Editor/translator Ibn Warraq (a pen name) wrote in the Preface to this 2000 book, “I have written the introduction to this present anthology, first, with a view to helping nonspecialists familiarize themselves with not only the names of historians… but also as many of the technical and semitechnical terms that they were likely to encounter on reading this volume… Second, I hoped to give sufficient background to put the current debates… about the origins of Islam, in their intellectual context.” (Pg. 9)
In the essay, ‘Origins of Islam: A Critical Look at the Sources,’ Ibn al-Rawandi notes, “The complete unreliability of the Muslim tradition as far as dates are concerned has been demonstrated… The uncertainty of the Muslim historians about Muhammad’s dates is just one indication that it was some time before Muslims were much interested in him at all. As we have seen, the important Islamic concept of Sunna, the right or established way of doing things, began as a generalized idea… It was not until the manufacture of Hadiths (Prophetic traditions) got under way in the second Islamic century that all these vague notions were absorbed and particularized in the detailed … Sunna of the Prophet. Likewise, it was only with the gradual emergence of the legend of Muhammad that places that had for well nigh two centuries gone unmarked and unregarded became places of reverence and honor… It is likely that Muhammad, insofar as he was remembered at all, was remembered chiefly as a political and military leader who brought the Arab tribes together and urged them to conquer in the name of their ancestral deity.” (Pg. 103)
Henri Lammens wrote in ‘The Koran and Tradition: How the Life of Muhammad Was Composed.’ “As for the wives of Muhammad, why does Tradition stop at nine? This figure was certainly exceeded and some passages of the sira speak of twenty-three wives. The choice of nine by the Tradition was, we believe, influenced by a passage in the Koran: ‘Marry two, three, or four wives.’ The sum gives us precisely the figure nine.” (Pg. 175)
In his essay, ‘The Quest for the Historical Muhammad,’ F.E. Peters states, “Quite simply, there is no contemporary and contopological setting against which to read the Koran. For early Islam there is no Josephus to provide a contemporary political context, no apocrypha for a spiritual context, and no Scrolls to illuminate a Palestinian ‘sectarian milieu.’ There is instead chiefly poetry, great masses of it, whose contemporary authenticity is somewhat suspect but that was, nonetheless, ‘the main vehicle of Arab history in the pre-Ilamic and early Islamic periods,’ and that in any event testifies to a quite different culture… The fact is that, despite a great deal of information supplied by later Muslim literary sources, we know pitifully little for sure about the political and economic history of Muhammad’s native city of Mecca or of the religious culture from which he came.” (Pg. 446)
This book will be of great interest to those seeking “critical” reviews of the historical origins of Muhammad and Islam.
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