Muhammad's Mission

Religion, Politics, and Power at the Birth of Islam

Tilman Nagel, Joseph Spoerl

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110675078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Combining vast erudition with a refusal to bow before the political pressures of the day, Muhammad's Mission: Religion, Politics, and Power at the Birth of Islam by Professor Tilman Nagel, one of the world's leading authorities on Islam, is an introduction to three inseparable topics: the life of Muhammad (570-632 CE), the composition of the Koran, and the birth of Islam. While accessible to a general audience, it will also be of great interest to specialists, since it is the first English translation of Professor Nagel's attempt to summarize a lifetime of research on these topics. The Introduction, Chapters 1-2, and Appendix 1 provide essential historical background on the Arab tribal system and Muhammad's position within that system; the political situation in pre-Islamic Arabia; the history of Mecca; and pre-Islamic Arabian religions. Chapters 3-5 cover the beginnings of the revelations that Muhammad claimed to be receiving from Allah, paying special attention to the influence on Muhammad of the hanifs, a group of pre-Islamic pagan monotheists attested in the earliest Islamic sources. The hanifs claimed to trace their religion back to the putative original monotheism of Abraham, from which they claimed Jews and Christians had deviated by, among other things, abandoning animal sacrifice. Chapter 6 explains how Muhammad's religious message included a thinly-veiled claim to have the right to political power over Mecca, a claim that exacerbated tensions with his own clan and led eventually to his expulsion from Mecca, as recounted in Chapter 7. Chapters 8-10 describe the impact of the hijra on the evolution of Islam. Seeing himself as the true heir to Abraham and the prophets who followed him, Muhammad would demand allegiance from Jews and Christians, as recounted in Sura 2 and other Medinan suras. He would initiate a war against Mecca, not in self-defense, but in order to gain control over the Kaaba, the central hanif shrine and the new qibla or direction of prayer for the Muslims. The Muslim victory at the Battle of Badr in 624 would help to shape a new ideal of a militarized religiosity in which those who waged war under Muhammad's command would attain the rank of "true believers, " while those converts who refused to make hijra and to fight for Muhammad were relegated to the lower rank of "mere Muslims, " as Suras 8 and 49 make clear. Muhammad's war against Mecca alienated many of his Medinan followers, the ansar. The refusal of the Jews to convert to Islam, combined with the close connection of the Jews to the ansar, led Muhammad to make war on the Jews as well as the Meccans. The surrender of Mecca in 630 (Chapter 11) did not lead to the end of war, for the aggressiveness and military success of Muhammad's movement had made it attractive to a slew of new converts whose desire for booty had to be placated. Sura 9, promulgated near the end of Muhammad's life, served as a broad declaration of war against polytheists, Jews, and Christians. Chapter 12 describes the evolution of Islam late in Muhammad's life into a "religious warriors' movement" that sought to extend the rule of Islam over the entire inhabited world. Chapter 13 covers the final pilgrimage and death of Muhammad, while Chapters 14-20 describe the development of Islamic dogma surrounding the figure of Muhammad and its implications for politics in the Islamic world and interfaith relations with non-Muslims up till the present day. The book concludes with appendices in which Nagel summarizes the state of scholarship regarding the life of Muhammad (Appendix 2) and the tensions between competing varieties of Muslim recollection of Muhammad (Appendix 3). Muhammad's Mission: Religion, Politics, and Power at the Birth of Islam is an erudite and authoritative guide to events of world-historical importance by a scholar who has spent a lifetime mastering the primary sources documenting the birth of Islam.

Chapter 1: Mecca

That the Quraysh may bring together, may bring together the caravan journey of the winter and the summer, for this they shall worship the lord of this house, who gives them nourishment against hunger and security before that which they fear! (Sura 106)

Islam, a “Religion of the Desert”?

In the clear nights of the desert, undisturbed by the affairs of the day, the starry heavens make an overwhelming impression, and the human observer is overcome by feelings of awe before the powerful One. How great, how sublime is He, whose work proclaims itself at such moments in all of its incomprehensibility! He is so great and so sublime that any comparison of His nature with earthly categories, within which human standards are necessarily imprisoned, is totally forbidden. “Allahu akbar, Allah is incomparably great:” this insight grips the night-time observer with irresistible force. “Allahu akbar!” – the greatest doctrinal truth of Islam, indeed the core of this faith, animates every dogmatic speculation and eludes any [critical] reflection. “Islam” is the experience of the smallness of anything earthly before the One, and nowhere is this experience more compelling than in the desert at night: Islam is the religion of the desert. One often reads, and even more often hears, this idea or something like it, above all from civilization-weary intellectuals in whose fantasy the desert is a place of unblemished purity and crystal-clear vision unobscured by any human works. The Creator and Preserver of the universe, and the nullity of the human being – a chasm whose depth cannot be plumbed with human concepts but can only be acknowledged with deep awe and reverence.

