People of the Book

Prophet Muhammad’s Encounters with Christians

Craig Considine

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781787384712
• eBook ISBN: 9781787386778
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

The Christians that lived around the Arabian Peninsula during Muhammad’s lifetime are shrouded in mystery. Some of the stories of the Prophet’s interactions with them are based on legends and myths, while others are more authentic and plausible. But who exactly were these Christians? Why did Muhammad interact with them as he reportedly did? And what lessons can today’s Christians and Muslims learn from these encounters? 

 Scholar Craig Considine, one of the most powerful global voices speaking in admiration of the prophet of Islam, provides answers to these questions. Through a careful study of works by historians and theologians, he highlights an idea central to Muhammad’s vision: an inclusive Ummah, or Muslim nation, rooted in citizenship rights, interfaith dialogue, and freedom of conscience, religion and speech. In this unprecedented sociological analysis of one of history’s most influential human beings, Considine offers groundbreaking insight that could redefine Christian and Muslim relations.

1

MONKS AND MERCHANTS

Around the year 582, the twelve-year-old Muhammad (d. 632) traveled southward toward Busra with Abu Talib (d. 619), his uncle, as Meccan caravans usually did after trading in Syria. Busra was a walled city located about 90 miles to the south of Damascus.¹ The city was populated mainly by Christians and sprinkled with monasteries. Busra also had exquisite gates, a Byzantine imperial-styled arch, and a skyline marked by its domed cathedral.²

As the capital of Syria, a province of both the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire from the first to the sixth centuries, Busra was a center of Christianity in the Near East that served as the seat of the Byzantine governor as well as the seat of the archbishop of Busra. According to Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad’s mother, Amina (d. 578), dreamt of Busra’s castles while she was pregnant with Muhammad.³ The castles may have been the monastic towers in which Christian ascetics and mystics lived.

In Busra, Abu Talib’s caravan crossed, as the Meccan caravans typically did, the small dwelling cells of hermits and monks. On this particular occasion, his caravan encountered a monk named Bahira, whose name is derived from the Syriac word bhira, which translates to “approved” or “tested” by God.⁴ The twelve-year-old Muhammad was an orphan living under the protection of his uncle at this time in his life.⁵ Al-Tirmidhi (d. 892) and various other historians have reported Muhammad’s encounters with Bahira.⁶

On a typical day, Bahira would have likely paid little or no attention to the passing Meccan merchants. On this particular occasion, however, he is said to have had a “revelation” from God.

Bahira decided to stop the caravan to invite the Meccans into his cell. Abu Talib and his peers accepted the invitation, and upon leaving their camels and goods, the merchants left behind Muhammad. Leaving a child behind in this manner was a normal practice; a younger member of a trading caravan would typically watch over the caravan’s property and hopefully keep it safe from badawah and gazu practices.⁷

While guarding the caravan, a small, low-hanging protective cloud remained stationary over the tree in which the young Muhammad and the caravan took shelter from the Syrian sun.⁸ Perhaps Bahira interpreted the cloud hanging over Muhammad as the sign of the long-awaited prophet, as foretold by the Christian scriptures that he (and previous generations of monks) had read and studied in their small cells in Busra.⁹

Before the trading caravan left Bahira’s cell in Busra, he asked Muhammad about Al-Lat and Al-‘Uzza. Al-Lat, whose name is a derivative of al-Illahat, the Arabic term for “the Goddess,” is thought to have been a similar goddess to Athena, the mother of all the gods in Greek polytheism. Al-‘Uzza, the Arabic term for “the Strong One,” was a widely venerated goddess among the Arab deities. She is said to have had a temple in Petra and may have been the city’s patron goddess.

In response to Bahira’s question about the gods, Muhammad is reported to have said: “Do not ask me about Al-Lat and Al-‘Uzza, for by God, nothing is more hateful to me than these two.”

Muhammad’s clear rejection of polytheism was sufficient for Bahira, a monotheist himself.

