How Islam Began, Fred Donner: UnCommon Core Lecture

uh so welcome back i should say to all of you i presume most of you have been here how many of you actually were in this room for class at some point wow only a few of you you must have had small classes i guess big pardon uh oh i see uh yeah the seats the seats do look newer than the architecture i will say that the architecture is older than we are and the seats are definitely newer than we are uh seatswell are a few places in the middle but uh people will find their way okay well i um i'm glad you're all here and interested in how islam began i'm interested in it too i uh it would be nice if i could tell you exactly how it happened but that's i think beyond anybody's capacity really to do the main reason being that we have a very grave problem of sources when we talk about islam's beginnings in the 7th century as with actually the origins of many religions but certainly in the case of islam even though it was once said that islam sort of started in the full light of history i think reynolds said that i kind of wonder what he'd been smoking the night before when he said that because uh the full light of history doesn't seem to fall on the in the the opening events of the rise of islam uh of course we always associate it with the person of muhammad the prophet of the islamic community and islamic tradition in the seventh century in arabia but we have no documents whatsoever from muhammad or from any of his companions in the original community that he's thought to have founded we have only very sparse references to the early events of the expansion of the islamic community from early non-muslim sources that could be taken as maybe quasi-documentary in quality we have extensive narrations or stories about the origins of islam in the muslim sources mostly in arabic but these are written down at least a couple of hundred years after the events and so there's always the question of you know is this what happened or is this just what the people 200 years later wanted us to think happened and there's a often a great difference there then there's the text of the quran or the holy book of the muslim tradition which many people including myself think is a very early text and might be taken as having quasi-documentary quality but it's not an historical text in the sense of something that's written to explain what happened it's a kind of text of exhortation and pious guidance religious guidance and so on and teasing historical factoids you might say out of this thing is anything but easy and it's really not a very satisfactory source for the historian who wants to sort of figure out as we might say what actually happened so we have a religious tradition that we know a lot about from these later narrative sources but our picture then may not jive well with what with what actually happened historically in the question for the historian like myself is what did actually happen and how much how close can we get to understanding that of course if you go to any encyclopedia or any textbook that talks about the history of islam or the history of the near east you will find a very nice neat picture of what happened what i like to call the traditional origins narrative but it's based on these later sources so we just don't know in what measure still this is a reliable picture for those of you who aren't familiar with it let me sketch out in the briefest possible way the general contours of that origins narrative because whether it's true or not the fact is that within 150 years or so this origins narrative was taken by members of the muslim community as the truth about how their tradition began and so it really shaped the way the islamic tradition evolved over time for many centuries after that right up until our own day so you kind of have to know that story even if it's only just a story and i think there's more to it than just it being a story i think it actually has some basis in reality the question is how much and pardon my cough which goes back to the early islamic period i had a cold uh like a month ago and the cough you know it was five days or whatever but then the cough just doesn't seem to want to go away so it will interrupt me now and then so the traditional origins narrative i guess we can say begins best with the person of muhammad the person who's considered to have been the prophet by the muslim community whose traditional dates are somewhere like born somewhere around say 570 died in 632 the common era and lived in western arabia um in the town of mecca where he was born and then for the last 10 or so years of his life in the city of yathrib or medina which is about 200 miles or so north of mecca according to the traditional narrations this area was a pagan community or a set of pagan communities that is the populations um believed in many gods they had sort of astral gods or gods that were considered to reside in stones uh or represented by forces of the weather and so on was not a monotheistic environment so muhammad grew up in this environment and that at a certain point in his life usually around age 40 it is said he began to receive revelations or seeing and hearing things which he took to be revelations from god uh and the transcription or the transcript of these revolut what happened would he sort of be overcome by the spirit let us say fall on the ground kind of sweating and shaking and when he snapped out of this trance he had uh a passage sort of burned into his memory and he would he could recite it and the recitations then were were soon written down by people and collected and this is what constitutes