Islamization and Arabization of egypt and the problem of the sources

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Mar 28, 2007 at 14:39

Hi , dhimmi no more,

I highly apprecaite your scholarly contributions here on the forum ! It would be a poor desolate place without you , my friend!

> I would urge you to check Hoyland's following books:

1. "Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze age to the coming of Islam" where he reviews all available extant sources, be it epigraphy papyri coins monuments etc... from Arabia prior to islam and from the Hijaz we have nothing. No codices, papyri, coins, epigraphy or monuments! The sources from the Hijaz prior to the rise of islam are jsut not there.

Now are you (or Hoyland) suggesting thereby they have never existed or will never emerge ? This was a history-less - so to speak - area , a blackhole with no humans living there during long millenia of Jakhilya or what ?

We know very well why hijaz is so poor in historical evidence. Moslems - the wahhabites particularly - wantonly destroy all historical evidence that might suggest the "holy" places had a different past from what is officially imposed . I am sure there must have been monuments in Hijaz and most probably a serious archaelogical enterprise might stil reveal plenty of material hidden in Hijaz despite all havoc played upon history by 1400 years of Moslem struggle against the jakhilya. In an old book I once read (Gervais Coutellement , Mon voyage à la Mecque , Paris 1896 ) I came across a passage where the author - after describing a little cemetery near Jidda where Europeans trying to penetrate to the holy cities had been murdered after having been unmasked as kaffirs and buried - he mentions that on the road to Mecca or Medina - I don't remeber exactly as it was along time ago I read it - there had been ancient stones with carved human faces. After the first Wahhabite state conquered Hijaz all those monuments were wantonly destroyed. I suspect in the older literature one might find a few more details of that kind too. I can't imagine Hijaz as a place without history. For me this would be a miracle comparable to Muhammad's splitting of the moon.

> 2. And this second book is a must reading for any student of early Islam and that is:

"Seeing Islam as others saw it. A survey and evaluation of Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian writings on early Islam"

> You will notice that I refer to this book very often and indeed the picture that emerges from non Muslim sources is indeed very different (eg: Those Arab invaders calling themselves al-Muhajiroon which is Moagairtoi in Greek and Mihgraye in Syriac and they did not call themselves neither Muslims nor Arabs and why is that? Only Allahu A3lam)

Well, is it so strange ? It took the first disciples of Jesus some time to adopt the name "Christians". Given the diversity and divisiveness among the tribes that took part in the great conquests it's understandable that they adopted no unified name as they had none and long wanted to have none. In those years of constant expansiona and plundering the illiterate Bedouins were preoccupied with more mundane things. This was the age of murderers and enslavers. They age of theologians was to come later.

> Hoyland also provides a full survey of all the extant Muslim sources be it papyri, coins, epigraphy and monuments as follows;

> A. The first 72 years after the death of Muhammad and what is really strange here is that the sources are silent about Muhammad and why is that? Well again only Allahu A3lam

Well , who knows what was written in the early sources that are lost to us and whose authors we only know from scanty mentions in later works ? How does Hoyland treat "lost sources" ?

> B. From the year 72 until 750CE or the end of the Umayyad's and this is when we start to see more chancery papyri but no literature as of yet.

But Arabs were illiterate after all. Why should we expect a literature from those murderous barbarians ? What literature do we have from the Goths except the Bible translated into Gothic by a Greek captive from Asia Minor ?

> And in this period we see real changes as in the evolution the Arabic language and of rukun al-Islam as in the case of the shihada from its primitive form in al-Masjad al-Aqsa to what we almost have now and Muhammad's name start to appear in the sources.

Then you wrote

>> Bismillah

>This is for sure a loan expression from Syriac and has always existed in Semitic religions as we have the famous:

> Beshem and Beshem Alaha (Syriac) or in the name of God which is Arabized as Bi Ism Allah (written) and vocalized as Bismillah or in (Bi) the name (Ism) of Allah and notice that I left Allah as such as Muslims claim that it is a contaction of the word al-Ilah or The God. I do believe that Allah is a loan word from Syriac and it is the proper name of God as the word Alaha/Allaha (Nestorian) means God and not the God.