After encountering Muhammad in person, Bahira felt that he might be a match for the physical description of the long-awaited prophet as foretold by the ancient texts handed down by Christian hermits and monks. He was particularly interested in seeing if the young boy had the sign of prophethood on his upper back.

It was between Muhammad’s shoulders that Bahira found the “seal of prophethood.” Bahira then told Abu Talib, Muhammad’s guardian, to go back to Mecca with the boy and to keep him safe from emotional and physical harm. According to Islamic sources, Bahira was referring to Jewish people, who he predicted would do harm to Muhammad if they came to learn about his coming prophethood.¹⁰

As William Montgomery Watt has noted, this is of course only a story, but “it is significant because it expresses a popular Muslim view of Muhammad. He was a man who had been marked out from his early youth, even from before his birth, by supernatural signs and qualities.”¹¹

Who was Bahira?

Who was this Christian monk that reportedly predicted Muhammad’s future prophethood? The Patrologia Graeca portrays Bahira as a renegade Christian heretic who was likely either an Arian or Jacobite.¹² John of Damascus (d. 749) also identified Bahira as an Arian, the term given to followers of Arianism, as conceived by Arius (d. 336), the North African presbyter from Alexandria, Egypt. The Arian teaching can be summarized as follows:

[Jesus] was created out of nothing; hence, He is different in essence from the Father; that He is Logos, Wisdom, Son of God, is only of grace. He is not so in himself. There was, when He was not; or, i.e., He is a finite being. He was created before everything else, and through Him the universe was created and is administered.¹³

Many of the Qur’anic accounts about God are similar to, or at least do not contradict, Arius’s beliefs on the nature of the Almighty. The Qur’an, in fact, emphasizes that God is the sole Creator and that Jesus, like Abraham, Moses, and Muhammad, was a human prophet of God that should be praised, admired, and followed, but not worshiped as though he were God. While Arius believed that Jesus was divine, he also claimed that he was not equal to God, a claim that the Qur’an generally accepts to be true.¹⁴

Put another way, Bahira—like Arius before him—may have rejected the idea that Jesus was himself God.¹⁵ Arius was eventually excommunicated from the Church in 321 and is said to have migrated to Asia Minor, where he converted many polytheists to Christianity. Arianism was later classified as a Christian heresy at the end of the Council of Nicaea (325), which Emperor Constantine (d. 337) of the Roman Empire had summoned to determine the “true nature” of Jesus.¹⁶

In meeting Bahira, Muhammad had likely encountered a Christian heretic, at least according to Byzantine leaders in Constantinople, whose views on Jesus’s nature were neither mainstream nor popular. Bahira is believed to be the first human being to have recognized Muhammad as a future prophet of the Arab people, and indeed the world.

The cross-cultural navigator and husband

Muhammad likely had more encounters with Christians while he was traveling on the trading caravans in the early years of his life. In doing so, he followed in the footsteps of his Quraysh ancestors.¹⁷ Muhammad’s great-grandfather (Hashim ibn ‘Abd Manaf) and grandfather (Al-Muttalib ibn Hashim) were involved in the caravan trading network around the Arabian Peninsula. Together, the father and son participated in two specific annual journeys along the region’s ancient incense routes—the Caravan of Winter to Yemen and the Caravan of Summer to Palestine and Syria. The latter two locations were ruled by Christian leaders under the authority of the Byzantine emperors. Yemen also reportedly had a small Christian population, particularly in Najran, a city located in the southwestern part of the Arabian Peninsula.

