Routledge Revivals: Medieval Islam (1979)

Dominique Sourdel, J. Montgomery Watt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351663502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The history of Islam runs without a break from its origins to the present. Therefore, understanding medieval Islam gives us a much clearer comprehension of the modern world.

First published in 1979, this concise account of the Islamic world in the middle ages covers a vast territory, stretching from Morocco and Spain to India and Turkestan. It discusses the teachings of Islam, its theology, mysticism and philosophy, and examines the relation between Islam and political order, particularly the concepts of power and the organisation of government. It discusses Islam's view of the social order and concludes by looking at the urban centres in which Islamic civilisation developed, describing the towns themselves and the various forms of Islamic art.

This book will be of interest to those studying medieval and Islamic history.

Chapter 1
Islam – a monotheistic and universal religion

Islam is first of all both a universal religion and a religion of conquest, whose sudden rise in the seventh century of our era was followed by slower, but still constant expansion. Because of this, Islam had a doctrine whose successive and concomitant developments were bound up with political and historical events, and these will engage us a little further on. Because of this also, Islam remained faithful to a message which it never ceased to defend, that of a monotheistic religion, the third to assert itself after Judaism and Christianity; it wanted at one and the same time to follow these and to distinguish itself clearly from them, while only partially recognising their validity. To the Prophet of Islam was indeed said to have been delivered in its integrity the message which had been received earlier by Abraham but which had subsequently been distorted by those responsible for transmitting it after him.

This explains why it is appropriate first of all to show Islam’s relation to the two great world religions which it sought to replace and with which its development brought it alongside and even into confrontation. This procedure corresponds to the attitude of the orientalists who could never study truly Islamic phenomena without making assertions about their origins. They did this in terms necessarily different from those used by Muslims; but it is interesting to discover, under their divergent and sometimes contradictory interpretations, the fundamental data which they borrowed from Islamic tradition itself and which they were content to consider in a completely different perspective.

1 ISLAM IN RELATION TO JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY

The position of Muslim believers is indeed very simple when they identify their faith with the original monotheism of the Biblical prophet Abraham, who is depicted by the Koran as the founder of the sanctuary at Mecca, the Ka‘ba, and at the same time as the destroyer of idols and the father of Ishmael in whom the Arabs see their common ancestor. Not only does Abraham occupy a privileged place among the various prophets mentioned in the Koranic text, but the traditional accounts locate the sacrifice of his son in the region of Mecca; this is briefly alluded to in the Koran and it is also evoked very specially by one of the rites of pilgrimage which has been celebrated through the centuries with increasing solemnity.

This locating in the Hijaz of an Abrahamic tradition claimed as an Arab patrimony did not prevent Muhammad’s preaching from being linked with Jerusalem by the story of the ‘night journey’ which commentators very soon developed as an explanation of a Koranic verse. It was in that city on the site of the ancient Temple that Muhammad, miraculously transported, was supposed to have been taken up into Heaven where he was said to have met the prophets of the Old Testament. The same tradition going back, it appears, to ‘biographies’ (sīra) written at the beginning of the eighth century, makes Moses appear advising Muhammad during his ascension to ask God to lessen the number of daily prayers, which were thus reduced to five. In addition Moses, transmitter of the first revealed Book which the Koran claims both to confirm and replace, would often appear in various suras: one reads for example (Koran XLVI, 12), ‘Before this Book there was the Book of Moses… and this Book confirms it in the Arabic language.’ Along with him other Biblical prophets appear, each in the anecdotal context of the environment where he was said to have lived and where his story was supposed to have unfolded itself. They were nearly always considered to have delivered to their people by God’s command a message which remained generally not understood.

The background of Biblical characters common to Islam, Judaism and Christianity is completed, according to Muslim belief, by the presence among them of Jesus whom the Koran holds equally to be a prophet: it recognises indeed the historic existence of the Son of Mary and admits his Virgin Birth, conferring on him the superior rank of bearer of ‘the Spirit of God’ while being quite unable to see in him the Son of God and to admit the event of his Crucifixion. This respect for the person of Jesus is combined with very hard sayings directed against the Christians who were held to have abandoned the true doctrine and to have adopted an ‘associationism’, idolatrous in the eyes of Muslims, in which can be seen a misunderstanding of the dogma of the Trinity. It is in this sense that Islam did not cease to number itself with the old monotheistic religions, whose adherents, or ‘People of the Book’, were held to have been the first to receive a message identical with that of Islam; this message was restored again in its purity only by the Koranic revelation whose divine origin forms the basis of all Muslim faith.

