It is well-known that the Quran as dictated by Muhammad
was written on palm leaves, stones, bones of camels and other such places. One
basic question that will be asked is this- “Why did Allah choose Muhammad as a
vehicle or medium to record the Quran when Allah knew that Muhammad was
illiterate? Or at least, why did Allah not turn Muhammad into a great scholar
overnight and provide him with good stationery to record the Quran?”
In the translation of the Quran by Mohammed Marmaduke
Pickthall, (Pickthall’s translation is considered as very authentic) the
following things are mentioned in the “Introduction” before the Quran’s first
chapter:
“All the surahs of the Koran had been recorded in
writing before the Prophet’s death, and many Muslims had committed the whole
Koran to memory. But the written surahs were dispersed among the people;
and when, in a battle which took place during the Caliphate of Abu
Bakr- that is to say, within two years of the Prophet’s death-a large number of
those who knew the whole Koran by heart were killed, a collection of
the whole Koran was made and put in writing. In the Caliphate of
Othman, all existing copies of surahs were called in, and an authoritative
version, based on Abu Bakr’s collection and the testimony of
those who had the whole Koran by heart, was compiled exactly in the
present form and order, which is regarded as traditional and as the arrangement
of the Prophet himself, the Caliph Othman and his helpers being Comrades of the
Prophet and the most devout students of the Revelation. The Koran has thus been
very carefully preserved.” (Page xxviii of Pickthall’s translation of Quran,
Madhur Sandesh Sangam, New Delhi, India, 1995)
Sadly for them, the information given in this
translation by British Muslim Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall clearly proves
exactly the opposite. Carefully read the sentences written in bold by us. “But
written Surahs were dispersed among the people”. What is the guarantee
that all Surahs were compiled and none were lost? Or that no extra Surahs were
added which were not there? Arabic is a language where the whole meaning of the
sentence can change with the slightest change in shape of the alphabet. In this
translation of the Quran, Pickthall also admits “Within 2 years of the
Prophet’s death a large number of people who knew the whole Koran by heart were
killed”. Here he is talking of the Battle of
Riddah (Apostasy) in Arabia in late 632- early 633 AD when
Arabia rose in revolt against Islam and gallantly fought Muslims .
Though the non-Muslims lost, a large number of Muslims
were killed in this battle, many of whom had learnt the Quran by heart, which
has been admitted by Pickthall. “In the Caliphate of Othman, all
existing copies of surahs were called in, and an authoritative version,
based on Abu Bakr’s collection and the testimony of those who had the
whole Koran by heart, was compiled…” This shows that there were many
different versions of the Quran in use by that time, during Othman’s rule
(644-656 AD). Othman ordered all other versions to be destroyed. Now the
very fact that within so few as 20 years of Muhammad’s death there were
different versions of the Quran and there was no one to check or guarantee that
Othman’s version was exactly as Muhammad said shows the reality! That is, Othman had to do the
job of compiling the Quran which should have ideally been done properly by
Muhammad. If God sent Muhammad down to the people with His Message and His book of guidance viz the Quran would he have made it so difficult for the humans? He
would have first made Muhammad a scholar capable of reading and writing
overnight, being the Almighty and then provided Muhammad and all Muslims good
stationery to record the Quran instead of relying on Muhammad’s companions to
write on palm leaves, on shoulder-blade bones of camels and on stones and
memorize it, and then have a large number of those who had memorized it killed
in the Battle of Riddah.