the text of the quran so in the eyes of muslims the text of the quran is the transcription of the very words of god as revealed to the prophet muhammad so what did he begin to understand from these revelations well what he the main thing he understood was that there weren't many gods there was one god allah which means simply god in arabic so it's kind of a misleading thing when people talk about how muslim muslims worship allah they don't worship god well i mean it's the christians in the arabic speaking world worship allah too because it's simply the word for god and when you look at the quran and you see how this god is defined you realize it's the same god that's being talked about in the old and new testament in hebrew bible in the new testament it is the god that created the world and created mankind and sort of tries to guide us to uh proper behavior and ethical behavior in any case this was the basic revelation from muhammad was that hey you know we all of these uh this pagan picture is wrong there's only one god that creates the world and creates us and gives us life and gives us the bounties that off of which we live as gifts kind of grace of god and that it is our responsibility to recognize god's oneness and to be grateful to god for his bounties to us for giving us life and so on um and that anything other than that is really an affront to god it's the gravest sin shirk as it's called in arabic associating things with god or pretending that something else is in any way equal to god so that was the basic idea this is what the term islam seems to mean means submission to the will of the one god so you submit you decide you know i'm not so important god is more important and i submit myself to his will in my life so it was a a a message of very strict monotheism and it included and of course based in the idea of prophecy that is that a prophet could sort of be in touch somehow with the divine spirit and receive guidance from god it also had several corollaries or subordinate features that go along with the monotheism one was the idea of the importance of piety that is you should live a righteous way of life as following the the laws that god has set down for us as enshrined in the quran or in the torah or in the gospels these are mentioned in the quran as earlier versions of god's revelation for mankind and if he the quran talks about a series of prophets which muhammad was the final one but there were earlier prophets that brought god's word to earlier communities and the muslim community is just seen as kind of the continuation of this process of successive revelations by god to different peoples why is piety important well you want to do what god tells you to do that's just sort of a no-brainer i suppose but also because um there is also the notion of a last judgment the idea is at the end of our life we will die we will go into some kind of i don't know hyperspace or something for a time and then at the end of time all the dead will be raised and brought before god's throne for the final judgment by god and then depending on how we lived our lives we'll either be rewarded by being sent to heaven for the rest of non-time for eternity or we will be sent to hell to be punished for the rest of non-time so that this whole idea of heaven and hell and last judgment is what shall we say gives point to the need to be pious in your life so these are the basic ideas that seem to have been uh preached by the prophet muhammad he encountered a lot of opposition in his home community in mecca for one thing the meccans as many pagan societies tend to be engaged in a lot of uh sort of ancestor worship they uh tended to glorify their ancestors and they they named themselves tribal names that had to do usually with an eponymous ancestor of some kind and there was kind of sanctity associated with your ancestors your grandparents and great grandparents and forefathers and muhammad was saying well these people were pagans they're all burning in hell or they will this is not something that most meccans wanted to hear anyway he became very unpopular at home he had a certain following of course of people who followed his message but he was then made to feel he and his followers made to feel increasingly unwelcome in mecca and so in the year 622 he and his followers undertook what's called in arabic the hijra which essentially means something like migration but it also means a bunch of other things it can mean the settlement of nomads i think but it also can mean sort of taking refuge and he made the hijra then migration to the town of medina or yathrab as it was originally called it becomes known as medina which means city because it was became known as medina city of the prophet and shortened to medina after he and his followers moved there in the year and so this is an important moment because it marks the time when nascent community of followers of muhammad really becomes autonomous in mecca of course they were living within the confines or the context of the meccan polity and the tribal clan affiliations that ran that town in medina the prophet was invited to be kind of an arbiter by the local tribal groups to be an arbiter for their disputes and so he came in kind of as the person who was going to run the town or sort of organize affairs in the town with his followers and so from 622 the hijra you really have the beginning of an autonomous muslim community for the first time and once he arrived there we read in our narrative sources that are the source of our this nice neat picture of islam's origins we read about how the prophet faced some opposition in medina too and