> So you can see that the fact that the invading Arabs used the word Bismillah on coins does not mean very much as it is a loan expression.

How about the fact I mentioned that some early Arab-Sassanian coins are dated after the hijra ?

>As for the Qur'an there are indeed many puzzles and i will discuss only three examples here:

1. We cannot reconstruct the life of Muhammad from the Qur'an period we must go to sources outside the canon. His name is mentioned 4-5 times and one time he is called Ahmad. The sira must be seen as a form of exegesis of the Quranic allusions and it is for sure not an independent historical source. If you wish to know more here just ask and I will give you more details.

2. Those strange letters at the begining of some suras that have puzzled the 3Ulama back then and they are still a puzzle to this day.

3. There are indeed many strange words in the Qur'an and the locus classicus has always been the word Ilaf in surat Quraish it puzzled the 3Ulama back then and we still do not have a clue about what this strange word really means.

i just selected the above example to explain to you the nature of the Muslim sources as we have them and the real issue now becomes if the 3Ulama in the 3rd century had no clue about all of the above then we have one of two options as was suggested by Cook:

1. It is either that the Qur'an predates Muhammad (and for those of us that know Arabic I'm always amazed at the difference in the style of arabic used in the Qur'an and this difference was realized by the 3Ulama and their answer was to divide it into Meccan and Medina period).

2. Or the Qur'an was not canonized until the 3rd century (during the masora) and pesrons unknown collected those circulating pericopes and logias but by then no one had a clue what the material really means.

But both of the above will detach Muhammad from the Qur'an and even will detach Islam from Arabia

The most interesting puzzle is what Wansbrough called "variant traditions" as in the "Shu3ayb tradition" and the "Two Gardens Tradition' If you read the Qur'an you will notice that Allah repeates himself very often and this has been explained by the 3ulama as a result of asbab al-nuzul or reasons of revelatations. Wansbrough believes that such traditions could very well have been "independet possibly regional traditions incorporated more or less intact into the canonical compilation" (see Cook)

> So the question to you is if the memory of the arabs was such a great memory how come we have all these puzzles? and why did the Arabs forget what these strange letters mean or what the word ilaf really means?

> The answer is as I see it the 3Ulama were making things up period.

That they did make up things on a large scale is sure. I have never doubted that. The only problem I see is the extent to which things were made up by the ulamas. I am ready to agree that they invented a lot of stuff to glorify Islam and the bosses for whom they were working. But suggesting that ALL was invented by them out of void is rather over-stretched or improbable, dear dhimmi. The movement that started in Mecca and Medina was too massive and too profound to be reduced just to a myth. Besides , the traditional story contains too many concrete details to be rejected as a figment of ater generations' mind . What about the 900 Jewish sculls in the main square in Medina ? Who knows probably there are still some there waiting for an archaeologist. The descriptions of besieging Medina by the Meccans also points to some arcaelogical possibilities (the ditch around the city). Finally , in later times the Moslems showed many buildings and places with some remarkable material remants - how about Muhammad's corpse or the cemetery in Medina and Mecca ? - which can't be simply declared as "fiction".

The Beduins are too primitive to be moved into action by abstract ideas. They need a concrete charismatic leader , a visible example , someone they can touch , see , listen to. They always follow a person , never - or seldom - an idea.

All major movements in history - be it Judaism , Christianity or Bolshevism - were initiated by concrete charismatic persons. The masses can't be mobilized in a different way. I can't imagine the October Revolution without Lenin or Fascism without Hitler . Sociologically such movements can't exist based just on some fiction or a myth. They need a strong , compelling , charismatic leader . Sorry , but Islam without Muhammad to my mind would have never come into being . Some Beduins might have found the idea of Islam interesting. But to follow it they needed someone both to whip them and to promise them earthly and heavenly paradises.

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