Muslim Identities

An Introduction to Islam

Aaron Hughes

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231531924
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Rather than focus solely on theological concerns, this well-rounded introduction takes an expansive view of Islamic ideology, culture, and tradition, sourcing a range of historical, sociological, and literary perspectives. Neither overly critical nor apologetic, this book reflects the rich diversity of Muslim identities across the centuries and counters the unflattering, superficial portrayals of Islam that are shaping public discourse today.

Aaron W. Hughes uniquely traces the development of Islam in relation to historical, intellectual, and cultural influences, enriching his narrative with the findings, debates, and methodologies of related disciplines, such as archaeology, history, and Near Eastern studies. Hughes's work challenges the dominance of traditional terms and concepts in religious studies, recasting religion as a set of social and cultural facts imagined, manipulated, and contested by various actors and groups over time. Making extensive use of contemporary identity theory, Hughes rethinks the teaching of Islam and religions in general and helps facilitate a more critical approach to Muslim sources. For readers seeking a non-theological, unbiased, and richly human portrait of Islam, as well as a strong grasp of Islamic study's major issues and debates, this textbook is a productive, progressive alternative to more classic surveys.

PART I

ORIGINS

1

SETTING THE STAGE

Pre-Islamic Arabia

PUTTING ANY religion’s origins under the microscope is an endeavor fraught with numerous tensions. Are we supposed to believe as true the stories that religious people tell themselves? Or do we attempt to disprove such stories using categories drawn from the secular sciences? The discrepancy between these two approaches symbolizes the tensions inherent to the modern study of religion, representing another variation on the classic theme of the apparent incommensurability between faith and reason. Outsiders usually dismiss religious accounts of origins as “mythic” and of little historical value. Insiders, by contrast, read the exact same stories but regard them as truthful accounts grounded in the historical record.

According to the earliest Muslim accounts—accounts written at least 150 years after the times on which they purport to comment—Islam represents the restoration of an original monotheism on the Arabian Peninsula. According to this account, this restoration was the result of Muhammad’s fight against polytheism and forgetfulness: the Arabs are said to have forgotten their original monotheistic impulse and to have begun to worship other gods. The advent of Islam accordingly represents the triumph of universalism over particularism, good over bad, justice over injustice, and so on.

Like all accounts of religious origins, the rise of Islam is predicated on a sharp disjuncture from its immediate environment. This fledgling Islam, like all new religious movements, had to find a balance between a connection to the distant past, on the one hand, and a shattering of the immediate past, on the other. The former disarms the charge of innovation, and the latter shows the uniqueness of the new message. In the case of Islam, connections were made between Arabs and traditional monotheisms of the distant past supplied by Jews and Christians, and the shattering of the immediate past enabled Islam to differ from its immediate polytheistic context.

All of this, however, takes place against a murky backdrop in which memory and desire, fact and fiction, collide. Because all accounts of religious origins are written only after the fact, they are often filtered and imprecise, describing what should have happened instead of what actually did happen. Scholars of religion usually refer to such stories nonjudgmentally as “myths,” or stories that people tell themselves to make sense of their worlds. The end result is that we often lack firm ground from which to perceive origins in any way except imprecisely. We must often take the same texts and narratives that insiders regard as historical and authoritative and subject them to different sorts of analysis.

Religions, like any social formation, do not appear fully formed. It is thus necessary to inquire into the larger contexts out of which religions emerge and against which they subsequently define themselves. As shown in this chapter, those people who formed Islam (whether Muhammad or the final redactors of the Quran or later legists) inherited a larger Near Eastern religious, cultural, and literary vocabulary that they shaped to fit their own needs and an emerging community’s needs. Unfortunately, however, we know very little about what was inherited and what was new. Although this question is certainly of interest to us today, it most likely did not concern seventh- and eighth-century followers of Muhammad. As a result, it is very difficult to illuminate the relationship between the rise of Islam and the existence of various Judaisms, Christianities, and other religious forms that existed within the Red Sea basin just prior to the advent of Islam. The Quran, whose dating is not without its own set of problems, offers very little help in this regard.

A second problem that faces the scholar of Islamic origins is the history of Western polemical writings that deal with this subject. Since the medieval period, European scholars have often defined Islam negatively, making it into little more than a seventh-century invention and corruption of more “stable” monotheisms (such as Judaism and Christianity; note that these names are always put in the singular and rarely, if ever, put in the pluralized forms “Judaisms” and “Christianities”). There exists, in other words, a lengthy history of non-Muslims that speaks about Islamic origins as a way to undermine the religion. The alternative, however, is not necessarily more satisfying because it has the tendency to take later Muslim theological accounts concerning the rise of Islam at face value. These later accounts are subsequently projected back onto the earliest period, even though it is a period about which we have very little evidence, and then assumed to provide accurate historical accounts of the period in question.¹

Although archaeological activity certainly takes place within the Red Sea basin, including the Arabian Peninsula, we still know very little about the early rise of and activity in Mecca (entry to which is forbidden to non-Muslims) and Medina, the two epicenters of Islam’s earliest formation. In addition, we possess very few written records that provide us with eyewitness accounts. Some scholars have attempted to use only non-Islamic sources (including inscriptions and coins) to reconstruct the rise of Islam.² Despite such attempts, our ability to chart and explain Islamic origins must necessarily be speculative and uncertain.

