User:Louis P. Boog/sandbox/beginning

=Origins of Islam, revisionist hypotheses=

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Outline

 * lede - what is revisionism, who are revisionists, why were they revising
 * Unreliability of Muslim literature sources
 * Conflict of traditional accounts with "hard sources"
 * Specific issues that aren't verified
 * Invading Arabs brought a new religion
 * Invading Arabs required conversion or a tax payment (jizya) from the invaded inhabitants
 * Invading Arabs talked about their prophet
 * Talked about their holy book, the Quran
 * Talked about great battle
 * Talked about Rashidun
 * Mecca being the "mother of cities", a place of "great significance and wealth"

Based on these doubts/questions/ contradictions,


 * Without religious zeal and divine intervention, Why would the Arabs invade and why would they be successful?
 * Empires ravaged by plague and exhausted by war with each other
 * Arabs having a long history as mercenaries familiarity with imperial tactics and technology
 * Lack of competition with other barbarians to the north or east.

If there is little reason to think Mecca is the location of Islam's origins where would they be?

[End of Outline] ---

lede
In the early 1970s some non-Muslim Islamic scholars (now often called "revisionists") began to question the traditional/conventional account of the rise of Islam. This origin story was subscribed to not only by the Islamic world but by most non-Muslim Islamic scholars,  who accepted it "in most of its details", (excluding elements involving divine intervention)  and accepted the reliability of it's traditional  literary sources.

However, these "revisionist" scholars (such as John Wansbrough and his students Andrew Rippin, Norman Calder, G. R. Hawting, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook; as well as Fred Donner, Günter Lüling, Yehuda D. Nevo and Christoph Luxenberg; popular historian Tom Holland, and ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq; who all drew on the earlier work of Ignác Goldziher and Joseph Schacht) questioned the reliability of the basis of the traditional account, i.e. Muslim "literary sources", written 150 to 250 years after Muhammad and (the new scholars argued) subject to biases of and embellishments by the authors and transmitters. Instead they proposed employing a "source-critical" approach to these literary sources -- which included traditional commentaries on the Quran (tafsir), oral accounts passed down of what the Islamic prophet Muhammad said, did, approved of or didn't (hadith), and traditional biography of the prophet (sira) -- and including as relevant evidence archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and contemporary non-Arabic literature, that they argued provided "hard facts" and an ability to crosscheck.

Their theories are "by no means monolithic", but they do share some "methodological premises" and theories: But may disagree on issues such as the historicity of Muhammad and questions on the Quran such as when did it first appear, how was it written, how was it transmitted from from one generation to another in its early years?
 * that the religious, political, cultural break between the civilizations of Persia and Byzantium, and the new 7th century Arab empire, was not as abrupt as the traditional history describes.
 * that what we know of as Islam was not formed before the 7th century Arab invasion of Byzantine and Persian empires, but after;
 * that Muhammad did not come from Mecca and the belief that he did is an invented tradition from decades after his death;
 * that the relationship between Muhammad and Jews and Christians may have originally been much less adversarial than traditionally described.
 * that the time period over which the basic principles of Islam were established was not the ten years of Muhammad's mission (622-632 CE), that Muslims often use when referring to the "origins" of Islam; but a longer period including Muhammad's mission, Rashidun caliphs and the Umayyad Caliphs.

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ARTICLES TO ADD TO after completion:

Muhammad in Mecca History of Islam Ulama jizya (DONE - MORE OR LESS) Historicity of Muhammad (DONE - MORE OR LESS)

Problems with traditional sources
The first part of the case to reexamine the traditional account of the origin of Islam described above, is the argument that the traditional sources of the account are not reliable.

Islamic historical narratives and the origin of Islam
According to traditional belief, Islamic literature provides the sources for the standard history of the origins of Islam, Islamic law, the life of the prophet. The Quran itself is said to be made "historically comprehensible" thank to the literature of traditional commentary on it (tafsir).

From narratives about Muhammad (usually sira and hadith), for example, "we know everything more or less" (in the words of Salman Rushdie), "where [Muhammad] lived, what his economic situation was, who he fell in love with. We also know a great deal about the political circumstances and the socioeconomic circumstances of the times". A summary of how Islam arose, given to us by Muslim historians of the 9th century and in large part accepted as standard by many secular historians, might be summarized as:

Traditional account
A new monotheist religious movement called Islam rises out of the remote and isolated desert region. Unlike earlier Abrahamic faiths (Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity), with which it shares some prophets and doctrines, Islam originates among pagan in Arabia (Hijaz), not the Eastern Mediterranean; its scripture, law and theology are in the Arabic language; an important part of its beginning is the  appeal to its target audience  to abandon traditional idolatry and polytheism and embrace the one true God.

According to believers, a number of signs point to divine intervention on behalf of the new religion. It's prophet, Muhammad, cannot read, and lives 1000 km from the Jewish and Christian holy land, but the holy book revealed to him (the Quran) is  "unparalleled" in its "sublimity" and talks much about Jewish and Christian scripture.

The Quran follows a passage from heaven down to the angel Gabriel (Jabreel) who revealed it to Muhammad over 23 years, The companions write down and/or memorize these revelations and not long after Muhammad's death a standard edition of the Quran is carefully complied and edited from these memories and scraps under the supervision of Caliph Uthman. Copies of this codex or "Mus'haf" are sent to the major centers of the rapidly expanding empire, and all other incomplete or "imperfect" variants of the Quranic revelation are destroyed. All demonstrates to the faithful its unique protection from corruption.

Like many religions, Islam has its own calendar, the beginning date of which commemorate the fleeing of its Prophet and his struggling followers from oppression in Mecca to the oasis settlement of Medina. There he developes rules of goverrnance and a fighting force. The treachery of local Jewish clans requires their expulsion, slaughter and/or enslavement, but after several years the prophet returns to Mecca in triumph and conquest.

Following the death of its prophet Muhammad, the new religion is led for three decades by a succession of four 'rightly guided caliphs' considered models (sunna) to be followed and emulated. Led by these caliphs and motivated by "an uncomplicated desire to spread the Word of God", Arab Muslim warriors advance.

Though 'a horde of nomads', often heavily outnumbered, experienced in fighting and raiding but not fighting military campaigns, the warriors of the new religion seize for Islam a swath of territory "larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion", taken in half the time it took the Romans to conquer theirs. As they confront their soon to be conquered enemies, the warriors always presented them with "the same three choices": "conversion, surrender with a payment of a poll tax, or death in battle". Though outsiders to the civilizations of Persia and Byzantium, the new Islamic civilization replaces not only the rulers of Persia and (most of) Byzantium, but the laws of those two empires with a new divine system of law (sharia) that encompasses all facets of social and economic life. The diversity in "languages, ethnicities, cultures, and religions" of the defeated peoples are replaced "by "Arabian Islam", and "not gradually, later" but by the seventh century. The common people of the lands they conquer welcomed their arrival.

Islamic historical narratives
The Muslim "literary sources" include early tafsir (commentaries on the Quran), sira (biography of the prophet),  khabar (reports or stories about historical events from early Islam, also a “narrative of biographical character”), qissa ("edifying narratives of the prophets that may be spiced with interesting titbits [sic] intended to keep the attention of the audience"), mathal (narratives or a sayings that are "used to prove a point of doctrine or explain a circumstance of life", maghazi (narratives of "the military campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad"), and hadith (records of the words, actions, and the silent approval of accounts of Muhammad -- which like the Quran qualify as God's revelation according to the traditional Islamic history).

But to modern secular historians they are simply not reliable for a number of reasons:


 * because their purpose is to strengthen religious faith, not to investigate and find out what actually happened;
 * because of their late dates (the beginning of the third Islamic century) make them more subject to error through long oral and written transmission, in addition to raising questions of whether it allowed time for a makeover (fabrication) of history;
 * because they contain "contradictions, confusions, inconsistencies", and that
 * because even compilers of the accounts (in particular hadith) agree the sources contain many falsified historical accounts.

Purpose
Unlike "history" that seeks to investigate the past to determine historicity (what actually happened), the narratives are "salvation history" or "sacred history", whose purpose is "to show the workings of God, not the machinations of man", much like the holy religious sources of other religions -- the Pentateuch, Talmud, New Testament.

In traditions of early military campaigns and battles, for example, instead of descriptions of planning, tactics and weaponry, troop strength, layout, or movement, of the sort you would expect to find in the Greco-Roman history; there are stories of "past glories and heroic exploits" to encourage the troops, told by storytellers/preachers. Islamic literature includes supernatural elements, most importantly that the Quran and Hadith are revealed by God through the angel Jibril. But there are other tales of divine intervention -- Ibn Ishaq described hosts of angels coming to the aid of Muhammad at the Battle of Badr.

Oral or written transmission
Hadith where passed down orally. Ibn Warraq argues that it is highly likely that the sira available to modern readers was passed down orally at first and later by hand-copied text, since the oldest paper with Arabic writing found on it dates from between 796 and 815 CE and Ibn Ishaq died in 767; there are least 15 transmitters of his Sira and their versions contradict each other. Hadith were passed down orally until canonical compilations in the late ninth century.

But written and oral accounts of historical events are subject to error. Generations of transmitters can unintentionally distort the original account (as in the children's game "Chinese whispers"), authors of ancient chronicles necessarily tell readers what they thought happened or wanted to believe happened and not necessarily "what actually happened". Eyewitnesses are subject to "conscious and unconscious ... attempts to fit" what they see into "preexisting knowledge". Transmission of history is subject to "embellishing and explaining, ... adding, subtracting ... substituting a word, a phrase or a gloss". For example, substituting "Muhammad" for "The Prophet" -- since the copyist "knows" The Prophet is Muhammad.

Late date
Revisionists like G.R. Hawting point out,

"We have no biography of Muhammad, no commentary on the Quran, no law book, no collection of Hadiths, no history of early Islam, etc. which can be said to predate, in the form in which we have it, the beginning of the third Islamic century.'"

The longer the period from event until account, the more opportunity for distortions described above, but revisionists also raise the question of why there would be such a long gap in time. Thomas Holland pointing out that historical records were being written and have survived "even on the most barbarous fringes of civilisation" (in Dark Ages era Britain) around that era,  why wouldn't they in the heartland of a blossoming empire? He argues that contemporaneous biographical information about Muhammad was likely  destroyed

For another literary source, tafsir for the Quran, Neva & Koren argue that variant texts before the late second century  were unlikely to have been destroyed", because  a simpler explanation is more plausible -- namely "that no one commented because nothing existed to comment on" -- i.e. that the Quran did not emerge until later than the Islamic tradition tells us.

Hadith
(As mentioned above) Hadith (the body of accounts of the prophets saying, doings, etc.), are unlike sira and khabar because they are considered a source of Islamic revelation and provide the basis of the "great bulk" of the rules of Sharia (Islamic law). Proper hadith include an "isnad", a "chain" of the transmitters who orally relayed the content of the hadith (matn) from Muhammad to a hadith compiler (such as Muhammad al-Bukhari or Ahmad ibn Hanbal). The most highly respected compilers carefully examined hadith to weed out false accounts.

Notwithstanding these measures, early Muslims Al-Nawawi, Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ, Ibrahim an-Nazzam; later reformers  Syed Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Iqbal; and of course revisionist scholars from the West such as Ignác Goldziher, Joseph Schacht, John Wansbrough, Michael Cook (historian), and Patricia Crone; argue that even the highly rated sahih ("sound" or authentic) hadith suffer from corruption or should be limited in their use.

The first revisionists (Ignác Goldziher (1850-1921) and Joseph Schacht (1902-1969)), studied Hadith literature and argued that the traditional Islamic accounts about Islam's early times — written 150 to 200 years after the events they describe — cannot be relied on as historical sources. Goldziher argued (in the words of R.S. Humphreys), "that a vast number of hadith accepted even in the most rigorously critical Muslim collections" were not passed down from Muhammad but were "outright forgeries", from "the late 8th and 9th centuries". The seemingly meticulous isnads providing support for them utter fiction. Schacht argued Islamic law was not passed down without deviation from the practice of Muhammad but "developed ... "out of popular and administrative practice" under the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750 CE), and "this practice often diverged from the intentions and even the explicit wording of the Koran ... norms derived from the Koran were introduced into Muhammadan law almost invariably at a secondary stage."

One concern is that rather than decreasing in number over time as they were lost or forgotten, the number of hadith increased, a red flag that fabrications must have been added. Revisionist Patricia Crone argues that it's not possible to find a "core" of authentic hadith because we do not know when the fabrication of them started. "Bukhari [810–870 CE] is said to have examined a total of 600,000 traditions attributed to the Prophet; he preserved some 7000 (including repetitions), or in other words dismissed some 593,000 as inauthentic. If Ibn Hanbal [ (780–855 CE)] examined a similar number of traditions, he must have rejected about 5700, his collection containing some 30,000 (again including repetitions). Of Ibn Hanbal's traditions, 1,710 (including repetitions) are transmitted by the companion Abd Allah ibn Abbas [(619–687 CE)]. Yet less than fifty years earlier one scholar had estimated that Ibn Abbas had only heard nine traditions from the Prophet, while another thought that the correct figure might be ten. If Ibn Abbas had heard ten traditions from the Prophet in the years around 800, but over a thousand by about 850 CE, how many had he heard in 700 or 632? Even if we accept that ten of Ibn Abbas' traditions are authentic, how do we identify them in the pool of 1,710?"

Sira
With the exception of fragments, Patricia Crone laments that the Sira of the Prophet is full of "contradictions, confusions, inconsistencies and anomalies" and constitutes "destruction rather than preservation of the past". Ibn Ishaq was not a grandchild of "the Prophet's generation ... but a great grandchild", writing from the point of view of the Abassids, not the earlier Umayyads that the Abassids overthrew and slaughtered. The traditions conflict with each other so often and so regularly `that one could were one so inclined, rewrite most of Montgomery Watt's biography of Muhammad in the reverse.'" (some examples being: Meccans first traded with foreigners who came to Mecca but stopped in the pre-Islam past, or alternately stopped after Islam triumphed to have more time to pray. The Meccans went to Syria every summer and winter, or instead went to Syria in one season and to Yemen the next.)

