robert spencer-did muhammad exist__ an inquiry into islams obscure origins-intercollegiate studies institute (2012) (1)

ejected Muhammad's prophetic claim. “The subject peoples,” according to a classic manual of Islamic
law, must “pay the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)”—but that is by no means all. They “are distinguished
from Muslims in dress, wearing a wide cloth belt (zunnar); are not greeted with ‘as-Salamu ‘alaykum’
[the traditional Muslim greeting, “Peace be with you”]; must keep to the side of the street; may not build
higher than or as high as the Muslims’ buildings, though if they acquire a tall house, it is not razed; are
forbidden to openly display wine or pork…recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of
their funerals or feastdays; and are forbidden to build new churches.” 50 If they violated these terms, they
could lawfully be killed or sold into slavery.
But there are problems with the Qur'anic passage from which such Islamic laws supposedly derive.
The People of the Book, in the translation of Qur'an 9:29 by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, must be made to pay “the
Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (al-jizyata ‘an yadin wa-humma saghirun).
Although saghirun clearly means “subdued,” or “humbled” or “lowly,” the words al-jizya and ‘an yadin
do not appear anywhere else in the Qur'an, and their meaning is not entirely clear. Of jizya, Jeffery notes a
Syriac word from which the Arabic one may be derived. He says that the word “looks very much like an
interpolation in the Qur'an reflecting later usage. In later Islam, jizya was the technical term for the polltax
imposed on the Dhimmis, i.e., members of protected communities.” 51 ‘An yadin, meanwhile, can be
understood in different ways. Ali renders it as “with willing submission,” but it could also mean “out of
hand,” in the sense not only of submission but also of direct, in-person payment. The thirteenth-century
Qur'anic commentator al-Baydawi explains: “Out of hand, indicating the condition of those who pay the
tribute. Out of a hand that gives willingly, in this way indicating that they submit obediently; or out of their
hand, meaning that they pay the tribute with their own hands, instead of sending it through others; no one is
allowed to use a proxy in this case.” 52 There are many other possible understandings of this text. The
great scholar Franz Rosenthal observes that ‘an yadin has “completely defied interpretation. All post-
Qur'anic occurrences of it are based upon the Qur'an.” 53
What's more, although the Islamic law regarding the dhimmis was elaborated from supposed commands
of the Muslim prophet, the regulations centered on the jizya were not codified in so specific a form until
several centuries after Muhammad's time. 54 So the term jizya could have been elaborated in later Islam—
when the great corpus of Islamic law was being formulated and codified—but read back into a much
earlier setting and incorporated into the Qur'an. And the strong evidence of Syriac linguistic influence
suggests that when it was elaborated, it could have been done in a Syriac environment, farther north than
the Arabian setting the Qur'an so self-consciously insists on.
A Text Converted to Arabic
It may be, then, that the Qur'an's foreign derivation is one of the primary reasons the book takes pains to
establish itself as an Arabic text. One reason for the Qur'an's Arabic protestations, other than the charges
that Muhammad was listening to a nonnative speaker of Arabic, may be that the Qur'an was not originally
written in Arabic at all but was eventually rendered in Arabic as the new religion was being developed.
Because the empire that it was designed to buttress was an Arabic one, it was essential that the new holy
book be in Arabic. The political imperative was to provide the new and growing empire with a religious
culture distinct from that of the Byzantines and Persians—one that would provide for the loyalty,
cohesiveness, and unity of the newly conquered domains.