Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren, Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State, Prometheus Books, 2003, viii+462 pp.For a religion's adherents, its origin-story, like that of a love-match for spouses, is much less a matter of fact than the fondly-retold, emotion-laden prologue to its sacred story, which defines its highest ideals and encapsulates its bounds of permissible practice. Historians of religion seeking to understand reasonably objectively the rise of Judaism and Christianity have over the last few centuries made little headway. The religious scriptures' own historical accounts were hopelessly vague, self-contradictory, and full of believer-pleasing miracles. Accounts by people of opposing sects were sketchy and biased by ill-will. The multitude of biblical-archaeology finds did not resolve ambiguities, though inspiring some novel theories like Norman Gottwald's proto-Marxist peasant revolution for Jewish origins.
The case of 'Islām is similar. Like most historians of the Levant in the period before literary Biblical criticism, most contemporary histories of the Islamic world pick and choose among the mass of Muslim historiography dating from the 9th (Christian) century onward to construct a coherent story of the origin of Islām and Arab conquest of the Peninsula, the Levant, Persia, and North Africa in the 7th century, subtracting miracle-stories, reconciling disparate genealogies and battle-accounts, and weighing the reliability of various chains of transmission. Even though we're closer to the present than in the cases of Jewish and Christian origins, there are not many contemporary writings on 7th-century events, and archaeological finds are difficult to date precisely. Revisionist historians of the period, notably the Anglos John Wansborough and Patricia Crone, have made a good case that the Islamic sources should not be trusted to provide an accurate account of 7th-century happenings, just as in the Jewish and Christian cases. However, a definite alternative account remains elusive. Relying heavily on period coins, dated rock inscriptions, and the Syriac writings of Christian chroniclers, Nevo and Koren attempt a coherent interpretation of the 7th century that treats the Islamic sources with great skepticism.
Nevo and Koren make key observations. The sparse contemporary accounts do not mention battles associated with the Arab conquest of chunks of the Byzantine and Sassanid empires. There is no clear mention of Muḥammad as the name of a prophet or 'Islām as the name of a religion until about 690, close to the time of the building of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Inscriptions from then onward feature mottos that are similar to Quranic verses, but mention of a written Islamic sculpture begins only around the time of the `Abbasid takeover in 750. Building on these arguments for silence, they reconstruct developments as follows. The Arab takeover was the culmination of centuries of Byzantine military redeployment away from the Levant, and did not require formidable military strength or the impetus of a new religion. Arab rule was solidly consolidated by Mu`awiya around 660, after fighting between various chiefs, who then had coins minted and public works built in his name. At that time, many Arabs were monotheists, taking Abraham as their model and revering Moses and Jesus as prophets, although pagan practices were very widespread as well. The expansion of the Arab empire created the political need for establishing a specifically Arab variant of monotheism, which was met by exalting Muḥammad as an Arab prophet who gave the Arab conquests divine approval. The `Abbasid rulers moved beyond the ethnocentric conception of 'Islām to one where 'Islām, embodied in its own scripture and legal norms, was to be embraced equally by all people. The Qur'ān was therefore compiled in the early `Abbasid period, based on miscellaneous preexisting collections of religious sayings. (See here for more detailed attempts, in a similar spirit, to understand the composition of some Quranic materials.)
Nevo and Koren's story of the rise of Islam is not completely convincing. Their contention that Byzantium intentionally left the Levant and Persia ready for takeover needs to be substantiated with detailed study of Byzantine records as well as other writings of the 4th-7th centuries. Dismissing the Peninsula as poor and culturally unimportant in the first half of the 7th century is supported by archaeological and documentary evidence, as masterfully summarized earlier by Patricia Crone in Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987), but leaves unexplained exactly how the Ḥijāz came to be accepted as the spiritual home of Muslims and a site of pilgrimage. And the vexed questions of where "jāhilī" poetry was composed and how literary Arabic (which, unlike 'Islām, is attested starting very soon after the Arab conquests) arose remain unresolved. While Nevo and Koren's story is more plausible than the standard accounts based on Muslim sources, it remains to be seen whether critical endeavors that build on their contributions will lead to a fully satisfying historical understanding of the origin of 'Islām, or whether, as in the cases of Judaism and Christianity, this will remain an episode shrouded in ambiguity and controversy. Regardless, it's a fascinating detective story to follow.