Examining them, Patricia Crone found a pattern, where the farther a commentary was removed in time from the life of Muhammad and the events in the Quran, the more information it provided, despite the fact it depended on the earlier sources for its content. Crone attributed this phenomenon to storytellers' embellishment. "If one storyteller should happen to mention a raid, the next storyteller would know the date of this raid, while the third would know everything that an audience might wish to hear about." An example was the oldest prophetic biography, that of Ibn Ishaq (died 767), which was much smaller than the commentary of Al-Waqidi (d.823), despite the fact that Waqidi's later works covered a shorter periods of time (only Muhammad's period in Medina). "Waqidi will always give precise dates, locations, names, where Ibn Ishaq has none, accounts of what triggered the expedition, miscellaneous information to lend color to the event" making him a popular source for scholars. The implication is that not only should Waqidi not be considered a reliable source, but that it is likely the same myth creation process didn't start with him but contaminated Ibn Ishaq's accounts. "... given that this information was all unknown to Ibn Ishaq, its value is doubtful in the extreme. And if spurious information accumulated at this rate in the two generations between Ibn Ishaq and al-Waqidi, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that even more must have accumulated in the three generations between the Prophet and Ibn Ishaq."

Hans Jansen also alleges self-contradictions, contradictions to other historical sources, embellishments by later authors, politically or theologically motivated distortions, etc., in Ibn Hisham's  version of the Sira by Ibn Ishaq. Among the questionable accounts are Muhammad's satisfying all his wives in one night, killing more enemies than described in similar hadith stories, and that not a not a single one of the many events Ibn Ishaq describes falls during a leap-year month. A fact Jansen finds suspicious because leap year months (which adjust for difference between the 365-day solar year and the 354/355 days of 12 lunar months, and which were used during almost all of Muhammad's lifetime) occur approximately every three years and were used by pre-Islamic Arabs. (This, of course, might be explained by the fact that Ibn Ishaq lived many years after Muhammad had done away with the leap years, if Ibn Ishaq's accounts were fictitious.)

Another revisionist, Tom Holland, argues that there must have been biographical mentions/information about such an important figure as Muhammad earlier than the the ninth century and that it is more likely this literature (sira not tafsir) was destroyed -- something he thinks is hinted at by Ibn Hisham introductory remarks of Sira, where he states that  “things disgraceful to discuss” and upsetting to people were omitted,  i.e accounts that contradict the story he wants to tell, the official account that is contradicted by others.

Khabar
Khabar (literally news, information, pl. akhbar) are statements, often reports or stories about historical events from early Islam, sometimes distinguished from hadith in that they are not from Muhammad but said to be from authoritative Muslims -- often Companions and Successors. In studying khabar, one non-Muslim scholar, Stefan Leder, found instances of "two or more irreconcilable accounts of the same event, possibly quoted from the same eyewitness", that were allegedly "truthfully handed down from prior witnesses" but in the process of transmission were "reshaped and gradually elaborated". Leder found it was not possible to sort out folkloric stories of storytellers (qussas) from allegedly historical akhbar, both "having their roots in the oral tradition of social gatherings".

In their study of the traditional Islamic accounts of early conquest, historians Albrecht Noth and Lawrence Conrad found the conquests of several key cities -- Damascus and Caesarea in Syria, Babilyn/al-Fusat and Alexandria in Egypt, Tustar in Khuzistan and Cordoba in Spain -- "are all described as having fallen into the hands of the Muslim in precisely the same fashion". There is a "'traitor who, ... points out a weak spot in the city's fortification to the Muslim besiegers; a celebration in the city which diverts the attention of the besieged; then a few assault troops who scale the walls, ... a shout of 'Allahu akbar!' ... from the assault troops as a sign that they have entered the town; the opening of one of the gates from inside, and the onslaught of the entire army.'"

One example of an account of an Arab conquest studied by Lawrence Conrad was that of the island of Arwad (3 km off the Syrian coast) in 29 A.H/650 CE. Conrad found that it not only contained contained stereotypic and formulaic elements found in other accounts, but differed "to an extraordinary extent" and was "irreconcilable" with the account given by one non-Muslim chronicler -- Theophilus of Edessa".

Noth and Conrad argue that these are too numerous and their similarity too exact to be historical coincidences. Conrad concludes that however "engaging and eventful", the original story of the conquest "must have been", that account was eventually lost as the need of the storytellers who passed down the tale shaped it to provide an account the "audience would find edifying and/or entertaining ... harmonious with that audience's conceptions of the origins of Islam and the early growth of the community".

Conflict between traditional account and non-traditional sources
Applying other more reliable sources (the aforementioned contemporary non-Arabic literature, archaeology, numismatics and epigraphy), revisionists see conflicts with the traditional/conventional account of the rise of Islam as a straight path of Islamic practice from the time of Muhammad through the Rashidun and Umayyad  eras, breaking abruptly with  the conquered civilizations.

Revisionist questions
Among the evidence revisionists martial  includes: a lack of Islamic iconography on coins until the reign of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (646-705 CE), and no use of the name of Muhammad on Arab-Sassanian coins until sometime after 685 CE; a failure by chroniclers to recognized Arabs as rulers rather than just immigrants, "for the first decade at least", no attempt by the conquered people to rebel against the Arab immigrants/conquerors despite outnumbering them by a wide margin (for example the Arabs took over Jerusalem by negotiations rather than by siege) suggesting that the immigrants/conquerors did not impose something hostile to the Christians' beliefs; the failure of the conquered Christians to mention the "rightly guided caliphs" or any of the legendary futūḥ battles (i.e. the early Arab-Muslim conquests which facilitated the spread of Islam and Islamic civilization; or to describe the Muslim leaders in religious rather than secular or political (kings, princes, rulers) terms, and particularly to refer to Muhammad by the standard title of "prophet"  or "apostle", rather than simply as the first of the Arab kings.

The fact that the immigrants/invaders included Christians, that when they did talk of religion they did not mention the "Quran", "Islam", or that the immigrants/conquerors were of a new religion, any mention any offers by the Arabs to Persians and Byzantines to avoid conquest by converting to Islam,

The ignorance of the putatively major trading center of Mecca by ancient Roman and Greek diplomats, geographers, historians,  or traders, mercenary recruiters, and even by the conquered peoples (at least "for a long time").

The use (prior to the changes made by legal scholar Al-Shafi‘i - died 820 CE) in the rulers' legal system of the "pre-Islamic sunnah" of Arabia, the mixed custom-administrative law of the distant provinces", and later the "living traditions" of the newly formed Islamic schools; where caliphs were "free to make and unmake Sunnah as they wished", the observation of early Muslim scholars that citing of hadith of the prophet was an innovation from past practices.

And casting doubt specifically on abrupt change brought by the Arabs was the  difficulty archeologists had when digging down to the level that divides the late Byzantine from the early Islamic era, of finding things they usually find indicating a conquest in the region of Palestine -- a layer of destruction or changes in the kind and/or style of pottery.

Implications of contemporary non-Arabic literature, archaeology, epigraphy, and numismatics
The conquest by Muslim Arabs of Byzantine and Persian lands should be reflected in the physical remains of archaeology, rock inscriptions and coins, dating from the first century or so after Muhammad's death (630-730 CE).

For example, Byzantine, Jewish or Persian literature, such as chronicles, from 7th century should mention Arab conquests -- Syria and Palestine in 641 CE, Mesopotamia in 636 CE, Egypt between 639 and 646 CE, and the rest of the Persian/Sassanid empire by 651 -- the ruling Rashidun Caliphs (632–661 CE) bringing a new religion, new laws, new ways of doing things. Archaeological digs should find things like remains of major battles, ruins of overrun forts, destroyed symbols of Byzantine authority, etc. dating to these times. Coins being common archaeological artifacts and "official pronouncements of current state attitudes", those after conquest should have verses or parts of verses from the Quran and mention of Muhammad and the caliphate, as coins of later Islamic states do. The thousands of rock inscriptions in the Arabian Peninsula and Syro-Jordanian desert, some that can be dated to the time around 630 CE. Those inscriptions before 630 should be pagan and those after Islamic, with some perhaps some signs of transition (mentions of paganism or pagan names in early Islamic inscriptions).

Contemporaneous non-Arab literature
While Christian and Jewish accounts were "just as much a part of the sectarian milieu" as the Muslim version of events and also must be treated with caution  (according to J. Wansbourgh), they deserve study, especially contemporaneous ones.
 * Perception of the new religion and the Arab invasion

What the invaded people understand of the religion of the immigrants is ambiguous. Examining 7th century Byzantine Christian sources commentary on the Arab "immigrants" (Mhaggraye) who were invading/settling in formerly Byzantine territory at that time [starting in the late 630s], historian Abdul-Massih Saadi found the Christians never mentioned the terms "Quran" nor "Islam" nor that the immigrants were of a new religion.

The invaded Christians used secular or political, not religious terms (kings, princes, rulers) to refer to the Arab leaders. Muhammad was "the first king of the Mhaggraye", also guide, teacher, leader or great ruler. They referred to the immigrants in ethnic terms -- "among them (Arabs) there are many Christians...". (Donner also states Christians were soldiers in the Arab immigration/invasion.) Robert Hoyland also found "contemporary observers mostly referred to the conqueror in ethnic rather than religious terms".

In the Fertile Crescent, inhabitants did not (in the words of Neva & Koren) "perceive, or notice, or recognize the fact of Arab rule for the first decade at least, not the Arab religion for most of the first century," (according to Syriac and Byzantine sources studied by historian S.P. Brock). "The title 'prophet'" applied to Muhammad by the Syriac and Byzantine inhabitants "is not very common, 'apostle' even less so. Normally he is simply described as the first of the Arab kings, [presumably after the inhabitants noticed the Arabs were ruling] and it would be generally true to say that the Syriac sources of this period see the conquests primarily as Arab, and not Muslim".

But if they don't mention that (most of) the Arabs were of a new religion, they do mention a non-Christian religion. The immigrants' religion was described as monotheist "in accordance with the Old Law (Old Testament)". When the Emir of the immigrants and Patriarch of the local Christians did have a religious colloquium there was much discussion of the scriptures but no mention of the Quran, "a possible indication that the Quran was not yet in circulation." The Christians reported the Emir was accompanied by "learned Jews", that the immigrants "accepted the Torah just as the Jews and Samaritans". At the same time, none of the sources described the immigrants as Jews. The Byzantine Christians did mention "First and Second Civil Wars" among "Arab political and tribal factions" which they saw as destroying the immigrants.

In keeping with seeming ignorance of the religion of the immigrants/invaders a Christian source, John of Fenek, writes that "of each person" the Arabs "required only tribute, allowing him to remain in whatever faith he wished." According to Hoyland, none of early sources found by historians makes any mention any offers by the Arabs to Persians and Byzantines to avoid conquest by converting to Islam. Tribute paid to the Arabs was the cost of being conquered, not of being non-Muslims.

Nevo and Koren argue early Christian sources do not mention the "rightly guided caliphs" (Rashidun) nor any of the famous futūḥ battles (i.e. the early Arab-Muslim conquests which facilitated the spread of Islam and Islamic civilization). Brock did not find any indication from Syriac chroniclers perceived, noticed or recognized Arabs had begun ruling their land for the first decade at least, nor the Arab religion for most of the first century."

One non-Arab (Greek) source not at all incompatible with traditional Islamic narrative, talks of "the belief that Abraham had bequeathed a monotheist religion" to Arabs, "including descent from Ishmael and Hagar and prohibition of pork and other Jewish practices". This source, The Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen", was written by a native of Gaza (Sozomen) whose "mother tongue was Arabic, so we have testimony from a reliable source that there were Abrahamic  monotheists (hanifs) by orgin; whether this was true of Arabs throughout the peninsula it is impossible to say".

Regarding the Islamic calendar, whose first year is said to commemorate the Hegira or migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina, "there is no seventh century source that identifies" the year as that of the Hijra. The "only clue to its nature comes from two Nestorian Christian documents of 676 and 680 that call it the year of the 'the rule of the Arabs'". (Early sources also don't agree on the dates of the Prophet's birthday and death. According to non-Muslim scholar Lawrence Conrad, "well into the second century A.H. scholarly opinion of the birth date of the Prophet displayed a range of variance of 85 years."

Contemporaneous Arab literature
Literature from various non-religious sources also contradicts elements of the traditional narrative. According to Hoyland, "Muslim lawyers debated Muhammad's rulings about what share of the spoils of war should go to Jews and Christians who fought alongside Muslims," indicating (contrary to later Muslim historians) that Muhammad's coalition included Christians and Jews.

Robert Hoyland writes that agreements/treaties between the invading Arabs and forces in land the Arabs conquered varied in terms: All these were contrary to 9th century claims by Muslim historians that conquerors "offered the same three choices of conversion, surrender and payment of a poll tax, or death in battle" to those they were about to conquer.
 * "the Samaritans of Palestine [who] agreed to act as guides and spies in return for exemption from land tax",
 * "the Jarajima, longtime residents of the Black Mountain region around Antioch, [who] served as frontier guards on the condition that they paid no tax and kept any booty they took when they fought alongside the Arabs."
 * "The Persian governor of Darband and his troops were spared payment of tribute in return for rendering military service, and indeed `it became accepted practice that those non-Muslims who went into combat against he enemy (on behalf of the Arabs), and also those who only contribution was to maintain readiness to fight, should be relieved of tribute.`"

The Constitution of Medina speaks explicitly of Jews being part of the Medinan community, according to Fred Donner, and St John of Damascus is believed to have been an advisor or administrator to the Umayyad caliph.