overcame that opposition how he consolidated his control over the oasis itself but also over tribal groups that lived in the countryside around um brought them into the sort of community in a new way um and then by the end of his time he was able to actually take over the city of mecca where he'd come from as well and overcome a lot of opposition with the meccans and he was able to overcome that and absorb mecca into this new growing statelet or polity that he was constructing in western arabia after he died in 632 his followers then embarked on a rapid process of expansion which usually called the islamic conquest or the arab conquest i don't much like the latter term i think it emphasizes a kind of national identity quality that wasn't there at the time that's a modern projection but we can call it the islamic conquest perhaps more satisfactorily and this process saw the followers of muhammad spilling out of arabia in organized forces armies we might say or raiding parties that moved into the territory of the two great empires of the day the byzantine or later roman empire in places like egypt and syria and the sasanian or persian empire in iraq and iran defeating those armies in many different battles and occupying increasing parts of their territory ultimately completely overthrowing the sassanian empire and taking away from the byzantine empire very large parts of that empire's territory particularly what we might call geographical syria everything from southern turkey down through modern syria lebanon jordan israel palestine and so on all of that and then from there into egypt and from there across north africa on the sasanian side occupying iraq and then pushing up over the next 40 or 50 years into the iranian highlands all the way across to the fringes of central asia and the borders of afghanistan so within about 50 years or 60 years this new community had somehow exploded and taken over politically a vast part of the globe that had previously belonged to the two empires and there are it's not easy to explain this the success of this rapid expansion process if you go to the muslim sources or ask muslim interpreters of their own history they would say well this is because god was on our side and it proves that you know we were right and okay if you go to historians who look at it in a different way they will struggle to explain how this happened or why it happened they might say well the two empires have been battling each other for centuries and they just finished some major wars and they were kind of weakened and then this sudden new force appeared on the horizon and both of them were too weak to resist it it's not clear actually how it manages to succeed to what measure it has to do with economic issues to measure it has to do with um zeal for a new faith tradition and sort of inspiring people to do things that they wouldn't ordinarily do we don't we still don't know i think a lot about it well in any case whether we know or not this is the in the most sort of cursory kind of sketch the story that you will find in a textbook or in an encyclopedia or entry on how um islam began now one thing you'll notice is that um this movement that we talk about as expanding so rapidly begun by muhammad is called islam always in the textbook you know muhammad comes and he founds islam or begins islam as a new religious confession and this is what the expansion is in the name of that is a scene that islam as a distinct religious confession is there from the very get-go from the first day you might say of muhammad receiving his revelations and in particular that this new faith tradition was very distinct from christianity and judaism with which on the other hand it obviously shares a lot of things if you think about what they have in common you will quickly realize that they have more in common than than they have differences i mean they believe in one god they believe in the idea of prophecy and a revealed holy text that somehow is god's word enshrined in some form in in a written text um they believe in the importance of following god's law as revealed in these texts they believe that there's going to be a last judgment and we're all going to be judged and go to heaven and hell so it's almost like they're variants of the same religious package of ideas when you compare it to say hinduism or buddhism there's really no comparison these three are like three siblings you know christianity of jerusalem's islam and we might include zoroastrianism actually as a close relative also in this package with all these common ideas that they share very different from most other world religions the problem is that when we look into the quran just try and understand a little bit more exactly what is this new religious movement about one of the things is if it's so similar if islam is so similar to these other religious traditions then how can we say that this rapid expansion comes because of the zeal for the new religion all the ideas are already known i mean it wasn't like monotheism or prophecy or revealed sacred text was something new to people in syria or iran or egypt they'd known about this for hundreds of years they were themselves mostly christians or jews or zoroastrians all of whom shared these ideas so what's the big deal with this new faith you know what's a new about it when we go into the quran which i take to be the best evidence for at least the thought world of the early muslim community that is the it's the earliest text i think we have that comes from the community itself where we can say okay these are these are guiding concepts for the community we find some interesting