Islam’s Origins: Myth and Material Evidence

good evening I'm Terry McCarthy I'm the president the Academy delighted you could come and join us tonight for the Nina Maria garrison lecture which is made possible by Nina Fon melts on one of our great supporters and our speaker tonight Fred Donner is at the University of Chicago and I promise not to say anything more about the vortex beyond just reminding you that in Barney Berlin we are now 40 degrees warmer than where Fred normally works so Fred is quite happy to be with us here for this semester as you might imagine he's the Peter beer it's my professor of Near Eastern history at the University of Chicago he got his PhD from Princeton and he taught me loose in history at Yale before going to the Windy City he's written a bunch of books including the early Islamic conquests narratives of Islamic origins and more recently Muhammad and the believers which created quite a lot of attention as I understand and while he's here he's going to be examining Berlin's Arabic papyrus collection and Berlin has a very large Arabic papyrus collection a lot of it hasn't actually been examined as we understand and we actually have here this papyrus is about four thousand years old so when we pass it around later please be very very careful Fred we'll explain how that all works and and then afterwards we'll have a little chat and then we'll open it up to questions and but I give you Fred Donner Thank You Terry very much for your kind words I think you misspoke oh I think it's four thousand minutes old we will hand it around later and before I go further before I really start I'd like to thank Terry and the American Academy in Berlin for allowing me to be here this semester it's really an honor and a pleasure to be here a wonderful place you know I met earlier today with one of the many wonderful staff members of the Academy Jessica for Veda about some routine paperwork that we all have to take care of with her and at the end characteristically she asked well how are you getting settled in are you are you enjoying it here is everything okay for you and I I told her well yeah I love it here is it's sort of like going to heaven without the inconvenience of having to die first [Music] so thank the Academy I thank the Academy I'm sure all my colleagues feel the same way who are here like me as fellows and I thank all of you for coming tonight and I hope you are avid and generous supporters of the Academy because it certainly is a worthwhile organization so my topic tonight is Islam's origins myth and material evidence as most of you surely know there has long been a standard or traditional view of how Islam began in reference to this standard view the great French historian anestine all said in the 19th century that Islam was quote born in the full light of history and quote it's not really a quote because it would have been in French but it's close but since that time it has become ever clearer that what I call the traditional is like origins narrative which almost everyone accepted with considerable confidence is far less secure than we once thought first however I think I need to sketch very quickly the outlines of this traditional view of how Islam began for those of you who are not familiar with it and I know there are many people in the audience many of you are my colleagues from the universitat or elsewhere and are very familiar with it so citrus news along for about eight or nine minutes I'll get through this so at the center of this traditional narrative is the person of Muhammad who is recognized by Muslim tradition as the Prophet who brought God's revelation to his followers he's the traditional death date for Muhammad is given as a 632 Common Era so first third of the seventh century so he was seen or is seen as the founder of a new religion which we call Islam and he was born and raised at first in the city of Mecca here is a photograph of Mecca not from the time of the Prophet I'm sorry to say but around 1900 maybe or late 19th early 20th century now the town of Mecca small even in the late 19th century of course very small in the seventh century maybe a few thousand people but nonetheless it was a town that had a pagan or polytheistic population that is people worshipped many different gods and it had an important shrine as the center in the center of the town which you can see here the famous Kaaba or this way means a cube in arabic a black stone of construction it was a courtyard around it but that's the Kaaba there and this was the center of areas pagan rites which the Quraysh tried the tribe of mecca supervised and profited from by taking care of all the pilgrims who came to the town so Mecca had this important cultic life or so we are told and it was also a town that was supported by commercial life because it was the center of a caravan trade in which the Mehcad merchants organized caravans it went south to the yemen and north to syria and north east to iraq and so on carrying various goods some of them repeatedly luxury goods great distances and this was part of the economic basis of the city what am i doing it wrong wrong button okay there's another picture I think a little bit more recent but closer up so you get to see the the Kaaba shrine in the middle and various other buildings around us well at about age 40 he Muhammad was raised in this town in the pagan environment but he was and who seems have been a promising young man but at about age 40 he was on a kind of retreat he's to go off to get away from it all and sit quietly in the out sorts of the city and reflect on life or whatever and at one point he began to receive what he took to the revelations from God that is he felt like he was overcome with this sense of a presence that he was seeing and especially hearing things and kind of in a trance-like state we're told and when he came out of it he had a passage of text that was kind of burned into his memory and he could recite it and so he proceeded to go back at first with great trepidation and tell his family and friends about these experiences some of them then became followers in his new religious ideas that were part of this so this is in Muslim tradition this is the revelation of God's Word to the Prophet this is and he had these Reposado yata Khalid er in his life when he would get a a new download of more material and this material then was was memorized by him but was also memorized by his followers he would recite it to them and they would gradually learn it someone wrote it down in pieces of stuff that was written and after he died then all these recitations were collected by a kind of editorial committee and all the written pieces were gathered together and they produced a sort of complete single text with just the text of the Quran the Sacred Scripture and Muslims so for Muslims the Quran is literally God's Word as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad and in case you didn't realize it of course the Quran is in Arabic so God speaks Arabic so you know if you have any sense want to be well cared for in the afterlife you should definitely take care of it well what were the fundamental ideas he was preaching we can deduce most of these from the Quran text itself the central one of course is the idea of monotheism a very strict understanding of monotheism that there is only one God the Creator God it creates the world creates us creates everything in the universe and that because this God is all-powerful and all creating we owe him our gratitude in forms of prayer and so on obviously the tradition the package of religious ideas also includes the notion of prophecies and some Muhammad was a prophet the idea that God singles out specific individuals to receive his guidance for mankind and it includes the idea of a kind of a revealed book which contains some kind of guidance or law for the community of believers also quite prevalent in certain parts of the Quran is warnings about the impending Last Judgment that is the idea that the end of time is going to come maybe sometime soon and that we better be ready for it and that what will happen at the end of time is that we will all be hauled before the divine judge including all the dead who will be raised in the dead all the souls will be awakened everyone will come forth before God and we will all be judged individually depending on how he behaved and this life that we have or and then we either rewarded by being sent to heaven or punished by being sent to hell and this of course then means that there's a strong emphasis also on piety or god-fearing this the idea that if you're going to be saved in this life you really need to behave yourself right you shouldn't do things that God finds hateful in social discourse and so on so there's a strong emphasis on pious behavior as well as this more abstract notion of a single God who creates everything well the preaching of these ideas by Muhammad you know he did win some followers quite a few it seems but it also generated us quite a bit of opposition in the town of Mecca in his home town from some of his kinsmen the simplest way to put it is because well maybe they felt their economic ties were somehow threatened but mainly I think they were appalled that the idea that some of their ancestors since this is a culture that engaged it was a tribal tribal the organized culture and they all identified themselves as descendants of some ancestor whom they revered the idea that these ancestors were pagans and therefore we're going to be going to hell was not welcome news to them so they didn't really like this set of preachings and so there was increasing opposition to Muhammad and his followers who were trying to do their prayers and other devotions from time to time and they would be ridiculed or abused in various ways by their townsman so finally it was necessary for them to to go somewhere else fortunately just as things were coming to a head a crisis point a delegation of people came from the town of Yathrib which is about 350 kilometres north of Mecca in western Arabia and invited Muhammad and his followers to come to Yathrib to be arbiters of their own cities kind of internal squabbles among different tribal groups and so Muhammad and his followers in the year 622 make their emigration from Mecca to Yathrib which comes to be known later as Medina the city of the Prophet this event is