Archaeology of conquered areas
Conquest of a civilization by another typically involved significant destruction of fortifications, palaces, cities, etc. According to archaeological evidence accumulated by Fred Donner, there is a lack of evidence of such destruction following the conquest and some evidence of a co-existence between Islam and Christian worship not found in later eras.
 * a church near Jerusalem was rebuilt early 8th century with both an apse and prayer niche (mithrab) for Islamic prayer.
 * When Muslims arrived in Damascus, they took over the church of St. John and divided it in half, with one part for Christians and one for Muslims
 * It is hard to distinguish archaeologically between late Byzantine and early Islamic examining the layers of sediment, debris, rock, and other materials that form or accumulate to create Stratigraphy. Unlike most conquests in Palestine, there is no layer of destruction, the kind and/or style of pottery doesn’t change. (Hoyland also states that "the Arab conquests were not particularly destructive".)

Archaeology of imperial forts
Islamic accounts of its early victories under Muhammad and the early Caliphate (Rashidun Caliphate) describe it defeating enemies despite being heavily outnumbered, a sign of God's favor and the religious zeal of Muslims.

The actual history of battles against Byzantines and Persians may have been different.

Archaeological work by S.T. Parker concluded that "during the fifth and sixth centuries C.E. ... Byzantium abandoned most of its fortifications ... and withdrew most of the regular troops" along the desert frontier (Limes Arabicus) designed to prevent Roman province of Arabia from attacks by the "barbarian" tribes of the Arabian desert, (exhausted by war, and the bouts of plague  see below). This left the "frontier defense mainly in the hands of the Arab phylarchs" (Arab tribal leaders allied with Byzantium). "In addition Bzyantium stopped "imperial patronage of secular building in sixth century Syria". Nevo and Koren conclude "archaeological evidence thus indicates that Byzantium began to withdraw militarily from Al-Sham" about the beginning of the 6th century and by early 7th century suggesting "a policy decision" by Byzantium, "long before" the Arab conquest, not to defend al-Sham, which further suggests that that it is unlikely the Arab invaders were engaged in any large battles with Byzantine forces.

Archaeology of pagan sites
Nevo and Koren also state that "extensive ... large scale, systematic surveys and excavations" archaeological work for several decades up to 1990 in Hijaz has found, contrary to Islamic tradition, "no signs of local Arab cultures from the sixth and early seventh centuries" including no pagan cites or sanctuaries", and no trace of Jewish settlement at Medina, Khaybar or Wadi al-Qurrar. This is despite finding the remains of many other cultures (Hellenistic, Nabatean, Roman, and Early Byzantine), and a "wealth" of pagan shrines and stone stelae in an area to the north -- the central Negev desert (between Arabia and Palestine) -- indicating (also contrary to Islamic tradition), that "active pagans must have formed a considerable part of the Negev population right through the first one-and-a-half centuries of the Muslim era".

Coinage
Nevo and Koren note coins of the region and era used Byzantine -- not Islamic -- iconography until the reign of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (646-705 CE). Neva & Koren find it significant that that until 70 AH (689/690 CE) Arab-Sassanian coins include monotheist phrases such as bism Allah, bism Allah rabbi/al-malik, rabbi Allah, but no specifically Islamic phrases such as the name of Muhammad until sometime after 685 CE. Once these slogans were introduced they "became obligatory on all coins minted over a wide area."

Revisionist historians finds the inscriptions and images on coins of an era under study significant because -- in the words of archaeologist Yehuda Nevo and researcher Judith Koren -- "'legends on coins are official pronouncements of current state attitudes (in this case to religion), intended for wide promulgation. Merely placing religious formulae on coins involves a conscious act of choice regarding what to say and what to omit.'" Specifically, old coins of Al-Sham/Levant can yield information on the progress of the Arab conquest of the Levant.

Possible explanations for this evidence -- Revisionists' account
Among the arguments of Cook, Crone and other revisionists are that rather than Islam giving birth to the Arab/Umayyad empire in its missionary zeal to spread the new religion; the empire gave birth to Islam. Islam was formed as a coherent religion with doctrines and laws after, rather than before, the Arab invasions of Al-Sham and Egypt, possibly to legitimize the rule of the invaders and "hold" the "empire together", emulating the sophisticated civilizations they had conquered while creating their own religious identity,  following the model of Jews and Christians with a book of revelation and a prophet "as a model for moral conduct".

Arabs had experience fighting for the two empires as mercenaries using their technologies and tactics, but also in rebelling against them. The conquered Byzantines and Arab conquerors blamed the success of the invaders on "God's decree" (according to Robert Hoyland); Christians tending to explain it as God's punishment for their sins and Arabs explaining it as reward for their (the Arabs') "adherence to the true faith". When the empires became both militarily and financially weakened -- unable to either pay or subjugate the Arabs -- the former mercenaries did not require religious motivation to turn on their masters.

In broad outline, some of the theses of the revisionists include:

Why conquest was successful
Secular historians (traditional and revisionist) credit a weakening of the two empires. There was a "huge" financial and manpower drain from the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628, and the bouts of plague in the region starting in around the mid 6th century CE. Rather than overcoming superior forces in their the conquest of Sham to the north, the Arabs moved into ravaged empires -- where according to a Christian bishop in the case of the Byzantiums the emperor Heraclius "could raise no more troops to opposed the Ishmaelites".

Hoyland postulates that the motivation for the invasion may not have been religious or even nationalistic but simply booty -- the success of earlier raids and the realization that they encountered little or no opposition. An explanation of a motive for conquest is summarized by Patricia Crone: "Muhammad had to conquer, his followers liked to conquer, and his deity told him to conquer: do we need any more?"

military experience from the empires
"The image of the Arab conquerors as 'a horde of nomads with no military experience' and as outsiders to the civilized world". While it is true that nomads have advantages over agriculturalists in pre-modern combat of being mobile, more used to fighting in their everyday lives, having an occupation (herding) that gives them more spare time to fight. But it is far from true that they had no military experience.

By the time of 530 CE, leaders of Arab mercenaries for the two empires were established enough for there to be "Romano-Arab and Perso-Arab polities" with dynasties extending "three, four, or more generations", according to Robert Hoyland. Arabs served both in regiments in the imperial army and "as independent vassals allied to the empire". One example is an Arab chief by the name of Arfar, who was "an experienced man of war, well-trained in the technology of the Byzantine military" Thus they had "acquired valuable training in the weaponry and military tactics of the empires".

... but not necessarily loyalty
However in 594 a leading Arab chief (Lakhm) was poisoned by Persian emperor Khusrau all the Arabs of the Byzantine and Persian realms revolted and dispersed," becoming "causing much trouble in the provinces" according to one chronicler.

Holland notes that the large numbers of Arabs who worked as mercenaries for Rome felt the loss of Roman gold (income) after the plague and destructive wars weakened that empire. This may have made the ex-mercenaries all the more receptive to declarations from Muhammad and the Quran that booty from conquest was divinely approved, and to the suggestion that they turn on their former employers.

As the "west Arabian coalition of Muhammad and his successors" (who had ties of commercial and personal ties with the mercenaries) were seen to win victories and gain plunder against their masters, they gained recruits from the (former) mercenaries -- some of the mercenaries being from the land they were "invading".

Why early lack of comment about conquest
Failure of the inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent to notice any "organized conquest" by Arabs when they arrived can be explained by the hypothesis that the Arab attacks on the lands of Persia and Byzantium to the north were mounted raids rather than religiously motivated military campaigns. Finding no opposition from the formerly mighty empires -- which had abandoned forts and watch posts after being decimated by plague and by warfare between each other -- the Arabs stayed and intermarried.

Why lack of destruction in conquest
Hoyland also argues that another non-religious reason that "the Arab conquests were not particularly destructive" was "the leadership already had close acquaintance with the empires and they wanted to rule it themselves, not destroy it". Rather than being removed from the influence and corruptions of Roman and Persia, many Arab warriors worked as mercenaries protecting the empires from other invading tribes.

REWRITE

Why tales of Rashidun when they may not have existed
Academic scholars have questioned the traditional view of the rashidun (and salaf). Robert Hoyland states that "writers who lived at the same time as the first four caliphs ... recorded next to nothing about them, and their names do not appear on coins, inscriptions, or documents. It is only with the fifth caliph ... Mu'awiya (661-680), that was have evidence of a functioning Arab government, since his name appears on all official state media."

Hoyland also questions the alleged morally superior of the rashidun (or at least Uthman and Ali) to their Umayyad successors, noting Ali was involved in the first civil war (First Fitna) and Uthman had "already inaugurated a nepotistic style of government" for which later Caliphs were condemned.

Academic scholars have questioned the traditional view of the rashidun (and salaf). Robert Hoyland states that "writers who lived at the same time as the first four caliphs ... recorded next to nothing about them, and their names do not appear on coins, inscriptions, or documents. It is only with the fifth caliph ... Mu'awiya (661-680), that was have evidence of a functioning Arab government, since his name appears on all official state media."

Hoyland also questions the alleged morally superior of the rashidun (or at least Uthman and Ali) to their Umayyad successors, noting Ali was involved in the first civil war (First Fitna) and Uthman had "already inaugurated a nepotistic style of government" for which later Caliphs were condemned.

Hoyland hypothesises that idea of a divinely guided "golden age" of early Islam came from religious scholars who needed to establish the idea that those who passed down the "teachings and legal decisions" of Muhammad (i.e. Muhammad's companions, and in particular the first four caliphs) "to the next generation and the wider world", had done so "correctly and carefully". While the successors caliphs should defer in religious matters to the scholarly class. Consequently the companions were "given a makeover" as "model's of piety and beyond reproach". REWRITE of the eighth and ninth century who wanted to "demonstrate that they, and not caliphs, were the true heirs of the prophet and so had the sole right to serves as guardians of Muhammad's laws and to make new laws." The first four caliphates had either been close to Muhammad or had supporters the ulema did not want to alienate and so were made distinct from later caliphs. Hoyland estimates that it was not until the mid-ninth century when it was embraced by Ahmad ibn Hanbal that the idea of the rashidun being followed by tyrants caught on among Muslims who called themselves "Sunni".

Why tales of slaughter and expulsion of Jew when they may not have existed
Holland writes that according to traditional Islamic narrative, after Muhammad established the Muslims in Medina, "the three Jewish clans supposedly native to Medina who were said initially to have given their backing to the Prophet, and then after turning fractious", were "said to have been variously driven into exile (the Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir tribes) or massacred and dumped into pits" (the Banu Qurayza tribe).

But according to Holland the three clans "do not feature anywhere in the Constitution of Medina." The sources talking about this exile and slaughter "are all suspiciously late" and "date from the heyday of Muslim greatness" when "authors would have had every interest in fabricating the sanction of the Prophet for the brusque slapping down of uppity infidels." (When the Arabs first conquered Jerusalem they lifted the ban on Jews being allowed into the city. and allowed them to pray on the temple mount.)

(Hans Jansen, also believes the depictions of the slaughter of the Banu Qurayza tribe have a strong political and theological motivation: As the "treaty of Medina" shows, the Jews were initially part of the Umma and were addressed as "believers"; cf. the research of Prof. Fred Donner.)

REWRITE BELOW (MOVED TO HERE) The connection between Muslims and Jews was very close in the early times of Islam. Jews too were called "believers" and were part of the umma. Antijewish texts such as, for example, the account of the slaughter of the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza came into being long after Muhammad when Islam had separated from Judaism.

Why lack of competition from potential invaders
An explanation of why the Arabs succeeded in creating an empire while other nomadic warriors equally eager to raid and pillage did not, is that those to the north and east (the Avars and Turks), were hindered by "substantial natural and man-made obstacles". The Arabs were (as Robert Hoyland puts it) favorably positioned "directly adjacent to the soft southern underbellies of these empires".

Welcome of invaders?
Hoyland also casts doubt on the "old idea, still encountered in modern scholarly literature" that the conquered welcomed their Arab conquerors, though anti-Chalcedonian Christians were more amendable to accommodation with Arab rule "once the initial period of fighting and looting had ended". The "history" of Islamic conquest now found in Islamic literature sources developed from more satisfying but exaggerated tales of "How We Beat the Romans"; these were "selected and embellished" in "the late Umayyad and early Abbasid" era.

GO OVER THIS

evidence for
Much evidence (see above) calls into question a straight path of Islamic practice from the time of Muhammad through the Umayyad caliphate. Evidence such as lack of Islamic iconography on coins until the reign of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (646-705 CE), no use of the name of Muhammad on Arab-Sassanian coins until sometime after 685 CE, the failure of the conquered Christians to mention the "rightly guided caliphs" or any of the legendary futūḥ battles (i.e. the early Arab-Muslim conquests which facilitated the spread of Islam and Islamic civilization, to describe the Muslim leaders in religious rather than secular or political (kings, princes, rulers) terms, normally referring to Muhammad simply as the first of the Arab kings, and by the title "prophet"  or "apostle",

The fact that the immigrants/invaders included Christians, that when they did talk of religion they did not mention the "Quran", "Islam", or that the immigrants/conquerors were of a new religion, any mention any offers by the Arabs to Persians and Byzantines to avoid conquest by converting to Islam,

The ignorance of Mecca by ancient Roman and Greek diplomats, geographers, historians,  or traders, mercenary recruiters, and even the conquered peoples (at least "for a long time").

The use (prior to the changes made by legal scholar Al-Shafi‘i - died 820 CE) in the legal system of the "pre-Islamic sunnah" of Arabia, the mixed custom-administrative law of the distant provinces", and later the "living traditions" of the newly formed Islamic schools; where caliphs were "free to make and unmake Sunnah as they wished",

Scholars advocating
A number of scholars have argued that the establishment of an Islamic empire was not sudden. Tom Holland thinks Islam did not come fully into being until about the mid eighth century, Fred Donner believes “Islam” became distinct from Christianity and Judiasm in the late 7th century,

Suliman Bashear argues that it is unlikely that the Arab invasion and conquest could have effected "such changes in world affairs within so short a span of time" that the diversity in "languages, ethnicities, cultures, and religions" were "suddenly swallowed up by Arabian Islam in the early seventh century" as Arabic historical sources of the third AH/ninth CE. century described. And that it is much more likely that Arab invasion preceded "Arabian Islam as we know it" and that Islam was fused with the Arab polity sometime after "the beginning of the second/eighth century".