The glorification of the desert and its dwellers, the Bedouins, to whom one ascribed a character unspoiled by the comforts of civilization, began already in the ninth century in the metropolitan centers of the still-young Islamic empire. It made its way to the educated classes of Europe in the Romantic era and implanted in them the prejudice that the “desert religion” of Islam is dogma-free religiosity in itself, with which all of humanity can agree. No one expressed this idea, which converts today are fond of citing to justify their conversion, more movingly than Goethe: Abraham long ago acknowledged “the Lord of the stars”; “…Moses in the distant desert / became great through the One … And so must the law appear / that Muhammad imposed; only through the concept of the One / did he conquer the world,” he waxes enthusiastic in a poem found in the posthumous portion of his West-eastern Divan. No wonder a zealous, recently converted Muslim has declared Goethe in a fatwa to be a fellow Muslim!¹

In any case, Muhammad’s allegedly unmediated experience of God is also an indubitable fact for the vast majority of Muslims, who know nothing of European literature and just as little of the polemics of their new Western co-religionists. We will discover the reasons for this later. By directing our attention now to the historical record, we will quickly see that Islam is nothing less than a desert or Bedouin-religion. Far from emerging out of a civilizational no-mans-land, it shows itself as being connected in many ways with the religious and secular history of the Near East.

Mecca: A Place with No Secure Basis for Life

Sura 106, one of the earliest sections of the Koran, gives information on the living conditions that form the background for Muhammad’s actions. Allah, the lord of the Kaaba, deserves thanks and reverence for ensuring the security of the Quraysh, Muhammad’s tribe, and for protecting them from hunger. In the Koran, Muhammad repeatedly refers to the precarious situation of Mecca, the dependence of its residents on the importation of foodstuffs. The Meccans object to Muhammad’s demand that they comply with his message: “If we follow you with the correct guidance, then we will be torn from our home!” He replies with soothing words from Allah: “Have we not guided them to a secure sanctuary, to which through our action fruits of every sort are brought as nourishment?” (Sura 28: 57). Shortly before his flight [from Mecca] in 622, Muhammad threatened his fellow Meccans: “God shows you a parable: There is a town that lived in complete security and drew its provisions abundantly from every place – but it did not thank Allah for his blessings! So Allah let it taste what it is like when hunger and fear overpower it” (Sura 16: 112). Moreover, for Muhammad it is absolutely clear that the Meccans owe their unusual position to the prayers that Abraham once addressed to Allah: “Our Lord, I have settled some of my descendants in a valley without cultivation near your holy house! Our Lord, they shall carry out the ritual prayer! Incline the hearts of some people towards them and nourish them with fruits! They will hopefully thank you for that” (Sura 14: 37).

What these Koran verses tell us is clarified and expanded by traditions about the market and pilgrimage customs on the Arabian Peninsula. In pre-Islamic times several localities competed for the favor of merchants and pilgrims. Commerce and religious cult in many ways went hand in hand. Both could be carried out in a tribal society only if unwritten rules were observed. If the pilgrims and merchants were to get to their destinations, they had to be able to travel through the territories of foreign tribes unmolested. At specific times of the year, in the relevant regions, feuds could not be pursued; escorts were organized [to guarantee safe-passage]. A complicated, easily disturbed framework of reciprocal obligations between the tribe on whose territory the pilgrimage site or market was located and the others, without whose agreement caravan traffic would have been impossible, determined the ancient Arab “domestic politics.” The order guaranteed by these means was of course highly unstable; rash actions by individuals, committed in the thoughtless pursuit of material interests or to restore damaged honor, constantly threatened it. In addition, the attempts by the Byzantines and Sassanids² to increase their influence in Arabia by using the ambition of a few clan leaders had a destabilizing effect.