It thus seems natural in the eyes of the adherents of Islam that Muhammad should have been led to state precisely the position of the new religion in relation to a Christianity or a Judaism then represented in Arabia by more or less active believers. In fact there were said to have been at Mecca before the preaching of Muhammad some Christians of humble if not servile status, and there was said to exist at Yathrib, the future Medina, an important Jewish community with which the Prophet, installed as its neighbour after the Hijra, had soon quarrelled and which he ended by driving away or exterminating on a charge of treason. But Muslim opinion refuses to speak of any contingent influences which could then have affected Muhammad’s thought, simple ’Messenger of God’ and transmitter of an absolute truth by definition external to himself.

This position is evidently to be found only rarely among occidental scholars who hesitate to place the Koranic revelation ‘after’ revelations ‘altered by their possessors’. On the contrary, indeed, when these scholars tried to underline the possible reconciliation between Muhammad’s preaching and previous religious messages, they did so by falling more or less openly into religious polemic which is certainly not the domain of the historian but is one which he often finds it difficult to escape. Latent possibilities of conflict certainly exist and their existence is felt in some way or other by all those who interest themselves in Islam, betraying in this respect personal options and feelings which could have been distorted by modern intentions of a political character. Certainly it is useful here to mention some themes which have not ceased to nourish researches or discussions in this field and which make it possible at the same time to understand, behind the objective facts under review, a background of religious struggles still alive today after having largely determined certain confrontations of the medieval period.

Such conflicts arise out of external similarities which are apparent in all encounters between an Islam and a Judaism each relying on reverence for a sacred text which commentaries and collections of traditions have come to explain; in both cases religion does not consist in the imitation of a perfect model but in carrying out rules laid down by the doctors in religious sciences. Both doctrines, then, do not only carry articles of faith to which the believer must adhere but a social and moral code of life sometimes very precise, regulating in minute detail the actions of day–to–day living, notably according a primary importance to ritual purity and including some related prohibitions about food.

Hence the intensity of the problem set by the attitude of Muhammad towards the Jews of Medina whom he admitted at first to the bosom of his new community (their rights being recognised in the document wrongly called ‘The Constitution of Medina’) and whom he described afterwards as hypocrites, even traitors, and punished as such. That Muhammad may have had relations with these Jewish groups going beyond the framework of a simple political agreement is proved by the fact that the Prophet of Islam had from the very first ordered that the daily prayers be accomplished facing Jerusalem. The Koranic text mentions the obligation as well as the change which intervened when Muhammad replaced the ‘direction of Jerusalem’ by the ‘direction of Mecca and the Ka’ba’.

So the Islamists are often asked about the meaning of this ‘change’ in the Koranic revelation and they have tried to place it in its religious context, that of the various suras which have been traditionally attributed some to the Meccan, some to the Medinan period of the Prophet’s life. Certain people have thought they could discern in this respect an evolution by virtue of which the figure of Abraham took on an increasing importance while Mecca became the point towards which the believers had to turn in prayer and while Muhammad, separating himself from the Jews, began to attack them violently. Muhammad, as the Dutch scholar Wensinck following Snouck-Hurgronje wrote, ‘was able to free himself from contemporary Judaism by attaching himself to the Judaism of Ibrahim [Abraham], which Judaism was the forerunner of Islam.’ In the same way, the Englishman Torrey spoke of a ‘Jewish Foundation of Islam’ and the French Jesuit Lammens did not hesitate to describe Islam as the ‘Arab adaptation of Biblical monotheism’. Similarly, the German Harnack declared ‘Islam is a recasting on Arab soil of the Jewish religion after the Jewish religion had undergone an analogous operation through contact with a Judaising, gnostic Christianity.’

Recently this hypothesis has again been taken up of a role exercised by Judaeo–Christianity in the development of Islam, but it has been mostly in the field of research into the evolution of Judaism during the first centuries of the Christian era. The question has been asked whether Islam had characteristics in common with a Jewish sect, that of the Ebionites, who revered Christ as a prophet but not as the Son of God; or whether it was related to certain gnostic sects which regarded the Biblical prophets as the successive transmitters of the same message. There are some specific elements there which give pause for thought but whose importance one must be careful not to exaggerate on the basis of comparisons bearing only on limited points. Our knowledge of the religious movements situated on the periphery of Judaism and of Christianity during the century which preceded the appearance of Islam still remains too fragmentary for us to argue in a valid fashion about them.