G.R. Hawking thinks that an Islamic empire developing gradually and was greatly influenced by conquered people, it would follow the pattern of other conquests of more developed "civilized" cultures -- China and of Roman Western Europe -- by fierce nomad warriors, where the conquerors dominated militarily and politically, but often adopted "the religion and to some extent, the language of the conquered".

Robert Hoyland thinks "there is probably some truth to the idea that Muslim did not initially see their faith as totally distinct from other monotheist confessions." Rather than conquests being motivated by a missionary desire to spread Islam, the establishment of Islam was motivated by conquest, the conquerors seeking divine justification for the conquest of land and creation of an empire -- not unlike the concept of "manifest destiny" in America.

Explanations for gradualness
Hoyland notes, among other things, that there were "many non-Muslims" in the ranks of the 7th century Arab conquerors so that the discriminatory policies were between conqueror and conquered. Neva and Koren claim a "striking" scarcity of evidence, "outside the Muslim literature, for the view that the Arabs were Muslim at the time of the Conquest." The distinction between conquerors and conquered gradually evolved (according to Hoyland) into one of Muslims and non-Muslims, as the (minority) non-Muslims among the conquerors converted to Islam.

The "many privileges and access to power" that the conquerors enjoyed and conquered lacked provided strong desire by the conquered to join the rulers, and Islam "served as a medium whereby non-Arabs could join the conquest elite".

Hoyland estimates that the Arab invaders (though not all Arab or "believers") numbered around 250,000-300,000, while the conquered were some 25-30 million. making the ruling class about 1% of the ruled. Hoyland postulates that while for the first fifty year the Arabs lived apart from their subjects in garrison towns, they shared these locations with non-Arab prisoners-of-war, slave or servants, who served as tutors, scribes, wives, concubines. As the first generation of conquerors died off, their descendents grew up far away from their father's homeland in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran among the non-Arabs who outnumbered them. Consequently "it was not long before blood was mixed, boundaries blurred, and religion and society fast transformed," with the new converts "shaping the culture and ideology" of Islam more than passively accepting it.

Fred Donner thinks it may have been because the first Arab invaders were leading a “believers movement”, a general “monotheist revival movement” with (ecumenical) multi-faith membership that gradually evolved into Islam. This would explain a lack of violence in the Arab takeover as the Arabs would not feel a need to crush (or wipe clean) the existing social/political/religious system, nor Christians to resist the new rulers; it would also explain archeological evidence of a couple of churches (including St. John in Damascus) having both Christian and Muslim worship characteristic.

Historical progression
After Muhammad there were at least two phases which were of major importance for the formation of Islam in its later shape (according to a number of revisionist historians): WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN
 * Under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (reign 685-705 CE) the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (the world's oldest surviving work of Islamic architecture) was built. There the word "Islam" appears for the first time. Until this moment the Muslims called themselves simply "believers", and coins were minted in the Arabic empire showing Christian symbols. Abd al-Malik also plays a major role in the reworking of the Quranic text.
 * It was during the Abbasid Caliphate (starting in 750 CE) that practically all Islamic traditional texts about Islam's beginnings were written. The Abbasids as the victorious party in the conflict with the Umayyads had great interest in legitimizing their rule. This motivation obviously crept into the traditional texts.
 * In the beginning, secular and spiritual power were united in the person of the caliph. There were no special religious scholars. Religious scholars came into being only later and conquered the spiritual power from the caliphs.

Before Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan was Mu'awiya I (reign 661 CE – April 680 CE), the founder and first caliph of the Umayyad Caliphate. Mu'awiya did a number of things not at all in keeping with what we now call Islam. He "refused to go to the seat of Muhammad" to celebrate his accession as ruler, and instead did it in Jerusalem. He saw fit to please the Christians of the region by going on pilgrimage "around Jerusalem in the footsteps of Christ" where he 'went up and sat down on Golgotha' -- a site immediately outside Jerusalem's walls where it is widely believed Jesus was crucified -- 'and prayed there.' Furthermore, surviving inscriptions, documents and coins from the reign of Mu'awiya include no mention of Muhammad. According to late 7th century Christian chronicler John bar Penkaye, Mu'awiya "allowed everyone to live as they wanted".
 * Mu'awiya

But under Muawiyah I there were also signs Umayyads were interested in Arab identity and land. They tightened "their grip" on Hijaz by appropriating (scarce) arable land.

The first coins proclaiming Muhammad a "Messenger of God" were minted by a lieutenant of Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr -- a rival caliph to the Umayyad's from 683-692. Abdal Malik, in his fight with Christian Constantinople, further developed the new competing religion built the splendid Dome of the rock which also included the inscription that Muhammad was the messenger of God 382-3. But knowing that Muhammad had never gone to Jerusalem, and that the House of God was occupied by his rival Ibn al-Zubayr, Abd al-Malik sent an army to kill Ibn al-Zubayr and in the process destroyed the sanctuary. Holland argues that the dynastic rivalry between Ibn al-Zubayr and the Umayyads created a need to "buttress earthly power" by demonstrating a firm basis for "claiming the favor of God". Just as Constantine I had done with Christianity to strengthen his reign claim to the name of the Arabian monotheist prophet Muhammad.

Caliph Abd al-Malik
Doing even more to make Islam Islam (according to Holland and other revisionists) was Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (reign 685 – 705 CE), who initiated the "first public displays of Islam by the state" that there is evidence for. He "promoted Muhammad as founder of his religion", and as "an authentic medium for the words of God").  The "Dome of the Rock he completed in 691-2 CE on the site of the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was decorated with mosaic frieze inscriptions proclaiming Muhammad to be the messenger of God. In contrast to the appeals to the sensibilities of Christians by his predecessor Muawiyah I, the frieze inscriptions explicitly reject the divinity of Christ ("Do not say 'three' ... God is only one god; he is too exalted to have a son") but differing "to some degree" from standard versions of the Quran.  (Attempts by the Umayyads to conquer the Christian power of Constantinople may have strengthened their feeling of competition with Christianity and/or they may have felt a need "focus their attention" away from the wounds of the "acrimonious civil war" of 683-92 towards their "chief surviving competitor", i.e. Christianity.)  The script is believed to be the first time the word "Islam" ("submission") was used as a proper noun.

During his reign reports of conversion to Islam "start to become common in our contemporary sources.

Under Abd al-Malik all traces of Roman and Persian heritage were replaced on Umayyad coins. Latin and Persian script was replaced by Arabic on passports contracts, tax returns, and receipts. A sign of movement of God house being part of arabization.

In 694 CE Abd al-Malik made a point of making a pilgrimage to "what posterity would commemorate as the Ka’ba of Mecca" and honoring it as the house of God.

Prior to Abd al-Malik, "We do not know of anyone who adjudicated on the basis of" what the Messenger of God (Muhammad) was reported to have done. "Sunnah" meant "good practice" in general, not the practice of rasul allah (Muhammad, the messenger of God). At the same time Abd al-Malik was not on the same page with classical Islam (revisionists like Holland and Crone argue), in accepting for the caliphate political, but not religious, power. His trusted lieutenant al-Hajjaj was allowed to declared that he (Abd al-Malik) "stood higher in God's view than did the angels and prophets", (what in later eras would be consider blasphemy). His coinage titled him "Khalifa Allah", ("Deputy of God" as opposed to "deputy of the Messenger of God"), and it was through him (his minions insisted) "that people might 'pray for rain'". Abd al-Malik and other Umayyad caliphs were described at the time as "Imam's of guidance", guiding the people away from error on the path to salvation. (In contrast, the celebrated early caliph/khalifa Umar titled himself not "Khalifa Allah" ("Deputy of God") but the more modest title Khalīfat Rasūl Allāh ("Deputy of the Prophet of God"), according to "the version of history written later by the ulama". This emphasized the importance of Muhammad, and has been the accepted definition of khalifa/caliph).

The son and successor of Abd al-Malik, Al-Walid I, was the first to use the term Muslim to define himself.

Questions about the biography of Muhammad
Modern secular historians do not so much as contradict the traditional narrative of the life of the prophet Muhammad as note a shortage of any early reliable sources about him.

According to Herbert Berg "without blind faith in the reliability of the sira", which revisionists do not have, 'there is little for the scholar who wants to study the life of Muhammad in his early seventh century Arabian context to do or say." Historian John Burton states "'In judging the content, the only resort of the scholar is to the yardstick of probability, and on this basis, it must be repeated, virtually nothing of use to the historian emerges from the sparse record of the early life of the founder of the latest of the great world religions ... so, however far back in the Muslim tradition one now attempts to reach, one simply cannot recover a scrap of information of real use in constructing the human history of Muhammad, beyond the bare fact that he once existed'."

According to historian Tom Holland, "only in the 690's did a Caliph finally get around to inscribing the Prophet's name on a public monument; only decades after that did the first tentative references to him start to appear in private inscriptions".

Crone and Hinds note how "striking" it is that the documentary evidence that "survives from the Sufyanid period (661-684) makes no mention of the messenger of God [Rasul Allah] at all. The papyuri do not refer to him. The Arabic inscriptions of the Arab-Sassanian coins only invoke Allah, not his rasul" (messenger).

As mentioned above, the house of the Prophet's birthplace in Mecca was made a house of prayer only by al-Khayzuran (d.173),  during Umayyad time, prior to which it was used as an ordinary dwelling house;  and the title applied to Muhammad among the invading Arabs was king rather than 'prophet' or 'apostle', according to Syriac and Byzantine sources in the Fertile Crescent.

Robert Hoyland argues that the conquest was unlikely to have been "managed and directed solely" by Muhammad and later by his successors from Medina". "Other" Arab leaders "in other locations" probably  preceded Muhammad but were "airbrushed out of history by later Muslim writers".

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Questions about the location of the home of Muhammad, Quran and the house of God (Mecca)
On one issue in particular -- the importance of Mecca -- there is another conflict between on the one hand, the traditional historical account, also championed by some non-Muslim historians, and on the other, by a variety of non-Islamic sources (as well as geographic facts) put forth mainly by Patricia Crone.

Traditional narrative on Mecca
According to this traditional account, the location Muhammad is born in and preaches is Mecca, a wealthy and powerful caravan international trading city trading (according to Islamic traditions) with Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, and/or Iraq. It is given the honorific "mother of cities" -- Umm al-Qura -- (according to tradition) by the Quran, , and "known to ancient geographers as Makoraba". Located in the desert in Hijaz (Western Arabia) many days journey from the Mediterranean Sea and Palestine, it was nonetheless founded by the prophet Abraham who built its Kaaba sanctuary and pilgrimage site, (according to revelation received by Muhammad). Though Abraham had cleansed the Semitic tribes of idolatry, since his time polytheism had returned to Mecca, and it was Muhammad's mission to re-establish monotheism -- turn humanity away from corruption and ignorance (jahil), towards knowledge ('ilm) and truth (haqq).

At least some modern non-Muslim scholars   have held that this had "important social consequences which somehow account for the appearance of the new religion and help to explain its success" (according to Herbert Berg)

Similarly, historians both Western (W. Montgomery Watt Karen Armstrong), and Muslim have argued that socio-economic conflicts among the wealth (specifically a "breakdown of traditional norms" with the rich growing richer and ignoring the impoverishment of their kin), led to "a social and moral crisis" in Mecca which had "important social consequences" (Herbert Berg), which "Muhammad's revelation was a response to",  and helped to explain his success.

In the conventional Islamic history, Mecca was "the center of a far-flung trading empire", a large trading hub with caravans such as two annual commercial caravans by the Quraysh tribe back and forth between Mecca and Yemen in the winter, and another caravan to Syria in the summer. These are believed to be referred to in.

"It is almost an axiom of Muslim studies that Mecca was the center of an important international trading network, from which its inhabitants gained considerable wealth and a preeminent position in Peninsular politics. The items traded through this network have usually been seen as Arabian spices and incense, with the addition of a transit trade in high-cost, low bulk luxury wares from India, supplied to the Mediterranean world."

Revisionist historians (mostly Patricia Crone) have found a number of problems with the claim of Mecca as "a place of great significance and wealth".

Reliability of traditions
The traditions from which the claim derive "conflict with each other (as mentioned above) so often and so regularly `that one could were one so inclined, rewrite most of Montgomery Watt's biography of Muhammad in the reverse.'" (some of the contradictions are: Meccans first traded with foreigners who came to Mecca but then Muhammad's father brought caravans to the foreigners' countries, Syria and Persia, and traded there; or alternately Meccans used to trade with these countries but stopped in the pre-Islam past or after Islam triumphed to have more time to pray. The Meccans went to Syria every summer and winter, or instead to Syria in one season and to Yemen the next; silver was what Meccans traded or just one of the items they traded, and so on.)

Wansbrough claims that Islamic traditions were often created (i.e. fabricated) "to demonstrate the Hijazi origins of Islam."

Knowledge of Hijaz Mecca by on-Muslim sources
Crone also found no evidence non-Muslim sources placed Mecca "where the Mecca we know today is placed, that is to say in the southern Hijaz." Examining the claim (made as recently as 1988 by one G.D. Newby) in line with the conventional/traditional Muslim account, that the city was "known to the ancient geographers as Macoraba", Patricia Crone states: "The plain truth is that the name of Macoraba has nothing to do with that of Mecca, and that the location indicated by Ptolemy for Macoraba in no way dictates identification of the two ... if Ptolemy mentions Mecca at al, he calls it Moka, a town in Arbia Petraea", i.e. near Petra in modern day Jordan.