Firstly, Muhammad dictated the Quran to his followers,
who noted it down in many places. According to Islamic tradition, the
Quran was originally written on palm leaves, on shoulder-blade bones of camels
and on stones. There was no single copy of the Quran existing during Muhammad’s
own lifetime in a written form! Muhammad was asked many times by Meccans to
perform any miracles to prove that he was a Messenger of God, such as making
his God flow rivers of milk, and Muhammad used to say “I cannot perform any
miracles, I am only a mortal messenger. My only miracle is the
Quran.” (Muhammad need not have had to perform any miracles, couldn't GOD
have flown rivers of milk to prove Muhammad’s Prophethood to the people?) But
this ‘only miracle’ of Muhammad also was not present in his own life-time in a
proper book form! Would a true God have left a very important task of
recording the Quran and making only one (and correct) version to humans, that
too some 20 years after Muhammad's death? He would have made sure that only one
version of the Quran remains, and that it is carefully recorded and available
easily to everyone.
As a matter of fact, even this tradition, that
Othman ended everything and finalized the Quran before AD 656 and that nothing
has changed in the Quran ever since, is also wrong. Wansbrough
(“Quranic Studies” Wansbrough, J. Oxford, 1977) showed that
far from being fixed in the seventh century, the definitive text of the Koran had
still not been achieved even as late as the later part of the ninth century.Thus,
a statement of Muslim creed, Fiqh Akbar I, dated to the middle of the eighth
century, does not refer to the Koran at all, which is quite surprising. The
ninth century also saw the first collections of the ancient Arab poetry seeing
the light of day, in which too there are instances of manipulation, as alleged
by some scholars. In fact, there is a strong opinion among many scholars that the
Quran was actually finalized in AD 933. This is also shown by the missing and
added verses in the Quran.
Missing and
Added Verses
It also appears that there are some missing verses and
some added verses. For example, there is a tradition from the Prophet’s wife,
Aisha, that there once existed a ‘verse of stoning’ where stoning to death was
prescribed as punishment for fornication. This is no longer to be found
in the accepted texts of the Koran and instead the Koranic punishment for this
crime only prescribes one hundred lashes. But the early prophets carried out
stoning for adultery, and Islamic law still prescribes it. According to the
above tradition, more than one hundred verses from the original, are missing.
Shiites (i.e. Shia Muslims) of course claim that Uthman left out a great many verses
favourable to Ali, for political reasons. Muhammad himself, as we
know, is said to have suppressed the now famous Satanic Verses. The
authenticity of many verses has been called into question not only by modern
Western scholars, but even by Muslims themselves. On the other hand,
most scholars believe that there are many interpolations making the Koranic
style uneven. Some of them are of a political and dogmatic character,
such as 42:36-38, which seems to have been added to justify the elevation of
Uthman as Caliph to the detriment of Ali. Of course, any
interpolation, however trivial, is fatal to the Muslim dogma that the Koran is
literally the eternal, uncreated word of God revealed to Muhammad and
thereafter unalterable and unchanged.
The traditional Muslim accounts of the life of
Muhammad and the story of the origin and rise of Islam are based exclusively on
Muslim sources, namely, (1) the Koran (2) the Muslim biographies of Muhammad
and (3) the Hadith. We shall briefly examine their content and authenticity.
The first biography known to us of the Prophet was
written one hundred and twenty years after his death, by Ibn Ishaq (d. 768 AD).
The original is lost and is only available in parts in a later
biography by Ibn Hisharm (and an even later biography by Al-Tabari) who died in
834 AD, two hundred years after the death of the Prophet. The other
popular biographies have been written only after the first two hundred years.
This long interval along with the other factors discussed below throws doubts
on the authenticity of the material available from these biographies. A recent
book, ‘The Quest for the Historical Muhammad’ edited by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus
Books, March 2000) has dealt with precisely this issue of historicity.
The Hadith or Hadis is greatly revered in the Islamic
world and consists of a collection of sayings and doings attributed to the
Prophet and traced back to him through a chain of supposedly trustworthy
witnesses called ‘isnad’. Six authentic collections written in the ninth
century are available, and an encyclopedia of 29000 traditions called Musnad
has been compiled by Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (d. 855 AD). Since the Koran does
not cover all aspects of the religion and law, and since the Muslims consider
the life of the Prophet as the Divine force in action, the sayings and doings
of the Prophet compiled in the Hadith along with the Koran guide the
jurisprudence of Islam.