Difficulties of the same order are not slow to appear when Christianity in turn is brought face to face with Islam. Certainly the doctrine which one can trace through Koranic preaching bears elements which are not original to it, such as the announcement of the Last Judgment or certain features of its angelology and demonology. God is surrounded by angels among whom some have been degraded for having refused to prostrate themselves not before God, but before man, and have thus become demons. The Judgment will separate humans into two categories, the elect who will enjoy Paradise and the damned who will be thrown into Hellfire.

To these may be added similarities of religious sentiment and of forms of piety which are thought to have been discovered between Oriental Christians and the first Muslims, and on which the Swede Tor Andrae, author of two classic works which appeared between 1918 and 1926, was one of the first to insist. He showed how the Syrian preachers well before Muhammad liked to describe the punishments endured by the peoples who had refused to follow their own prophets, or the penalties threatened after the Judgment to all those who had neglected the worship of God and the practice of alms-giving; and he underlined the analogies of content between texts which, in order to suggest the delights of Paradise, used in the same way a metaphorical language designed to render intelligible what human understanding was unable to conceive. From these comparisons it has been concluded that Muhammad had been in contact with Syrian Christians and one might ask for example if the monk Bahira who, according to the Life of Muhammad, is said to have met him in his youth at Bosra in Syria and to have discovered in him a future prophet, would not represent one of the anchorites who might have familiarised the young camel-driver, in search of religious certitude, with various points of their own doctrine.

The idea was apparently very old, since certain Christians of the seventh century, without going so far as to present Islam as an ‘Arab adaptation’ of Christianity, did not hesitate to rank it among the ‘heresies’ of this religion precisely because of the personality of Bahīra whom later Oriental Christian polemicists continued to charge. The points from which these polemicists argue, however, correspond only to resemblances of detail which are after all secondary, whereas Islam opposes the Christian faith on essential affirmations such as belief in the Trinity or ideas of original sin and redemption. Thus the foundation, on which are based the efforts of certain modern authors who have tried to equate the Christ of Islam with the Jesus of the Gospels, is a flimsy one. Their allegations seem to make light of the fundamental differences between Islam and Christianity, differences which do not always exclude possible borrowings from archaic forms of Christian doctrine, such as have recently been thought to be discovered in certain passages of the Koranic text with a strophic structure.

2 THE ORIGINALITY OF ISLAM

Beyond these varied hypotheses and despite doctrinal variations which showed themselves in the course of its history, Islam never ceased to affirm, by means of the Koran and by means of subsequent Muslim reflection, a coherence and convictions which are its own and which no one could contest from the standpoint of religious anthropology. As a strict monotheism it can be described as total submission to a Creator God who is all–powerful, all–knowing, omniscient and supreme judge, but also compassionate and merciful, as the formula of the basmala, so often repeated and written by Muslims, affirms. This mercy, however, does not go beyond a simple pardon for faults committed and in no way evokes the feeling of the same name which is at the root of Christianity, but which, for Muslims, would be incompatible with strict transcendence. Moreover, Muslim religious life is essentially characterised by respect for the revealed word and by the observance of prescribed acts, which, apart from the well–known obligations of prayer, fasting, legal alms, pilgrimage and holy war, comprise a number of different rules or recommendations of a moral, social and political nature. Among these rules are, for example, those which justify the existence of legal penalties, which authorise slavery and which set up an organisation of the family and marriage based on the rights of the individual, establishing strictly the rights of inheritance while excluding neither concubinage nor repudiation (divorce).

This originality has, moreover, held the attention and some modern historians have recently asked themselves not so much about the external religious influences which might explain the content of the Islamic message as about the manner in which the message itself would have been a response to the exigencies of the society of that period, thus appearing in some measure as the ‘product’ of the society which had received it. The Scottish scholar, William Montgomery Watt, was the first to raise this question not without attracting many criticisms and refutations. In fact, the novelty of his procedure had been to study closely and in depth the position at Mecca on the eve of the Hijra by attributing greater value than had been the case up till then to the stories recorded in the sīra or the life of Muhammad. He there discovered data, previously unused, about the mutual relations of the clans and about the state of social tension which had existed in a city made rich by commerce across the desert but marked by the disproportionate growth of the fortunes which the families of caravan traders had built up. This situation of conflict and instability called forth new religious preaching in so far as the bedouin morality of the preceding epoch no longer sufficed to protect the weak against the strong, nor the poor clans against the clans who had grown rich. The idea was not entirely new and Henri Lammens had already for example, much earlier, described Mecca as a ’merchant republic’. But William Montgomery Watt’s researches made it possible to place Muhammad’s enterprise at a moment of imbalance which broke the ancient relationships and put in question the traditional values linked with that condition.