Muhammad grew up hearing stories about his ancestors’ encounters with the Christians. Hashim, his great-grandfather, may have visited Byzantine authorities in Damascus around 490 to negotiate tariff reductions and safe traveling passages for Meccan merchants journeying into Byzantine territory, which stretched from Constantinople, across Asia Minor, down through Syria, and into Palestine and Egypt. Muhammad’s ancestors, as Martin Lings (2006) points out, also likely had access to the goods of various Christian traders and craftsmen in Axum, the capital of Abyssinia, the Christian kingdom located across the Red Sea in northeast Africa that I explore in detail in Chapter 3.¹⁸

Muhammad’s travels on the trading caravans of the Near East suggest that he would have been familiar with Byzantine law, culture, and languages, as well the customs and traditions of other Christian populations throughout the Near East. Juan Cole suggests that Muhammad was probably literate, as any long-distanced merchant would have been in the seventh century.¹⁹ Long-distance Near East merchants like Muhammad in the latter part of the sixth century would have likely operated in a trilingual environment of Arabic, Aramaic, and Greek.

Muhammad’s encounters with Christians during the trading caravans suggest that he may also have had “a very considerable store of knowledge of Judaism and Christianity, and that it was the sort which he would have been most likely to obtain through oral channels and personal observation over a long period of time.”²⁰ In cities like Petra, Muhammad would have learned about Neoplatonic and Christian-Greek styled Arabic notions of love, salvation, and wisdom, which may have piqued his curiosity about Christianity and monotheism at large.²¹ Petra had previously been beset by heresies and religious disputes associated with Christianity in the fourth and early fifth centuries. In the sixth and seventh centuries, it served as the capital of Palaestina Tertia (Third Palestine), a Byzantine province and the seat of the metropolitan see of Byzantium.

Muhammad’s experiences as a merchant shaped him into a cross-cultural navigator, a sociological term that captures how social identities have been—and continue to be—transformed through cross-cultural exchanges and interactions.²² A cross-cultural navigator is someone who is able to harvest the resources from their own communities and from wider sociocultural environments. A cross-cultural navigator also conjures up metaphors of traveling and of fluid identities that are constantly in transition. As such, a cross-cultural navigator is someone who possesses insight into—and an understanding of—the functions and values of various cultures across places and times.

Another of Muhammad’s cross-cultural encounters occurred around 595, when he is said to have encountered a Christian man named Nestor, who had also been living in Busra. In 595, Muhammad was responsible for leading the trading caravan of a businesswoman named Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (d. 619).²³ Muhammad’s relationship with Khadijah ended up transcending business and evolving into a relationship of love. She saw Muhammad not merely as an important business partner or financial asset but a potential husband and life companion. The following description of Khadijah would be acceptable to scholars:

Khadijah was born to a life of privilege. Her family was important in Mecca and quite wealthy; she could have lived a life of ease all her days. Khadijah, however, was an intelligent and industrious young woman who enjoyed business and became very skilled. When her father died, the young woman took charge of her family business, which thrived and grew under her direction. Compassionate as well as hardworking, Khadijah gave a great deal of money to help others—assisting the poor, sick, disabled, widows, orphans, and giving poor couples money to marry. Twice Khadijah married, and when each of her husbands died, she overcame her grief and continued to rear her small children and run her successful caravan business by herself. Khadijah had many employees, including the important position of her agent, who traveled with her caravans, negotiated deals in other cities, and took charge of the large amounts of money involved in the trading business. When Khadijah was 40 years old, she was widely known in Arabia as a powerful, smart, independent woman, and many men wanted to work for her. However, when she needed to hire an agent, she did not hire any of the men who eagerly sought the job. Instead, she selected a hard-working young man named Muhammad who had the reputation of being honest and diligent. Muhammad was only 25 years old when he accepted the job, but he proved to be an excellent employee and a courteous and ethical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Map of the Near East in 570
• Glossary
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1. Monks and Merchants
• 2. Angels and Mystics
• 3. Allies and Prophets
• 4. Citizens and Rebels
• 5. Guests and Hosts
• 6. Symbols and Souls
• Appendix 1: Qur’anic Verses Related to Jesus
• Appendix 2: The Constitution of Medina (622)
• Appendix 3: The Covenant of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of Najran (630)
• Appendix 4: The Farewell Sermon (632)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index