According to Holland "In gazetteers written by Muhammad's contemporaries -- whether by diplomats geographers or historians -- mentions of [Mecca] are notable by their glaring absence". Most striking of all is the absence of any mention of Mecca in Procopius, since in one passage of the history of the wars (1.19) the historian provides a remarkably detailed survey of the western coast of Arabia.

Another historian, D.S. Margoliouth, also found that the name Makoraba cited by "Ptolemy (VI. vii.32)" could not have been a variation on the name Mecca because it was "derived from a different root", and that classical geographers like Ptolemy, "who devote[d] considerable attention to Arabia," made no reference to any settlement in the location of present day Mecca.

Also suspiciously absent of any mention of Mecca in the Hijaz (and its supposed leading tribe Quraysh) were records of Roman mercenary recruitment that kept track of the background of the ranks of Arab foederati, (i.e. tribes who were outside of Roman colonies and not beneficiaries of Roman citizenship, but who were bound by a treaty (foedus /ˈfiːdəs/) to come to the defence of Rome). While many "exotic names" and most every ethnic grouping "between Palestine and Hijaz appeared on the Roman register", no Arabs registered from the location of Mecca or the tribe of Quraysh. This was despite there being a tradition that "Muhammad's own ancestor Qusayy, ... seized power in Mecca only after" the Roman emperor "had extended him aid".

Among the Greeks and Latins who would have been the customers of the alleged trading hub there is no mention of Meccans or Quraysh "as the middlemen in a long-distance trade" in contemporary writings either before or after the Arab invasion. (No mention by their new Syrian subjects that the Meccans/Quraysh were "the people who used to supply such-and-such regions with such-and-such goods".) Among the conquered subjects of the Arabs there is no mention of the invaders as Meccan "for a long time". The city that the invaders came from "was long assumed to have been Yathrib" (i.e. Medina).

Importance as trading hub
But perhaps most importantly it made no sense that Mecca was an important trading hub in that time and place. Mecca was not on the overland trade route from Southern Arabia to Syria ("only by the most tortured map reading can it be described as a natural crossroads between a north-south route and an east-west one.") Crone estimates the incense route "bypassed Mecca by some one hundred miles". If a caravan did come to the far west of the peninsula, it could stop at the oasis of Taif, which unlike Mecca had food supplies and did not require a steep decent.
 * But even if it had been on that route, the overland trade route from Southern Arabia to Syria was not very important compared to the maritime trade route
 * and by the end of the second century AD at latest, the trade route was no longer in use.

Arab sources on trade

 * A close examination of the Muslim sources themselves show that, except for Yemeni perfume, the Meccans traded mainly in cheap leather goods and clothing, and occasionally, in basic foodstuffs (clarified butter and cheese)
 * These goods were not exported to Syria, which already had plenty of them, but were supplied almost exclusively to inhabitants of the Peninsula.
 * According to Ignac Goldziher, the Prophet's birthplace (at Mecca) was "used as an ordinary dwelling house" during the Umayyad era and was made a prayer house "only by al-Khayzuran (d.173)", the mother of Harun al-Rashid; facts not consistent with a consecration of places associate with God's messenger going back to "the earliest period of Islam".

Conflict with epigraphs and language
There are thousands of pagan and monotheist epigraphs or rock inscriptions throughout the Arabian peninsula and in the Syro-Jordanian desert immediately north. Here also, Nevo and Koren have found a number of features not consistent with the traditional Islamic narrative of Arabic pagan culture in the hijaz prior to Islam, including the development of Arabic script there. These include
 * A lack of "inscriptions in Classical Arabic ... found in the Hijaz" (west Arabia region of Mecca and Medina) until the 40s/660s, the beginning of the reign of Mu'awiya. These "come from the Ta'if area, which Mu'awiya seems to have been interested to colonize around that time."
 * No pagan inscriptions in Classical Arabic have been found in the Hijaz, (although pagans spoke and wrote in Arabic before Islam).
 * No Classical Arabic inscriptions "make any mention of paganism, or include pagan names", (during a transition from paganism to Islam it would be usual to find names based on the old religion among "first-generation converts."
 * No traces in the Hijaz of pre-Classical or less-than-fully-developed forms of arabic script you would expect to see from inscriptions made before the era of classical arabic, while these are found in Syria, "where inscriptions in a close variety of Classical Arabic and an early Kufic script appear (e.g. on church lintels.) in sixth century CE."
 * The adaptation around this time of a script (Aramaic) that seems a poor match compared to script already in use by close-by Arabic speaking Jahili Peninsular tribes (such as the Tamudians, Safaites, Lihyanites).
 * In the area where the prophet of the new religion lived (Hijaz), no inscription including Muhammad's name appears on a public monument until the 690's CE. No inscriptions on private structures appears until decades after that, according to Tom Holland.

ideas on the original home of Muslims
P. Crone, M. Cook, J. Wansbrough, Reuven Firestone and Norman Calder and S. Bashear all argue that the traditional account of Islam originating in Hijaz (specifically Mecca) is fiction.

The lack of epigraphy (rock inscriptions),  archaeological remains, indicating pre-Umayyad Arab or pagan activity in Hijaz; lack of any mention by ancient geographers,  foreign trading partners, or Roman recruiters; or reason to think its population would have been familiar with Jewish or Christian religious texts; and the total implausibility of its having economic raison d'etre to sustain any significant population,  (all mentioned above) lead revisionists to look elsewhere for the actual homeland of Muhammad and the Quran.

But is Muhammad was not from Mecca and Islam did not arise there, where did he and it come from? Some of the locations suggested are Palestine (Jerusalem); the southern desert fringes of Palestine (Tom Holland); the northern Negev desert (Nevo and Koren), Northwest Arabia, south of Palestine (Crone). (All these regions are close to each other.)

plausibility of Palestine
Tom Holland gives a number of arguments for the original "House of God" of Muhammad being in Palestine/Israel/Syria/Jordan, (rather than Mecca), specifically on the southern desert fringes.
 * Islam did not rise among polytheistic pagans in the desert (Holland argues), but in a milieu where Jewish and Christian texts were well-known. The "infidel" Mushrikun of the Quran were not actual pagan polytheists but monotheists who being attacked for  deviating from true monotheism  (doing something like praying to angels instead of only to God). Holland speculates the polytheists might have been guilty of praying to angels He also suggests the location might have been a place such as  Avdat in the Negev desert -- which at the time of Muhammad was an Arab city  where irrigation allowed for agriculture in the surrounding area and where ruins indicate Christianity was mixed with paganism -- could have been the location where pre-Medina Quran was set.
 * the Quran speaks of Jesus in a number of verses, suggesting (against mainstream doctrine) that the trinity includes the mother of Jesus;(Quran 5:116-118) that Jesus did not die on the Cross. But these heretical Christian (and Jewish) beliefs were not found in Christian lands in the Muhammad's time having been stamped out sufficiently thoroughly that modern peoples only know about them because their texts were found buried in the Egyptian desert.  This suggests (to Holland), that the desert frontier of Roman Palestine -- not far from Egypt -- was an area that exiled heretical Christians (and Jews) might well have been exiled into, and where Muhammad may have encountered them.
 * stories of Abraham in late antiquity mention him in deserts near Palestine, (contradicting the traditional Islamic account) but never in Western Arabia.
 * Arabs worked with Roman and Persian empires as mercenaries and absorbed much of the culture of the empires.
 * according to traditional sources, "all" the targets and objects of Muhammad's military campaigns and ambitions, "with the single exception of Mecca itself, were just south of Palestine, a desert region "that the Romans' Arab allies" had "traditionally patrolled."
 * A "number of leading Qurayshi dynasts" were said to have bought estates in Syria "despite supposedly being based in Mecca", i.e. more than 1200 km away -- a situation highly impractical in a time of animal drawn transportation and unprecedented in the Roman empire.


 * Verses of the Quran (Crone and Holland believe) allude to the land where it was revealed:
 * Romans are “fighting in a nearby land” (30:2-3)(Quran 30:2-3) Mecca was not nearby, but the frontier of Palestine was.
 * Mushrikun of the Quran are said to raise cattle, tend vines, grow olives, grapes and wheat -- none of which were found in the deserts of Mecca. Olives were specifically a Mediterranean crop. Wheat and grapes are also staples of the Mediterranean. Palestine is on the Mediterranean Sea.
 * In preaching to the unbelievers: “Remember when we delivered Lot … destroyed the others … you pass by them morning and night”, (Quran 37:133-138) a reference to the destruction of Sodom in the Bible. Sodom is thought to have been located on the southern tip of Dead Sea where a Chapel was built in the early 7th Century to commemorate its destruction. A location in the Desert but approximately 80 km from Jerusalem.

Michael Cook argues Jerusalem, not Mecca, is the geographic focus of Muhammad's religious movement rather than just the area Muslims first expanded into after establishing control of Mecca. Cook cites an Armenian chronicler of the era who writes that Muhammad told the Arabs that "as descendants of Abraham through Ishmael, they too had a claim" to Palestine, which "God had promised the to Abraham and his seed".

Hoyland writes that people on the margins of empires might be "proud of their ties with the empire" earning "high stipends and titles" as mercenaries, while others further out and less influenced by the empire (but aware of its riches) might look for weaknesses in its defenses to enrich themselves.

Crone argues for northwest Arabia as the location for Muhammad's career: "Qurashi trade sounds perfectly viable, indeed more intelligible, without its south Arabian and Ethiopian extensions, and there is a case for a Qurashi trading center, or at least diaspora, in the north. One might locate it in Ptolemy's Moka. Somewhere in the north, too, there was a desert sanctuary of pan-Arabian importance, according to Nonnosus ... Jewish communities are well attested for northwest Arabia. Even Abrahamic monotheism is documented there, and the prophet who was to make a new religion of this belief was himself a trader in northwest Arabia."

The written Classical Arabic adopted the twenty two-letter Aramaic script -- when a much more suitable South Arabian script with 28-29 letters was already being used by Arabic-speaking Jahili Peninsular tribes  (Tamudians, Safaites, Lihyanites) nearer to Mecca. This anomaly could be explained if the Arabic-speaking alphabet adopters were not living in Mecca but somewhere closer to Aramaic writers (i.e. somewhere in north-western Arabia) than to the Southern Arabian Arabs. Nevo and Koren argue that the Mushrikun of the Quran were not wayward monotheists (as Holland maintains) but actual pagans who lived not in Hijaz (where archaeologists have failed to find sixth and early seventh centuries Arab or pagan remains), but in an area in the central Negev desert (whose northern reaches are about 50 km from Jerusalem) where archaeologists have found a "wealth" of pagan shrines and stone stelae. Nevo and Koren think this indicates (also contrary to Islamic tradition), that (a) "active pagans must have formed a considerable part of the Negev population right through the first one-and-a-half centuries of the Muslim era", and also (b) that accounts of Jahili religion in the Hijaz could be "back-projections of a paganism actually known form later and elsewhere." .
 * Roots of the Arab language
 * Archaeology, epigraphy

"All these points together suggest ... that Classical Arabic in fact arose in Syria rather than the peninsula, and penetrated to the Hijaz only as part of Mu'awiya's colonization efforts in the 40s." A conflicting revisionist explanation is that the Quran was not written/revealed in one location during one era, but is made up of fragments, some much older than the era of Muhammad.

Why and how did Mecca become the birthplace of Islam
In other words, how, if Mecca was not the original holy city that the Quran was revealed in and that Muhammad and his companions emigrated from to Yatrib/Medina, why would and how could a myth be created convincing Muslims that Mecca as Muhammad's home when it was several hundred km north?

As to why the traditional Islamic account would claim, Crone states "It is difficult not to suspect that the tradition places the prophet's career in Mecca [which was unknown prior to the rise of Islam] for the same reason that it insists that he was illiterate: the only way he could have acquired his knowledge of all the things that God had previously told the Jews and the Christians was by revelation from God himself. Mecca was virgin territory; it had neither Jewish nor Christian communities." She sees much promise for answering the question what was Muhammad "reacting to, and why was the rest of Arabia so responsive to his message?" in research of databases of hadith, in archaeology and in focusing on the context of the world of late antiquity.
 * why was a new location thought to be needed?

Gerald Hawting postulates Mecca became the Muslim sanctuary "at a certain stage in the development of the new religion" when "the need arose to assert its independence, and one of the most obvious ways in which this could be done was by establishing a specifically Muslim sanctuary."

In addition to distancing "Islam from its Jewish roots in the north," the location was only 100 km away from oasis of Ta'if, an area where (a) Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan's father Marwan had been governor and where (b) Abd al-Malik's top lieutenant al-Hajjaj had come from.
 * Why choose Mecca in the Hijaz?

when?
While the traditional belief is that qiblas (the direction for salah prayer) were changed from pointing towards Jerusalem to pointing toward Mecca not long after 622 CE at the instructions of Muhammad, Holland writes that if "calculations of mosque renovations can be trusted", a very similar change took place, somewhere around 60 years after Muhammad's death (around 690 CE), i.e. following Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan's 694 CE pilgrimage to Arabia. Qibla's in mosques throughout his caliphate were reoriented away from the original direction -- somewhere "between Medina and Palestine" -- to one toward Mecca. Holland quotes one Muslim as complaining, 'At the time of the prophet, may God save him and give him peace, our faces were all turned in one direction -- but after the death of the prophet, we turned ourselves hither and thither".

Questions about alleged fabrication
How could the history of such an important location be fabricated? If Mecca was not the original holy city that Muhammad and his companions emigrated from to Yatrib/Medina, how could such an important location as the house of God be abandoned and moved over a thousand kilometers "from the center of Umayyad power" to a remote, barren location? Holland makes a number of points:
 * Religious landmarks (totems, locations, icons, etc.) of doubtful authenticity and removed in time from the religious events they celebrate would not be unique to Islam. The support for the traditional belief that Mecca was the home of Muhammad "first appeared" several generations after his lifetime. "In the first flush of Christian tourism to the Holy Land ... previously forgotten biblical landmarks" were provided by enterprising Palestinian landowners, and "no more likely to reflect authentic tradition" than Mecca.  Another precedent for late determination of religious landmarks is Empress Helena's discovery of the True Cross leading to Christians attribute the location of the crucifixion to Golgotha, also long (about three centuries) after the fact.