CLAIMS OF HISTORICITY
Hadith
It has been generally held that among the world’s
major religions, only the historicity of Muhammad and Koran are undisputed and
that the details of his life are more historically verifiable than the founders
of other major religions. Recent findings suggest that this claim is not true
and in fact, there is now a strong view that there has been a large scale
fabrication of the prophet’s life and scriptures and that there has been a
considerable influence of neighbouring religions and rituals as well as
traditional pagan Arabian faiths and rituals. The present position has been
neatly summed up by Ibn Warraq in his book, ‘Why I am not a Muslim?’2.
Unfortunately this book has been banned in India and therefore we can only list
the original sources to which the reader is requested to refer for detailed
information. The reviews of this book have been collected and summarized in
‘Time for Stock Taking.3
Towards the end of nineteenth century, Western
scholars began the process of sifting all available information and data on
Islam since there was some suspicion that some of the traditions were
deliberately forged in order to further the interests of certain groups and
families. Wellhausen divided the historical traditions into two
categories – the apparently authentic primitive traditions, which have been
recorded in the late eighth century, and second, a parallel tradition that was
deliberately forged to rebut the first. The second version was
found to be full of tendentious fiction. Goldziher, another reputed scholar of
the era, studied the Hadith extensively and demonstrated that a vast number of
hadiths accepted even in the most rigorously critical Muslim collections were
outright forgeries compiled from around the late 8th and 9th centuries.5
The reason for this parallel tradition can be traced to the politics of
competition among the early successors of the Prophet, who had often assumed
his mantle after eliminating their predecessors with great blood shed; and had
hence to humiliate their memory and that of their forefathers through their
version of the tradition, apart from proving their own legitimacy (see
chronology of early Islam in Appendix B). Under the Abbasids (progeny
of the Prophet’s uncle), the fabrication of hadiths greatly multiplied, with
the explicit purpose of proving the legitimacy of their own clan as against
that of the Alids (progeny of Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet).
The storytellers also excelled in inventing entertaining hadiths in order to
make a fortune by drawing large crowds. Of course Muslim scholars were aware
that forgeries abounded and attempted to eliminate many of them in the six
authentic collections. But even these were not free from later interpolations
and therefore there are several texts of the Hadith in use.
A true God would have simply given only one and
correct version of the Hadith so that people would have no doubt about Muhammad
and his life. Would he have allowed so many different Hadiths to crop up,
many unauthentic, and leave so much confusion on which is correct and not?
Without the Hadith, Islam doesn't stand at all since we don't know anything at all
about Muhammad and who he was, or anything about the Quran. A true God would
have made sure that a full, proper description of Muhammad is available to
humanity without any confusion, and a true and only version of the Quran is
available.
Since the biographies on the Prophet appeared much
after his death and were based on these traditions, the early twentieth century
scholars working at that time considered them suspect.6 Their
conclusions were subsequently investigated by a group of Soviet Islamologists7
who concluded that the life of Muhammad and that of his immediate successors
are as ‘mythical’ as the accounts of Christ and the Apostles (discussed later)
and that Islam was merely an offshoot of Arianism (a Greek Christian doctrine)
and that the Arian Islamites were indistinguishable from the Jews until the
impact of the Crusades made them assume a separate identity. In fact some of
them wondered if Muhammad was not a necessary fiction since every ‘historical’
religion must need to have a founder.
From the 1950s, Islamic studies received a further
impetus under Schacht8. His conclusions were even more radical and
disturbing. He proved that many Islamic traditions did not exist at a
particular time by showing, for example, that they were not used as a legal
argument in a discussion that would have made reference to them imperative, had
these traditions existed. He in fact concluded that every tradition
allegedly traced back in time to the Prophet must be considered inauthentic and
the Fictitious expression of a legal doctrine formulated at a later date!