known as the hedgerow the immigration and it's an important moment because it marks the beginning of the first autonomous sort of self-governing Muslim community in Mecca the Muslims were not able to be self-governing there were loss of non non-believers around who really controlled things but in in yathreb or Medina they were able to sort of organize themselves as a community as they wished to and it's also important as Hydra and 622 because it's the starting date for the Muslim calendar it came to be taken later as the starting point of the Muslim calendar so when you see Muslim dates they go back to this event in 622 although because the Muslim year is only 356 days long in decision three hundreds a lunar year it means that you can't just subtract 622 from a common era date and get the right Islamic dates you have to go to a table or conversion schedule somehow so Mohammed was then living in yathreb with his followers there was tension between him and his followers on the one hand and some of his some of the people in yathreb who joined him and became very close to him and others in Yathrib who again felt a certain distance took a somewhat more skeptical attitude towards his activities and so he had a long period of seven or eight years he was trying to and successfully successful he did overcome the opposition of these various groups among them the most famous or infamous episodes have to do with several large Jewish clans in the city of Yathrib it had plans of people who were Jews but also people who were not Jews they were presumably pagans of some kind they all converted to Islam fairly and accepted the idea of monotheism the Jews of course were already monotheists didn't to change at all but there developed it seems according to the tradition in tents or tensions between Muhammad and his followers on the one hand at some of these Jewish clans which resulted in some rather ugly episodes in which the Jews were driven out of the community or in one case the community was the Jewish clan was basically that all the men were executed and the women and children taken in slaves if these stories are true and that's a question about this whole later narration of what happens but come to that another time in any case as he was consolidating his position in yathreb or Medina he and his followers were also beginning to proselytize outside of the city of yathreb and to win following from among different tribal groups and small villages mostly pastoral Ematic tribal groups in the vicinity ultimately it was possible to confront the city of Mecca where he had come from the Meccans had attacked yet of a couple of times actually finally after several years the Prophet was able to go back and take over Mecca in a more or less peaceable way he just came in and occupied it and the Meccans agreed that they would accept his new faith and admit him to the city and so he and his followers came in and they did pilgrimage at the site of the Kaaba and they were now part of this growing state in western Arabia with Medina at its center the Prophet stayed in Medina he went back to the Dunedin stay in his hometown and so this begins the process of expansion of the Islamic state that was astonishingly rapid starting after his death in 632 after his death instead of the state falling apart his followers organized themselves and began to press out to take over larger areas a process usually called something like the Islamic conquest or the Arab conquest I don't like either term very much but those is it that's the term that's usually used for it and in the process of this who can see from the map see there's a very rapid expansion this dark green is the area that was controlled more or less by the time of the prophets death within a couple of years the rest of the Arabian Peninsula had been taken over by armies organized by his first successor a man named Abu Bakr and then shortly thereafter within a few more years a decade or two this whole area including Egypt Syria and Iraq and much of Iran was taken over and they kept pushing to the to the horizons so that by say 740 they controlled all the way from Spain all the way to the Indus River Valley here so it was a very rapid expansion the first 30 or 4 years sort of inexplicably rapid and historians including myself have puzzled over this for a very long trying to understand how this could be especially because it came the expansion started in a place namely Medina and Western Arabia that first of all had no tradition of statecraft and second of all had no obvious resources to support an expansion so how does how was it possible and in the process they overthrew the one of the two great powers of the day the sustain ian's Empire which had been situated on the Iranian plateau in Iraq in this area they completely overthrew that and they took away about half of the later Roman or Byzantine Empire which was centered in Constantinople but had controlled Syria and Egypt and large areas around the Mediterranean they managed to take these territories away from these two empires somehow without obvious means of doing so here's another map showing the expansion and showing in a rather speculative way I think I can say the possible roots of some of the armies in this multifaceted process of expansion okay so that's basically the outline of the traditional origins narrative I already mentioned some of the problems that seem to in here in it but not all of them by any means the problems are numerous and they're very deep actually first of all this picture is based on it's a voluminous picture we have tons of detail about all aspects of it pretty much but it's based on sources that are much later the sources are mostly literary sources chronicles biographical dictionaries and the like that come from the later Muslim community and most of them were not written until two or three centuries after the events that are supposed to be describing the life of the Prophet they're not from the seventh century they are from the later eighth century or the ninth century a tenth century and even later in some cases yes some of these later sources rely on earlier reports that were apparently transmitted orally or maybe they're in doubt in notebooks that have been lost in them so that reports are subsumed into these later compilations but there's very little we can be we have to be very skeptical about the idea that any of these things it really goes back to original documents from the time of the Prophet or of the early conquests so there's that sort of problem in principle with the evidence that it is later another problem is that when we look at the different Muslim narratives about what happened in the origins period we find a lot of contradictions in the sources between one report and in other reports and well how do you sort out these contradictions for a century or more lots of people try to set these accounts and harmonize them work out a way to sort of see if they could all be seen as valid but it was kind of a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of some small thing but more and more that seemed to be not possible there just seemed to be irreconcilable differences between some of those sources another problem was that the narration however you took it from these Muslim sources of later date seemed to conflict with the narrations that we have from non Muslim sources of mainly Christian sources that were written somewhat earlier they were written in the later 7th century in the early 8th century so before the Muslim sources are written down we have from the Christian community some descriptions of these new people coming and what was happening and well in some ways they track with the Muslim sources not too badly in other ways they seem to be quite at various of what the Muslim sources say and finally this traditional narrative is based on almost no actual documentation that is no texts or documents or real artifacts that came from the time itself and from the people themselves who were making this history and you know historians like to work with documents that's the most secure basis for us to reconstruct the past but there were very few documents actually available from this period as it turns out and the ones that were available basically weren't used and I think they weren't used by Western scholars for a long time mainly because Western scholars already had a nice prepackaged story the traditional large entire story coming out of these a narrative sources and so in working with the actual documents which are miserable scraps of iris and coins and so on so all these little bits of information it's very hard to get a general picture it's very hard to put it together it's much easier to just read these narrations of what actually happened right and so I think that was one of the reasons why at least for a hundred years or so people really didn't pay that much attention to the documentary evidence well now that people seem to be more aware since about the 1970s scholars are more aware that we can't just go on using the traditional origins narrative as the basis for our own understanding we have to come to us somehow more scientific historically scientific view of what was going on there's been a kind of paradigm shift I think but Western scholars attempted to figure out ways that we could get a better picture one of course was to look at the traditional sources like these and to try to make minor modifications to harmonize things but as I said that wasn't really a process that worked very well here's a few of the things that have come out in recent years I could put my own book in there but I did my recent one but I didn't on the other hand there were some scholars who said this traditional picture is so completely wrong that we need to just throw it out completely and start over using only documents and a few things and in fact one this I think is going too far one scholar John Juan's row who was a he was an American but he taught at the University of London for most of his life even opined that you know we'll never be able to know what actually happened at the beginnings of Islam and historians should just stop trying and well for me as a historian this is not a very satisfying way to look at things I think we need to do more this approach is a little bit too radical the fact is that there are some documents that confirm bits of