Revisionist Theories of Islamic Origins

The Arabian Desert from where the Arab armies emerged.

When one studies the origins of Islam, one has to ask the proper questions. Over the last 40 years, many scholars have done revisionist history regarding the early years of Islam.

According to the orthodox Islamic narrative, Muhammad dies in 632 AD. It took about another year to bring all of Arabia under the fold of Islam, then the Islamic armies went to war with the weakened Persian and Byzantine Empires. In a few short years, the Islamic Empire completely overthrew the Persian Empire and took much land from the Byzantine Empire such as Syria, the Holy Land, and all of North Africa. This was all done by inspiration of a new religion, prophet and holy book.

Revisionist theories on the origins of Islam have reached the popular level. Tom Holland and Robert Spencer are good examples. Fred Donner and Dan Gibson have some interesting theories as well.

One thing that is interesting when studying Islam is the lack of early sources. The Quran is an early source, but anyone who reads the Quran will notice that it doesn’t give geographical locations or context. To understand the Quran, one must look through Islamic tradition such as Tafsir, Hadith, and Sira. The Sira refers to biographies of Muhammad. The hadith are narrations about his life and teachings and Tafsir is the work of Quranic commentaries. All of these sources come very late. The hadith and Tafsir come in the 9^th century and the first Sira written by Ibn Ishaq comes in the second half of the 8^th Century. Muhammad died in 632 AD so this poses a problem.

Why were no documents(or very few) written in the first hundred years? Islam didn’t start as a marginal movement like Christianity did where you had a few people in the Holy Land that spread the message to individuals living in cities of the Roman Empire. Islam started as an Empire. They had organized armies so they could do whatever they wished. Within a decade after Muhammad’s death, the Arabs had captured Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria and other cities.

With these important cities in their possession, the Muslims could do as they pleased. They would have had the capacity to produce large amounts of documents. They could have paid scribes to record Hadith and Sira. They could have learned to read and write from the inhabitants of the cities and make their own documents. If they didn’t want to do this, they could have simply enslaved local scribes and forced them to do their bidding. None of this happened.

Because this didn’t happen, the only option the revisionists have is trying to squeeze little historical facts out of the Quran and looking at archeology. I have looked into many revisionist theories regarding these origins. Some give some interesting conclusions that the orthodox narratives cannot explain but while some problems are solved, more are thrown out.

I once emailed Robert Spencer about his theory of Muhammad not existing. I mentioned that if he was invented between 690 and 700 AD, how was the Arab government able to implement this fabrication over an Empire that spanned thousands of miles with people who never knew about this man. He gave some cheap answer that they retroactively inserted him into history. I can’t remember all the details but I certainly wasn’t satisfied by the answer.

While Spencer brought up some good points about archeological facts that contradict the orthodox Islamic narrative, his theory is very implausible. While I agree that the orthodox narrative has problems, I don’t subscribe to any revisionist conclusions. I might accept a point made by them here or there but their conclusions carry a lot of baggage. Remember, if you want to overthrow the orthodox narrative, the burden is on you to explain all the facts.

At the same time, there is one question that I cannot answer. Where are all the early Islamic documents? This was an organized Empire with access to scribes. There is no excuse. Where are they?