The Myth of Mecca
By Jack Wheeler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
9/27/2001
The most sacred spot on earth to all members of the Islamic
religion is the Holy City of Mecca, revered as the birthplace of
Mohammed. It is one of the five basic requirements incumbent upon all
Moslems that they make (if their health will allow it) a pilgrimage to
Mecca once in their lives (the other four: recognize that there is no
god but Allah, that Mohammed is Allah's prophet, ritually pray five
times a day, and give alms to the poor).
The founding events of Islam are Mohammed's activities in Mecca
and Medina, a city north of Mecca. The life of Mohammed, known
as the Sira, is popularly accepted to be fully documented
historically, that everything he did and said was accurately
recorded. According to one hagiographer, although Mohammed
"could not read or write himself, he was constantly served by a
group of 45 scribes who wrote down his sayings, instructions and
activities.... We thus know his life down to the minutest details."
The evidence for this is "the earliest and most famous biography of
Mohammed," the Sirat Rasul Allah (The Life of the Prophet of God) of
Ibn Ishaq. The dates given for Mohammed's life are 570-632 AD. Ibn
Ishaq was born about 717 and died in 767. He thus wrote his biography
well over 100 years after Mohammed lived, precluding his gaining any
information from eyewitnesses to the Sira as they would have all died
themselves in the intervening years.
However, no copies exist of Ibn Ishaq's work. We know of it only
through quotations of it in the History of al-Tabari, who lived over
two hundred years after Ibn Ishaq (al-Tabari died in 992). Thus the
earliest biography of Mohammed of which copies still exist was written
some 350 years after Mohammed lived.
It is curious, therefore, that there seems to have been so little
serious scholarly research of the historical evidence for how Islam
came to be. Yet what seems to be isn't so. A number of professional
academic historians, both Western and Moslem, have produced a large
body of research on the origins of Islam. For reasons best known to
the pundits and reviewers who should be aware of it, this research
remains publicly unknown.
Dr. Patricia Crone, who received her doctorate under Prof. John
Wansbrough at the University of London's School of Oriental and
African Studies, was Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Oxford and
Cambridge, and is currently History Professor at Princeton
University, is an example. In her book, Meccan Trade and the Rise of
Islam, Dr. Crone demonstrates that Islam did not originate in Mecca.
Mecca is located in the Hejaz region of what is today Saudi Arabia. It
is portrayed by traditional belief as a wealthy trading center, full
of merchants trading goods by caravan from Yemen in the south and
Syria and the Byzantium empire in the north. Crone shows that Mecca
was in fact way off the incense route from Yemen to Syria, which
bypassed where Mecca is today by over 100 miles. Further, there is no
mention whatever of Mecca in contemporary non-Moslem sources:
"It is obvious that if the Meccans had been middlemen in a long-
distance trade of the kind described in (traditional Islamic)
literature, there ought to have been some mention of it in the
writings of their customers... who wrote extensively about the south
Arabians who supplied them with aromatics. (Despite) the considerable
attention paid to Arabian affairs there is no mention at all of
Quraysh (the tribe of Mohammed) and their trading center (Mecca), be
it in the Greek, Latin, Syraic, Aramaic, Coptic, or other literature
composed outside Arabia ." (p. 134)
An exhaustive examination of all available evidence and sources
leads Crone to conclude that Mohammed's career took place not in Mecca
and Medina or in southwest Arabia at all, but in northwest Arabia.
Agreeing with her is Islamic historian Mohammed Ibn al- Rawandi. He
observes that it took some 150-200 hundred years after the Arab
Conquest which began in the 620s for places that had gone unremarked
and unregarded to become places of reverence associated with the
Prophet. Mohammed's supposed birthplace in Mecca, for example, was
used as an ordinary home until al-Khayzuran, the mother of the first
Caliph of Baghdad Harun al-Rashid, made it a house of prayer some 150
years after Mohammed's death.
For an increasing number of Islamic historians, the tradition of
Mohammed being the source and explanation of the Arab Conquest,
wherein Arab tribesmen on horseback emerged out of the Arabian deserts
to conquer Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, and
Spain in less than 80 years (636- 712), stands history on its head.
They demonstrate that the story of Mohammed uniting various Arab
tribes like Genghiz Khan did for the Mongols, and providing them with
the religious fervor to conquer in the name of Islam, is "sacred
history," rather than real history. Historian Gordon Newby explains:
"The myth of an original orthodoxy from which later challengers fall
away as heretics is almost always the retrospective assertion of a
politically dominant group whose aim is to establish their supremacy
by appeal to divine sanction."
This applies to the Arab Conquest, says al-Rawandi, because for
some two hundred years the Arab conquerors were a minority
amongst a non-Moslem majority. For al-Rawandi, Islam is an
invention for the purpose of providing a religious justification for
Arab Imperialism. The Conquest is the reason and explanation for
Islam, not the other way around. While there may well have been a
historical individual named Ubu'l Kassim who was later entitled
Mohammed ("The Praised One"), who raised followers and participated in
the initiation of the Arab Conquest, he likely came from northeast
Arabia in what is now southern Jordan. The deity that Ubu'l Kassim
chose to follow was Allah, a contraction of al- Lah, the ancient Arab
God of the Moon [note: which is why the symbol of Islam to this day is
the crescent moon]. Ubu'l Kassim died, however, some years before the
Arab Conquest was fully underway (the traditional date is 632).