Traditions introduced from around the time of the Successors (to the Prophet)
were offered as traditions from the time of the Companions (contemporaries of
the Prophet), and traditions from the time of the Companions to the Prophet
were offered as traditions practiced by the Prophet himself. Details
from the life of the Prophet were invented to support legal doctrines. He also
showed that the beginnings of the Islamic law cannot be traced further back in
the Islamic tradition, than to about a century after the Prophet’s death. Thus
it did not directly derive from the Koran, but developed out of popular and
administrative practices under the Urnmayads which diverged often from the
intentions and even the explicit wording of the Koran. The integration of the
two was done at a later stage.
Many scholars were convinced of the essential
soundness of Schacht’s analysis and developed his thesis further. Wansbrough9
argued that the Koran and the Hadith grew out of sectarian controversies over
the course of a long period and then were projected back
in time onto an invented Arabian
point of origin. He felt that Islam emerged only
when it came into contact with rabbinical Judaism.
The Quran
Doubts over the authenticity of the Hadith prompted
scholars to take a critical look at the Koran too. As we have seen earlier,
Muslims claim the Koran to be a historically verifiable scripture, which is the
collection of the revelations of Allah through the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet. These revelations were communicated by the Prophet
to various persons in his lifetime and many others were taken down by
Muhammad’s scribes. According to one tradition, after Muhammad’s death,
the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, appointed the former secretary and scribe of the
Prophet, Zayd ibn Thabit, to undertake the task of collecting all available
material and compile it together. He collected them ‘from pieces of papyrus,
flat stones, palm leaves, shoulder blades and ribs of animals, pieces of
leather and wooden boards, as well as from the hearts of men’. He
compiled all the material in the amazingly short span of two years and handed
it over to the Caliph. The Suras or chapters in the Koran have been so arranged
that the longest suras find place in the beginning and the shortest in the end.
Thus there is no way of knowing when, exactly the Prophet received a
particular revelation. This becomes important since the message of a particular
revelation, as we shall see later, is often contradicted by the message of a 'later’ revelation. Scholars, both Muslim and Western have generally
been able to separate the revelations received in Mecca and those in Medina
since the message of Allah is conciliatory in the former and aggressive in the
latter.
According to traditions many versions of the book
began to be circulated and serious disputes arose. According to the
traditions, the third Caliph, Uthman (650-656 AD) approached Zayd again to edit
and prepare the official text. This was prepared and circulated widely and the
other versions were destroyed. According to orthodoxy, this text has not
undergone any change since then and is the standard version followed all over
the world.
Historical research, however, indicates otherwise.
Wansbrough showed that far from being fixed in the seventh century, the
definitive text of Koran had still not been achieved even as late as the later
part of the ninth century. Thus,
a statement of Muslim creed, Fiqh Akbar I, dated to the middle of eighth
century, does not refer to the Koran at all, which is quite surprising. The
ninth century also saw the first collections of the ancient Arab poetry seeing
the light of day, in which too there are instances of manipulation, as alleged
by some scholars. Both have perhaps gone hand in hand with an attempt to prove
the antiquity and sacredness of the Arabic language and culture so that God
could hand over the Koran in pure Arabic. Very much influenced by rabbinic
Judaism outside Arabia, the early Muslim community took Moses as a model and
Muhammad’s credentials as a prophet were gradually established in Moses’
likeness. The aim was to have a swadeshi prophet and a scripture in competition
with the Jews and Christians!
Contradictions
And Abrogations
Far worse is the matter of abrogation or cancellation
of passages in the Koran. The Koran abounds in contradictions and hence Muslim
theologians have a rather convenient strategy by which they abrogate or replace
certain passages and verses with other verses and passages with a contrary
meaning, and which, they claim, was subsequently revealed by Allah to Muhammad.
