robert spencer-did muhammad exist__ an inquiry into islams obscure origins-intercollegiate studies institute (2012) (1)
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supported a political position or religious practice, made it virtually impossible to regard the Hadith,<br />
which fill m<strong>an</strong>y volumes, as historically reliable.<br />
It is noteworthy that Goldziher, although he never converted to Islam, had a deep <strong>an</strong>d abiding love for<br />
the Islamic faith. As a young m<strong>an</strong> he sojourned to Damascus <strong>an</strong>d Cairo, <strong>an</strong>d he came to admire Islam so<br />
fervently that he wrote in his diary: “I became inwardly convinced that I myself was a Muslim.” In Cairo<br />
he entered a mosque <strong>an</strong>d prayed as a Muslim: “In the midst of the thous<strong>an</strong>ds of the pious, I rubbed my<br />
forehead against the floor of the mosque. Never in my life was I more devout, more truly devout, th<strong>an</strong> on<br />
that exalted Friday.” 9<br />
It may seem str<strong>an</strong>ge, then, that Goldziher would cast scholarly doubt on the historicity of the entire<br />
corpus of the Hadith. But he <strong>did</strong> not intend his conclusions to be corrosive of Islamic faith. Instead, he<br />
hoped that they would lead to a critical evaluation of the Hadith as what they actually were: not sources<br />
of historical information, which they had been always assumed to be, but indications of how Islamic law<br />
<strong>an</strong>d ritual practice developed. He hoped, in other words, that his scholarly findings would lead to a fuller<br />
underst<strong>an</strong>ding of Islam's <strong>origins</strong> <strong>an</strong>d thereby positively affect its present character.<br />
Likewise dubious about the historical legitimacy of the early Islamic texts was the Itali<strong>an</strong> scholar of the<br />
Middle East Prince Leone Caet<strong>an</strong>i, Duke of Sermoneta (1869–1935). Caet<strong>an</strong>i concluded that “we c<strong>an</strong> find<br />
almost nothing true on Muhammad in the Traditions [i.e., hadiths], we c<strong>an</strong> discount as apocryphal all the<br />
traditional material that we possess.” 10 His contemporary Henri Lammens (1862–1937), a Flemish Jesuit,<br />
made a critical study of the Islamic traditions about Muhammad, casting doubt on, among other things, the<br />
traditional dates of Muhammad's birth <strong>an</strong>d death. Lammens noted “the artificial character <strong>an</strong>d absence of<br />
critical sense” in the compilation of the earliest biographies of the prophet of Islam, although he warned<br />
that “there c<strong>an</strong> be no question of rejecting the whole en bloc.” 11<br />
Joseph Schacht (1902–1969), the foremost scholar of Islamic law in the Western world, wrote a study<br />
of the <strong>origins</strong> of Islamic law in which he observed that “even the classical corpus” of Hadith “contains a<br />
great m<strong>an</strong>y traditions which c<strong>an</strong>not possibly be authentic. All efforts to extract from this often selfcontradictory<br />
mass <strong>an</strong> authentic core by ‘historic intuition,’ as it has been called, have failed.” He backed<br />
up Goldziher's finding that “the great majority of traditions from the Prophet are documents not of the time<br />
to which they claim to belong, but of the successive stages of development of doctrines during the first<br />
centuries of Islam.” But Schacht went beyond even Goldziher's arguments, concluding, for inst<strong>an</strong>ce, that<br />
“a great m<strong>an</strong>y traditions in the classical <strong>an</strong>d other collections were put <strong>into</strong> circulation only after Shafii's<br />
time [the Islamic jurist ash-Shafii died in 820]; the first considerable body of legal traditions from the<br />
Prophet originated towards the middle of the second century”; <strong>an</strong>d “the evidence of legal traditions<br />
carries us back to about the year 100 A.H. only”—that is, to the first decade of the eighth century, not <strong>an</strong>y<br />
closer to the time Muhammad is supposed to have lived. 12<br />
John W<strong>an</strong>sbrough (1928–2002), <strong>an</strong> Americ<strong>an</strong> histori<strong>an</strong> who taught at the University of London,<br />
amplified the work of earlier scholars who doubted the historical value of the early Islamic texts. In his<br />
groundbreaking <strong>an</strong>d complex work, W<strong>an</strong>sbrough postulated that the Qur'<strong>an</strong> was developed primarily to<br />
establish Islam's <strong>origins</strong> in Arabia <strong>an</strong>d that the Hadith were fabricated in order to give the Arabi<strong>an</strong><br />
Empire a distinctive religion so as to foster its stability <strong>an</strong>d unity.