critical précis of Wansbrough's thesis, Reza Aslan (No god but God, 2005) writes:
[Wansbrough] has famously argued that Islam as we know it originated outside Arabia hundreds of years after the death of Muhammad (if such a person even existed). Wansbrough and his colleagues have done remarkable work in tracing the evolution of Islam as it developed in the Judeo-Christian sectarian milieu of the seventh-to-ninth-century Arabia and its environs. But Wansbrough's persistent exaggeration of the non-Arabic (mostly Hebrew) sources regarding early Islam, and his unnecessary disregard of the historical Muhammad, has too often made his arguments seem more like "a disguised polemic seeking to strip Islam and the Prophet of all but the minimum of originality" to quote R.B. Sarjeant (Aslan: 111).G.R. Hawting is yet another scholar associated with Crone, Cook and Wansbrough. In his The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (2002), Hawting advances the project view that 'The Qur’an neither reflects an Arabian background nor was it produced in inner Arabia as the tradition claims.' According to him, "the polemic of the Koran against the mushrikun [polytheists, pagans, idolaters, and disbelievers] reflects disputes among [co-]monotheists rather than pagans, and that Muslim tradition does not display much substantial knowledge of Arab pagan religion. There is no compelling reason to situate either the polemic or the tradition within Arabia" (as cited in Walid A. Saleh, The Fog of History, a review of G.R. Hawting: The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History, in H-Mideast-Medieval, February, 2005). Here a reading of W. Montgomery Watt's The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (1973) tends to place these remarks in some perspective.
A Tabloid Tragedy
I find an unresolved tragedy in this. Here we have patently brilliant research data that tends to get used for mischievous ends. See for example the scary Free Thought Mecca. See also Daniel Pipes's (2005) review of The Quest for the Historical Muhammad (Ibn Warraq, ed., 2000). Pipes is a former advisor to the US State Department who has used the "new" history in justification of the "clash of civilisations" theory, according to which the west is forever doomed to come into conflict with the barbarian Muslim world, and the that Arabs themselves are doomed to destruction. The internet proliferates with such unfortunate displays, regrettable and quite destructive too; and all because neither the secular academic nor Islamic scholar ever come together to openly discuss these things, and so it's left to those whose agendas are "not scholarship, but anti-Islam polemic" (Fred M. Donner, 2001; book review of Ibn Warraq, 2000).
In fact, I sometimes find it hard to know how to interpret much of the online material. Take for example this New Statesman editorial with its wildly incendiary title, The great Koran con trick: Scholars claim that Islam's holy book is not quite what it seems (Martin Bright, Dec 10, 2001).
Additional links
John Wansbrough, A Tribute.
Patricia Crone, Book God's Rule book review, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam section beginning at page 231.
Wilferd Madelung, Succession to Muhammad (1997). Fazlur Rahman, The Message of Fazlur Rahman.