This problem of contradiction would never have arisen had there been a
specific chronology of the revelations, which would have enabled us to
determine which verse was given earlier and which later. In the absence of it,
there is obviously a lot of arbitrariness in determining the time of the replaced
verse. There has been some unanimity in determining the Meccan i.e.
early suras and Medinan i.e. later suras. While the former has many passages
preaching tolerance when Muhammad’s faith and supporters were still in a
minority, the later Medinan suras, when Muhammad was already a winner, abound
in intolerance like the famous verse of sura 9.5, ‘Slay the idolaters
wherever you find them'. This
verse, along with others given in Appendix A, obviously nullifies the earlier
124 verses that exhorted tolerance and patience, and which are quoted
extensively by the Indian Muslim scholars to deny accusations that the Koran
and Islam are inherently violent and intolerant.
As an example let us take the often quoted short sura
109, ‘The Unbelievers’, thought to be a Meccan sura, which says, “Say:
Unbelievers I do not worship what
you worship, nor do you worship
what I worship. I shall never
worship what you worship, nor will
you ever worship what I worship.
You have your own religion, and
I have mine. ‘ How can this be reconciled
with the numerous examples given in Appendix A (sections on Idolaters and
Instructions to Believers) which are mostly Medinan verses and preach hatred
and intolerance? A reading of these directives from Allah leaves no doubt that
so far as non- Muslims are concerned, the Koran is not a religious book at all
but a war manual and a penal code!
We also have strange incidences of an earlier verse
cancelling a later one in the same sura. Thus verse 2.234 replaces
verse 2.240 (dealing with maintenance of widows). In all, over 200 verses (some
scholars estimate the figure to be 500, i.e. about 8% of Koran), have been
cancelled or abrogated by later ones.
The doctrine of abrogation makes a mockery of the
Muslim dogma that the Koran is a faithful and unalterable reproduction of the
original scriptures that are preserved in heaven. If God’s words are eternal,
uncreated and absolute, then how can we talk of God’s words being superseded or
becoming obsolete? Are some words of God to be preferred to others? And who is
to judge this? The doctrine of abrogation has indeed been very convenient to
bale out Muslim scholars and politicians out of the difficulties that such questions
create!
The above things are sufficient to conclude that the
text of the Quran had not been finalized in AD 656 when Othman ordered all
other versions to be destroyed. This shows that the scholars' view that the
Quran was altered and amended till AD 933 may well be correct.
Both Islam and Christianity, in comparing themselves
with pagan faiths to establish their superiority, claim historicity for their
founders. But Western scholars have also questioned the historicity of Jesus
Christ. They have shown that the gospels were written towards the end of the
first century, some forty to eighty years after the supposed crucifixion of
Christ, and that there was considerable interpolation afterwards. Thus the
letters of Paul do not mention many extraordinary details of Jesus’ life. Even
the post-Pauline letters written before 90 AD do not contain any convincing
historical details. It now seems highly unlikely that any of the sayings
attributed to Jesus in the Gospels was ever spoken by a historical figure. Hoffman10
concludes, ‘scholars now count it a certainty that the Gospels are compilations
of “traditions” cherished by the early Christians rather than historical
annals’.
The Koran extensively quotes from Pentateuch (called
Taurat after Torah in Hebrew) i.e. the first five books of the Old Testament.
Now the present opinion of the western scholars is that instead of being
written by or revealed to Moses by God, it is a work of four different writers
and edited by a fifth person around 400 BC. Hence the early prophets are
probably not historic figures, but only legends.11
We have already seen that the same applies to Jesus.
It is even doubted that they existed at all. Now the question arises
that if the Biblical Prophets and their history is itself doubtful, what
veracity does the Koran have as an eternal truth revealed by God himself,
considering the fact that the Koran too acknowledges the Old Testament to be an
intrinsic part of the history of Islam.