information we find in the traditional eret of sources and so we can't just throw out the traditional narratives entirely even though we have to be very circumspect at using them and this rather complicated looking short I hope it's not too complicated but you have a time light at the bottom of dates and so Mohammed died somewhere here around 6:30 to the amaya dynasty comes through over 660 animals to 715 the Abbasid dynasty overthrows them and 750 and rules until 1250 a actually and the poor on as far as we can tell crystallizes well some tradition would say a crystallize is already by hearsay but I think recent work in Quran manuscripts suggests that maybe it's still undergoing some evolution up until about 700 we don't really yet this is work that's going on as we speak still today then you have documentary sources produced first by the people in this believers movement itself so I put DS here to give an idea so we have a few in the 7th century and then more and more and more now this might be a coin or a strap uh papyrus it may not tell us a whole lot but it tells us something the Christian sources often literary sources that are a little bit more expansive some of those are earlier so we can get information from them and try to piece this together and so the challenge now is to try to piece all this together and fit it into the beginnings of the narrative sources which as you see really start up about here become voluminous at this point and they project back what they thought it happens is this much earlier period so we have to somehow work with these different categories of material and to try to assemble a more shall we say plausible narrative so I think that the it makes sense then to start with the earliest information dating from the 7th century that we can find the true narrative information or whatever kinds of material we have from the 7th century and then maybe tap that into the are two traditional origins narrative as we feel we can connect it and this information from the 7th century then comes especially from two sources information from within the community itself one is the plural and texts and the other is documentary evidence like say coins or papyri so I want to start by talking a little bit about the Portland put a prettier picture up for you that's not a very good picture but it's a prettier document this is a leaf of a very early Quran it was found in Yemen in the Great Mosque in Yemen seems to be a 7th century document and as I said the Quran is generally thought to be an early text and so well maybe we can use it as a quasi documentary source of information we can I suppose but the problems with it are several one in particular is that the Koran texts doesn't say much about the events of Muhammad's day when it was supposedly revealed it's God's Word after all not Muhammad's word it's a kind of it gives us many what you might call timeless moral lessons about how were supposed to lead our lives sometimes talking about previous communities of believers and freakiest prophets and what happened to them as moral lessons so we should wise up and know how we should behave on the basis of these lessons it's full of passages that we can take as moral exportations do this and don't do that but that doesn't really tell you much about what was happening at the time and then there are some passages and not a few actually that give us what we might call legal material or guidelines for conduct how to how to behave how to act in our lives so that's one problem with the Quran it doesn't actually give us a lot of historical nitty-gritty as we'd like to have it secondly the Koran text itself is I think very poorly understood by Western scholars what was this text if you don't accept it as God's revelation to the Prophet then what was it as a text when and where did it come from how did it coalesce into the form in which we have it now Islamic tradition of course knows that this is God's revelation as revealed to the Prophet and sit down in a set form fixed form at a very early date already by the 650s in the eyes and listen tradition but to historians who look at this material with I think in an open mind we have to admit that the historical context of the Koran is anything but clear and the amount of time it took for it to congeal into a text is not clear although I think by 700 or so we can certainly say that the text was was pretty much set but before that I think there's still a lot of question about what was going on with this text and the only more research will hopefully clarify that question there are even theories of a much later origin for the Koran this same scholar I mentioned before John wansbrough thought that the text maybe didn't call us until the 9th century I think that's going much too far and the evidence of the actual Quran manuscripts suggests that it's earlier than that he also proposed that the text didn't crystallize or coalesce in Arabia in Medina or anywhere else but somewhere outside of Arabia perhaps southern Iraq where there were lots of Christian and Jewish communities that seemed to be referred to in the Koran text well as I said I think the evidence shows that the Koran text is mostly early although I think there are perhaps some later interpolations into it from the late 7th century but even if the text was fixed in its written form another problem is that the way Arabic was written in this early period because Arabic did not have a long tradition of being written as a language at this time the script system was exceedingly defective there were many letters that several different sounds used the same letter form there are no diacritical marks that are later given to be able so you can distinguish between these different letters that are given in the same form the vowels were not written even the long vowels most of them were not written so you could look at a set of letters and read it in a whole bunch of different ways sometimes and which brings a different meaning so even if the writing was stable the meaning may not have been so stable so that these are all questions about the text of the Quran as it seems first to have been around in the 7th century but I think we can say that the text is early enough that it gives us at least there are certain things in it that are on the stay cool the idea of monotheism and a bunch of other religious ideas and I think that we can say that at least it's sufficient to give us a good idea of what the guiding principles religious principles and moral principles of this new community were there the one site suggested to you at the beginning monotheism worried about the Last Judgement living righteously and so on but when we look at the text of the Quran we can notice immediately certain things that do not line up with the traditional Muslim view one is that we notice that the words Islam and Muslim are seldom used in the Koran text actually the word Islam occurs only eight times the word Muslim occurs about 60 times and they mean something different than what they came to me and later on after 700 or so Muslim in the Koran means someone who submits himself to God's will the very best Solana means just you submit yourself to DES well then as you recognize that there's only one god and they that he is sovereign over all of us and we have to you know you devote yourself to God in some way it doesn't Muslim then means that you're submitted to God but it doesn't mean you're a follower of a particular religion with the name of Islam and similarly the word Islam means the act of submitting to God so well it doesn't isn't a name for a religion yet it doesn't seem to me and the way it's used in various sentences makes that quite clear we can see an example of this in Quran verse surah 3 or chapter 3 verse 67 where it says Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian but rather he was what it says hadith and Muslimin which means something like a monotheists who submitted himself to God's will so Abraham was in that sense a Muslim he wasn't in the later sense of the capital M he was so obviously so Muslim is 7/7 seldom used in the Quran Islam even less frequently instead we see that the main term of address in the Quran people to whom it's being addressed and the main term of identity for these people was a related word which means believers that was a movement his believer in what we known as believers which is used about a thousand times in the Quran it's overwhelmingly more frequent so this is why I prefer in the seventh century really not to talk about Muslims and Islam but to talk about the believers movement because that seems to be what these people how they thought of themselves and what they call themselves and it's also very interesting when we look into the Quran text that there are some passages in the Quran that make it clear that Christians and drew Jews who after all are monotheists or think of themselves as monotheists those who are adequately pious were considered among the believers so we have this creation of this new community that could have included some christians and jews quran 262 for example goes those who believe and Jews and Christians and sabians those who believe in God and the last day and who act righteously shall receive their reward with their Lord and they shall neither fear nor feel distress so they're being promised Felicity in the afterlife because they are believers in the one God and then the last day and so on an hour they are living righteously that's also very important so in short this early community that Muhammad found it seems not to have been limited to what we today call Muslims but was apparently a kind of maybe a monotheistic revival movement focused on the ideas of God's oneness the need for piety among his followers and fear of the Last Judgement which again the Prophet may have expected to happen at any time there are a few passages as yes the imminence of it now the notion that some Jews and Christians may have been part of the believers movement we see implied in the Quran obviously opens many new possibilities for interpretation for one thing it forces us to question the appropriateness of the very notion of conversion for the first several generations of this movement in that is in the seventh century since conversion implies movement from one clearly defined set of religious doctrines to another or from one clearly defined