A tradition recorded in early Islamic times gives us information about the caravan traffic in ancient Arabia that was based on the solar calendar. In the northern part of the [Arabian] Peninsula, the market of Dumat al-Jandal fell in the third month of the old Arab calendar year, which, with twelve months, each of which was measured from new moon to new moon, and comprising 365¼ days, roughly agreed with the solar year. A few tribes whose territory lay in the vicinity were customarily responsible for the safety of visitors during the relevant days. Merchants who travelled from the Hijaz or Yemen trusted themselves to one of the escorts organized by the Quraysh, which guided them through the territory of the Mudar Arabs; the Quraysh regarded themselves to be the most excellent of the descendants of a man named Mudar, whom they declared at least in Muhammad’s time to be the most noble of the offspring of Ishmael. We will have more detailed things to say about this later. Dumat al-Jandal itself, as long as the market was underway, stood under the control of a so-called “king,” who belonged either to the princely house of the Ghassanids, who ruled in what is today Jordan, or to the south-Arabian tribe of the Kindites. The latter had attempted in vain in the sixth century to bring all the tribes of the peninsula under their rule, which amounted no more and no less to attempting finally to put an end to the problem of feuding, which disturbed the social order and made caravan commerce extraordinarily difficult. The “king” had the right to put his goods up for sale first and to collect a tithe of all the other commercial goods. Markets operated from the sixth to the eighth months in a few coastal localities on the Persian Gulf. The Sassanids, to whom Arabia for purely geographical reasons could not be a matter of indifference, attempted to install “kings” agreeable to themselves; for example in al-Musaqqar in the region known today as al-Ahsa’ [they installed as ruler] a member of the Banu Tamim. – We shall encounter this tribe again in connection with the Quraysh and Muhammad. – There was no “king” in as-Sihr on the Indian Ocean; thus there was no tithe to pay, but instead it was necessary to pay for an escort. In Yemen, which in Muhammad’s lifetime was in part ruled by a Sassanid expeditionary force, one did have to pay the tithe, but was spared the expense of hiring an escort. Finally, at the beginning of the eleventh month the market was open for business in ‘Ukaz north of al-Ta’if; at the beginning of the twelfth month one set out for the marketplace of Du Magaz, then travelled from there a short time later to Mecca to complete the pilgrimage rites there and at a few other places in the immediate vicinity.

This somewhat idealized depiction of the ancient Arab market practices, which describes conditions at the end of the sixth century, allows us to understand why Muhammad exhorts his tribe to give appropriate thanks to the “Lord of this house.” The Quraysh owed their survival to their successful participation in this venerable but precarious political framework, which in addition was repeatedly exposed to tensions caused by interventions by the two great powers with an interest in Arabia – Sassanid Iran and the Byzantine Empire. The sources assure us that the Meccans were no one’s subjects; but that does not mean they were spared attempts to exert influence [over them.] On the contrary, the rivalry between the two great powers sowed division between the Quraysh clans, and [this rivalry] was one of the established facts that affected the life of Muhammad, leaving traces in his preaching, as we shall see. First, however, we must keep our focus on pre-Muhammadan Mecca and review what the sources tell us about the efforts by the Quraysh to ward off “hunger and fear.”