 * Evidence for Mecca as homeland is much more scarce than many assume. Holland argues that references to the "House of God" and the Kaaba (passed down in accounts of events like Ibn al-Zubayr and his civil war with the Umayyadin) were taken for granted to refer to Mecca by "Muslim historians, writing more than a century after the fact"; but in fact "nowhere in the writings of contemporaries" is the word Mecca used, nor is the location of the "House of God"/Kaaba, nor details or name indicated in the poetry, chronicles or gazetteers of the era; (revisionists like Holland arguing that this was because the l "House of God"/ka'ba they were referring to was not in Mecca but at a more northern location, closer to Palestine).
 * Kaaba/shrines/sanctuaries were not rare."There were kaabas reaching from Nabatea to Najran";
 * The abandonment of shrines/sanctuaries was also not uncommon "over the course of generations, sanctuaries had repeatedly been staked out as hallowed -- haram -- and then just as abruptly been abandoned," an example being found in 2:142 of the Quran where a reference is made to a moving of the Qibla i.e. direction of prayer: "The foolish people will say 'what has turned them away from the prayer direction they used to face'". This is traditionally thought to refer to a change in the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca, sometime after 622 CE.
 * An important feature of the Kaaba in Mecca was the black stone in the Kaaba's eastern corner, which different traditions describe as having been moved around by Abraham, by Ishmael and Moses. That sacred items from sanctuaries were moved to new locations has a precedent with the sacred protecting image of Palladium, which was taken from Troy to Rome to Constantinople.
 * The Kaaba of early Islam was not ancient. In 683 the Kaaba at "the house of God" was burned to the ground" as the Umayyad army of Yazid was laying siege to a rebel Ibn al-Zubayr and his followers. It was rebuilt shortly after.

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Crone concludes that "Meccans did not trade outside of Mecca on the eve of Islam". That there was no continuous transmission of historical fact through the three generations or so that separated the early first/seventh century from the mid-second/eight century" and that the lines of transmission of the accounts were "pure fabrications".

"in the decades prior to the great war with Persia", Byzantine Romans registered large numbers of Arabs who flocked to the Roman border as part of a Roman recruitment drive for arab mercenaries (who made up the foederati). While many "exotic names" and most every ethnic grouping "between Palestine and Hijaz appeared on the Roman register", no arabs registered from the location of Mecca or the tribe of Quraish. This was despite the putative status of the tribe as the dominant power in the Hijaz and that of the city as trading center, but also in contradiction with the tradition indicating that Mecca and the Quraysh should have been known to the Romans since (according to the tradition) "Muhammad's own ancestor Qusayy, is supposed to have seized power in Mecca only after ‘’Qaysar’’ (caesar, synonym for Roman Emperor) "had extended him aid". Holland states that "even eminent Muslim scholars might confess themselves puzzled by the precise meaning of the word 'Quraysh'" and speculates that if Quraish did not refer to a particular tribe it might have been derived from the Syriac term for "confederated" and have been "a convenient shorthand for all those tribes" hired as mercenaries by the Romans.
 * Roman record and lack of mention of Mecca or Quraysh

CHECK FOR DUP Religious faith has been described as the motivation and the reason for the success of the Arab invasion. Western historian Howard-Johnston writes "faith was the driving force behind the Muslim conquests".
 * Muslim invasion as spread of Islamic civilization
 * Traditional account

"In the early days of Islam, the extension of Islamic rule had been based on an uncomplicated desire to spread the Word of God. Although the Muslims used force when they met resistance they did not compel their enemies to accept Islam."

Robert Hoyland notes that both the conquered Byzantines and Arab conquerors blamed the success of the invaders on "God's decree"; Christians tending to explain it as God's punishment for their sins and Arabs explaining it as reward for their (the Arabs') "adherence to the true faith".


 * Revisionist account

Nevo and Koren argue early Christian sources do not mention the "rightly guided caliphs" (Rashidun) nor any of the famous futūḥ battles (i.e. the early Arab-Muslim conquests which facilitated the spread of Islam and Islamic civilization).

Traditional history of Islam describes the 7th century invasions as a means of spreading Islam: However Hoyland states: "Arab conquerors do not seem to have expected ... the conversion of the conquered population to Islam ... God had ordained that the conquered people would be the Arabs' booty not it's equals" A Christian source, John of Fenek, states "of each person they [the Arabs] required only tribute, allowing him to remain in whatever faith he wished." Neither he nor other early sources mention any offers by the Arabs to Persians and Byzantines to avoid conquest by converting to Islam.

The year 622 is the first year of the Islamic calendar, chosen according to Islamic tradition because it is the year of the Hegira or migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Yathrib (later renamed Medina). "But there is no seventh century source that identifies it as that of the Hijra, and the only clue to its nature comes from two Nestorian Christian documents of 676 and 680 that call it the year of the 'the rule of the Arabs'". early sources don't agree on other important dates in early Islam -- the Prophet's birthday and death. Non-Muslim scholar Lawrence Conrad writes, "well into the second century A.H. scholarly opinion of the birth date of the Prophet displayed a range of variance of 85 years."
 * Dates of early Islam

starts with Muhammad, an illiterate camel trader orphaned as a young boy, who is chosen by God to deliver a religious message of pure monotheism -- his message being the latest and last of God's revelation to humanity. Muhammad preaches in Mecca, an international trading city located in the desert many days journey from the Mediterranean Sea and Palestine, but one founded by the prophet Abraham who built its Kaaba sanctuary and pilgrimage site, (according to revelation received by Muhammad).(2:125-129) Though Abraham had cleansed the semitic tribes of idolatry, polytheism had returned to Mecca, and it was Muhammad's mission to again establish monotheism -- turn humanity away from corruption and ignorance (jahil), towards knowledge ('ilm) and truth (haqq). Starting in 610 CE, he gradually builds up a following, but is persecuted by the leaders of the powerful Quraysh tribe that controlled Mecca's economy and its pagan shrines. In 622 -- year one of the Islamic calendar -- the first Islamic community is founded when he flees to the city of Medina with his followers and turns to "fighting in God's path" to defeat paganism; he attempts to win over Jewish tribes but ends up executing and enslaving the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe for their treachery, and changing the direction of prayer from the Israelite capital of Jerusalem to Mecca. A number of signs point to divine intervention on Muhammad's behalf: although he cannot read, and lives 1000 km from the Jewish and Christian holy land, the Quran Muhammad reveals is sublime in "unparalleled in sublimity" and talks much about Jewish and Christian scripture; though often heavily outnumbered the warriors of the new religion advance, first taking control of Mecca and West Arabia, then north to conquer the Persian empire and most of the Byzantine empire, seizing for Islam a swath of territory "larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion", seized in half the time it took the Romans to conquer theirs. All conquered peoples are invited to become Muslims, but Christians and Jews who do not are shown tolerance, allowed to practice their religion in exchange for payment of tax and a show of humility.
 * traditional account

Through Muhammad, God's revelation comes to Muslims both in the form of spoken words that make up the Quran, and in the example Muhammad provides to his followers that make up the Sunnah, both of which form the divine law or sharia. This essence of Islam is brought from West Arabia to the conquered lands, where it is systematized and elaborated following a direct chronological path of Allah-> Muhammad-> Companions-> Followers-> Fiqh. The Quran is carefully complied, edited and codified shortly after his death so that fourteen centuries later we can read and follow exactly what was revealed to The Prophet. The traditions of Muhammad and early Islam were passed down orally and also carefully complied, edited to discard false accounts, so that "we know everything more or less" (in the words of Salman Rushdie), "where [Muhammad] lived, what his economic situation was, who he fell in love with. We also know a great deal about the political circumstances and the socioeconomic circumstances of the times," As the Muslim world grows and spreads, the conquered people (and later unconquered people) will accept the faith until Islam becomes the world's second largest faith. Muslims will not always have the pious and just leadership of Muhammad (613-632 CE) or the correct legal practice of the first four divinely guided caliphs (632-661 CE), or virtue of "Islam's founding fathers (the salaf)", but it will always be able to look back on this golden age to inspire them.


 * Implications

This account should be reflected in not only Islamic literature but in archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and contemporary non-Arabic literature from the years of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphate. The major dates of Islam -- the early Muslim conquests of Mecca in 630, -- should be indicated  Pagan arabic inscriptions in rocks and monuments should be found before around 630 CE (when  Mecca was taken by Muhammad's Muslims) in the hijaz, but after this date Islamic arabic inscriptions. And since written Arabic was developing to become classical Arabic during this time, we should expect to see some inscriptions in early forms of written arabic in the Hijaz. Archaeology evidence of major battles, ruins of overrun forts, etc., symbols of Byzantine authority should follow the dates of conquest -- Syria and Palestine in 641 CE, Mesopotamia in 636 CE, Egypt between 639 and 646 CE, and the rest of the Persian/Sassanid empire by 651. Not so shortly there after these dates in these areas there should be signs of the new caliphate in inscriptions on monuments and rocks (there are "thousands" of rock inscriptions in the Arabian Peninsula and Syro-Jordanian desert), Islamic sayings of the Quran and mention of Muhammad and the caliphate on coins found from that era (since in the words of archaeologist Yehuda Nevo and researcher Judith Koren -- "legends on coins are official pronouncements of current state attitudes (in this case to religion), intended for wide promulgation. Merely placing religious formulae on coins involves a conscious act of choice regarding what to say and what to omit.") ) In Byzantine, Jewish or Persian chronicles from the conquered territory there should be mention of the conquering Arab Rashidun Caliphs bringing a new religion, new laws, new ways of doing things.

Islamic literature on the Prophet of Islam, his sayings, interpretations of the Islamic holy book the Quran, how their enemies were defeated, etc. -- should be abundant from this era particularly since  (according to Islamic tradition) Muslims conquered and expanded their empire to spread the religion of Islam, and were in control of the levers of power of an expanding empire during the years of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphate, (not hiding from the persecution of authorities like early Christians).

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traditional account
Islamic law (sharia) grew directly from the commands and prohibitions of God revealed to Muhammad and delivered to the first generation of Muslims. Listening to God's revelation in God's own words (Quran) and in Muhammad's word (hadith), the first Muslims (the Companions) hear and obey, and pass on the the commands and prohibitions to succeeding generations (salaf). This essence of Islam was brought from West Arabia to the conquered lands, where it was systematized and elaborated into one of the schools of fiqh,   following a direct chronological path of -- Allah-> Muhammad-> Companions-> Followers-> Fiqh. (For example, Sunni Hanbali scholar/preacher Al-Hasan ibn 'Ali al-Barbahari (d.941) who ruled the streets of Baghdad from 921-941 CE, insisted that "whoever asserts that there is any part of Islam with which the Companions of the Prophet did not provide us has called them [the Companions of the Prophet] liars".)

Revisionist findings
Revisionists found a decided break in this chain in their study of early Islam.

Patricia Crone writes that under the Umayyads (661–750 CE), Sunnah was not the practice of Muhammad, but "good practice in general and that of prophets and caliphs in particular. Among the prophets David and Solomon have price of place", in other words not Sunnah of the Prophet.

Robert Hoyland also argues that some of the earliest Islamic scholars saw use of hadith of Muhammad as an innovation and departure from legal practices of the generations immediately following the death of the prophet:
 * "I spent a year sitting with Abdullah ibn Umar (son of the second Caliph, d.693, who is said to be the second most prolific narrator of ahadith, with a total of 2,630 narrations) and I did not hear him transmit anything from the prophet";
 * "I never heard Jabir ibn Zayd (d. ca. 720) say 'the prophet said ...' and yet the young men round here are saying it twenty times an hour".

Hoyland also argues that certain Umayyad documents about the designation of royal heirs and an inscription by Muawiyah I in West Arabia (that includes a plea for God's forgiveness, strength, and support and "to let the faithful profit by him", without any mention of Muhammad) indicate an Umayyad belief that "the era of prophets was at an end and that caliphs now acted as God's agent's on earth."

Joseph Schacht, found (sharia) "did not derive directly from the Koran but developed ... out of popular and administrative practice under the Umayyads, and this practice often diverged from the intentions and even the explicit wording of the Koran ... norms derived from the Koran were introduced into Muhammadan law almost invariably at a secondary stage." He found the law as practiced was made up of three different bodies of custom, rules and law ("sunnahs") operating in parallel: the "pre-Islamic sunnah" of Arabia, the mixed custom-administrative law of the distant provinces" of the Umayyads, and later the "living traditions" of the newly formed Islamic schools.

The concept of the hadith of Muhammad being the pre-eminent criteria (except for the Quran) for the source of a ruling came under legal scholar Al-Shafi‘i (767–820 CE, dying 190 years after Muhammad did), when legal scholars sought to unify the law into one sunnah, according to Schacht. Prior to Al-Shafi‘i (who died 190 years after Muhammad), "it is clear that the caliphs were free to make and unmake Sunnah as they wished. `We do not know of anyone who adjudicated on the basis of this rule before Abd al-Malik`, a transmitter remarks without in any way wishing to depreciate the validity of the rule in question; in other words, it was valid because a caliph had made it, not because it went back to the Prophet or a companion".

Crone also compared "Sunni, Shia and Ibadi law to Roman law and provincial law in Byzantine Syria and Egypt. She concludes that the Islamic institution of the Sharia is the result of a long process of adjustments by the ulama, who inherited its substance from the Umayyad caliphate in general and Mulawiya, in particular." Sharia originated as"substantially it was of ancient Near Eastern and Greek origin, or in other words it was the indigenous law of the Near East s it had developed after Alexander. The Muslims sifted and systematized this law in the name of God, imprinting it with their own image in the process"

Islamic law
According to J. Wansbrough, the Quran did not precede sharia (Islamic law), but "it was only after the articulation of law as divinely decreed that a scriptural canon [i.e. the Quran] was established".