religious community to another but in the early believers movement as far as we can tell we seem to have a community in which religious doctrines beyond the idea of strict monotheism we're still kind of being felt out or worked out still forming up and there is evidence of a lot of fluidity between the arabian believers and others especially christians with whom they came into contact in the lands that they took over in syria iraq egypt and so on we can't say as much for jews and their last reans who are also numerous in the Near East because we just don't have any evidence for them unfortunately we have much more for the Christian communities they wrote more or more of it as survived but you remember I said before that the Quran is notoriously difficult to interpret and to understand given that our our knowledge of what it was and how it arose is so uncertain so how can we be sure that in fact these people did really think of themselves as believers and that their movement included Jews and Christians are we may be deluding ourselves being misled by willful interpretation or misinterpretation of a couple of passages in the Quran well to answer this question I think we need to turn here to the documentary evidence from the 7th century and there are various bits of documentary evidence that come in handy here and they're quite interesting so for the idea that this was somehow a movement that was motivated by a religious impulse above all some of the earliest documents including coins seemed to confirm this this picture shows when the new community expanded into the Near East into sasanian and Byzantine territory it took over a lot of things including the Mint's of these governments that had been there before took over the mints and the mint workers and the the dyes for the coins and so after a few years they started minting their own coins using the same mints and the same dyes and so what you see here is a coin which is exactly like a sustained ian silver dram and you can see on the obverse the head of the great king here was distinctive hairdo and on the reverse you actually have a fire temple with two attendants on either side not a very Muslim imagery at all and it's got middle Persian writing around here various kinds in Bolivia or middle Persian which was sort of the official language of Austrian ISM and presumably of the sasanian dynasty as well and yet on the you see here on the margin there's a counter mark we might call it they've taken the original die and they've added something and this is an Arabic and it says dismal law in the name of God so this is of course a very common phrase in the Muslim tradition but it shows that you know they're marking their presence by putting this counter mark on the coins and it's an explicitly religious slogan now you can say well they were all these people in this expansion movement there are a lot of people who just jumped on the bandwagon because they you know it was exciting they could go conquer new lands they can get plunder and booty and slaves and whatever they wanted they really weren't interested in monotheism or anything else that may be but nonetheless somehow the leadership of the organist inked of Lee religious terminology which I think helps to kind of reaffirm some of the ideas we find in the ending narrative tradition that the movement was led by people well did they think of themselves as believers well we find some inscriptions from the 7th century that seemed to confirm that they thought of themselves this way because we find some inscriptions that talk about the leader of the movement as the immune Amin a commander of the believers so if Hughes the commander of this community and you see me enter the believers presumably believers is what the community thought of itself was being this is a quite a famous inscription actually it was first published I think in the 1950s by George miles found in a thought of sort of above Mecca and the hills above Mecca and it's description commemorating the construction of a dam by the amirul mumineen or commanders a believer's Mallya who ruled from 642 660 I think and it's it just did the wrong thing okay came back somewhere you can see in here MA we uh I mean what we need commander of the believers and then it goes on and talks more about the construction of the dam and who built it and so on so that seems to kind of confirm the character of the movement as a believers movement that they thought of themselves as believers in the 7th century or we also find some papyri from the 7th century here's a scrap you're going to see it several times today from the collections in Vienna and one of the things one of the things we find on some of these papyri is when they give a date you know the dating system of Muslims today if you see a datas it's the date of the hit goes back to the hijra the prophet's migration from Mecca to Medina but we don't find the word Hydra in these inscriptions or in in early datings not until about 300 of the Muslim era did we find it what we find though in the 7th century are some documents that are dated in something called mean the jurisdiction of the believers which again emphasizes the idea that they're believers and if you're an Erebus you can see out here in the in the lower line here a cloth is missing but here's the remote nanine illa something right so we find a number of these documents with this this dating formula Khomeini in referring to the jurisdiction of the believers which means alone their government was seen as it that's the rule of the believers other evidence beyond the Quran for the idea that the movement was open or shall we say non confessional included Jews and Christians as long as well as Quranic believers there is a document or what can we call the transcript of a document which is found in the later narrative sources but which every scholar who looks at this says this must be an actual transcript of something very very old it's usually called the constitution of Medina or the only document or the sahifa various names but one of the things it mentions is it lists a number of Jewish clans in Medina yes rib who are part of this pact making up this how this community is to be constructed and it includes Jewish plans as part of the Ummah as part of the community it explicitly says that so this seems quite clear that there were Jews or was considered that in some way as part of this community and from many 7th century literary texts and Syriac so these are the Christian texts that are earlier than the Muslim literary sources and they tell us sometimes about the beginnings of Islam we know that many Christians served in Dubai eight courts they served in the Army they served in a bureaucracy sometimes even as what we would call the Prime Minister John of Damascus is a famous one serve the Umayyad caliphs or Amir's Amin in Damascus but we have we have many many references to this also into Muslim sources we find especially in poetry you find references to Christians being part of the what we usually think of as the Muslim armies in the 7th century even one passage very interesting one where the Christian writer says these people came and they sent campaigns every year to the Far Horizons and they conquered and they took a lots of captives and brought back lots of booty and among them there were many Christians both from our sect and from the heretics another Christian section so it seems like there was a some kind of cooperation here between these this new boot this new believers movement and many people in the Christian communities as well or another one there's a there was a bishop an armenian bishop in the 7th century named scipios someone using his name the scholars call this text pseudo scipios someone wrote a chronic and attributed to de sitios in the 7th century and this gives us one of the very first descriptions of the career of the Prophet in a very truncated very brief but it does talk about the Prophet and how he was a teacher and taught them his followers the laws and so on one of the things that says a little farther on after the Prophet has died it talks about how they conquered Jerusalem and it says they appointed as the first governor of Jerusalem a Jew now this this factoid this bit of information is not confirmed in any of the Muslim sources or in any Christian source other Christian source one kind of ask mmm was this bishop you know Christian communities in the seventh century were very strongly anti-jewish they engaged in a lot of anti-jewish polemic maybe he didn't like these people these new people and he just wanted to discredit them so he said they appointed you as a way of just smearing them but maybe they did appointed you as the governor of Damascus of Jerusalem we don't know we have no confirmation of this fact but it's very suggestive in the light of all these other bits of evidence about some kind of symbiosis or cohabitation of the people we usually call Muslims that are believers from Arabia and the Christian and maybe other communities of the Near East so how long did this sort of open construction of the community last the change to Islam as we know it occurs I think around the Year 690 700 or it starts at least then in under the Umayyad dynasty we it's basically a kind of shift in focus the believers now are defined as those not just to believe in one God in the last day but as those who believe in one God in the last day and who follow the Quran as their Scripture and who accept Muhammad as the Prophet who brought the scripture and actually to this day that's still the simplest way to define a Muslim as you know Muslims fight each other all the time as most people most religions do she's against Sunnis and so on but one thing they all exert the two things they all accept is the Koran is the scripture and Muhammad is their prophet about everything else they may different but on that they agree and that seems to have been the focus of this new construction of what the community of believers was and in addition to this new construction with this new emphasis on the Prophet in the Quran they also engage in a kind of rebranding or renaming of things they started to fish out of the Quran various words and to change the meaning from what it had been in the Quran somewhat into something else and to use it in this new way so they found this word Islam submission to God's will and they made