Pace Cook and Crone, the implications of their theses are indeed “devastating“. Any research that casts doubt on the traditional Muslim account of the Koran, the Rise of Islam and the life of Muhammad is totally unacceptable to Muslims. The two final letters reveal the enormous gulf between the attitudes to research in Islam and Christianity. The pen-ultimater letter writer, Robin Oakley-Hill, remarked that, “It is hardly fair to characterise western Koran scholarship as neo-colonial given that western academics subject Christianity to far more rigorous- frequently destructive-examination….Perhaps Islam could do with a [Pope] John XXIII and some liberation theology“.
Oakley-Hill’s point had been made by John Wansbrough himself over thirty years earlier:
“As a document susceptible of analysis by the instruments and techniques if Biblical criticism [the Koran] is virtually unknown. The doctrinal obstacles that have traditionally impeded such investigation are, on the other hand, very well known. Not merely dogmas such as those defining scripture as the uncreated Word of God and acknowledging its formal and substantive inimitability, but also the entire corpus of Islamic historiography, by providing a more or less coherent and plausible report of the circumstances of the Quranic revelation, have discouraged examination of the document as representative of a traditional literary type.“2
Little seems to have changed nineteen years later, for Andrew Rippin lamented:
“. . . I have often encountered individuals who come to the study of Islam with a background in the historical study of the Hebrew Bible or early Christianity, and who express surprise at the lack of critical thought that appears in introductory textbooks on Islam. The notion that ‘Islam was born in the clear light of history’ still seems to be assumed by a great many writers of such texts. While the need to reconcile varying historical traditions is generally recognized, usually this seems to pose no greater problem to the authors than having to determine
‘what makes sense’ in a given situation. To students acquainted with approaches such as source criticism, oral formulaic composition, literary analysis and structuralism, all quite commonly employed in the study of Judaism and Christianity, such naive historical study seems to suggest that Islam is being approached with less than academic candour.“3
The last letter to the Editor of the New Statesman was from a Christian clergyman, and clearly reveals that Christianity has absorbed the lessons not only of the Enlightenment, but Biblical Criticism. The Reverend Richard Craig wrote,
“In spite of huge advances in biblical scholarship, Ann Widdicombe [a Conservative Member of the British Parliament] can still assert in her review of [the book] Mary: The Unauthorized Biography, that St.John’s Gospel is an eyewitness account of the life of Christ. Most scholars reject such a view. Martin Bright’s report is welcome evidence that scholarly investigation of the origins of Islam is beginning the long and painful path trodden by Christian theologians‘ inquiry into our sacred texts. Widdicombe’s acceptance of the literalist view of the gospels is till widely held by many sitting in church pews, even though the clergy have been taught otherwise for 50 years or more“.
Cook, in his letter, also claims that the Koranic fragments from the Yemen do not “prove“ a great deal. But they do. As Gerd Puin told Toby Lester, “So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God’s unaltered word. They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana’a‘ fragments will help us to do this.“ Andrew Rippin was also enthusiastic: “The impact of the Yemeni manuscripts is still to be felt. Their variant readings and verse orders are all very significant. Everybody agrees on that. These manuscripts say that the early history of the Koranic text is much more of an open question than many have suspected: the text was less stable, and therefore had less authority, than has always been claimed.“4
If what Puin and Rippin say is correct, then the consequences are again “devastating“, a fact recognized by R. Stephen Humphreys, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who argued,
“To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community. The Koran is the charter for the community, the document that called it into existence. And ideally-though obviously not always in reality-Islamic history has been the effort to pursue and work out the commandments of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of fourteen centuries is effectively meaningless.“5
In brief, pace Cook and Crone, historians do try to establish what really happened and their research has profound implications for the believer and the religion’s own traditional view of itself. The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are particularly vulnerable to the historical sciences, since the validity of their respective dogmas are closely predicated on or anchored in putatively historical events, in a way that Buddhism, for example, is not. The historical Buddha, that is if he is indeed a historical figure, only said “follow my argument“, and if his life proved to be a pious legend, his argument would still remain, and “Buddhism“ would not be shaken in its foundations. As Van Harvey said in his classic The Historian and the Believer, the deontology, as the French would say, of the historian, that is to say the moral obligation of the historian as historian and hence the critical historical method
“has the profoundest of implications for religious belief in general and Christian belief in particular“.6
I lean heavily on Van Harvey’s The Historian and the Believer — which incidentally by a happy coincidence is dedicated to Rudolf Bultmann — in what follows.