things one thing we notice is that yeah of course the word islam and muslim are found in the quran but the text itself the quran itself does not seem to be addressed to people who call themselves muslims it's addressed to people who call themselves believers now there's some connection between these two words but believers is definitely the the concept of being a believer is what matters uh in the quran it there are something like a thousand different passages in the quran that address themselves to it's oh you who believe using the the verbal form of this word mutmen or just talks about the believers do this and the believers do that the number of times that muslim or islam are referred to are far fewer maybe 60 or 70 by comparison so we have to ask ourselves well what what does it mean then to be a believer if if muhammad was actually starting as i like to say a believer's movement because i think that's what the text tells us it had we have to think of it as what does it mean to be a believer we also see i'll come back to that in a second it's not just the time of the prophet and in the quran that we see this when we start looking at the very sparse actual documentary evidence for this new uh community as it expands outside of arabia into syria into egypt into iraq and so on we start to get 20 30 40 years after the death of the prophet we start to get some real documents we get a few papyri from egypt we get a few coins that the believers themselves have issued and so these are true documentary true pieces of documentation that come from the time and place itself and what do we see well we see some inscriptions that talk about the leader of this community a number of them and he's always referred to as the amir al-mu'min the commander of the believers this they don't call him the commander of the muslims they call him the commander of the believers which confirms in my mind the fact that this community thought of itself as a community of believers that this was the operative concept for them believers not yet muslims exactly and a little later we even find around the 50s of the muslim era so that would be the 670s roughly 40s and 50s 60s and 670s still very early in the life of this new empire or state we begin to find a few papyri that talk about that are dated and then they'll say written in the year 46 min in the jurisdiction of the believers which again sounds like the state saw itself as a community that was erected to somehow impose the values of this new community in terms of judging disputes meaning the believer's jurisdiction so this notion of believer dumb if you will or being a believer's movement i think is really we have to say the sort of basic concept that informs these people's self-conception so who then were these believers what did they believe well again the place to start i think is the quran because we don't really have any place else so we can go to find out for what a definition of a believer is and when we look at it well it says of course the believers should worship god and they should be mindful of god at all times of day and they should do good works of various kinds you should should do this and shouldn't do that and so on this is to be expected um but some verses in the quran make it very clear that some of the so-called peoples of the book of kitab the term usually well clearly means from various passages in the quran it becomes clear that it means christians and jews referred to generally as peoples of the book because they had received their revelations earlier and it makes it clear in some passages that some of the peoples of the book were among the believers or considered among the believers and would attain salvation on the last day now this is a very interesting concept it suggests that the construction our construction of islam as a religion that starts completely different from christianity and judaism is a little bit skewed or maybe a lot skewed at least as it was at the very beginning it looks like at the very beginning what we have is a kind of monotheistic revival movement that could include christians and jews if they were adequately pious in their behavior because they did believe in one god and they did believe in the last day and so they could be included in this movement there is also uh what can i call it an almost document i don't know um there's a text which is found in the later narrative sources the chronicles and so on in several different ones and if different copies of it they're almost identical which is sometimes called the constitution of medina and what it purports to be is a copy of a document drawn up by muhammad with the people of yathrib the people of the city that he moved to at the time of the hijra now this document it's not a document in the proper sense because we don't have the original copy we have a literary transcription of something that's said to be a document now is it a total forgery or not well everybody who looks at this thing including me but including a lot of scholars who are very very skeptical about the reliability of these later sources they look at this transcription and they say this has got to be a transcription of something really old really early because if you were at a later time trying to invent such a document you would never invent it in this way it has too many weird archaisms of language it has too many strange things in it that can't be explained according to the sort of traditional narration of how things developed you know if you were inventing something later on to foist it back and sort of project it back to the origins you would you would never have come up