it into Islam into the name of a reified religion and there are many other examples of this so what they're basically doing is you might say is Lama sizing Islamic or Ana sizing Islam they're connecting it to the Quran they took a number of institutions and practices that had developed in the 7th century found words in the Quran that could be applied to them and then applied those words to them and that became the new terminology the easiest example to follow is the name of the head of state the amirul mumineen that's a nice term everybody knows what it means it's obvious and it's you know grammatically and in every other way but it's not found in the Quran and so they found a word in the Quran Khalifa which means it's applied to a couple of prophets who were sent to sort of supervise their communities with God's guidance and that was applied to the ruler of the community so now we called on caelis this comes from the Arabic Khalifa so instead of a miracle meanie and you start calling the ruler the Khalifa using a Quranic term instead of a term that didn't have the Quranic pedigree you might say so as I say this is part of a broader relabeling or rebranding process that's going on it seems starting in the 8th century and afterwards so what am i doing in Berlin I'm going to study for piratey and will it tarry hand around these 4,000 minute old sheets of papyrus for you so you can have some virus yeah what I want to do here are two things actually some years ago I found a bunch of oh let me talk about this picture first I forgot to go anyway so this is a photograph of the inside of the dome of the rock I'm sure you you all know the building it's the golden dome building in Jerusalem that was built by the amido mumineen or Calif Abdul Malik around 692 just as this change is beginning to happen and inside it it has these beautiful mosaics all around the inside of the Octagon and included in the mosaics are is a long passage of writing and this writing is generally considered to be its quotes from the Quran various quotes from the Quran many of them are passages that are very critical of a concept of the Trinity the Christian concept of the Trinity so it's really drawing a line between the people we now call Muslims and the Christians who believed in the Trinity it also talks about Islam and it talks about Muhammad the prophet of God and someone so it sort of emphasizes all these things that I've just talked about how Islam is the name of the new faith Muhammad is the Apostle and so on and this is part of the Quran so what am i doing in Berlin I want to do basically have a double project one part of the project is to edit fragments of papyrus from the 7th century that I found some years ago in Vienna and trying to edit these up however small and miserable the fragments may be I want to edit them up and publish them so that scholars don't have to do the same thing and try and find them all again and then try and read them again they can just look and see what they say and use this in their historical reconstructions because I think that given the general dearth of documentary evidence for the 7th century it behooves us as historians to get every bit we can they into circulation and so that's what I'm trying to do and that part of the project to try and use this as a way of getting behind if you will the the Islamic traditional origins narrative and the second thing I want to do is to in Berlin in particular is to look here for more evidence of this kind of change in the community in the seventh century especially searching in the collections of Arabic papyri at the neues Museum that the poppy was some long in the center of the city this collection seems to have lots of Arabic papyri but the collection was difficult for most scholars to access from 1939 until very recently during the war the papyrus collection like much else in the museum's was packed off and salt mine somewhere for protection so they wouldn't be destroyed after the war Berlin was divided the museum's are on the eastern side it was not easy for scholars to work on this material after the reunification they consolidated the museum's but they had two different cataloging systems so they didn't want to let anybody see anything because they didn't know what they had really with two systems they had to unify the system so it's only been in the last five or six years I think that the papyrus collection has become really opened up to scholars to work on this material and with the assistance of the director of the papyrus collection dr. Furr in a leper who unfortunately couldn't come today I'm looking forward to digging into that material so I'll be spending some of my some of my days downtown in the papyrus collection one challenge in doing this is that only a very small proportion of percentage of the Arabic papyri that survived are from the seventh century most of them are from the 8th or 9th or 10th century or 11th century papyrus comes out of use paper replaces it in the 11th century in most collections that I've seen the proportion is about of 7th century papaya or about one-quarter of 1% of the total number so you go through a thousand you might find two or three so now you know I might be lucky it might fine for and it might be something larger than this you know what we hope is we'll find something quite large well how do you tell that it's the seventh century for Pyrus that's a good question well you can do it fortunately on the basis of the paleography the writing of Arabic papyri seems to change rather dramatically around 700 I'm not quite sure why but it does and certain letter forms that are used in the early papyri simply go out of use after about 700 so if you see those letter forms you know that it's a seventh century papyrus in this case four exist there's a letter called behind was it a sort of anomaly needles tomorrow and it has a distinctive letter which you in later Arabic has a kind of looped top but in the early Arabic documents they make it like a V so you can see one of them they're surrounded by red there's an open-topped and as a final in the medial or final position it will show this way so this is a like dead giveaway right away if you see one of those you know you're onto something early and then you can look at other letters which also change their form and sort of confirm that this is in fact a seventh century papyrus so you know you can look at a papyrus for a minute or or less and Satan though it's later no it's later notice it are you gonna be doing that a lot so you finally find a few of these pieces so of course I'm hoping to find lots of them I'm not sure I'll find many and of course the challenge once you find them is you have to read them to figure out what they say and this is also not so easy because often the writing is torn I mean this one is pretty clear what's available is clear but you know what was over here or on the lines above or in long you know we don't know but you get what you get and you try and work with it one hopes one would find more complete documents and I think is my last slide I'll show you a more complete document that I found guess what in all places Chicago it was in the small collection we have in Chicago of Arabic papyri and I apologize is a very dark picture as you can see it's not without its problems to read because after the initial stuff which tells you who it's from and and a lot of polite phrases if I hope you are well and I you know we worship God and then it says now then it's about to give him the business and then you get to speak hold right we're telling you what it's about but then it goes on for like another twenty line Center and it's quite informative it tell us about the distribution of a relatively small amount of money amongst a bunch of people who seem to have been associates its exchanging ly interesting it seems to me to be may be the earliest Arabic letter we have and yet the format of it the Epistle ography of it is exactly like much later Arabic letters so it looks like the writing of Arabic letters was something that was already well practiced even in the seventh century which suggests that actually Arabic was being written before the rise of Islam but we just don't happen to have any examples of it this may be the earliest one it's also interesting in other ways it has all these typically we would say Islamic monotheism you lay in the name of God the compassionate the merciful at the end it says peace upon you and the mercy and the blessings of God the mercy of God so that's what I'm already cut off from the law but nowhere does it mention the Prophet nowhere does it mention the Quran no where does it cite the Quran nor does it have any Christian or Jewish formula its monotheistic but it doesn't seem to be confessional does that tell us something well if it might fit into the idea of the believers movement it doesn't it doesn't prove it but it certainly doesn't disprove it anyway I'm hoping I'll find a couple dozen of these but we'll see thank you very much so Fred the actual process of your work it sounds very much like a Sherlock Holmes with a PhD trying to piece together stuff I mean there's a sort of that there's a quite exciting parts of this I imagine because you don't know what you're gonna find no that's exciting I don't wear the same kind of hat no I notice nonetheless there's something akin to detective work and as you say the 7th century the Pyrus is papaya are quite rare so you must get quite a buzz when you've gone through whole bunch of stuff and something you get one you know when I was working in Vienna they have 20 25,000 more or less usable pieces they have 65,000 papyri in Vienna or numbers session numbers but 40,000 of them are like postage stamps little tiny pieces you know or in one case it was a great big sheet with one word in the corner isn't gonna tell you much but they do have 20-some thousand quite you know sizable pieces of papyrus at least as large as the one I showed you the little corner which is informative and many they're complete Texas but fortunately they have them all microfilm in the 1960s now yes it's microfilm black and white and you have to sit in this reader machine you know and crank through but it was great because I could just go through and look at an image they look at another image wait look so I could work through you know I worked through those 22,000 and