Patricia Crone argues that Sharia law was founded not on traditions of rasul allah, (the messenger of God, Muhammad), but on the law "of the Near East as it had developed under Alexander. The Muslim sifted and systematized this law in the name of God, imprinting it with their own image in the process." This provincial law that "the Umayyad caliphate in general and Mulawiya in particular" employed, became what we now call sharia after a "long period of adjustments by the ulama". SEE ABOVE

CRITICISM OF HADITH Hoyland also argues that claims that the doings and sayings of Muhammad were carefully noted and carefully transmitted to later ulama by the salaf generations are belied by quotes of early Islamic scholars who specifically denying common use of hadith of Muhammad:
 * "I spent a year sitting with Abdullah ibn Umar (son of the second Caliph, d.693) and I did not hear him transmit anything from the prophet";
 * "I never heard Jabir ibn Zayd (d. ca. 720) say 'the prophet said ...' and yet the young men round here are saying it twenty times an hour".

Historian Tom Holland argues that Islamic law was not passed down without interruption from Muhammad to the schools of fiqh where it was developed and refined. Instead prior to the late Ummayad era the Caliph was dominant. It was this ulama who built up "a body of law capable of taming the extravagances and injustices of the age ... without reference to the Caliph" and the ulama who grounded the law "and very publicly so, in the life and times of the Prophet himself" to trump the authority of the Caliph. According to Holland, the early Ulama (the class of guardians, transmitters and interpreters of religious knowledge in Islam) were overwhelmingly comprised of conquered peoples -- namely Zoroastrians and Jews -- who converted to Islam. The actual conquering Arab warriors were overwhelmingly illiterate, while there was a strong scholarly tradition among the conquered Zoroastrians in the form of Mobad, and rabbis among the conquered Jews. Holland argues the ex-Jewish and Zoroastrian scholars were strongly motivated to applying their scholarship to develop religious law to curtail the power of the "haughty Arab elite" and "trump the forbidding authority of the Khaifat Allah". To this end they transform a "jumble of beliefs and doctrines" into a systematic Islamic law.

ULAMA
NEEDS TO BE REWRITTEN, SHORTENED


 * In the beginning, secular and spiritual power were united in the person of the caliph. There were no special religious scholars. Religious scholars came into being only later and conquered the spiritual power from the caliphs.

According to Hoyland, "many of these converts -- and even more so their descendants, who had been born into Islam -- wanted to explore and expound their new religion and to reconcile it with their former faith and culture." Exploration in the form of scholarship was also "a way for newcomers and the lowborn to attain respect and status". Some of the most famous of these scholars (who were all born during the "Islamizing" period of the reigns of Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan and Al-Walid I) included Hoyland relates a tale of Caliph Abd al-Malik bemoaning the fact that non-Arab religious expertise was such that they would "predominate over the Arabs to such an extent that they will preach to them from the pulpits, with the Arabs down below listening".
 * Muqatil ibn Sulayman (d.767), "a captive from Bakh, author of the earliest extant Quran commentary";
 * Yazid ibn Abi Habib (d.746), "son of a captive from Nubia, the top legal authority in Egypt of his generation";
 * Ibn Ishaq (d.767), "grandson of a captive from 'Ayn al-Tamr in Iraq, author of the most famous biography of Muhammad";
 * Ibn Jurayj (d.767), "grandson of a captive from Anatolia, a prolific collector of sayings of Muhammad";
 * Abu Hanifa (d.767), "grandson of a captive from Kabul, eponymous founder of a law school";
 * Hammad Ar-Rawiya (d.772), "son of a captive from Daylam, an expert on ancient Arabic poetry".

However, according to one Umayyad-era rabbi named Rav Yehudai, of the Talmudic school of Sura, many Mobads who had `converted to the religion of the Ishamelites [i.e. Muslims],` ... were still not entirely clear of the trace of their former beliefs, even down to the third generation: for part of their original religion still remains within them.'" Holland argues this could explain the tenants of Islamic Sharia and/or Sunna not in the Quran, but found in: Holland believes that Jewish influence would also explain why "the earliest and most influential school of Islamic law" should have been founded barely thirty miles from "the great Talmudic school of Sura" near Kufa.
 * Zorastrianism -- such as that apostates should be executed, ... that prayers should be offered up five times a day (not just three), or that pious Muslim should use miswak --- a twig of the arak tree -- to brush their teeth; or
 * Judiaism -- such as the tendency of Jewish law (halakha) "to regulate every dimension and aspect of human existence"; the practice -- that "only rabbis, had every previously deployed" -- of authenticating prophetic sayings of the Oral Torah by creating a chain of transmission listing who passed down the prophet's saying to the present (known as isnad in Islam); and prescribing capital punishment by stoning for adultery (the Quran calls only for lashing for adulterers).
 * Hoyland describes the "structural similarity with Judiaism" of sharia as "a comprehensive religio-legal system regulated by scholars on the basis of scripture and oral tradition from a prophet"

ADD TO CRIT OF HADITH QUOTATIONS Jewish influence in Islamic law and sunna
 * Byzantine law -- Robert Hoyland argues sharia law followed the "model" of the Byzantine empire in making three different classes in religion:
 * a class for the state religion (Christianity in Byzantium, Islam in the Arab Empire),
 * another for tolerated religions (Jews in Byzantium who were -- in theory -- protected, but forbidden under Roman law to do things like build new synagogues, give testimony against Christians, defame Christianity, etc.; in the Arab Empire "people of the book" (Ahl al-Kitab) were protected but subject to a special tax and regulations similar to Roman ones)
 * one for "illicit" religions (pagans faced "severe constraints" in Byzantium and in the Arab Empire were in theory compelled to either convert to Islam or die).
 * Sasanian Persian regulations -- Hoyland argues that the "raw materials" for sharia law ban on non-Muslims imitating Muslims came in part from Sasanian Persian regulations to distinguish between commoner and noble (commoners being forbidden to imitate the headgear, overcoats, belts, shoes, and hairstyles" of the nobles).
 * Hoyland emphasizes that "The laws that were in place in the Middle East the day before the Arab conquests were still in use the day after, and this pre-existing corpus of laws -- a mixture of ancient Middle Eastern and Roman law -- remained current in the Umayyad period, supplemented by ad hoc emendation made by caliphs and their agents." But "many rulings that we think of as very Islam, like amputation of the hand for theft and the death penalty for apostates" are "ancient Middle Eastern and Roman law ...  were applied in the region long before Islam ... this corpus of law remained current after the Arab conquests and was taken over and reworked by Muslim scholars. .... Some of these item were maintained while other, such as the adoption of children and contracts involving earnest money (non-refundable deposits) were rejected; in both cases the acceptances and rejections were attributed to Muhammad himself."

Ulama to trump influence of Caliphs

Jews and Zorastrians had the scholarly tradition that mostly illiterate Arab warriors did not, but of course they were conquered subjects. How to even the playing field.

"Only establish that an opinion had truly been voiced by this same Prophet of God, and it would immediately come to possess the full terrifying force of eternal law. Here for the restless and ever-growing number of Muslim who were unable to trace their origins back to the first generation of the conquest ... resentful of the haughty Arab elite [scholarship] was truly golden opportunity ... only by compiling the sayings of the Prophet could they possibly hope to trump the forbidding authority of the Khaifat Allah. If a Sunna -- a body of law capable of taming the extravagances and injustices of the age were indeed to be fashioned without reference to the Caliph, then its origins would need to be grounded, and very publicly so, in the life and times of the Prophet himself. No other source ... would possibly do".

How to authenticate Muhammad's sayings? Model for Isnad

Such was the question, a century on from the death of the Prophet, that confronted the first generation of a whole new class of scholars: legal experts whom Muslim would come to know as the ulama. Fortunately for them, just across the mudflats from Kufa --- where the yearning to forge a new understanding of Islam was at its most turbulent and intense -- the perfect role models were ready to hand. The rabbis of Sura, after all, had been labouring for many centuries to solve precisely the sort of problem that now confronted the ulama. The secret Torah, so it was recorded in the Talmud, 'had been recieved at Sinai by Moses, who communicated it to Joshua, who communicated it to the elders, who communicated it to the prophets' -- who, in turn, had communicated it to a long line of rabbis, right down to the present. Nowhere in the world, in consequence were there scholars better qualified to trace the chains of transmission that might link a lawyer and the sayings of a prophet than in the yeshivas of Iraq. Was it merely coincidence, then, that the earliest and most influential school of Islamic law should have been founded barely thirty miles from Sura? .... Initially, in the manner of rabbis citing their own masters, members of the ulama were content to attribute these hitherto unrecorded doctrines to prominent local experts; then, as time went by, they began to link them to the Prophet's companions; finally, as the ultimate in authorities, they fell to quoting the Prophet himself directly. ... Muslim scholars were following a trail that had been blazed long before. Islamic though the isnads were, they were also more than a little Jewish."

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Questions about the Quran
REWRITE!! TOO LONG!! As the holy book of Islam, the Quran is an important part of the origin of Islam but while it is traditionally thought to be a book in need of sources to explain it historically (specifically tafsir), revisionists (Crone, Cook, Holland) think it also sheds light on the beginnings of Islam. The holy book of Islam, the Quran, according to traditional Islamic belief, was the result of revelation to Muhammad, an illiterate Arab camel trader from Mecca orphaned as a young boy, who is chosen by God to deliver a religious message of pure monotheism. The Quran is not only the latest and last of God's revelation to humanity, it is literal, infallible, "perfect, timeless", "absolute" unadulterated word of God. identical to an eternal “mother of the book” the archetype /prototype of the Quran kept in heaven.
 * Traditional account

We can be sure that fourteen centuries later that what we read and follow is exactly what was revealed to The Prophet, because of divine protection of the work and the care taken by the first Muslims. They memorized and wrote the Quran down on scraps, and shortly after the death of Muhammad carefully compiled, edited and codified it, sending copies of the book throughout the newly conquered lands.

Although Muhammad, the Messenger of Islam, is believed to be the last line of prophets known to Jews and Christians from the bible, unlike Judaism and Christianity Islam is revealed in a different language (Arabic), and location, (Arabia) -- specifically two settlements (Mecca and Medina) over 1000 km  from the land of Moses and Jesus (the Eastern Mediterranean).

Questions
Revisionists, on the other hand, hold that the Quran should be "viewed in the same way as the Old Testament has been viewed by biblical scholars for over a century: as a literary source to be critically analyzed in order to ascertain its probable origins and textual history".

As a holy book of guidance of belief and behavior revealed by God, the Quran is not a major source of information on Islamic history. Reading the Quran but being ignorant of commentary we could "probably" infer (in the words of M. Cook) that "the protagonist of the Quran was Muhammad, that the scene of his life was in western Arabia, ... But we could not tell that the sanctuary was in Mecca, or that Muhammad himself came from there, and we could only guess that he established in Yatrib. We might indeed prefer a more northerly location altogether, on the ground that the site of God's destruction of Lot's people (i.e. Sodom) is said to be one which those addressed pass by "morning and night".

Few names of places, people, etc. are given in the Quran; in the entire book, four religious communities (Jews, Christian, Magians, Sabians), three human beings, three Arabian deities, two ethnic groups (Quraysh, Romans), and nine places are named (according to Michael Cook), often only a few times -- Muhammad, for example is mentioned by name only four or five times. (Muslims believe more are mentioned, although often not by name.) Consequently, "identifying what the Quran is talking about in a contemporary context is ... usually impossible without interpretation";   Fredrick Paxton agrees: "The Qur'an itself is historically incomprehensible without commentary" Interpretation/commentary (known as tafsir) that "has been woven tightly around the the holy text since the early ninth century", (in the words of Holland), But like other traditional Islamic historical sources (hadith, sira) tafsir commentary is highly questionable in revisionist eyes.

Examining the Quraysh chapter in Quran, Crone finds the traditional exegesis contradictory and "concludes the Islamic commentators had no more idea of what it means than we do today. "The numerous purported historical events that are supposed to have occasioned a revelation (Badr, Uhaud, Hudaybiyya, Hunayn, and so on) owe many of their features and often their very existence to the Quran itself. That is to say, wherever the Quran mentions a name or an event, stories were invented to give the impression that somehow, somewhere, someone, knew what they were about. This means that `much of the classical Muslim understanding of the Quran rests on the work of popular storytellers, such storytellers being the first to propose particular historical contexts for particular verse`" in short: `What tradition offers is a mass of detailed information, none of which represents straightforward facts'" Crone believes that there is no core of actual events underneath the embroidery of storytellers, "it was the storytellers who created the tradition".

But revisionists believe the Quran gives "hints" to answers of historical questions about the location of the homeland of Muhammad and the Quran, and of its own history.

Quran
According to scholar Fred Donner, while it is generally agreed the Quran was intended as "a source of religious and moral guidance" for its readers, Islamicist scholars not only disagree with the traditional/conventional origin story of the holy book but disagree among themselves on "things so basic" about the Quran as how it originated, "Where did it come from, and when did it first appear? How was it first written? In what kind of language was -- is -- it written? What form did it first take? Who constituted its first audience? How was it transmitted from one generation to another, especially in its early years? When, how and by whom was it codified?"


 * The Quranic text as is in use today shows many differences to the earliest existing manuscripts. A core part of the Quran may derive from Muhammad's annunciations, yet some parts of the Quran were definitively added later or were reworked later. In addition to this, many small deviations came into the text as with other ancient texts which were manually copied and copied again.
 * The existence and significance of the prophet Muhammad as a historical person depends especially on the question whether any, and if so, how many, parts of the Quran can be attributed to his time, or whether all or most parts of the Quran came into being only after Muhammad's time. The researchers' opinions differ over this question. Fred Donner suggests an early date for the Quran.
 * The Quran is not written in a "pure" Arabic as the Syriac language seems to have had a certain influence on the language of the Quran which was forgotten later. This could be a possible explanation of why a fifth of the Quranic text is difficult to understand.