This chapter has two aims. First, it attempts to provide a historical snapshot of what little we know about pre-Islamic Arabia. What, for instance, might the Red Sea basin in general and the Arabian Peninsula in particular have looked like socially, culturally, economically, and religiously? The following problem is indicative of the difficulties in creating a snapshot of pre-Islamic Arabia. We certainly know that Jews (or, perhaps more accurately, Jewish–Arab tribes) and Christians (again, more accurately, Christian–Arab tribes) inhabited parts of Arabia; however, we know very little of these groups’ belief structures and religious contours. We should avoid assuming that race and ethnicity (e.g., Jew or Arab) were mutually exclusive cultural markers in the periods before, during, and even immediately after the formative period of Muhammad’s movement. There is also a danger of imposing our own theological differences—for example, among Christian, Jew, pagan, and Muslim—on this period. If we look at all these categories as fluid and unstable, we might get a different appreciation and understanding of the period in which Islam arose.³

Not unlike most chapters in this book, this chapter offers two often contradictory accounts—insider and outsider accounts—that attempt to describe the emergence of various Islams in Arabia in the seventh century. The insider account tells a narrative of Muhammad’s response to the divine message and his skillful navigation of the Arabian tribes from the bonds of idolatry to the freedom of Islam. Muhammad’s message, embodied in the Quran, was responsible for the rapid spread of Islam throughout the Mediterranean basin and beyond. The outsider or more skeptical approach, by contrast, argues that any account of origins must be based on historical, archaeological, and philological proof. The projection of later Islamic traditions, according to this approach, onto a period wherein we know next to nothing is largely an ideological project of later centuries and of limited historical value.

The final section of this chapter attempts a synthesis of the two accounts, showing how and why later Muslim thinkers projected various values onto the emergence of Islam.

Pre-Islamic Arabia

The customary presentation of pre-Islamic Arabia is based on a later Islamic myth of its isolation and separation from the larger empires of the area. This trope of a desert people wandering in darkness and receiving a divine message is certainly a common one in ancient Near Eastern religious cultures. However, if we assume the mythic trope as historical narrative, as is frequently done, we miss out on the active involvement of pre-Islamic Arabs and other tribes in these larger empires. It is certainly clear, for instance, that the peninsula functioned as an important nexus on a number of east–west and north–south trade routes.⁴ Pre-Islamic Arabia did interact with the rest of the Middle East and did so increasingly as time progressed. The claim that Arabia was untouched by the major empires of the regions and their religions is, however, a potentially useful theological claim. The myth of pre-Islamic isolation served a number of functions. First, it allowed Islam to appear miraculously with Muhammad on the world stage. Second, it permitted Islam to emerge untouched by other monotheisms in the area, thereby protecting Islam from later charges that it and its scripture, the Quran, are copies of Jewish and Christian sources. Third, it signals the uniqueness of Muhammad’s message that inspired the tribes of Arabia to take up monotheism. Finally, it contributes to the creation of a foundation narrative to rival the accounts of origins found in other religions, most notably various Judaisms and Christianities, some of whose practitioners undoubtedly formed the core of Muhammad’s early movement.

It is important to be aware that Arabia was not monolithic in terms of its cultural, religious, and material practices. It consisted of distinct geographical regions, each of which was settled by various peoples with their own cultural and religious traditions. Scholars who work in pre-Islamic Arabia tend to divide the region into three cultural regions: East Arabia (comprising modern-day Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Oman), South Arabia (roughly corresponding to modern-day Yemen), and North and Central Arabia (modern-day Saudi Arabia minus its eastern coast, the Sinai and Negev deserts, and parts of modern Jordan, Syria, and Iraq).⁵ The earliest written sources from East Arabia date to roughly 2500 B.C.E., and those from the other regions to roughly 900 B.C.E. The Arabs made up only one group in this area, but they became the most successful, eventually absorbing all the other groups in the region.

The pre-Islamic Red Sea basin occupied a distinctive geographic location that in many ways functioned as a conduit between civilizations and continents. It witnessed the emergence of several civilizations, the relics of which are still evident today. One such civilization was that of the Nabateans, who created the city of Petra in modern-day Jordan (figure 1), one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Other such Arabian civilizations prior to the fifth century C.E. include the Lakhmid kingdom in the North around the Euphrates River and the Himyar kingdom in the Southwest near Yemen.

The Arabian Peninsula existed between three major agricultural centers: Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Each of these three lands were connected to what one historian calls “political hinterlands.”⁶ That is, if one traveled east, north, or south, one would soon come upon some of the major civilizations of late antiquity. In Iraq, for example, there existed the Sassanian Empire; just beyond Syria lay the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire; and in Yemen there existed the Abyssinian Empire. Subsequent Islamic myths of isolation and separation to the contrary, Arabs seem to have been active participants in the various social, economic, cultural, and religious features of these diverse imperial powers.

Virtually all the inhabitants of pre-Islamic Arabia were members of a tribe, a mutual aid group connected to a larger notion of kinship. These tribes were composed of a hierarchy of overlapping loyalties largely determined by the closeness of kinship that ran from the nuclear family to the tribe and even, in principle at least, to the entire ethnic or linguistic group. Disputes were settled, interests pursued, and justice and order maintained by means of this organizational framework. Early inscriptions from South Arabia mention that tribes were also bound together by allegiance to the cult of their patron deity, in relation to whom they were designated “the children,” and by loyalty to their king.⁷

FIGURE 1 Facade of the Treasury, Petra, Jordan. (Photograph by Bernard Gagnon; courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

These tribes possessed a strict code of honor that was based on diyafa (hospitality), which required that even one’s enemy must be given shelter and fed for some days. Generosity was a related virtue, and even today in many Bedouin societies gifts must be offered and cannot be declined. The community was also responsible for taking care of the poor in its midst, and in many of the tribes tithing (a form of tax) was mandatory. Hamasa (courage, bravery) was also closely linked to Bedouin honor, indicating the willing...