Islam

An Advanced Introduction

Roberto Tottoli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000206197
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Exploring complex relations between Muslim visions and critical stances, this textbook is a compact introduction to Islam, dealing with the origins of its forms, from early developments to contemporary issues, including religious principles, beliefs and practices. The author's innovative method considers the various opposing theories and approaches between the Islamic tradition and scholars of Islam.

Each topic is accompanied by up-to-date bibliographical references and a list of titles for further study, while an exhaustive glossary includes the elementary notions to allow in-depth study. Part I outlines the two founding aspects, the Qur'an and Prophet Muhammad, highlighting essential concepts, according to Islamic religious discourse and related critical issues. In Part II the emergence of the religious themes that have characterised the formation of Islam are explored in terms of historical developments. Part III, on contemporary Islam, examines the growth of Islam between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern age.

Advanced readers, already familiar with the elementary notions of Islam and religious studies will benefit from Islam that explores the development of religious discourse in a historical perspective. This unique textbook is a key resource for post-graduate researchers and academics interested in Islam, religion and the Middle East.

PART I

Origins and the foundation of Islam

1
MUHAMMAD

Islam owes its historical origins to Muhammad (Arab. Muḥammad, “The Praised One”) and the revelations he received from God between 610 and 632 ad, which were then collected in the Qur’an. The historical circumstances behind the arrival and life of Muhammad are therefore of fundamental importance for the Islamic tradition. The life of Muhammad is the defining moment for the relations between the one God and his creation, and indeed the moment that saw God and the human race at their closest, thanks to the angelic mediation of Gabriel, who brought the revelation. According to the Qur’an and tradition, what the Arab prophet received was in fact the last of a series of revelations that had forever been made to mankind, from Adam to Jesus, but it was Muhammad who conveyed, in terms of Islam, the ultimate, immutable sense of this history. Over and above the historiographical issues, a matter of critical appraisal but not of faith, the Arabian environment in which Muhammad was born and the events of his life between Mecca and Medina represent the basic coordinates of a devotion to the man who was “The Seal of the Prophets” (Quran 23:40), seeing in the founder of Islam both the human nature of the man destined to assert the absolute transcendence of God and the singular nature of this paradigm of absolute human perfection, loved and cherished in every form.

Pre-Islamic Arabia and Late Antiquity

The historical significance and even the very possibility of reconstructing the state of affairs in Arabia before the advent of Muhammad in relation to the emergence of Islam and its early developments remain matters of controversy, and there is also a considerable distance between the religious point of view and non-Muslim critical analysis. The problem revolves mainly around the copious Islamic sources, dating often more than a century and a half later than the time of Muhammad, and the significance that can be attributed to them in assessment of the historical background from which Islam emerged.¹ This literary tradition is a veritable mine of information, although it requires exhaustive and potentially exhausting study – hardly very inviting in an age when theorisation is an easier option than painstaking research – to arrive at a true understanding of it. However, its later emergence has often provided a reason for scepticism leading, in some cases, to systematic rejection of this rich Arabic and Islamic tradition in Islamic studies. On the other hand, scepticism and persistent doubts about the Arabic and Islamic sources recounting the early history of Islam have led scholars to look beyond the Arabian Peninsula and view the origins of Islam in a broader historical picture and in the complex of the other surrounding civilisations.²

Today, without doubt, it is no longer thinkable to define Islam – as handbooks in Islamic studies had it until a few decades ago – as a phenomenon suddenly occurring in a region on the fringes of the “great” history of the Near East. Nomadic tribes had always been on the move outwards from the heart of the Peninsula towards, for example, the Syrian region, and here we have the first historical evidence. There is indirect evidence regarding the kingdom of Sheba in the south of the Arabian Peninsula and its trading role within a system of broader relations. The nomadic pattern of life in the region does not lead us to expect much in terms of archaeological or literary evidence, but it does point to customary relations between the Arabs in the Peninsula and other centres in the neighbouring regions. The Arabian originality that later Islamic tradition reconstructs is debatable although it does show a certain coherence that may reflect cultural practices not necessarily contrasting with the actual situation which surely had its place in the history of the region.³

