LRB, Vol. 43 No. 12 · 17 June 2021
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Winged Words
Tariq Ali
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Muhammad
byMaxime Rodinson
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/search-results?search=Maxime%20Rodinson>,
translated byAnne Carter
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/search-results?search=Anne%20Carter>.
/NYRB, 373 pp., £14.99, March,978 1 68137 492 5/
The most stimulating, balanced and sympathetic secular biography of the
Prophet of Islam was written by a left-wing French Jewish intellectual
in 1961. Maxime Rodinson’s Life of Muhammad was a formative influence on
my generation. It seemed to be the first real attempt to come to terms
with a culture that could not be understood through sacred texts or
works of exegesis alone. Rodinson’s intellectual trajectory was
indelibly linked to his personal and political biography. His parents,
like many other Russian Jews, had fled the tsarist pogroms of the late
19thcentury, ending up in Marseille, where his father worked in the
clothing trade. Maxime, who was born in 1915, left school at the age of
twelve to work as an errand boy. His parents had backed the Russian
Revolution, and in its wake joined the French Communist Party. But their
refuge in France was short-lived. They were dispatched to Auschwitz by
Hitler’s French auxiliaries. It’s worth recalling that the herding up
and dispersal of French Jews was at least in part a Vichy initiative.
It’s a sordid history that the Gaullists and their successors (of most
political persuasions) effectively covered up for decades. The
reintegrated fascists played a horrific role during the Algerian war in
both colony and metropolis.
Rodinson was luckier than his parents. Despite his lack of formal
educational qualifications, in 1932 he passed the entrance exam for the
School of Oriental Languages in Paris, where he specialised in Arabic,
Turkish and Amharic. His linguistic abilities saved his life. During the
war he was taken on as a military interpreter and later worked at the
Institut Français in Damascus and then the Department of Antiquities in
Lebanon, returning to France only in 1947. As well as helping him escape
the extermination camps, this accident of location enabled a deep study
of Islamic culture, its history and origins. Back in Paris he took
charge of the Muslim section of the Bibliothèque Nationale and then
taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He left thePCFafter
Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the crushing of the Hungarian
Uprising by Soviet tanks in 1956, but remained an independent-minded
Marxist for the rest of his life.
Rodinson was never a Zionist. His views on Israel, already critical
after Israel ganged up with France and Britain to topple Nasser,
hardened further after the Six-Day War in 1967. Sartre’s magazine,/Les
Temps modernes,/devoted a special issue to the Israeli-Arab conflict on
the eve of the war, with contributions from Israeli and Arab writers
separated so as not to appear in dialogue. Rodinson was the only
contributor awarded space of his own. He had no doubts about the nature
of Israel as a settler-colonial enterprise, but argued that its
existence was a historical fact that had to be recognised. His
sympathies always lay with the Palestinians. To them he would explain
the sui generis character of Israeli colonisation. The Jews were
not/colons/in the French Algerian mould. They had nowhere to go back to.
They had been gassed and burned out by Hitler; theUSand Britain had
limited the number of Jewish refugees they would accept. The Jews would
resist being driven into the sea. He told the Israelis that they should
cultivate the friendship of nationalist Arab states (Nasser proposed
this to Moshe Sharett, only to be rejected by Ben Gurion and Golda
Meir). Israel did exactly the opposite, choosing to become the principal
relay of Western imperialism in the region. None of this affected
Rodinson’s attitude to Islam and its history. His breach with the
dominant Christian narrative was permanent. He died in 2004. Three years
earlier, in an interview with/Le Figaro/published as an appendix to this
new edition of/Muhammad/, he argued that violence wasn’t any more
intrinsic to Islam than it was to other religions.
Rodinson’s biography, which he revised more than once, first appeared in
1961, when very little writing of any value on Islam was available in
the West. In Emmanuel Macron’s debased language, this makes Rodinson a
premature ‘Islamo-gauchiste’. Recounting the story of Muhammad’s life
wasn’t an easy task. For one thing, unlike the compendium known as the
Old Testament, there is very little biography or history in the Quran.