like two and a half months it was a very efficient way to work and every hour says somebody who's shouting I've got one every every week or so every week I would find one actually it was interesting because a lot of them came up in a cluster right in the middle around 11,000 so I was going for weeks with it and I finding anything otha this is really a bummer you know and finally all sudden I hit this mother lode of about 40 of them there were all more or less catalog to get it so they were probably a lot that had been found in Egypt together and were sold to a dealer together and bought by the guy who gave them to the Austrian library together and they were cataloged together and so they they were you know whereas many of the others were from other parts of the trash heap that were from a later date you know that's where most of them come from they when people in Egypt over the centuries you know they'd had old documents they were no longer useful you know letters from your grandfather - they threw out they throw them on trash heaps outside the villages and then the peasants discovered well this is organic material so they would pitch fork it into their wheelbarrows and take it and spread it on their fields as fertilizer you know help things grow and then about 1850 and including these papyrus documents around 1850 they discovered that these crazy Europeans would buy these things so they started saving them and selling them to antiquities dealers and they ended up in you know the antiquities market and then enemy zooms that's how they actually the ones in Berlin are different the ones in Berlin came from excavation from excavations in the early 20th century they were excavated from elephantine and i think and they found a lot of papyri sort of somewhere some layer in the excavations and so they boxed them all up in big wooden boxes and shipped them to Berlin in like 1906 or 1907 and many of those boxes and so if any of you knows of a funder who could fund the papyrus collection rather handsomely - to process all this material has to be opened carefully opened and these sheets have to be conserved you know so they put under glass and so on they need a big grant to do that now we're into Indiana Jones turns the real thing so in the in the Middle East in the Muslim world in general there's a range of views they're moderates and they're converging to extremists the Salafis the wahhabis how is your work viewed in the in the in the Muslim world do people see it as threat do they watch it with interest how would you say that the reception is in and where's that to board questions no it's not too broad a question answering it would be too broad to answer probably know the the reaction is obviously mixed and there are gonna be some people who will say well he's an unbeliever what do you expect you know that he's going to hell anyway what a week yeah they don't seem to worry too much about what unbelievers say but there are some Muslims actually quite a few I think who are really open to new views of Iceland's origins and particularly in Indonesia I'm told there are lots of Muslims who feel uncomfortable with the traditional way Islam is presented by the Wahabis you know which is just a hobby form of Islam very conservative which has been dominant in Saudi Arabia since the 18th century has been pushed because the Saudis have so much oil money that they can send preachers and they can build mosques and build Islamic centers and spread their version of Islam and try to undermine more moderate versions of Islam and so I'm going to mine shiism they've been doing this for a half a century with our own money so this is a form this conservative form of Islam is one that has been you know heavily subsidized you might say but there are Muslims especially in Indonesia who feel very uncomfortable to this because they say you know this this form of Islam is too Arab we're not Arab so we have a different social a totally different kind of society and this doesn't fit well with us we want to find a way to be good Muslims but in our own way and in the modern world and so they are very interested in at least some revisionist interpretations of how Islam they have begun because then they can say well you know they like this one especially my view because they can say well you know this provides an opening for kind of being ecumenical with Christians and Jews hostile to them so the text of the Quran is pretty sacrosanct for Muslims and as you say it actually doesn't of historical material per se and what is being very controversial even within Muslim scholar scholars in the world of Muslim scholars have been the hadith the sayings the suppose it's saying to the prophets right hele prophet do you add suppose yes and and and and and there are all these categories of how reliable as saying how many people have supposedly written it down once and would your work have any impact on that whole debate which is still ongoing within within the Muslim not really I mean I basically avoided using hadith material yeah my feeling is you know there are undoubtedly some hadith that are authentic something the Prophet actually did say in this collection of material but there's so much other stuff in there that we know he couldn't have said and the problem is there's no way really to tell one from the other there's no sort of foolproof method for discriminating or deciding what is an authentic prophetic hadith and what is just something that someone later on wanted to put in his mouth and so as a historian I feel like I can't really use any of this you know so I haven't used it in my own work really for support as evidence for anything I just don't think we can I don't know whether there's gonna be a way ever found to do that the Muslim was tried very hard you know Muslim scholars already in the 9th century but keenly aware that there were lots of for studies there were people making up things that they said the Prophet had said you know to sort of bolster their own particular political point of view or social opinion or whatever it might have been theological position but that Muslim scholars were aware of that and so they developed a method to try and screen this material out of the false material and they they did it on the basis of the chain of authorities that transmits that actually referring to a hadith consists of a text a short text usually you know you should drink a certain kind of beer well no there weren't any about that but you should do something in a certain way and then it would say you know someone told me my teacher told me on the authority of his teacher on that's already of history Choi and Thai who heard it from the Prophet that this was what you should do well these chains of authority then were scrutinized by Muslim scholars they said well you know it says it went from A to B to C but B you never studied with C C died before B was born you know so this is a weak hadith it can't be true so they did that kind of you know that's due diligence it was formally and they constructed end collection of hadith which is like one percent of the total number which were considered the sound hadith someone had strong chains of authority but even in those collections of sound hadith we there are many that we know must be fabricated where the Prophet is seen as predicting things that happened two hundred years after his death I mean yeah he was a prophet but I really don't think he foresaw authorizes the best of the feasting so we know that the method that the hadith scholars developed was not adequate to sort of screen out fraudulent Hadees and nobody else has really come up with a better system modern scholars keep trying and they work with something of the same method I mean they do look at the Assad the chain of authorities but they also look at the body of text and they try to coordinate them and one thing we can do by looking at these analysis try to decide when this hadith went into circulation we can see if you have many different transmissions of it you can see how the chains of authority kind of converge on someone and that person is probably the person who put it into circulation even though he said he got it from three generations earlier if you don't have any other transmissions probably he put it into circulation so he either made it up or his teacher made it up and he spread it so one more question and open up to the floor cuz they're a lot smarter people out there than me and it struck me when you put up one of your slides you had I think six or eight books of scholars looking at the historicity of the of the founding narrative of Islam and of course a lot of the scholarship on the historicity of the Christian religion was done here in Germany 18th 19th century and how would you compare those types of scholarship if you if you if you could if that's not - I think they're they're very much very similar they're looking at in the case of the Christian tradition you're looking at first of all the Hebrew rival in the New Testament Gospels and analyzing those marriages and the thing is that the it's a little hard to describe it the Quran and the Islamic narrative sources that crystallize in the eighth century ninth century and later together are sort of the analog to the Hebrew Bible right or to the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles which is sort of the more historical books right I mean the whole the whole New Testament is really kind of a historical I think about the core Tran is it's not a historical book it's not structured as a narrative and it doesn't try to relate to history of the Prophet so that comes in the narrative sources the chronicle of authority and many other kinds of Chronicles and the biographical dictionaries at that material is although the analog to many of the historical books of the Hebrew Bible and gospel narratives but there's a similar cut you know the in some ways I'm only actually wondered about this it usually is thought that the Christian scholars of the Christian and Jewish tradition of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament were the ones that blazed away and tradition criticism source criticism and all this and that Muslim scholarship Western scholars working on this then picked up those tools and applied them but actually one of the first scholars in the Islamic tradition to work on the Islamic tradition in the