But let us see how the pattern evolved. In the second half of the sixth century ad, in an age still normally referred to as Late Antiquity, in a region in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula, in Mecca, called Macoraba by Herodotus, in one of the clans of the tribe of Quraysh that had control over the city, Muhammad was born. This did not happen in the neighbouring yet remote Palestine or Mesopotamia, traversed by Christians, Jews and the followers of the Iranian religions, or on the bustling borders of the Persian and Byzantine empires. Nor did it come about in the Yemenite region, touched on by traffic from the nearby Horn of Africa. Mecca and the heart of the Peninsula were inhabited by Arabs, and Arabian, too, were the tribes who made their way to north and south, skirting the above-mentioned regions, of which we know more than enough from the successive Islamic sources but all too little from primary or alternative sources.

Christians and Jews inhabited and traversed the Arabian Peninsula. For centuries, Jews had been present not only in Yemen but also in various oases, just like the Christians of varied extraction and persuasion. According to the Islamic sources, paganism was very widespread with specific divinities for tribes and places, and other cults which were shared, including, for example, the cult of a unique God, in some cases bearing the name of Hubal. Trade was the most significant activity, together with what the sparse oases could provide in a particularly hostile climate where the camel was man’s essential helpmate. The urban culture of the oases, and of Mecca, too, when Muhammad was born, shared the region with a nomadic culture and a tribal system that regulated relations and shaped the traditional law which dictated the precarious equilibriums. The population moved and shifted as a result of clashes, rivalry and pressures that sent the Arabs scattering in all directions. Mecca itself had a shrine (Kaʿba), as was the case in other centres in the Peninsula, and at same time was the site of an annual festival and fair that attracted tribes and the population of the extensive region for traditional and religious reasons overlapping with commercial and trading considerations. The tribe of the Quraysh had custody of the sanctuary.⁴

This period in Arab history preceding the advent of Muhammad was to be defined as Jāhiliyya (literally “age of ignorance”) in later Muslim historiography, and also in the Islamic religious collective imaginings. Jāhiliyya is a theological concept reflecting dynamics in the religious vision of the birth of Islam, the implicit judgement characterised by a sacred, non-historical perspective. The definition entails no evaluation of the pre-Islamic world before Muhammad’s mission, but is understood in the sense of “preparing for” and historically justifying the emergence of Islam as a great new beginning.

For scholars and researchers, on the other hand, the major issue underlying the before and after of Muhammad’s mission is, rather, a broad assessment of the connections between a specific Arab culture and the monotheistic traditions prevailing in the region in Late Antiquity (Judaism, Christianity, Manichaeism, and still others), and which of these traditions left the most significant mark on the emerging Islam. Historians, including historians of religions, have in general shown a varied and even contrasting range of opinions on the prevailing cultural imprint on the Islam of the origins, often depending on biased approaches or current trends, turning the focus on one aspect or another in the course of time. The field of enquiry is in any case still open, and sees a steady spate of analyses in Islamic studies.

The life of the Prophet

Mecca

Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 ad, in the Arab clan of the Banū Hāshim, son of his father ʿAbd Allāh, who died before he was born. He came into the world in the same year that saw an intrepid sovereign from Yemen, by the name of Abraha, attempt to attack Mecca and destroy the Kaʿba. His mother, Āmina, died when Muhammad was 6 years old and the child was placed in the care first of his grandfather, ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, and then of his uncle Abū Ṭālib, as was the clan practice. This, and little else, Islamic historiography has to tell us of the early years of the life of the Prophet, at least until the time he met his future wife, Khadīja, a rich widow in the Asad clan, by whom he was employed. Like many of the men in his region, Muhammad earned his living escorting trading caravans to the north, and at the age of 25 he began to do so for Khadīja. It was in the course of expeditions to the Syrian region that a Christian monk by the name of Baḥīrā recognised in him the signs of prophecy.

As long as he was married to Khadīja, who gave him four daughters (and two sons, who died at a very early age), Muhammad entered into no other marriages. The fundamental date in Muhammad’s life at Mecca was 610 when, at the emblematic age of 40, Muhammad received the first revelation from the awesome Archangel Gabriel (Q. 96:1–4).