with this so the the general consensus is that this text is in fact something like a transcription or a partial transcript partial transcription of an actual early document that somehow survived and when we look at this thing it's very interesting one of the things we see in it is that it speaks explicitly of muhammad's nascent community in medina as including jewish clans of medina it says there are these jewish communities and they're they are part of the ummah part of the community we are one community apart from other communities but the jews are part of our community so it it this also suggests that there's some way in which this early community of believers included many different kinds of people perhaps uh maybe we might call them a quranic believers people who had been pagans and then who followed the quran uh and so they they get incorporated into it they would be sort of the standard kind of muslims we might say but then there are also included in this community christians and jews perhaps who were adequately righteous or pious in their behavior and who became part of the community as well this of course changes our perception of everything about how this community evolves subsequently because and when we see it expanding rapidly if you think of it as a muslim community expanding at the expense of say jewish and christian communities you know it's us and them and the line is between muslims on the one hand christians jews and others on the other uh well you get a very kind of confrontational picture if you imagine it as a kind of monotheistic revival movement preaching to people who are already in most cases monotheists like jews and christians or quasi-monotheists like zoroastrians and then seeing that some of those monotheists are actually part of your movement it takes kind of the edge off it a little bit if you were for example a christian or a jew in palestine or egypt and these people came preaching to you it wouldn't be necessary for you to give up your faith you could become a believer join the movement and stay who you were you could be a jewish or a christian believer in the believer's movement it was a kind of monotheistic broader broader in definition than the traditional picture would i think allow and when we look at the reports that tell us about the early empire that emerges under the so-called umayyad dynasty starting in 660 the ones who come to run this thing from the early you might appear from 660 to around 700 many different sources make it quite clear that there were lots of christians in particular who were important in the early believers movement once it gets it moves its sort of center of gravity from arabia out to syria the capital becomes well somewhere in syria damascus is often the capital it seems and when we when we look more closely we find that there are lots of christians serving in the military service of this new state in the armies as it expands uh and there are some really important uh high officials of the state advisors to the caliphs as we call them to the emir commander of the believers who are christians you've probably heard of saint john of damascus he was one of them he's considered to be a saint in the christian church but in his earlier years he he was actually what you might call a prime minister for the commander of the believers in damascus so all of this tends to imply that the original believers movement was not so clearly defined as a separate religion distinct from other monotheisms but was rather a monotheistic revival movement emphasizing piety and strict observance of the reveal law this is a again a different picture from what you get in the traditional narrative and also what you get in the textbooks based on the traditional narrative we see interesting um there's other bits of interesting evidence that we can draw on here too there's some archaeological evidence now that's very come to light recently that's quite fascinating um a church not far from jerusalem that was excavated 15 or so years ago and it was rebuilt several times so the first construction is in something like the fifth century and it's rebuilt in the sixth century and it's rebuilt subsequently in about the eighth century early eighth century um so under the umayyad dynasty well of course it has an apps in the east but in the south wall there's a mitch there's a niche mihrab a prayer niche for muslims in this church so the question is what kind of cohabitation is going on what is this building being used for it was a church with you know did was there a muslim as we would say community that was praying towards mecca also meeting in this church were they meeting at the same time with the christians who were praying to the east what is the relationship between we don't know but the fact that you have one building with both of these um features an apps in the east and prairie niche in the south wall is very suggestive there's my early islamic cough again and we also find in the later narrative sources some very suggestive reports that say well of course they couch everything in terms of we the muslims they've already made this change into thinking of themselves as strictly as muslims different from christians and jews they say when the muslims arrived in damascus they took over the church of saint john the big church which is now the umayyad mosque in damascus and they divided it in half and the christians prayed in one half and the muslims sprayed in the other half and there's a similar report about the city of hama i think and maybe a couple of others now we don't know exactly what this means what what kind of memory is this is this