Settlement on Holy Ground

Tradition tells us that, five generations before Muhammad, several clans of the tribe of Quraysh, led by a certain Qusayy, settled in the sacred territory surrounding the Kaaba. The other pilgrimage sites of Arabia that we know of were not inhabited places. If necessary a few custodians were permanently present. But, we are told, Qusayy had stone lodgings erected directly adjacent to the Kaaba, a violation of tradition. Allah, the divinity who was worshipped beside others at the sanctuary, became the special protector of the Quraysh, who called themselves “Allah’s people.” The pilgrims who completed the ritual circumambulation of the shrine understood themselves to be the guests [of the Quraysh] with the right to claim protection from them. It is impossible to say whether these ideas were actually presented by the Quraysh at the time of their usurpation of the shrine – for that is what it was – or whether they were conceived only later to justify this transgression of the customary practice. In any case, in the lifetime of Muhammad, this was considered to be the truth, as the Koran verses presented above make clear. Moreover, people believed at the time that there was a special relationship between the Kaaba and Jerusalem; one prayed standing before the southern wall of the Kaaba facing north, in the direction of Jerusalem. One of the threatening speeches in the Koran against the Quraysh can only be interpreted in one way, if the Quraysh were convinced of their connection to Jerusalem. Muhammad places the relevant words in the mouth of Moses: Twice, Allah has decreed, would the Israelites transgress against him, the creator; the first time is in the past, [when] they were driven from their homes, but with Allah’s help, were allowed to return. If “you,” the Quraysh, “do good, you do good for yourselves,” Muhammad continues; otherwise enemies will “enter the place, as they did the first time” and “destroy completely what they have seized” (Sura 17: 7). This proclamation could only make an impression on the Quraysh if they referred this second destruction to Mecca. We will encounter again much later this idea that the Kaaba, allegedly founded by Abraham, is a sort of branch establishment of Jerusalem. We note in passing that the Byzantine church historian Sozomen, who came from the vicinity of Gaza and wrote in the fifth century, reports of pilgrimages to the tomb of Abraham in Hebron; Arab pagans as well as Jews and Christians participated in these pilgrimages, the Arab pagans bringing sacrificial animals and abstaining from sexual intercourse during the festival days – customs that one encounters again in Mecca. Sozomen also notes that the Emperor Constantine (r. 306 – 337) put an end to the veneration of Abraham in Hebron due to its unchristian character. Qusayy himself, to return to him, spent the first part of his life in the region of Tabuk, which lies in the Arab regions south of modern-day Jordan that formed the border zone between the Hijaz and the Byzantine Empire. Qusayy’s father Kilab, whose genealogy is traced in a direct line back to Ishmael, died shortly after the boy’s birth; his mother then entered a marriage with a man from the tribal federation of the Quda’a, which lived in the same region. As a young man Qusayy made his way to the Hijaz, where he married into the clan that at that time was in charge of the cult surrounding the Kaaba. This clan belonged to the tribe of the Khuza’a, whose genealogy had no connection to Mudar and who therefore could claim no descent from Ishmael. “As the sons (of Qusayy) increased, their wealth grew and their reputation rose, his (father-in-law) died. Now Qusayy saw that he (due to his descent from Ishmael) had a greater right to the Kaaba and Mecca than the Khuza’a and (their allies) the Banu Bakr (b. ‘Abd Manat b. Kinana), [he saw] namely that the Quraysh represented the branch of the purest descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham.” Qusayy gathered men from his tribe, persuaded a few others to join them, and occupied the Kaaba, but to hold it, he had to take up permanent residence in the sacred zone surrounding the shrine, in which the use of weapons is forbidden. His precarious position prevented him from joining in the customary pilgrimage practice of traveling out of town to the locale of ‘Arafat after completing the rites at the Kaaba. Qusayy rationalized this unusual practice by asserting that [he and his clan] were “Allah’s people” and did not worship other deities.

In Muhammad’s day, the Meccans connected a number of further distinctive aspects of their daily lives to Qusayy. Thus, he was said to have erected the boundary markers of the sacred territory and the “house of deliberation.” As the Quraysh saw it, in the era of their “founding father,” the Khuza’a had spoiled the true Kaaba cult, which Qusayy was thus justified in taking over. [The Khuza’a] had to forfeit this office. It was a different matter with the ritual activities that we read about outside of Mecca, which remained under the control of the former custodians, but ones who did not belong to the Khuza’a. However, an important part of the rites, the opening of the route from ‘Arafat to Muzdalifa, passed to a clan of the Banu Tamim after the family that had occupied this office died out; the Banu Tamim were an important tribe with many branches, especially in northeastern Arabia. Qusayy was said to have divided control over Mecca’s internal affairs among six offices, which were allowed to be occupied only by his descendants; all other Quraysh clans were excluded from them. At least, this is what we are told, and it is clear that this assertion reflects the clan rivalries that we will consider in the next chapter. Three of these offices relate directly to the pilgrimage, namely the gatekeeper of the Kaaba, the feeding of the pilgrims, and providing them with water. The remaining three can be interpreted as the beginnings of an institutionalized exercise of power: leading the consultative assembly, bearing the war banners, and exercising high command in war.

However, there was one office that was highly important for the orderly unfolding of the pilgrimage and that remained outside the control of the Quraysh, namely, the determination of the leap-month. If one calculates the 12 months of the year precisely according to the phases of the moon, as was customary in pre-Islamic Arabia, then one arrives at a total of only 354 days. But the date of the pilgrimage, as noted above, was linked to the solar year, so at regular intervals a leap-month had to be intercalated [or inserted into the calendar]. The details of this [intercalation] had to be proclaimed each time at the Kaaba. But above all, they had to be spread abroad outside of Mecca, because people had to know when the sacred months began, when it became possible for pilgrims to travel to and from pilgrimage sites without being subjected to attacks by highway robbers. Near the end of his life Muhammad would condemn the leap-month as a remnant of polytheistic darkness (Sura 9: 37). In an Islamized Arabia only the pilgrimage to Mecca remained permissible; if its date according to the lunar calendar shifted through the solar seasons, then the system, sketched above, that had once prevailed across the peninsula would collapse; Mecca would have no competition – assuming it could hold all of Arabia under its power.