Ernst Troeltsch [1865 -1923], the German Protestant theologian who wrote on the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history, spent a large part of his life trying to grapple with the significance of the historical-critical method, whose development he considered „one of the great advances in human thought; indeed, that it presupposed a revolution in the consciousness of Western man“.7
The historian’s will-to truth guided his aim which was nothing less than discovering what really happened. With objectivity, the historian was able to discover that much of what had been previously accepted as fact was in reality fiction, that many long-trusted witnesses were actually credulous spinners of tales and legends. The essential questions kept in mind by the skeptical historian were “whether or not something actually happened; whether it happened in the way it is told or in some other way“.8 Troeltsch argued that the presuppositions of the critical historical method themselves were basically incompatible with traditional Christian faith, based on a supernaturalistic metaphysics. He believed that this incompatibility was clearly evident in the domain of Biblical criticism. The assumptions on which the method rested were irreconcilable with traditional belief. While the theologian regards the Scriptures as supernaturally inspired, the historian must assume that the Bible (or, of course, the Koran, though Troeltsch himself kept to Christianity) is intelligible only in terms of its historical context and is subject to the same principles of interpretation and criticism that are applied to other ancient literature. Or, they must be understood, as Maxime Rodinson expressed it in the Islamic context, by “the normal mechanisms of human history“. Explanations in terms of the supernatural intervention of God will only act as a hindrance to true historical understanding. For the skeptical historian all historical claims have only a greater or lesser degree of probability.
Troeltsch was unflinching in facing up to the consquences of the critical historical method. He wrote,
“Once the historical method is applied to Biblical science and church history, it is a leaven that alters everything and, finally, bursts apart the entire structure of theological methods employed until present“.
2 John Wansbrough, Quranic Studies (Oxford, 1977), p. ix.
3 Andrew Rippin, Muslims. Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, Vol. 1:The Formative Period (London, 1991), p. ix.
4 Toby Lester, What is the Koran? in What the Koran Really Says, ed. Ibn Warraq, Amherst: Prometheus Books. 2002, pp. 109-110
5 Ibid.,p.110.
6 Van Harvey. The Historian and the Believer. Toronto, Ontario: The Macmillan Company, 1966, p.xii
7 Van Harvey. Op.cit., pp.3-4.
Kepha says
How would “historicizing” Islamic beginnings delegitimize Islam (assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Qur’an wasn’t full of falsehoods)?
The Bible gives historical contexts for the giving of both the Torah and the NT. The canon itself gives the contexts into which the writing prophets spoke. Biblical theology is an exercise in historical memory.
I’ll admit that I reject what the early 20th century so casually called “the assured results of scientific criticism”–debunked and abandoned time and time again by scholars launched from its foundations (for example, Harnack’s and Ramsay’s very thorough debunking of the older Tuebingen school). If my pedagogical duties permitted the time, I could write a couple of books on why I think this way.
As for Cook and Crone, I find the Hagarism thesis intriguing, but unpersuasive. I’ve simply seen too many modern cults of personality spring up around far lesser men to doubt the historicity of the “founders of the Great religions”, even if as a Christian I see only my own religion as true, and the others, at best, as witnesses that we can’t escape living in God’s world, no matter how we might try.
Muhammad ibn Abdallah was a real Hejazi of the late 6th -early 7th century. I do not doubt that he said a number of things he intended to be seen as prophecy, and that these things he said got collected by his successors and put in the Qur’an and Hadith. But this does not mean that I believe the religion contained in these sources to be true.
I am not a Buddhist, but I believe in the historicity of Sakhyamuni Gautama. I am not a Daoist, but I believe in the historicity of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi. I am not a Muslim, but I accept the historicity of Muhammad.
This being said, I appreciate Mr. Spencer’s exposure of some dangerous biases in the current scholarly consenses.