The Last
Prophet
A group of scholars, Cook, Crone and Hinds12
continuing the work of Wansbrough took an even more radical stand. They
regarded the entire traditional Islamic history down at least to the time of
Abd al Malik (685-705 AD) as a later fabrication. As a counter check, they
studied the contemporary, neighbouring non-Muslim sources like the Greek,
Syrian and Armenian. A totally unexpected picture emerged, as a result. The
only facts they could confirm were that a merchant called Muhammad existed,
that something significant happened to him in 622 (the year of Hijra), and that
Abraham was central to his teachings. But there is no mention of Mecca, no
indication that Muhammad’s career unfolded in inner Arabia and no reference to
the Koran until the last years of the seventh century. Also, the Muslims prayed
in a direction much further north than Mecca; hence their sanctuary could not
have been in Mecca. Also when the first Koranic quotations appeared on coins
and inscriptions towards the end of the seventh century, they showed divergence
from the canonical texts. The earliest Greek source speaks of Muhammad being
alive in 634 AD, two years after his death as per the accepted version of
Islamic traditions. An Armenian chronicler of the 660s describes
Muhammad as establishing a community which comprised both Arabs and Jews with
the aim of conquering Palestine. The break with the Jews is placed
immediately after the Arab conquest of Jerusalem. The oldest Greek source makes
the sensational statement that the prophet who had appeared among the Arabs
(Saracens) was proclaiming the coming of the (Jewish) messiah, and speaks of
the Jews who mix with the Arabs, and the danger to life and limb by falling
into the hands of these Jews and Arabs.
On the basis of available non Muslim evidence, Cook
and Crone13 give a new account of the rise of Islam. Muhammad told
his Arab followers that as descendants of Abraham through his first son,
Ishmael they too had a claim to the land God had promised to Abraham and his
seed. His message appeared as Judaic messianism which lead to intimacy with
Jews and marked hostility towards Christians. The Arabs soon quarreled with the
Jews and their attitude softened towards Christians. But they yet had to
develop a religious identity and religious structures. Here they were
influenced by Samaritan philosophy. The latter were an offshoot of the Jews but
they had a separate identity. They only accepted Pentateuch, the first five
books of the Old Testament and had a high regard for Moses. Under their
influence, the Arabs proceeded to pattern their faith after Moses as follows
Moses
Exodus
Pentateuch Mt. Sinai
Shechem
Muhammad
Hijra
Koran Mt.
Hira Mecca
Evidence Of
Fabrication
1. There is no reference to Mecca in early non- Muslim
references. Mecca was supposed to be a very flourishing trading centre as it
was on the trade route from South to North Arabia (i.e. from India to Europe)
when Muhammad was born, but Crone has shown that geographically it does not
fall on this natural trade route. In fact, the alignment of early mosques and
literary evidence of Christian sources, suggests that the direction in which
the early Muslims prayed was northwest Arabia. Mecca was chosen as a Muslim
sanctuary much later in order to relocate their history within Arabia, to
complete their break with Judaism and finally to establish their separate
religious identity.
2. According to the traditions, Koran had many
versions and Uthman destroyed all but one. Similarly Hajja (661-714 AD), the governor
of Iraq, had collected and destroyed all the writings of the early Muslims.
3. The Koran is strikingly lacking in overall
structure. It appears to be a product of hasty and imperfect editing of
materials from a plurality of traditions.
4. Many traditions in the Hadith appear to have
been invented to explain the presence of some passages in Koran. Seemingly
precise data seems to have been cooked up to provide authenticity. Thus
the early historian, lbn Ishaq (d. 768) was vague about many events, whereas
Waqidi (d. 823) gave precise dates and other details for the same events!
If so much spurious information had accumulated in two generations, it is hard
to avoid the conclusion that even more must have accumulated in the three
generations between the Prophet and Ibn Ishaq.
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Sangh Pariwar, Ed. Sits Ram Goel, Voice Of India, New Delhi, 1997
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inquiry, Humphreys, R. S., Princeton, 1991
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