On the History of War in Pre-Islamic Mecca

But let us return to pre-Islamic conditions! There were tribes that cared nothing about the sacredness of the Kaaba or the pilgrimage to it; they could be attacked even during the sacred months. The distinction between “sacred” and “profane” thus had the correlative meaning of respecting or failing to respect the Quraysh claims to power and the Meccan cultic praxis that was traced back to Abraham and Ishmael. The tribes that did not participate were called “the profaners”; religion and politics were tightly bound together. To hold their own against “the profaners,” it was necessary to have a military force composed of more than just the Meccan clans. The first attempts to form a sort of protective force are attributed to ‘Abd Manaf, a son of Qusayy. He gained the support of a tribal federation named Ahabis, whose founder was not a Quraysh but was thought to be closely related in his genealogy to the Quraysh. From this time on, the Ahabis formed the core of the Meccan military force, and they also distinguished themselves later in the battles against Muhammad and his followers after they had been driven to Medina. When he took control of Mecca, Qusayy was able to count on the support of Quda’a, the tribe into which his mother had married after she was widowed and in which he had grown up. ‘Abd Manaf lacked such support, so it was a significant advantage for him to be able to enter an alliance with the Ahabis. This secured for him access to Tihama, the coastal plain along the Red Sea, through which important trade routes ran. – Shortly after his arrival in Medina, Muhammad will stake everything on disrupting these routes to the detriment of Mecca. – To the Ahabis belonged two Mudarite clans, which would later be absorbed into the Meccan-Quraysh clan of the Banu Zuhra b. Kilab; furthermore, the Khuza’a clans would play a role in their affairs, the Khuza’a of course being the former lords of the Kaaba. Traditions report that the Quraysh together with the Ahabis strove to impose peace in the Tihama, which they succeeded in doing after lengthy and eventful battles. The names of the Meccan participants show that these events lasted into the youth of Muhammad.

The so-called figar wars also occurred in these decades, battles which, if one follows the common etymology, were caused by violations of the duty to refrain from violence during the sacred months. Thus, the prince of Hira, a vassal of the Sassanids, had hired a leader for the caravan that he wanted to send to the market of ‘Ukaz. A man from the tribal federation of the Qais ‘Ailan, in whose sphere of influence that locality lay, had offered him his services but had been rejected. The spurned man got his revenge. He lay in ambush for the caravan from Hira and killed its leader. Word spread of the atrocity in ‘Ukaz, which was filled with Qaisites, since the pilgrimage was about to begin. Commercial activity came to a halt due to fear of fighting between them and the Quraysh, whose intervention was expected due to the proximity of the Meccan pilgrimage season; it finally was settled that a year hence the Quraysh and the Ahabis would challenge the peace-breakers to combat. Extensive but confused traditions, focusing more on details than on the overarching narrative and thus allowing no clear summary, depict the fighting, which did not end well for the Quraysh. At the end both parties calculated the blood money that was owed and it turned out that the Meccans had to pay considerable sums. Until they had done so, they had to hand over hostages. One of them was ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Mecca
• Chapter 2: The “Year of the Elephant”
• Chapter 3: Purity
• Chapter 4: The “Lord of the Dog Star”
• Chapter 5: The “Satanic Verses”
• Chapter 6: Moses and Pharaoh
• Chapter 7: The Expulsion
• Chapter 8: The Pagan Prophet
• Chapter 9: War against Mecca
• Chapter 10: The Bid for Power
• Chapter 11: The Occupation of Mecca
• Chapter 12: Jihad
• Chapter 13: The Dying Prophet
• Chapter 14: The Return of Muhammad
• Chapter 15: The Roots of “Knowledge”
• Chapter 16: “Knowledge” without History
• Chapter 17: The Eternal Role Model
• Chapter 18: The Dogmatization of the Figure of the Prophet
• Chapter 19: The Birthday of the Prophet
• Chapter 20: The Guarantor of Salvation in This World
• Clarification of a Few Concepts (A Brief Glossary)
• Annotations
• General Index
• Index of Koranic citations