The first hundred years of Islam produced military histories of its
conquests, synthesised later by the historian Tabari (whose account of
the conquest of Iran and the ease with which the population embraced
Islam is still worth a read), but not much else. Some early texts
conveniently disappeared as evidence of internecine conflicts and rival
interpretations was hidden. Finally, the dominant Sunni faction managed
to agree on an acceptable version of the Quran and the basic outlines of
the Prophet’s life. Rival accounts were suppressed and the first armed
bands in the movement began to spread the winning version of events.
What possessed Maxime Rodinson, a materialist to the core, to write a
biography when only such limited and contradictory material was available?
‘I have tried to show how his character and his ideas were formed,’ he
wrote.
I have sought to understand how his personal traits, growing out of
his psychological structure and personal history, had prepared him
to receive a special Message which he believed to come from the
Hereafter, and to comprehend how and why this Message was consonant
enough with the needs of his milieu to be received with enthusiasm,
first by a small group, then by all of Arabia and beyond. I have
attempted to understand, and to make understandable, how and why
this mystic, intoxicated with the Divine, was able to become a head
of state, a military commander and an ideological leader.
Rodinson believed that hostility to Muhammad and to Islam itself was a
result of the instrumentalisation of Christian and imperialist war aims
from the eighth century onwards. A 19th-century example of this type of
‘scholarship’ was Sir William Muir’s/The Life of Muhammad from Original
Sources/, first published in 1861, soon after the British brutally
suppressed the Great Uprising of 1857 in India, particularly targeting
the Muslims among its leaders. The nominal leader of the revolt, the
last Mughal emperor, was exiled to Burma, and some of his sons were
executed. ‘The sword of Muhammad and the Koran are the most stubborn
enemies of Civilisation, Liberty and Truth which the world has yet
known,’ Muir wrote, a sentiment still shared by many Western
politicians. In his interview with/Le Figaro/, conducted two weeks after
9/11, Rodinson remarked that ‘the temptation may be strong to equate
[Islam] to a kind of barbarism. This must obviously be resisted, for
Islam is also the winged words of the great Muslim thinkers.’
Rodinson begins by describing the world into which Muhammad was born.
Rome besieged by barbarians; Constantinople giving an impression of
serenity and solidity, its confident and complacent rulers gazing on the
Golden Horn, unaware of the rumblings in their lands; further east, the
rulers of Persia failing to recognise that their kingdom was in terminal
decline. Islam was, Rodinson explains, the last of the three
monotheistic religions, after Judaism and Christianity, that met the
social and economic needs of semi-nomadic trading communities in the
Arab East. Early Christianity worked away patiently at the Roman Empire,
with martyrdom helping to diffuse its ideas. The Trinitarians laid the
foundations for a serious challenge to paganism and Constantine’s
conversion did the rest. Christianity was the main political, economic
and religious rival that confronted the fledgling faith being created in
Yathrib (Medina). The concurrent implosion of two huge empires,
Byzantine and Persian, made the task of the new religion easier. Islamic
armies swept into these collapsing worlds at astonishing speed and
within a hundred years of the Prophet’s death in 632, Islam had extended
itself through force of arms to the Atlantic coast – the/al-gharb/or
Algarve – in the west, while its traders had reached Khanfu (Canton) in
the east.
In the absence of much worthwhile Western scholarship, Rodinson’s
analytical and rationalist biography had to rely on previous works in
Arabic, including the Quran and the often unreliable/hadith/,
compilations of the sayings and actions of the Prophet. Some of these
texts are still disputed: each faction or sect picks and chooses what it
needs. The first biography was composed by Ibn Ishaq several generations
after the Prophet’s death. Though the manuscript was carefully edited
some decades later – episodes that did not tally with the needs of the
day were neatly removed – it remained a useful reference for those who
came later. The story it tells is simple: an orphan boy from the
powerful Quraish tribe in Mecca was adopted by his uncle. Each member of
the tribe in theory had the same rights and a share in the common
property. In practice it didn’t work out like that, and because of their
hidden wealth and military prowess the elected tribal elders became an
elite. In a culture where the lineages of horses, even, were carefully
recorded and the most prized animals prevented from mating with others
of inferior pedigree, Muhammad’s orphan status – his disrupted lineage –
was frowned on. He found work in a local trading outfit run by a woman
called Khadija, who took him as her husband. Her financial, political
and emotional support played a huge role in his development before his
visions, as Rodinson calls them, began.