Al-Rawandi summarizes what then happened:
"Once the Arabs had acquired an empire, a coherent religion was
required in order to hold that empire together and legitimize their
rule. In a process that involved a massive backreading of history, and
in conformity to the available Jewish and Christian models, this meant
they needed a revelation and a revealer - a Prophet - whose life could
serve at once as a model for moral conduct and as a framework for the
appearance of the revelation. Hence (Ubu'l Kassim was selected to be
the Prophet), the Koran, the Hadith (Sayings of the Prophet), and the
Sira were contrived and conjoined over a period of a couple of
centuries. Topographically, after a century or so of Judaeo-Moslem
monotheism centered on Jerusalem, in order to make Islam distinctively
Arab... an inner Arabian biography of Mecca, Medina, the Quraysh, the
Prophet and his Hegira (flight from Mecca to Medina alleged in 622,
Year One in the Islamic calendar) was created as a purely literary
artifact. An artifact, moreover, based not on faithful memories of
real events, but on the fertile imaginations of Arab storytellers
elaborating from allusive references in Koranic texts, the canonical
text of the Koran not being fixed for nearly two centuries." (p.104)
Al-Rawandi concludes that the Sira, the life of Mohammed in
Mecca and Medina is a myth, a "baseless fiction." This is the
conclusion of a substantial number of serious academic historians
working on Islamic Studies today. They include Mohammed Ibn al-
Warraq, Mohammed Ibn al-Rawandi, John Wansbrough, Kenneth Cragg,
Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, John Burton, Andrew Rippin, Julian
Baldick, Gerald Hawting, and Suliman Bashear. Yet they and their
research are virtually unknown.
Not any longer. In committing The Atrocity of September 11,
Islamic terrorists did far more damage to their religion than to New
York City or the Pentagon. As U.S. Special Forces teams hunt them down
and put them to death, they and all the Bin Ladens of the Moslem
Terrorism network should know that the world is soon to learn about
the Myth of Mecca.
We don't know about the Myth of Mecca because we are afraid to.
We, Americans and Westerners and participants of civilization,
have been intimidated and frightened into examining the historical
truth regarding Islam. Dare to criticize Islam and some crazed
ayatollah will issue a fatwah calling for your death. Well, if there
is one thing that we must learn from The Atrocity is that we cannot,
we dare not be afraid any longer. The Atrocity was committed
exclusively by Moslems in the name of Islam. True enough, President
Bush, in his magnificent speech to Congress, said their actions
blaspheme and insult Islam. But throughout the Arab world, from cafes
in Beirut and Cairo to the streets of Nablus and Gaza, people laughed
and celebrated their religion's slaughter of thousands of Americans.
So we should feel no need to refrain from exposing that this slaughter
was committed in the name of a make- believe myth.
The Moslem Terrorists who committed The Atrocity have put all of their
fellow Moslems on the defensive. We see full-page ads in newspapers
taken out by Moslem governments and Moslem organizations, expressing
their sympathy and condolences. These are welcomed and their sincerity
need not be questioned. But words are not enough. Actions are what
count. What is required of Arab-Americans is not words, but for them
to locate the several thousand agents of Bin Laden and the Moslem
Terrorist Network reputed to be in this country, and turn them in to
the FBI. What is required of Moslem communities the world over is the
same: identify, locate, and turn advocates of terrorism in to the
appropriate authorities.
Yet much more is now required of the adherents of Islam: the
reinvention of their religion. No longer can the words of the Koran be
considered inerrant, infallible, and those of Allah himself . The
words must be read thoughtfully and critically, and the wisdom they
contain extracted with reflection, not reflexively. Christianity
emerged from its Dark Ages when its sacred texts were considered
infallible and criticism condemned (often to death) as heresy, to
subject itself to historical examination and rational discussion. It
is stronger for it. For a religion's strength does not lie in
fanatical belief, in an unquestioned assumption that disagreement or
criticism of it is an incomprehensible perversion. A religion's
strength lies in the goodness it does for people's souls.
As Al-Rawandi puts it:
"The claims of Islam do not depend on historical origins, but on an
inner knowledge of God, the accompaniment and reward of piety. What
makes Islam true is the spiritual life of Moslems, not religious
history but religious experience."
These are the teachings of a school of Islamic thought known as
Sufism. How Islam must reinvent itself to emerge out of the Islamic
Dark Ages it has inhabited for the last several hundred years, and
join and flourish in the civilized world, is to combine the teachings
of Sufism with those of Jadidism, the attempt by Central Asian Islamic
scholars 100 years ago to make a revitalized Islam compatible with the
modern world. While Jadidism was snuffed by the Soviets, its revival,
combined with the inner peace and truths provided by Sufism, could
reinvent an Islam prepared to participate and prosper in the 21st
century.
The combined synergy of Sufism and Jadidism would be the
salvation of Islam. Today it stands in dire need of being saved. I
hope that dedicated Islamic scholars will appear on the scene to
create such a salvatory synergy. In the meantime, none of us any
longer needs to be afraid or intimidated by the Myth of Mecca.
References
Al-Rawandi, I.M. Origins of Islam: A Critical Look at the Sources.
Prometheus, 2000 Crone, P.M. Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam.
Oxford, 1987. Newby, G.D. The Making of the Last Prophet: A
Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Mohammed. Columbia, 1989.
Wansbrough, J. Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural
Interpretation. Oxford, 1977. Warraq, I. M. The Quest for the
Historical Muhammad. Prometheus, 2000.
See Also: Islam: The Endless Jihad
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