West was a great Hungarian Jewish scholar Ignatz Gould seer who wrote some of his early works in the 1880s now one of the first books of higher criticism in the West is Hermann Gunkel I think and he's like the 1890s so maybe he got it from gold seer rather than the other way around you know it's really interesting what the pedigree is but there were so many more scholars working on the Christian tradition that there was a much more rapid development of the scholarship the critical scholarship on the Christian and Jewish texts than there was on the Muslim taxes is just for infinitely more people working on it and so you had it much more debate in dialogue and so on it's so develop on quickly and more precisely some materials were not worked on except by a few people so the progress is very slow until about the 1970s when kind of the the roof was blown off by a couple of revolutionary sort of I think making books that really got everybody doing this now so it's become a kind of a growth industry since then but we're late to get catch up yeah hmm so we have a microphone Johann has a microphone and if you'd like to ask question prep your hand please ask a question no lectures there's a gentleman back there I think Eva Rincon not a historian but perhaps if you allow an interdisciplinary question given the lack of evidence I am as a lawyer inclined to rather think of the three question marks and starting with the fifth question marks I will always address the issue of interdisciplinary approach is there any collaboration let's say with ball callused s-- around the globe that could potentially derive some information some at least not as evidence but at least as a theory that perhaps climatic change might have forced by sentient population to defect from their religion opening the gates of damascus to the new movement of independence or whatsoever or is this simply myth thank you I'm somewhat hard of hearing it doesn't affect me when I speak but when you talk I have a hard time hearing as Meza I have a hard time understanding the question could you you want to repeat it maybe more briefly and louder so I can get any interdisciplinary approach on the lack of evidence that perhaps volcanoes around the globe could link volcanic exposure mega photonic explosions in Nicaragua at the time leading to potential climate change in the region leading potentially or connecting prudential mistrust of the population of the Byzantine Empire of the Sassanid Empire with their own Empire perhaps leading to this membrane that eventually led to this independence movement that took up a new religion as a merely influential impetus of saying ok we follow the new religion in order to become independent from the formal religion that they used to be inclined to volcano scholar oh well we do have lots of volcanic what can you koala remains throughout the Near East in Arabia NHS where Islam is thought to have begun and in Jordan and places like that a salt desert and so on but these volcanoes volcanoes I think are from like 20,000 BC they're much before the rise of Islam and I don't know of any evidence of volcanic eruptions in this part of the world in the first millennium of the Common Era I don't think in the Byzantine or for Muslims we don't find any evidence that from died Noah yes Oh Nicaragua maybe yes but not in the Arabian area no let's get another question thank you very much for the for the presentation I'm also not a historian if I understood you correctly you're saying that this community of believers did not really make a distinction between Jews and Christians and Muslims especially in the beginning which is fine but my question is were there any practical material implications for this so for example the whole issue of jizya I don't know what that means in English the the special tax is that Christians had to pay so there must have been some kind of a demarcation between a Muslim and the Christian and the Jew otherwise there would be no justification for paying this tax so how would you explain this in the in the context of your arguments well first of all I don't think that if there was this kind of broad acceptance of others believers let's call them arabian believers or something cuz we don't know what to call them otherwise he can't we don't call them Muslims over you at home and Christians and Jews they didn't accept all Christians and Jews they only accepted those who were righteous for appropriately righteous you know it was a it's quite clear in the Quran those who believe and who are pious and do good work are the ones who are part of the believers movement as for the word jizya which is often taken to be the name the head tax in Islamic law of the ninth century and later it becomes the term for the head tax applied to non-muslim communities Christians and Jews and our Austrian sewers under Muslim rule but in the early years as we know from the papyri jizya seems to mean other things it seems to mean like tribute so or tax in a more general way it's not clear so it doesn't seem to have this later meaning of specifically attacks on non-muslims as we would say using the later terminology with Muslims separate from Jews and Christians yeah as why it's really hard to talk about it without we have to escape these categories and it's very hard to sort of cleanse our mind of these categories which we have had hammered into us forever you know but it's you know the term Jew see also is one that where the meaning is fluid somehow in the early period we find for example in the classical Islamic law of the later period we find the juiciest a term for the poll tax the head tax on non-muslims Christians and Jews in particular and another word that edge is the term for the land tax but we find papyri that talk about jizya of a community on their lands it's not a head tax it's a tax on land and so these terms seem to have had kind of varying usages over time and we have to be sure we're using them in a way it's appropriate for the time we're talking about in the 7th century don't I think they were still very fluid it meaning probably also both those terms are found in the Talmud which is the Jewish Scriptures compiled in the 6th century for the most part in this potamia usually is also a Jerusalem Talmud but and they it in Aramaic it uses the term cut egg and gus' eat as terms for taxes so that the Arabic in the Quran using jizya and then later Islamic law using courage seems to be kind of continuing these notions of Taxation that come from before the Islamic period this gentleman here let's go there and then we'll come over here thank you something thank you so much Fred for an amazing talk who's inspiring to just see the kind of work that you're doing and I'm so glad that you're doing it because um I'm not sure how many people are so my question actually relates really closely to the one that was asked about this process of assimilation or of the process of disassemble a ssin the process of this drawing of lines as you said between who constitutes a Muslim and who doesn't and I appreciated what you said but I'm just wondering if you could talk a little about the broader socio-political context that led or what was the impetus to then draw this line between a Muslim being someone who just believed in a single God and therefore include certain behaviorally appropriate pious Christians and Jews versus to then drawing this much narrower boundary of a person who believed in one God and that God being Muhammad than that next being the Quran so I'm just wondering what the impetus at that point in time the kind of you know general impulses of what led to the drawing of this line so it's almost a question prior to the previous one which was talking about the implications but I'm more interested in when and what like I'd be know when thanks to you but why was that line drawn okay well I think you know I can't say that I know but it seems to me that this is a distinction that starts to arise around 706 90s and 700 at the time of the Calif or Melek and I think it's kind of the consequence of Empire you know by this time this ruling it we have a movement that starts in Arabia all of the people in leadership are people from these tribes of Mecca and closely affiliated tribes Quraish tribe and then they have a whole lot of other tribes and tribesmen who are kind of subordinate to them but they all speak Arabic and they go out and they shall we say conquer the world or subdue it any way bring it under their control and are collecting taxes and so on there's a civil war and a lot of fighting and finally optimally is able to win out and defeats his rivals and but I think he realized there two things first they realized after sixty years or so of ruling a lot of people who weren't from Arabia who didn't speak Arabic that these people are different from us and they also realized that Christians stubbornly adhered to this notion of the Trinity and they said how can three be one you know there's one guy there are not three guys you know there's these very interesting passages in the Quran where it says you know to the Christmases don't say three it says yeah it also says it's unseemly for God to have a son the idea that Jesus was God and God's Son is you know this is a non-starter for them they believe in this this abstract single God out there somewhere distant and remote and you know he's nothing like a human being he's not gonna have a son this is like having you talk about it so they attacked us specifically those doctrines of Christianity in very brief terms in a number of places in the program and I think it was the sort of gathering awareness of that that made alcoholic and his advisors say we're securely in control now we can draw the line and sort of we are going to just rule these people as a ruling elite of wheelin caste and they're different from us it may also have come from the Christians and Jews themselves who may have accepted the believers when they arrived from Arabia as new rulers because they had new rulers arriving periodically anyway from elsewhere so why not another one you pay taxes and new people so what but at some point they realized well no these people are different and they have a different religious take on things and so I the awareness of difference may have come from both sides that's not really an answer but it's my stab at it thank you very much my name is Jurgen