some kind of effort to explain or justify the fact that the muslims ultimately took over the church of saint john and made it into the umayyad mosque in damascus which i hope you all go have a chance to see someday when things settle down in syria a little bit it's a wonderful uh monument it's still there but it is very suggestive that there is this um close association of for ritual purposes of you know the muslim prayer hall and the christian prayer hall we might see in the same place we don't know how muslim ritual evolved exactly a lot of the basic muslim rituals are mentioned in the quran but they're not defined or described in the quran it's just bits of them are referred to so we know that muslims prayed in the quran so in muhammad's day they must have prayed and we know that their prayer involved bowings and prostrations because those are mentioned but it doesn't say how many prayers a day you have to do it doesn't say uh exactly how you you do the prayer ritual and it may be that that the way muslim prayer evolved was very heavily influenced by the way christians and jews prayed in the late antique world because certainly christian prayer at least in the late antique period also involved prostrations and and bowing and so on so we don't know uh how this process of ritual crystallization in the earth what becomes the early muslim community took place but the coexistence of these communities uh in this what seems to have been a sort of open um more ecumenical monotheistic revival movement is very suggestive well this expansion of the early community and the early becomes an early state is a case of state expansion and so it was a conquest that involved armies and defeats of others armies as i suggested with defeat of the byzantine and persian armies are recorded both in muslim sources and non-muslim sources but most of the towns and villages of the near east seem to have capitulated peaceably in any case there's no evidence of destruction in the archaeological record to mark this so-called islamic conquest very few exceptions the city of caesarea was besieged and we see ever that's reported to us in our chronicles later muslim chronicles and we do see evidence of of a siege in caesarea and we we can and there's a burning layer and so on when the city finally fell but this is almost unique uh in hardly any other place do we find any trace of a conquest of a forcible change of rulers now it isn't to say there wasn't some force involved if an army camped outside the city you know you might capitulate and the city would stay intact but the fact is that um for archaeologists it's sort of become now um a common place to observe that the islamic conquest is archaeologically kind of invisible you cannot see it in the material record going from layer to layer in the archaeological record it just doesn't show the pottery doesn't change right away there isn't a sudden change of material culture there's no destruction layer to market you don't know which of course makes it much more complicated to date things if you get something from a certain way and you say is this late byzantine or is this really islamic well was pretty hard to know because the culture was the same for 50 years there and you don't know which side of the apparent barrier between pre-islamic and islamic this might fall on there doesn't seem to have been any or don't seem to have been any demands either that people brought into this new state convert to something immediately these christians and jews mostly who lived in these towns were already monotheists so as long as they uh paid their taxes to the new government everything was cool right they didn't have to make any changes there was no need to convert to anything they were already monotheist if you were a pagan then you'd have a hard time because as i said for the believers movement the idea that there was one god and you had to honor that fact or acknowledge that fact was something that they wouldn't compromise on but if you were already a monotheist you were sort of in a sense already saved you're already there so it means that archaeologically the um the record isn't going to show the conversion to islam or the trans fer to islamic rule as we might say the rule by this new state that starts in arabia and then spreads out into the near east when then do we can we really talk about the emergence of islam when does islam really appear for the first time as a distinct religion from the matrix of the believers movement as far as i can tell this happens towards the end of the seventh century say in the 690s or early 700s and it's associated i think especially with the person of the amir menin or commander of the believers or caliph abdul malik who ruled at that time what we see is beginning at this time is an increased emphasis on the importance of the person of muhammad himself as the prophet emphasizing his prophecy which is something that let us say other other believers like christians and jews might not have accepted so readily this would have been a problem for them perhaps so the emphasis on the prophet muhammad and the emphasis on the quran as the key sacred text were the things that are the kind of the hallmarks of a newly crystallizing sense of muslims as a separate religious identity or confession distinct from christianity and judaism and sometime around this time i think there's a kind of redefinition of the leading cadres of this community who were of arabian origin and they began to say well you know these christians and jews who are believers i'm not sure they're really believers you know now it's not clear that they they have some funny