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Posted: Thu Mar 29th, 2007 02:47 pm |
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The Myth of Mecca
http://www.politicalusa.com/columnists/guest_columns/wheeler_007.htm
By Jack Wheeler
9/27/2001
The most sacred spot on earth to all members of the Islamic
religion is the Holy City of Mecca, revered as the birthplace of
Mohammed. It is one of the five basic requirements incumbent
upon all Moslems that they make (if their health will allow it)
a pilgrimage to Mecca once in their lives (the other four:
recognize that there is no god but Allah, that Mohammed is
Allah's prophet, ritually pray five times a day, and give alms
to the poor).
The founding events of Islam are Mohammed's activities in Mecca
and Medina, a city north of Mecca. The life of Mohammed, known
as the Sira, is popularly accepted to be fully documented
historically, that everything he did and said was accurately
recorded. According to one hagiographer, although Mohammed
"could not read or write himself, he was constantly served by a
group of 45 scribes who wrote down his sayings, instructions and
activities.... We thus know his life down to the minutest
details."
The evidence for this is "the earliest and most famous biography
of Mohammed," the Sirat Rasul Allah (The Life of the Prophet of
God) of Ibn Ishaq. The dates given for Mohammed's life are
570-632 AD. Ibn Ishaq was born about 717 and died in 767. He
thus wrote his biography well over 100 years after Mohammed
lived, precluding his gaining any information from eyewitnesses
to the Sira as they would have all died themselves in the
intervening years.
However, no copies exist of Ibn Ishaq's work. We know of it only
through quotations of it in the History of al-Tabari, who lived
over two hundred years after Ibn Ishaq (al-Tabari died in 992).
Thus the earliest biography of Mohammed of which copies still
exist was written some 350 years after Mohammed lived.
It is curious, therefore, that there seems to have been so
little serious scholarly research of the historical evidence for
how Islam came to be. Yet what seems to be isn't so. A number of
professional academic historians, both Western and Moslem, have
produced a large body of research on the origins of Islam. For
reasons best known to the pundits and reviewers who should be
aware of it, this research remains publicly unknown.
Dr. Patricia Crone, who received her doctorate under Prof. John
Wansbrough at the University of London's School of Oriental and
African Studies, was Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Oxford and
Cambridge, and is currently History Professor at Princeton
University, is an example. In her book, Meccan Trade and the
Rise of Islam, Dr. Crone demonstrates that Islam did not
originate in Mecca.
Mecca is located in the Hejaz region of what is today Saudi
Arabia. It is portrayed by traditional belief as a wealthy
trading center, full of merchants trading goods by caravan from
Yemen in the south and Syria and the Byzantium empire in the
north. Crone shows that Mecca was in fact way off the incense
route from Yemen to Syria, which bypassed where Mecca is today
by over 100 miles. Further, there is no mention whatever of
Mecca in contemporary non-Moslem sources:
"It is obvious that if the Meccans had been middlemen in a
long-distance trade of the kind described in (traditional
Islamic) literature, there ought to have been some mention of it
in the writings of their customers... who wrote extensively
about the south Arabians who supplied them with aromatics.
(Despite) the considerable attention paid to Arabian affairs
there is no mention at all of Quraysh (the tribe of Mohammed)
and their trading center (Mecca), be it in the Greek, Latin,
Syraic, Aramaic, Coptic, or other literature composed outside
Arabia ." (p. 134)
An exhaustive examination of all available evidence and sources
leads Crone to conclude that Mohammed's career took place not in
Mecca and Medina or in southwest Arabia at all, but in northwest
Arabia. Agreeing with her is Islamic historian Mohammed Ibn
al-Rawandi. He observes that it took some 150-200 hundred years
after the Arab Conquest which began in the 620s for places that
had gone unremarked and unregarded to become places of reverence
associated with the Prophet. Mohammed's supposed birthplace in
Mecca, for example, was used as an ordinary home until
al-Khayzuran, the mother of the first Caliph of Baghdad Harun
al-Rashid, made it a house of prayer some 150 years after
Mohammed's death.
For an increasing number of Islamic historians, the tradition of
Mohammed being the source and explanation of the Arab Conquest,
wherein Arab tribesmen on horseback emerged out of the Arabian
deserts to conquer Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan,
Egypt, Libya, and Spain in less than 80 years (636-712), stands
history on its head. They demonstrate that the story of Mohammed
uniting various Arab tribes like Genghiz Khan did for the
Mongols, and providing them with the religious fervor to conquer
in the name of Islam, is "sacred history," rather than real
history. Historian Gordon Newby explains:
"The myth of an original orthodoxy from which later challengers
fall away as heretics is almost always the retrospective
assertion of a politically dominant group whose aim is to
establish their supremacy by appeal to divine sanction."
This applies to the Arab Conquest, says al-Rawandi, because for
some two hundred years the Arab conquerors were a minority
amongst a non-Moslem majority. For al-Rawandi, Islam is an
invention for the purpose of providing a religious justification
for Arab Imperialism. The Conquest is the reason and explanation
for Islam, not the other way around. While there may well have
been a historical individual named Ubu'l Kassim who was later
entitled Mohammed ("The Praised One"), who raised followers and
participated in the initiation of the Arab Conquest, he likely
came from northeast Arabia in what is now southern Jordan. The
deity that Ubu'l Kassim chose to follow was Allah, a contraction
of al-Lah, the ancient Arab God of the Moon [note: which is why
the symbol of Islam to this day is the crescent moon]. Ubu'l
Kassim died, however, some years before the Arab Conquest was
fully underway (the traditional date is 632). Al-Rawandi
summarizes what then happened:
"Once the Arabs had acquired an empire, a coherent religion was
required in order to hold that empire together and legitimize
their rule. In a process that involved a massive backreading of
history, and in conformity to the available Jewish and Christian
models, this meant they needed a revelation and a revealer - a
Prophet - whose life could serve at once as a model for moral
conduct and as a framework for the appearance of the revelation.