right Maya I want to thank you for a most fascinating lecture and talk I would like to bring you if you permit into the present day and ask you about the opportunities that that you have during your time here as a as a scholar in in Germany you are a historian and I might say a scholar of Islamic studies if that may be correct on that and I want to work out a distinction there in that with Islamic Studies there you would probably have or in the in the field of history that you represent you have some or numerous peers in Germany with which you quite naturally interact but you may also be aware I'm sure you are aware that the German state governments who are in charge of education in their individual states are building up and funding body of scholars of Islamic religion theologians of of Islam whose whose intent and purpose would be to to teach students of Islamic religion to become Imams or themselves teachers have you interacted with with this probably much smaller group of people have you found them to be receptive to your ideas are they especially valuable interlocutors and and fruitful in your discussions I would perhaps ask you to draw this distinction between Islamic studies and Islamic theology as academic subjects thank you welcome thank you it's a very interesting question I haven't had a lot of question contact with the which you might call the seminary and training categories although 10 years ago 11 now I came to a lecture here in Berlin that was given by the former grand mufti of Yugoslavia most of its age who is it turns out was formerly a student of ours in Chicago so I knew him quite well and when I learned about this lecture I notified somebody who was in the or and they said oh you must come to lecture then so I came and he stood up to give his talk which was a very nice talk a very sort of ecumenical open-minded talk he's a wonderful man and he graciously recognized me he said he was so honored to give a lecture in front of his former professor and I had to stand up and everybody so after the lecture was over a woman came to me introduced herself who said she worked for the German interior ministry on the German government's relationship with Muslims the interesting thing was that her name she was a Muslim herself her father was German her mother had been Turkish and her name was Leila Bonner there's another name her husband's name after but it was like wow somebody but my name is a Muslim but no I haven't had a lot of contact with with people in that line of work they are trying to Train responsibility moms to care for their own Muslim communities you know which is a way of sorting Saudi Wahhabi indoctrination with these very conservatively trained even a source in from Saudi Arabia until people with a much less open-minded form of Islam I would say it is though you know that's a question for Muslims to decide not for people like me I'm not it's not I would like to thank for your really thought-provoking talk first but I just wanted to ask you it's like to wrap it up actually it seems like the initial reaction to Islam or the initial scripture was rather like an expansion of the already existing monotheistic religions somehow and then the institutionalization process of the religion basically created an erasure of the history and recreated a new understanding of Islam and Muslim tradition but what I wanted to ask you is I don't know whether you would be able to comment on this topic but I already somehow thought about the Golden Age of Islamic philosophy and also the 13th century and Sufism where you have a new understanding of Islam which does not really concentrate on the demarcation between these three religions but rather the similarities and the intersections so would you be able to comment on that do you think that this erasure happened once and then that created a fixated understanding of institutionalized Islam without any new strand of Islamic philosophy emerging with a new interpretation because I feel like Sufism has a potential that kind of breaks through this institutionalized understanding well it's I'm not sure I followed everything and there was a lot in your and the various aspects of what you mentioned you know I think about Sufism and Islamic law and you think about religion and how people respond to religion it seems to me there's two ways that people do it and Sufism on the one hand in Islamic law and the other represent sort of manifests as two ways in the Islamic community one way is a very kind of spiritualistic way its touchy-feely or something it's very internal and personal to you has to do with your feelings in a sense of connection with the deity and all of that and legalistic details are not so important and another way is to stress the legalistic details and that's what dislike the Sharia is much more about that it's it's focusing on exactly what you have to do to attain salvation you know how you should walk how you should brush your teeth how you should pray how you should do all of these things if you make a contract you should do it this way because this is the the just in the right way and this is what will help you be a good person and attain Felicity in the afternoon so it's very legalistic and focuses so these represent two different completely different takes on religion generally I think you'll find us in every religion this divergence between these two forms and who's to say which one is right Liz Ali showed that they were mutually compatible you know it was his great contribution less you showed that Sufism that mysticism was not something that was a violation of the law literally so that it was legal from the point of the jurist to be a Sufi although the hobbies don't accept it you know that that's a very strict formulation of Islamic jurisprudence that does not accept Sufism as an acceptable form of Islam let's take one more and then we'll adjourn next door so where would you draw please the line between the historic Muhammad and the mythic Muhammad as difficult as it may be evidently there's a mythological aspect mohamad traveling through the skies and into the sky and there's a historic aspect clearly but some people go as far as to say the religion of Islam you mentioned it didn't arise in the area of Mecca and Medina rather in the area of Jerusalem so where would you draw the line on the Arabian and South Arabia and again how would you portray the political interests that led to the way the figure of Mohammed was construed over the decades if not to say over the centuries you know there are people who argue that Muhammad never existed like there used to be people argued that Jesus never existed because you know we don't have actual documentary evidence for we only have the evidence from within the religious tradition but the people who argue that I think are rather willful and overlooking a couple of pieces of evidence document we're all not documentary exactly but there is for example the scrap of Syriac text that dates from something like 634 which is only a couple years after the Prophet died that talks about in Syriac the thigh iead the mathematics about the nomads of someone named looks like Muhammad right so this is like almost immediately after he dies there is a non-muslim shall we say not from the believers community a reference to an event involving a raid by these people and they are associated with the name of Burroughs name FN so I think we have to accept that yeah the Prophet is there know how much more of the shall we say mythic construction of Muhammad's life that we find in the traditional marriages which as I summarized for you here earlier we want to accept is a really tough question and there's no answer that we can no obvious answer we can give to it my own sense though is that when let's put it this way when the day of judgment comes and all truths are revealed including his dark trees when if we get to that point we will we will find I think that the traditional Muslim narrative is not completely off-base that maybe eighty or ninety percent of it is pretty much sort of what happened but that there are certain points at which it has given a totally different spin to aspects of that development and I think for example the notion of communal identity is one of those areas where the real picture might have been quite different from what we're given in the sort of traditional narration the mythic picture and there may be other aspects to where there's a sharp divergence but I wouldn't be surprised if something like the conquests is found to have happened anyway more or less s they're described you know we can't be sure but that's my hunch at this point they asked me on the day of judgment which is coming soon I hear them I'm sure somebody in the audience has been practicing their 7th century Arabic on that papyrus to try and fake you out and but I know that I know there were other questions let's adjourn to the next room and Fred I'm sure you'll be available for I lower the concentrations [Applause] you

Channel: American Academy in Berlin

Views: 471,854

Rating: 4.3237963 out of 5

Keywords: islam

Id: koVaxbWBlr4

Length: 92min 49sec (5569 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2019

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[u/lingben]

The traditional narrative of Islam’s origins centers on the career of the prophet Muhammad (d. 632 CE) in Arabia and the rapid spread of his movement throughout the Near East immediately after his death. Over the past half-century, however, scholars have come to realize that this picture is the product of the Islamic community of the eighth, ninth, and later centuries and that its goal of providing a satisfying narrative may not accurately reflect how Islam actually began and grew into the major world religion we know today. In this lecture, Fred M. Donner argues that a more historically accurate view of Islam’s origins has been hindered by the scarcity of documentary evidence from the seventh century and considers some of the key sources that may help us understand these momentous events in Islamic history.

[u/888number1]

https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/57705/the-fantasy-islam-of-the-university-of-chicago

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Donner took an approach that is common among those engaging in Fantasy Islam: pick and choose among the Islamic sources.