Muhammad never claimed to be anything other than a human being: he was a
Messenger of God, not the son of Allah, and not in direct communication
with him. The visions were mainly aural: the Prophet heard the voice of
Gabriel, who dictated the Quran on behalf of Allah. In a largely
illiterate world, in which storytelling was rife and memories strong,
history was transmitted orally. Muhammad was not the only travelling
preacher at the time; his message caught on because the nomadic
communities found it plausible. Sometimes he stated that on a particular
matter (usually related to sexuality) he had asked Gabriel for advice
and obtained his approval. Khadiya became his first follower. Breaking
with his tribe, which then subjected him to the most vicious slanders,
pushed Muhammad to create a new movement. He came to realise that tribal
divisions were exacerbated by the plethora of local gods and goddesses,
with each tribe worshipping its own favourites. Monotheism was the
solution. He chose Allah, one of the Arab gods, to be the sole divinity
at the expense of other deities, including the extremely popular women
goddesses, who are honoured in an earlier version of the Quran, but were
dispensed with later when the tribes that worshipped them converted to
Islam. A rigorous monotheism prevailed thereafter.
Hounded out of Mecca by enemies including the leaders of his own tribe,
the new Prophet and his handful of followers migrated to Yathrib
(Medina). It was in Medina that a growing movement armed itself
spiritually, with a first draft of the scriptures (more or less)
completed, and militarily, securing the allegiance of rival tribes. Both
the faith and its armies found new recruits. They moved rapidly to take
advantage of the weaknesses of Eastern Christendom and the movement was
soon in control of Mesopotamia, Syria and then Persia.
Muhammad’s death in 632 led to a factional war. He had made clear that
his followers should never present him as anything other than a human
being blessed by Allah. He was a simple messenger, not a maker of
miracles. He did not choose a successor, and disputes over who should
become caliph were the origin of the split between the Sunni and Shia
branches of Islam. War erupted within the faith when the Umayyads, the
peninsula’s first Muslim dynasty, which had itself replaced the
non-hereditary leaders who first followed Muhammad, were themselves
defeated and supplanted in 750 by the Abbasids, who represented the
enlarged fiefdom of Islam and the newly converted non-Arab Muslims. One
Umayyad prince, Abd al Rahman, fled to a different peninsula on the edge
of the Atlantic and took power in al-Andalus, the name given by the
Arabs to the whole of Muslim Spain.
The homage paid by Cervantes in/Don Quixote/to the heritage of Spanish
Islam is seldom remarked on. (There isn’t a single reference to it in
Harold Bloom’s weak, lazy introduction to Edith Grossman’s translation
of 2003.) When he was writing the novel in the early 17thcentury Spain
was racked by an economic crisis whose chief causes included the
depopulation of the countryside after the expulsion of Spanish Muslims,
and inflation following the arrival of large quantities of silver and
gold from the New World. For nearly five hundred years the dominant
culture and language in Spain and Portugal had been Arabic. In the
opening pages of/Don Quixote/the narrator explains that he found the
manuscript he is editing in the Alcana bazaar in Toledo and that it is
written in Arabic. It’s an old language, he says, but there is another
that is even more antique. He is referring to Hebrew and signalling his
own Jewish origins, still denied by the Royal Spanish Academy. At one
point the two anti-heroes reach an uninhabited village and cautiously
reflect on the ethnic cleansing of Jews and Muslims. Towards the end of
the novel, Sancho questions his master about the meaning of a word he
has just used:
‘What are albogues?’ asked Sancho. ‘I’ve never heard of them or seen
them in my life.’
‘Albogues,’ responded Don Quixote, ‘are something like candlesticks,
and when you hit one with the other along the empty or hollow side,
it makes a sound that is not unpleasant, though it may not be very
beautiful or harmonious, and it goes well with the rustic nature of
pipes and timbrels; this word/albogues/is Moorish, as are all those
in our Castilian tongue that begin with/al/, for example:/almohaza,
almorzar, alhombra, alhucema, almacen, alcancia/and other similar
words...I have told you all this in passing because it came to mind
when I happened to mention albogues.’
But nothing is ever told ‘in passing’ in this courageous novel. It is
perhaps the most carefully crafted work in European literature, both
parts written in the shadow of the Inquisition. In another passage,
Cervantes gives Sancho some lines whose reference to the expulsion of
the Muslims and Jews is unmistakeable: ‘I’d like your grace to tell me
why is it that Spaniards, when they’re about to go into battle, invoke
St James the Moor-Slayer and say: “St James, and close Spain!” By some
chance is Spain open so that it’s necessary to close her, or what
ceremony is that?’
