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Muhammad vs. Muhammad

Jan 26, 2012 11:10 am By Robert Spencer

In 2006 I wrote the book on the right, The Truth About Muhammad, a biography of the prophet of Islam based on the earliest Muslim accounts of his life, in order to illustrate what Muslims generally believe that Muhammad said and did. In my forthcoming book, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins, which will be published April 23 by ISI, I examine the historical value of those early Muslim accounts. It is an attempt to determine whether what Muslims believe Muhammad said and did, as recounted in The Truth About Muhammad, actually corresponds to historical reality.

There are numerous reasons to question the historicity of the early Muslim accounts of Muhammad’s life. Take, for example, an incident I refer to briefly in yet another book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades):

Muhammad already had experience as a warrior before he assumed the role of prophet. He had participated in two local wars between his Quraysh tribe and their neighboring rivals Banu Hawazin.

That he participated in these wars, known collectively as the Fijar War, or Sacrilegious War, is generally agreed upon, but there is no agreement about what he thought later about his role in them. The Egyptian writer Muhammad Hussein Haykal, in his 1933 biography, Hayat Muhammad (translated into English as The Life of Muhammad), quotes Muhammad expressing regret for his participation in this war:

“I had witnessed that war with my uncle and shot a few arrows therein. How I wish I had never done so!” (Pp. 52-3)

However, the ninth-century Muslim historian Ibn Sa’d, in one of the earliest and most important sources for biographical information on Muhammad, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, directly contradicts Haykal by quoting Muhammad saying this about the Fijar War:

I attended it with my uncles and shot arrows there and I do not repent it. (I.143)

So which is it? Is Haykal right that he really did express regret, or is Ibn Sa’d right that he explicitly ruled out doing so? Haykal doesn’t give his source, but it is possible that he had access to a hadith or some Islamic tradition that flatly contradicted the one Ibn Sa’d recorded eleven centuries earlier — although this is unlikely, since Ibn Sa’d often records variant and contradictory reports and discusses how they can be harmonized, or why one should be accepted and the other rejected. In this case Ibn Sa’d gives no hint of any variants. Haykal may simply have altered this tradition for apologetic purposes. Those who cite him as their source on this, or try to build an argument upon his quotation, do so at their own risk.

Nonetheless, such contradictions abound in the hadith reports. Muhammad can quite often be found saying contradictory things, as I show in Did Muhammad Exist?. In that book also I discuss how this odd situation came about: opposing factions both invoked Muhammad as an authority, and invented traditions to support their point of view.

Of course, they didn’t come up with all that many decisive variants on the matter of waging war against and subjugating non-Muslims. That Muhammad was a warrior and taught warfare against non-Muslims is not disputed by any party, regardless of their view of whether or not he regretted his participation in the Fijar War — unfortunately for infidels. Here are two of the many hadiths in which Muhammad counsels war:

“I have been commanded to fight against people so long as they do not declare that there is no god but Allah, and he who professed it was guaranteed the protection of his property and life on my behalf except for the right affairs rest with Allah.” — Sahih Muslim 30

“Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them….If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them.” — Sahih Muslim 4294

UPDATE: I have received an email full of various false statements. I know the claims made about me are false, so it should come as no surprise that their claims about Arabic are false as well.

The email took issue with the points I made here on the basis that the Arabic of the passages from Haykal and Ibn Sa’d is identical. But that was not the issue in my post: the question is whether, as I said Haykal “had access to a hadith or some Islamic tradition that flatly contradicted the one Ibn Sa’d recorded eleven centuries earlier” — in other words, that led him to interpret the passage in the way that he did, such that his translator rendered it in one way, and the translator of Ibn Sa’d translated it in the opposite way.

I was working from the two-volume edition of Ibn Sa’d translated by S. Moinul Haq and published by Kitab Bhavan in New Delhi, which I have here in my office, and which is available at Islamicbookstore.com and numerous other Islamic bookstores. Did S. Moinul Haq, a respected Muslim translator of many Arabic works, really make an elementary error in his translation?

Actually, no. There is a good possibility, obliquely acknowledged in the email attacking my post, that the disputed statement from Muhammad could be translated as “I would not be pleased had I not done so.” Although it is not incorrect to say that ma as a negating particle is not commonly used to negate a present tense, it still could be used, and a good majority of Arabophones use ma to negate the present tense in a variety of dialects, albeit not necessarily in written form. But this tradition purports to record what Muhammad said; why wouldn’t it be in Arabic as commonly spoken? So it is entirely possible that it uses ma to negate the present, as in common spoken form. Certainly Gulf-Arabic spoken variants do use ma to negate the present tense even today.

The double negative is not necessarily “nonsensical” here, as the email claims, and it would indeed translate into “I would not be pleased had I not done so,” or “I do not repent.” To say that “repent” doesn’t appear in the Arabic is a quibble that betrays that the author of the email does not have even a basic understanding of how translation works.

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