In the same way, a study of the origin of the first converts showed that Islam had found followers above all in the humbler circles which were threatened by the expansion of the most powerful clans. The proclamation of the Last Judgment and the condemnation of the rich would thus have been addressed in particular to those who dominated the ‘merchant republic’ and profited from their activities. From there to say that the economic situation had determined the proclamation of the Islamic message was only a single step, which Montgomery Watt always maintains he had not taken; according to him, the appearance of Islam was a response to the aspirations of certain people in a situation marked by social change but this did not mean that it was the only response possible. The relationship established between Islam and the historical circumstances surrounding its birth could not then be confused with the outcome of an absolute determinism; the historian’s only concern is to scrutinise as exactly as possible the nature of the connections which could have existed between the Koranic message and the economic and religious atmosphere which prevailed at Mecca at the time of Muhammad.

To demonstrate the reality of these connections, some have wanted to make use of what was known of personages prior to Islam, who, according to Muslim chroniclers, had been converted to pure monotheism and designated by the term ‘hanīfs’ which was also applied to Abraham in the Koran. The aspirations of these hanīfs were said to have witnessed to a tendency aiming at replacing the innumerable gods of Arab paganism by a single God, a tendency which Islam came precisely to satisfy. But the existence of monotheistic beliefs not accompanied by the moral teaching which characterises the Koran is difficult to imagine in the Meccan situation: one can only suppose a slow evolution from Arab paganism leading little by little towards monotheism. This last hypothesis has certainly met with some approval and it has been recalled that at Palmyra, in an environment strongly Arabised and at the start of the Christian era, an altar had been dedicated to a single God, compassionate and merciful. Apart from the fact that no one knows precisely who were the worshippers of this god, the distance in space and time which separates Palmyra in the Roman era from Mecca at the beginning of Islam, is enormous. On the other hand, the very fact of the existence of the hanīfs hardly survives detailed examination of some ancient texts where the term appears: it would seem that the term may have been used to signify no more than ‘Muslim’ by the biographers of the Prophet, and ‘pagan’ by some pre–Islamic poets. In this case it would be the equivalent of a Syriac word of the same meaning and nothing would permit one to affirm that there really were, before the time of Muhammad, followers of monotheism designated by this expression.

There are many observations seeking to illustrate the obstacles one is up against when trying to make use of evidence provided by the ancient Arab biographers of Muhammad. Encouraged to present certain episodes in the life of their hero, notably his childhood, in a miraculous climate whose authenticity remains very dubious, they force themselves moreover to explain the slightest passages of the Koran, perhaps reconstructing, in their own way, facts which, according to them, would have served as supports for these revelations. Certainly we can accord them more credence as regards the composition of the tribes, the identity of the first Muslims and their personal rivalries, all of which information has rightly served as a base for the hypothetical historical reconstructions of Montgomery Watt. But the hypercritical position retains its supporters, and some, like Régis Blachére, have always preferred to challenge the historicity of the sīra, to rely solely on the data of the Koranic text, without however completely succeeding in the undertaking.

3 THE PERSONALITY OF MUHAMMAD

The personality of Muhammad has for its part often been appreciated in different ways. If it is no longer a question nowadays of considering Muhammad as an imposter, as did Voltaire, or of doubting his sincerity, as did more recently Henri Lammens, it is still the case that his personality continues to provide those who study it with somewhat enigmatic or ambiguous aspects and that all response to the questions thus raised consequently modifies the interpretation of the Koranic message which is adopted. These questions which appear especially in a climate of confrontation between Is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
• CHAPTER 1 Islam – a monotheistic and universal religion
• CHAPTER 2 The medieval Islamic world
• CHAPTER 3 Aspects of Islamic doctrine
• CHAPTER 4 Islam and the political order
• CHAPTER 5 Islam and the social order
• CHAPTER 6 Centres of civilisation
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX