(English Original of „Historische Methodologie und die Forderung nach Wohlwollen gegenüber dem Islam“)
- Historical Methodology and the Believer
A few years ago I was invited to a conference at The Hague by Professor Hans Jansen, the great Arabist. After listening to series of grim papers all day long, Hans and I headed for the nearest bar. I was to give my talk the next day and I asked him what I should talk about. He replied, you must begin with a joke, there were not enough jokes. So I shall begin with a joke, first told me by Joe Hoffmann, which in fact is relevant to the theme of my present paper, that is, historical methodology, and the consequences of scientific research into the origins of early Islam and Christianity, consequences for the believer above all.
The time: the 1950s. Place: The Holy Land. Two archaeologists are working on a site they believe is the true location of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Golgotha just outside ancient Jerusalem. After months of careful digging they came across two skeletons several feet apart, and thinking perhaps these were the bones of the thieves crucified at the same time as Jesus, they shifted their attention to a spot where Jesus himself would have been crucified. Sure enough they find some bones, and the remains of a cross, and after weeks of further digging and carbon-dating analysis conclude that these remains were of Jesus. Furthermore, the archaeological details were consistent with the account of the crucifixion as found in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. They looked at each other as they realized the implications of their findings, particularly for the Resurrection. This discovery was far too important to release to the public without first involving some eminent theologians. They immediately thought of Rudolf Bultmann, perhaps the leading theologian of his day, and author of “The Gospel of John (1941)“, now considered a classic in the field of research into the historical Jesus. Our archaeologists phoned him, and explained in breathless tones their discovery and its consequences. Bultmann listened patiently and was then silent for twenty seconds. Finally, in a thick German accent he said: “You mean he really existed!“
Soon after 11 September, 2001, the left-wing British weekly journal The New Statesman published an article provocatively entitled “The Great Koran Con Trick“ by Martin Bright. The article was essentially a more crude and self-consciously sensationalist version of an article written by Toby Lester, a couple of years earlier, entitled “What is the Koran?“ [1999]. Bright rehearsed the familiar theories of the revisionists, centered on the work of John Wansbrough of the School of African and Oriental Studies [SOAS], and those influenced by him, scholars such as Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, Andrew Rippin, and Gerald Hawting. The article resulted in many letters to the Editor, and six of them were published the following week [17 December, 2001]. The longest was from Patricia Crone, writing from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In her letter, Crone wrote, “modern historians are not interested in the truth and falsehood of the religion they study at all. They study religions as historical factors shaped by their environment and acting back on it in turn, much as scientists study the formation of dust clouds or the evolution of plants. Religious beliefs shape the world they interact with, whether the person studying them happens to share them or not; all that matters is what they meant at the time, not what they mean now“. A little further, Crone continues, “[Historians] have no intention of making the Muslim house come down, nor indeed could they even if they did. Religion does not belong in the domain open to proof or disproof by scholarship or science“.
Michael Cook, Crone’s one-time colleague and co-author of Hagarism, also wrote to the journal. Here is the full text of his letter: “It is perfectly true that some of various academic theories about the origins of Islam are radical. But it would be wrong to suggest that they ‚prove‘ the traditional Islamic account of the beginnings of the religion to be false. They don’t. Neither, so far as I know, do the early Koranic fragments found in Yemen prove anything like that. They are exciting to experts, they scatter a few apples over the cobbles, but they don’t upset the apple-cart. In any case, it is hard to see why academic theories about the origins of Islam should be any more ‚devastating‘ than theories about Jesus have been to Christianity. Academic work does occasionally enliven the halls of learning, but it doesn’t devastate world religions. They don’t play in the same league“.
Now the remarks of both Cook and Crone are misleading to say the least. First, Crone seems to imply that all historians are only engaged in historical sociology of religion, investigating what it meant to be Muslim, and how Muslims saw and experienced their own religion, and are not interested in the truth and falsehood of the religion studied. Not only does this not characterize the work of all historians, it does not even characterize her own. In Hagarism[1977], co-written with Michael Cook, Slaves on Horses [1980], God’s Caliph [1986] written with Martin Hinds, Roman Provincial and Islamic Law [1987], Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam [1987], Crone challenged the accepted views on early Islam. Hagarism, for instance, exploded the “the academic consensus and demolish deference to the Muslim view of things, thus making it possible to propose radical alternative hypotheses for the origins of Islam“, in other words, alternative accounts of what really happened. 1 They clearly rejected the Islamic tradition.
Second, Cook and Crone imply that academic research has no consequence for the religion or the believer, but they themselves clearly saw the implications of their own scholarly work, for they admit in the preface to Hagarism, that without exposure to “the sceptical approach of Dr. John Wansbrough to the historicity of the Islamic tradition . . . the theory of Islamic origins set out in this book would never have occurred to us“ (p. viii), and that this approach led them to a theory which is “not one which any believing Muslim can accept: not because it in any way belittles the historical role of Muhammad, but because it presents him in a role quite different from that which he has taken on in the Islamic tradition. This is a book written by infidels for infidels, and it is based on what from any Muslim perspective must appear an inordinate regard for the testimony of infidel sources“ (pp. vi-viii). Why the recourse to the “infidel sources“, that is, the non-Muslim historians of the period of the Islamic conquests? Their reply: “Virtually all accounts of the early development of Islam take it as axiomatic that it is possible to elicit at least the outlines of the process from the Islamic sources. It is however well known that these sources are not demonstrably early. There is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century, and the tradition which places this rather opaque revelation in its historical context is not attested before the middle of the eighth. The historicity of the Islamic tradition is thus to some degree problematic: while there are no cogent internal grounds for rejecting it, there are equally no cogent external grounds for accepting it. In the circumstances it is not unreasonable to proceed in the usual fashion by presenting a sensibly edited version of the tradition as historical fact. But equally, it makes some sense to regard the tradition as without determinate historical content, and to insist that what purport to be accounts of religious events in the seventh century are utilizable only for the study of religious ideas in the eighth. The Islamic sources provide plenty of scope for the implementation of these different approaches, but offer little that can be used in any decisive way to arbitrate between them. The only way out of the dilemma is thus to step outside the Islamic tradition altogether and start again“.(p. 3)
What an extraordinary avowal: a history “written by infidels for infidels“. What on earth do they mean? Do they mean Muslims should not read it? Why? Because the account in Hagarism is not true? Or more simply, they believe it is true but it is an account no Muslim will find acceptable. Are Muslims not capable of accepting the truth? Must Muslims be always protected from the truth? Why are their sensibilities more important than, say, those of the Christians or Jews?
1 Ibn al-Rawandi. Origins of Islam: A Critical Look at the Sources, in The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, ed. Ibn Warraq, Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000, p.95.
Burnaby Lad says
yeah it’s a chief thing
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clem.alford@talk21.com says
Isn’t it great to be an atheist!!!
Kepha says
Scholarly consenses are, like the biblical Reuben:
Reuben, thou art my firstborn (i.e., honored)…unstable as water, thou shalt not excel; because thou wentest in to thy father’s bed; then defiled thou it…(Gn. 49:3-4).
That is, they build on those foolish Old Tuebingen scholars who tried to shoehorn Christian beginnings into the thesis-antithesis-synthesis straitjacket rather than show proper respect to the faith that made their positions possible. Indeed, the scholarly consensus will go wherever there’s grant money and a crack at appearing on public television or do whatever low and sordid thing will help them get attention.
Every “assured finding” of “scientific” biblical criticism or study of Christian origins is debatable; and even utterly off-the-wall and erroneous things get printed to great fanfare. Elaine Pagels’ _Gnostic Gospels_, for example, flunks Church HIstory 101, yet she became one of the media’s “go to” people.
Yes, Uncle Kepha remains a traditional Protestant Christian.
As for Islam, I hold no candle for that stew of blasphemy and Teufelsdreck. But I believe that there was a successful Hejazi warlord named Muhammad ibn Abdallah who formed a kingdom, got the beginnings of a book and a cult going, and laid the groundwork for the Arab imperium that followed him.
A far more damning indictment of Islam lies not in its historical origin (God, conceivably, could work through a Hejazi warlord), but in the impossibility of the Qur’an continuing the biblical prophetic tradition when it identifies the sister of Moses with the mother of Jesus (and I don’t buy the mental gymnastics in which Muslim apologists engage to prove otherwise); misidentifies the Persons of the Christian Trinity as God, Jesus, and Mary; and charges the Jews with making Ezra the Son of God in a manner analogous to the Christian view of Jesus. The Qur’an also has Muhammad swearing by the stars (a bit of old Mesopotamian astral religion sneaking in?) rather than swearing by the true God alone.
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PRCS says
+1
Hoi Polloi says
Good comment.
Hoi Polloi says
“much as scientists study the formation of dust clouds or the evolution of plants”
No, not at all. A belief held by an individual is in no way comparable to a dust particle in a dust cloud or the formation of an assemblage of said dust particles. She does not gain credibility by making this claim.
somehistory says
People who lack faith, do not understand faith. People who lack belief in Christ, do not understand the belief that others have, nor why we believe.