Hence (Ubu'l Kassim was selected to be the Prophet), the Koran,
the Hadith (Sayings of the Prophet), and the Sira were contrived
and conjoined over a period of a couple of centuries.
Topographically, after a century or so of Judaeo-Moslem
monotheism centered on Jerusalem, in order to make Islam
distinctively Arab... an inner Arabian biography of Mecca,
Al-Rawandi concludes that the Sira, the life of Mohammed in
Mecca and Medina is a myth, a "baseless fiction." This is the
conclusion of a substantial number of serious academic
historians working on Islamic Studies today. They include
Mohammed Ibn al-Warraq, Mohammed Ibn al-Rawandi, John
Wansbrough, Kenneth Cragg, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, John
Burton, Andrew Rippin, Julian Baldick, Gerald Hawting, and
Suliman Bashear. Yet they and their research are virtually
unknown.
Not any longer. In committing The Atrocity of September 11,
Islamic terrorists did far more damage to their religion than to
New York City or the Pentagon. As U.S. Special Forces teams hunt
them down and put them to death, they and all the Bin Ladens of
the Moslem Terrorism network should know that the world is soon
to learn about the Myth of Mecca.
We don't know about the Myth of Mecca because we are afraid to.
We, Americans and Westerners and participants of civilization,
have been intimidated and frightened into examining the
historical truth regarding Islam. Dare to criticize Islam and
some crazed ayatollah will issue a fatwah calling for your
death. Well, if there is one thing that we must learn from The
Atrocity is that we cannot, we dare not be afraid any longer.
The Atrocity was committed exclusively by Moslems in the name of
Islam. True enough, President Bush, in his magnificent speech to
Congress, said their actions blaspheme and insult Islam. But
throughout the Arab world, from cafes in Beirut and Cairo to the
streets of Nablus and Gaza, people laughed and celebrated their
religion's slaughter of thousands of Americans. So we should
feel no need to refrain from exposing that this slaughter was
committed in the name of a make-believe myth.
The Moslem Terrorists who committed The Atrocity have put all of
their fellow Moslems on the defensive. We see full-page ads in
newspapers taken out by Moslem governments and Moslem
organizations, expressing their sympathy and condolences. These
are welcomed and their sincerity need not be questioned. But
words are not enough. Actions are what count. What is required
of Arab-Americans is not words, but for them to locate the
several thousand agents of Bin Laden and the Moslem Terrorist
Network reputed to be in this country, and turn them in to the
FBI. What is required of Moslem communities the world over is
the same: identify, locate, and turn advocates of terrorism in
to the appropriate authorities.
Yet much more is now required of the adherents of Islam: the
reinvention of their religion. No longer can the words of the
Koran be considered inerrant, infallible, and those of Allah
himself . The words must be read thoughtfully and critically,
and the wisdom they contain extracted with reflection, not
reflexively. Christianity emerged from its Dark Ages when its
sacred texts were considered infallible and criticism condemned
(often to death) as heresy, to subject itself to historical
examination and rational discussion. It is stronger for it. For
a religion's strength does not lie in fanatical belief, in an
unquestioned assumption that disagreement or criticism of it is
an incomprehensible perversion. A religion's strength lies in
the goodness it does for people's souls.
As Al-Rawandi puts it: "The claims of Islam do not depend on
historical origins, but on an inner knowledge of God, the
accompaniment and reward of piety. What makes Islam true is the
spiritual life of Moslems, not religious history but religious
experience."
These are the teachings of a school of Islamic thought known as
Sufism. How Islam must reinvent itself to emerge out of the
Islamic Dark Ages it has inhabited for the last several hundred
years, and join and flourish in the civilized world, is to
combine the teachings of Sufism with those of Jadidism, the
attempt by Central Asian Islamic scholars 100 years ago to make
a revitalized Islam compatible with the modern world. While
Jadidism was snuffed by the Soviets, its revival, combined with
the inner peace and truths provided by Sufism, could reinvent an
Islam prepared to participate and prosper in the 21st century.
The combined synergy of Sufism and Jadidism would be the
salvation of Islam. Today it stands in dire need of being saved.
I hope that dedicated Islamic scholars will appear on the scene
to create such a salvatory synergy. In the meantime, none of us
any longer needs to be afraid or intimidated by the Myth of
Mecca.
References Al-Rawandi, I.M. Origins of Islam: A Critical Look at
the Sources. Prometheus, 2000 Crone, P.M. Meccan Trade and the
Rise of Islam. Oxford, 1987. Newby, G.D. The Making of the Last
Prophet: A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Mohammed.
Columbia, 1989. Wansbrough, J. Quranic Studies: Sources and
Methods of Scriptural Interpretation. Oxford, 1977. Warraq, I.
M. The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. Prometheus, 2000.
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