This event, which took place on Mount Ḥirāʾ overlooking Mecca, filled him with doubts and terror (Q. 53:1–18), assuaged by his wife, who comforted him and stayed by him. This initial encounter was followed by interruptions and further revelations. Three years later, Muhammad proclaimed what was happening to him and the contents of the revelations to the people closest to him, who accepted the message; they included, along with Khadīja, Abū Bakr, his cousin ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and yet others. Despite these first positive responses, Muhammad’s public preaching was far from successful. The number of followers – although it was to grow progressively – offered scant encouragement, and many of them were poor or with little influence in the social life of Mecca. At the same time, the opposition of the majority of the inhabitants of Mecca went from strength to strength, above all when Muhammad began to attack the pagan divinities and proclaim the primacy of the bond of faith over the traditional bond of blood. The Prophet even found himself having to arrange for some of his followers to seek refuge in the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia at the court of a sympathetic Negus, who arranged to protect them, and he himself was the victim of increasingly rough bullying when he went out among the people. The death of his uncle and protector Abū Ṭālib and then of his wife Khadīja in 619 made matters even worse, while the opposition of the Quraysh grew even harsher.

The situation was such that, when a delegation from the nearby Yathrib oasis invited Muhammad to move out there in order to arbitrate in the local tribal disputes, after a further meeting in the following year he accepted the invitation and organised his emigration (Arabic hijra) in the year 622. Subsequent to Muhammad’s move there, Yathrib was renamed Medina, as “city” (Arabic madīna) of the Prophet. The Islamic calendar begins from this date, using lunar years, which are about 11 days shorter than solar years.⁵

Two episodes that occurred in the closing stage of Muhammad’s life in Mecca are significant for a number of reasons. First, there was the revelation of the so-called Satanic verses. The account has it that Muhammad announced the revelation of verses attesting to the legitimacy of the cult dedicated to three local divinities (Manāt, al-ʿUzzā and al-Lāt), only to be followed by another revelation that dismissed it as a false revelation invented by Satan. The account is accepted somewhat guardedly only by a few Muslim historians, since it is only attested by a relatively late, albeit authoritative source, namely, Ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī’s History (d. 923).

The other episode is Muhammad’s extraordinary night journey (isrāʾ) from Mecca to Jerusalem and ascent (miʿrāj) to the seven heavens. Alluded to in the Qur’an (Q. 17:1, 53:1–12), according to exegetical tradition and looming ever larger in the narratives as in the collections of sayings of Muhammad (ḥadīth) and the accounts of the life of Muḥammad (sīra), it has become the miracle par excellence attributed to the Prophet. His meeting with other prophetic figures (including Abraham, Moses and Jesus) in the seven heavens served to confirm the prophetic prerogatives of Muhammad, while the location sanctioned the sacred status of Jerusalem for Muslims. His companion and subsequent first caliph, Abū Bakr, who succeeded him and attested to the truthfulness of his return, was in consequence given the epithet “The Truthful” (al-ṣiddīq), while ʿĀʾisha, the first and best loved of his many wives after the death of Khadīja, held, on the contrary, that it was an ecstatic vision, claiming that his body had never moved from Mecca. In Islamic literature in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and every other language that has been touched by Islam, we find increasingly elaborate versions, enriching the account with eschatological details of visits to hell and paradise. One particular version is the Book of Muhammad’s Ladder, which developed in this tradition and was in circulation in Europe in the Middle Ages.⁶

Medina

The move to Medina profoundly affected the destiny of Islam. At the outset, however, Muhammad found the situation divided between two Arab tribes (Aws and Khazraj) and three Jewish clans (Qaynuqāʿ, Naḍīr, Qurayẓa), often in conflict among themselves. Muhammad’s attention turned first, in fact, to the Jews, with whom he must have felt more affinity than with the pagans of Medina. However, his attempt to convince the Jews of his prophetic mission did not meet with the favour he had hoped for. Successive revelations brought out significant differences with the Hebraic faith: prayers were now addressed towards Mecca (Q. 2:144) and fast...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Origins and the foundation of Islam
• PART II: Islam and Muslims in history
• PART III: Contemporary Islam
• Glossary
• Further reading
• Index