In describing pre-Islamic Arabia, the period of Jahiliya (the state of
ignorance) according to Islamic tradition, Rodinson cites the
observation of the fourth-century Roman soldier Ammianus Marcellinus
that Arabian tribespeople are
always on the move, and they have mercenary wives, hired under a
temporary contract. But in order that there may be some semblance of
matrimony, the future wife, by way of dower, offers her husband a
spear and a tent, with the right to leave him after a stipulated
time, if she so elects: and it is unbelievable with what ardour both
sexes give themselves up to passion.
‘This description is undoubtedly an exaggeration,’ Rodinson declares,
though he admits that women played a ‘less subordinate role among the
nomads than was the case with sedentary peoples, or than that which
occurred after Islam’. That women’s lives became more regulated and
oppressed after the emergence of the three monotheisms is beyond
dispute, but women found ways to resist some of the impositions. The
Tunisian scholar Abdelwahab Bouhdiba argues in/Sexuality in Islam/(1975)
that while patriarchy is fundamental in Islam, the third great
monotheism is better than the two earlier ones at recognising some of
the needs of women. He compares the different versions of Adam and Eve’s
expulsion in the Old Testament and the Quran. In the former they succumb
to temptation; in the latter, despite their disobedience and punishment,
they discover a new truth. Quranic verses insist that copulation and
physical love are the true genesis of life. The pleasures of the flesh
reflect the will of Allah.
Bouhdiba’s second example is the story of Joseph’s temptation. The Old
Testament version puts the blame entirely on the wife of the rich
merchant Potiphar, who tries to seduce Joseph. He resists, and the
scorned woman uses the shirt she has torn off him to accuse him of
assault. He denies it, but is imprisoned, before becoming a powerful man
who brings his father, Jacob, and his family to Egypt, escaping the
famine in Canaan. In the Quranic version, the situation is more
ambiguous. There are a number of temptations on offer. ‘Come, take me,’
Zuleikha says. ‘God be my refuge,’ he replies. She tears off his shirt
and ‘they race to the door’ just as her husband enters the room. The
evidence is inspected and a lot hinges on whether the shirt was torn at
the front or from behind. The latter is the case, and Joseph is
acquitted. God’s intervention in order to prevent adultery was
necessary, the Quran says, ‘for she desired him and he would have taken
her.’ Imam Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, believed that Joseph
was about to fall. Another Muslim exegetist, Ibn Abbas, goes further:
‘He undid his trousers, adopting the posture of traitors.’ According to
the ultra-orthodox exegete Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, Joseph had taken up a
position between Zuleikha’s thighs and was undressing her, but found
himself incapable. Al-Razi writes that he is merely reporting this and
does not believe it himself. Fantasies and fictions abound in both
Jewish and Muslim accounts of the episode.
Morethana decade ago I visited the Great Mosque in the Yemeni capital,
Sanaa. I was with an Iraqi architect, an expert in Yemen’s mudbrick
architecture. The mosque is one of the three oldest places of worship in
Islam. It was in the process of restoration and had been carefully
stripped bare. Scaffolding was everywhere. I was lucky to be allowed in.
The mosque was founded in the seventh century, possibly during the
Prophet’s lifetime, and was said to have been visited by Imam Ali. A
team of Italian experts was hard at work, flanked by Yemeni
archaeologists. Artefacts and faded murals from a pre-Islamic past were
being uncovered, some Christian, others pagan, indicating the previous
lives of the structure: temple, church, mosque. Not at all uncommon in
the Arab world and beyond. The archaeologists were also searching for
something that would help date the foundation of the mosque.
Sanaa’s mud-brick architecture is stunning. There is nothing like it
anywhere else in the world. Whether these glories of early Islamic
civilisation will survive the destruction being wrought by the Saudi
‘guardians of Islam’s Holy Places’ and their Western allies remains to
be seen. There has been extensive damage already. The Saudis are past
masters in destroying places of importance to early Islamic history. The
royal family’s adherence to the sectarian Wahhabi doctrine led them to
order the destruction of the tombs of Muhammad’s family and some of his
closest followers in Medina.
