Origins of Islam

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Islam was created when Muhammad received a revelation from God and was commissioned to bring his faith to the rest of the world. Spurred on by faith in God and divine favor, Arab Muslims conquered much of the known world. At least, that's the traditional account which Muslims believe and which is generally taught in classes on Islam - but just how reliable is it?

According to some recent scholars, it's not very reliable at all. Although a minority in the academic world, there are a few researchers who believe that there are good reasons to think that just about everything contained in the "Traditional Account" is basically wrong. Yet do those reasons include any hard evidence? That's what Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren argue for in their recent book Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State.

Nevo, an archaeologist, and Koren, an information specialist, set aside Muslim textual sources that are not contemporary with the events they describe (which means just about all of them) and instead focus on generally ignored sources: Christian writings of the era, material remains, coin inscriptions, and the inscriptions found at other locations. Taken together, these are treated as a more reliable and consistent source of information about events that occurred during the rise of Islam than Muslim texts which were written two or three hundred years later on.

These sources also present what Nevo and Koren believe to be a very different picture of the rise of Islam. First, the Arab armies did not conquer the eastern provinces of Byzantium in a glorious war because the Byzantine forces had largely withdrawn from the region to focus on more important tasks. Second, the Arabs of the time were not yet Muslim, but rather still pagan. It was not until after moving into formerly Byzantine lands that the rulers adopted a form of monotheism, and it was not until much later that anything approaching "Islam" developed.

Third, Muhammad was not a genuine historical figure; instead, he was created because Arab monotheists needed a religious figure as a focal point of their developing religious faith. Finally, the Qur'an which we have today was not created all at once or even at the time alleged. In reality, the Qur'an is a compilation of many different texts, not finalized until the second century of the Muslim era.

None of this will be accepted by Muslims, whether liberal or conservative, but much of it does corroborate conclusions reached by other scholars on entirely different grounds. Some of the conclusions which Nevo and Koren reach seem rather speculative - not a problem in and of itself, because speculation can often be an important impetus to further research. Nevertheless, there are ideas which they advocate but which are not as well supported as they should be - for example, the state of the Byzantine defenses.

On the other hand, some of their conclusions do appear to follow quite consistently from hard material facts found on physical objects like coins and archaeological sites. If the authors are wrong, which is always a possibility, there remains the fact that this evidence does need to be explained - and the "traditional account" of the growth of Islam does not seem as though it will do the job. If another interpretation and explanation can be devised, that would prove interesting; in the meantime, however, Nevo and Koren's arguments deserve to be taken seriously.