ideas about jesus being god it's very hard for us to accept this um and so i think what happens is that it's somewhere around this time there's a kind of redefinition of the core group in the community as muslims that defines the christians and the jews of the earlier movement out of the movement so now they're they're no longer part of the movement and islam as we can call it becomes a separate religious confession and i think they begin to focus on the term islam at this time also as a way of of finding a term that's in the quran that is distinctive for them the people who follow the quran they start downplaying this term believer they say well it means the same thing as muslim and they don't they don't date anything any longer using this old formula uh with the jurisdiction of the believers they sort of bury that terminology and they start talking about this well these are years of the hijra years from the time of muhammad hidra or migration that marks the beginning of our community so they they start renaming or relabeling things practices and um concepts that they had developed in the first hundred years or so in order to make them look distinct from christianity and judaism and other religious traditions and to give themselves a kind of new coherence as a new religious community so this shift from a believer's movement to islam is i think a really important thing that takes place around the year 700 it's very hard to know and it's also i think it was probably led by official decrees and official policies we see it for example in the dome of the rock constructed by abdul malik and his advisors on the temple mount in jerusalem that beautiful golden building that you know is there and it has inside it mosaics with inscriptional texts which are selections of passages from the quran and they've selected the passages from the quran that emphasize the fact that the trinity is is not acceptable uh so this sort of seems to be drawing a line between the new sort of newly discovered muslims and muslims who have sort of really gotten a new sense of themselves and christians who believe in a trinitarian concept which from the point of view of muslims how can three be one you know this is not not something that they accept on the other hand there's it's also possible that this shift from believers to muslims was something that was not entirely led by official policy from the top down and trickled down but where the official policy was responding to a kind of uh more popular set of changes in popular opinion that we're realizing that maybe among christians and jews these arabian believers really aren't like us and they're somehow different so in any case whether it was from the bottom up or top down or simultaneously both we start to see this process of sort of differentiation whereby islam and muslims can really identify themselves as a distinct community even though they had begun in a much more ecumenical kind of movement that had a lot involved christians and jews let's say in the original foundational uh efforts well of course all of this means that when today or any period in the past uh we look at um what is islam how is it constructed and people always want to go back to the beginnings to see what something is about right well if you go back to the beginnings as far as i can tell you're going to find something really quite different and it opens all kinds of it creates problems sometimes for people in interpretive terms especially for muslims but it also opens up all kinds of opportunities i think of creative reinterpretation of sort of how muslims should behave today of course as you probably know one of the things about islam today and really ever since the time of the prophet muhammad is that there's no single authoritative source for what muslim doctrine should be it's not like the catholic church where you know the pope makes a decree or an insulical or something and that's that's doctrine and catholics have to follow it there's no such thing in islam there's no uh pope in the islamic tradition there are lots of very learned people historically were lots of different people who were very learned but of course they disagreed about all kinds of things and so you had different opinions sort of the battle of intellectuals in the community and whichever one seemed to be the most persuasive or important was the one that held sway but different ones were always uh favored in different places so there's no single islam today and nor has there been for centuries and so a reinterpretation of the origins of course then provides even more scope for all kinds of flexible new possibilities for how muslims might engage with the world around them today i think i've talked long enough and if you have any questions we can entertain them thank you you

Channel: The University of Chicago

Views: 479,650

Rating: 4.3326221 out of 5

Keywords: fred donner islam, uncommon core how islam began, fred donner, fred donner university of chicago, fred donner uchicago, fred donner the early islamic conquests, how islam began, fred m donner, the origins of islam, the origin of islam, fred donner narratives of islamic origins, islam origin, origins of islam, origin of islam, tom holland islam, how islam started, how did islam begin, university of chicago, uchicago, islam lecture

Id: 5RFK5u5lkhA

Length: 42min 52sec (2572 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

ASTAGFIRRALLAH IM NOT GONNA WATCH!!! ALLAH KNOWS BEST WHY IS THIS WHITE TRASH TALKING ABOUT MY RELIGION HE IS NOT ARAB AND HAVENT FUCKED A GOAT IN HIS LIFE ALLAHUACBAR KILL THE JEW TRYING TO INSULT MY PEACEFUL RELIGION!