The importance to modern scholarship of the Sanaa palimpsest is
immeasurable. It was found during restoration work in 1972, hidden in an
attic behind a false ceiling. The work in the mosque was funded by the
West German Foreign Ministry, and radio-carbon technology enabled German
scholars to read the lower layer of the palimpsest and date the texts to
between 578 and 669ce, about forty years after the Prophet’s death. They
were transcribed in Hijazi calligraphy, and are in a different order
from any known version of the Quran. They provide the clearest evidence
to date that a version of the Quran did exist around the time of
Muhammad’s death, something the scholar John Wansbrough and some of his
disciples denied for a long time, arguing that a ‘stable scriptural
text’ did not emerge until up to two hundred years later. These early
fragments had been erased and replaced on the top level of the
palimpsest by the version of the Quran agreed by a committee of scholars
under the supervision of the third caliph, Uthman.
The texts are preserved in the House of Manuscripts in Sanaa, where they
remained available for scholarly inspection until the outbreak of the
war that is now in its seventh year. As I write, Yemen is still being
bombed by Western-backed Saudi armed forces. Were they to take the
capital, they would have no compunction in destroying the mosque. The
fact that it was visited by Imam Ali, the inspirer and first caliph of
the Shia, would be an inducement.
Rodinson acknowledged his own debt to another maverick historian, the
British Christian-Marxist scholar William Montgomery Watt, whose own
biography of Muhammad appeared in the mid 1950s. Both works were highly
regarded by scholars and historians in the Islamic world. The reason is
simple. There was no mockery, and both made a firm break with the
descriptions of Muhammad as a ‘charlatan’ or ‘impostor’. Islamic empires
had been seen as a challenge since Charles Martel’s victory against the
Muslim armies at Poitiers in 732 (a reference point in all French school
histories), and propaganda against the religion was unremitting. Dante
honoured the Muslim philosophers Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina, but as a
Christian poet he had to do his duty, so imagined the Prophet of Islam
and his son-in-law Ali consigned to the eighth circle of Hell, one of
the ditches of Malebolge:
No barrel, even though it’s lost a hoop or end-piece, ever gapes as
one whom I saw ripped right from his chin to where we fart: his
bowels hung between his legs, one saw his vitals and the miserable
sack that makes of what we swallow excrement. While I was all intent
on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his
chest and said, ‘See how I split myself! See now how maimed Mohammed
is! And he who walks and weeps before me is Ali, whose face is
opened wide from chin to forelock. And all the others here whom you
can see were, when alive, the sowers of dissension and scandal, and
for this they now are split.’
A similar prejudice was on display when the supposedly satirical neocon
magazine/Charlie Hebdo/, treated these days as a secular Bible by many
in the French establishment, printed notorious images of the Prophet in
2012. The octogenarian Henri Roussel, the founder of the magazine (when
it was/Hara-Kiri)/, was one of the few to reprimand his former
colleagues. After pointing out that the terrorism in France should be
put on the scales with French involvement in wars against the Muslim
world, he rebuked the editor: ‘To show, with the caption “Muhammad: A
Star Is Born”, a naked Muhammad praying, seen from behind, balls
dangling and prick dripping, in black and white but with a yellow star
on his anus – whatever way you look at it, how is this funny?’
Islamophobia has always been present in French colonial culture. The
Maghreb wars came home and festered, with migrants (predominantly
African Muslims) on one side and white settlers and ex-soldiers on the
other. With the almost complete collapse of the anti-colonial wing of
the French intelligentsia in the 1980s, aided by the belated turn to
anti-communism in the mid 1970s, a vacuum emerged in French political
culture. The old parties of the left – the Socialist Party and the
Communist Party – hadn’t been staunch opponents of French imperialism
before the nationalist victories in Vietnam and Algeria. The events of
11 September 2001 brought the country’s deep hostility to Muslims and
Islam out into the open. In the years that followed/laïcité/was weaponised.
With Macron and Marine Le Pen mud-wrestling for the presidency, French
Muslims remain a key target. Macron is playing catch-up on a field where
his opponent has all the advantages and no need to prove her
credentials. For French Muslims, there is a stench of Vichy in the air,
with pollution levels highest in cities and regions dominated by the far
right. Few are searching for antidotes to this poison, but some exist.
One of them is this biography.
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