Another hint of the location is verse "The Romans have been defeated in a nearby land, and yet after their defeat they shall be victorious in a nearby land." Q.30.1 Holland notes "it is hard to know what this is referring to if not the loss of Palestine to Khusrow II".

Islam originated in Mecca in Arabia, according to the traditional narrative of Islam. Muhammad was born and lived in Mecca for for the first 52 years of his life (570–632 CE). The religious sanctuary of Islam, its most sacred site, the Kaaba, (also Bayt Allāh (بَيْت ٱللَّٰه, "House of God"), is in Mecca; all Muslims pray obligatory ritual prayers (salat) facing Mecca. G.R. Hawting states that other institutions of Islam such as its calendar and practice of polygamy are "traditionally explained against the background of pre-Islamic Arabia".

Crone and Holland point out that verses in the Qur'an describe the Muslims' polytheist opponents as cultivating wheat, grapes, olives, and date palms ( and ) -- which cannot be grown in Mecca; and living near the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah  -- which is believed to be located over 1000 km north of Mecca; the Quran also says "The Romans have been defeated In the nearer land, and they, after their defeat will be victorious”  -- which fits the description of the  Roman/Byzantine defeat/loss of Palestine to Khusrow II" and comeback in fighting the Persians/Sasanians but occurred in land many days journey to the north of Mecca, not nearby.
 * hint of location of homeland of Muhammad and Quran

Historian Tom Holland writes that the Quran does not mention pagan idols, goddesses, pagan sanctuaries or shrines and that revelation seems to be attacking the mushrikun practice of asking angels for intercession. (chapter about what we don't know. page77-79) Similarly Judith Koren and Yehuda D. Nevo also claim that "the most elementary stylistic and analysis" demonstrates that readers or listeners of the Quran were "expected to be familiar with the stories of Judiaic-Christian scripture" rather than polytheist pagans.

Tom Holland states that that there is "not a shred of backing ... within the pages of the Quran itself" for the traditional belief that the Mecca in Quran (48:24) is the Mecca of classical Islam located in Hijaz or that Bakkah in the Quran refers to Mecca.

Opponents of Muhammad and Quran are worshipers of other gods
In 53:19-22, where the Quran denounces the "reverence" for al-Uzza, al-Lat and Manat it never accuses mushrikun or anyone of worshipping the three, nor does it state they are goddesses, nor is the word "goddesses" found anywhere in the Quran. Muhammad does not mention the existence of pagan shrines or sanctuaries. What the Quran does say is: "Those who deny the life to come give the angels female names." (53:27) Holland asks whether the mushrikun where accused not of worshipping more than one god but of praying to angels.

Questions about mysteries of the books contents
Among the characteristics of the Quran giving rise to questions are that "if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense," according to scholar Gerd R. Puin, "a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible". The Quran "sometimes makes dramatic shifts in style, voice, and subject matter from verse to verse, and according to journalist and scholar Toby Lester.  In many verses, God is being addressed by humans, instead of  addressing human beings. The "extent to which we find the Prophet apparently being addressed and told about God as a third person, is unusual", as is the number of times where "God is made to swear by himself", according to R. Bell and W.M. Watt.

It assumes a familiarity with language, stories, and events that seem to have been lost even to the earliest of Muslim exegetes", (Toby Lester). The text contains a number of what Michael Cook calls "linguistic puzzles". A dozen or so words in the text, such as qaḍb, ʿābb , Jibt , whose meaning Muslim commentators (and Western scholars) have not been able to ascertain. What the phrase "out of hand" means in regard to how unbelievers are to pay tribute to Muslims, is also a long-standing puzzle.

There are also "mystery letters" (aka Muqattaʿat ('disjointed letters' which begin about one quarter of surahs of the Quran. They come in groups of between one and four letters, do not form words, and their significance "has perplexed the commentators from the earliest times", according to Muslim translator and expositor Muhammad Asad: "'There is no evidence of the Prophet's having ever referred to them in any of his recorded utterances, nor any of his Companions having ever asked him for an explanation. None the less, it is established beyond any possibility of doubt that all the Companions - obviously following the example of the Prophet - regarded the muqatta'at as integral parts of the suras to which they are prefixed, and used to recite them accordingly..."

In addition to mystery letters there is a mystery religion -- the Sabians or Ṣābiʼūn -- mentioned three times, but whose identity was not known even to the earliest Quranic commentators of the 7th and 8th century.

A mystery of sharia rather than linguistics is why verse  prescribes a penalty for adultery of "100 lashes" for zina (sex outside of marriage), but sharia law based on hadith of Muhammad calls for sentencing adulterers to death by stoning -- despite the fact that in theory the Quran always trumps hadith as a basis for Islamic law.

Explanation
If we assume that someone "must once have known" what these words and letters meant (rather than their always having been known only to God), an explanation offered by revisionists such as Michael Cook is that there must have been a gap in the transmission of the Quran where (in the word of Fred Donner) it was "transmitted in purely written form, without the benefit of a controlling tradition of active recitation". Cook believes the break could have come before and/or after Muhammad:
 * 1) "[M]aterials that make up the Quran did not become generally available as scripture until several decades" after Muhammad, "with the result that by the time this happened, memory of the original meaning of the material had been lost." and/or
 * 2) "much of what found its way into the Quran" came (long) before Muhammad and so its meaning was forgotten.

Scholars advocating
A number of scholars have emphasized that the establishment of an Islamic empire was not sudden. Holland, for example, states he doesn't think Islam came fully into being until about the mid eighth century, Fred Donner believes “Islam” became distinct from Christianity and Judiasm in the late 7th century, Robert Hoyland thinks "there is probably some truth to the idea that Muslim did not initially see their faith as totally distinct from other monotheist confessions.")  Rather than conquests being motivated by a missionary desire to spread Islam, the establishment of Islam was motivated by conquest, the conquerors seeking divine justification for the conquest of land and creation of an empire -- not unlike the concept of "manifest destiny" in America.

Suliman Bashear argues that it is unlikely that the Arab invasion and conquest could have effected "such changes in world affairs within so short a span of time" that the diversity in "languages, ethnicities, cultures, and religions" were "suddenly swallowed up by Arabian Islam in the early seventh century" as Arabic historical sources of the third AH/ninth CE. century described. And that it is much more likely that Arab invasion preceded "Arabian Islam as we know it" and that Islam was fused with the Arab polity sometime after "the beginning of the second/eighth century".

G.R. Hawking thinks that the theory of gradual development with great influence of conquered people would explain why the origin of the Islamic empire did not (seem to) follow the path of other conquests of more developed "civilized" cultures by fierce nomad warriors -- such as invasions of China and of Roman Western Europe and China -- where the conquerors dominated militarily and politically, but often adopted "the religion and to some extent, the language of the conquered". (In other words, despite appearances, the Islamic empire did follow that path in part.)

Hoyland also finds it unlikely that the Arab conquest was a "watershed" between one society and a "totally different" one. MERGE TWO PARAGRAPHS BELOW

Explanations for gradualness
Hoyland notes, among other things, that there were "many non-Muslims" in the ranks of the 7th century Arab conquerors so that the discriminatory policies were between conqueror and conquered. Discrimination between Muslim and non-Muslim came later after "most of the non-Muslims in the imperial armies had converted to Islam". Neva and Koren claim a "striking ... lack of evidence, outside the Muslim literature, for the view that the Arabs were Muslim at the time of the Conquest."

Hoyland argues that the distinction between conquerors and conquered gradually evolved into one of Muslims and non-Muslims, as the (minority) non-Muslims among the conquerors converted to Islam. The "many privileges and access to power" that the conquerors enjoyed and conquered lacked provided strong desire by the conquered to join the rulers, and Islam "served as a medium whereby non-Arabs could join the conquest elite".


 * Hoyland estimates that the Arab (though not all Arab or Muslim) invaders numbered around 250,000-300,000, while the conquered were some 25-30 million. making the ruling class about 1% of the ruled. Hoyland recons that while for the first fifty year the Arabs lived apart from their subjects in garrison towns, they shared these with prisoners of war non-Arab slave or servants, tutors, scribes, wives, concubines. As the first generation of conquerors died off, their descendents grew up far away from their father's homeland in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran among the non-Arabs who outnumbered them. Consequently "it was not long before blood was mixed, boundaries blurred, and religion and society fast transformed," with the new converts "shaping the culture and ideology" of Islam more than passively accepting it.

Rather than being removed from the influence and corruptions of Roman and Persia, many Arab warriors worked as mercenaries protecting the empires from other invading tribes.
 * Hoyland argues that another non-religious reason that "the Arab conquests were not particularly destructive" was "the leadership already had close acquaintance with the empires and they wanted to rule it themselves, not destroy it".


 * Fred Donner thinks it may have been because the first Arab invaders were leading a “believers movement”, a general “monotheist revival movement” with (ecumenical) multi-faith membership that gradually evolved into Islam. This would explain a lack of violence in the Arab takeover as the Arabs would not feel a need to crush (or wipe clean) the existing social/political/religious system, nor Christians to resist the new rulers; it would also explain archeological evidence of a couple of churches (including St. John in Damascus) having both Christian and Muslim worship characteristic.

Historical progression
After Muhammad there were at least two phases which were of major importance for the formation of Islam in its later shape (according to a number of revisionist historians):
 * Under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (reign 685-705 CE) the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was built. There the word "Islam" appears for the first time. Until this moment the Muslims called themselves simply "believers", and coins were minted in the Arabic empire showing Christian symbols. Abd al-Malik also plays a major role in the reworking of the Quranic text.
 * It was during the Abbasid Caliphate (starting in 750 CE) that practically all Islamic traditional texts about Islam's beginnings were written. The Abbasids as the victorious party in the conflict with the Umayyads had great interest in legitimizing their rule. This motivation obviously crept into the traditional texts.

NEEDS MAJOR REWRITING Later, the caliph Mu'awiya did a number of things not at all in keeping with what we now call Islam. He "refused to go to the seat of Muhammad" to celebrate his accession as ruler, and instead did it in Jerusalem. He saw fit to please the Christians of the region by going on pilgrimage "around Jerusalem in the footsteps of Christ" where he 'went up and sat down on Golgotha' -- a site immediately outside Jerusalem's walls where it is widely believed Jesus was crucified -- 'and prayed there.' Furthermore, surviving inscriptions, documents and coins from the reign of Mu'awiya include no mention of Muhammad. According to late 7th century Christian chronicler John bar Penkaye, Mu'awiya "allowed everyone to live as they wanted".
 * In the beginning, secular and spiritual power were united in the person of the caliph. There were no special religious scholars. Religious scholars came into being only later and conquered the spiritual power from the caliphs.
 * Mu'awiya

But under Muawiyah I there were also signs Umayyads were interested in Arab identity and land. They tightened "their grip" on Hijaz by appropriating (scarce) arable land.

The first coins proclaiming Muhammad a "Messenger of God" were minted by a lieutenant of Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr -- a rival caliph to the Umayyad's from 683-692. Abdal Malik, in his fight with Christian Constantinople, further developed the new competing religion built the splendid Dome of the rock which also included the inscription that Muhammad was the messenger of God 382-3. But knowing that Muhammad had never gone to Jerusalem, and that the House of God was occupied by his rival Ibn al-Zubayr, Abd al-Malik sent an army to kill Ibn al-Zubayr and in the process destroyed the sanctuary. Holland argues that the dynastic rivalry between Ibn al-Zubayr and the Umayyads created a need to "buttress earthly power" by demonstrating a firm basis for "claiming the favor of God". Just as Constantine I had done with Christianity to strengthen his reign claim to the name of the Arabian monotheist prophet Muhammad. Revisionist scholars Crone and Hinds argue that the title Khalifa Allah ("Deputy of God")] "had already emerged during the Rashidun period", (Coeli Fitzpatrick believes it was first used during the Umayyad period).
 * Khalifa Allah

Caliph Abd al-Malik
Doing even more to make Islam Islam (according to Holland and other revisionists) was Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, who initiated the "first public displays of Islam by the state" that there is evidence for. He "promoted Muhammad as founder of his religion", believing (Holland thinks) that Muhammad was "an authentic medium for the words of God"). The "Dome of the Rock he built in 691-2 CE on the site of the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was decorated with mosaic frieze inscriptions proclaiming Muhammad to be the messenger of God, and explicitly rejecting the divinity of Christ. ("Do not say 'three' ... God is only one god; he is too exalted to have a son") but differing "to some degree" from standard versions of the Quran. (Attempts by the Umayyads to conquer the Christian power of Constantinople may have strengthened their feeling of competition with Christianity and/or they may have felt a need "focus their attention" away from the wounds of the "acrimonious civil war" of 683-92 towards their "chief surviving competitor".)  The script is believed to be the first time Islam (submission) was used as a proper noun.

During his reign reports of conversion to Islam "start to become common in our contemporary sources.

Under Abd al-Malik all traces of Roman and Persian heritage were replaced on Umayyad coins. Latin and Persian script was replaced by Arabic on passports contracts, tax returns, and receipts. A sign of movement of God house being part of arabization.

In 694 CE Abd al-Malik made a point of making a pilgrimage to "what posterity would commemorate as the Ka’ba of Mecca" and honoring it as the house of God.

Prior to Abd al-Malik, "We do not know of anyone who adjudicated on the basis of" what the Messenger of God (Muhammad) was reported to have done. "Sunnah" meant "good practice" in general, not the practice of rasul allah (Muhammad, the messenger of God). At the same time Abd al-Malik was not on the same page with classical Islam (revisionists like Holland and Crone argue), in accepting for the caliphate political, but not religious, power. His trusted lieutenant al-Hajjaj was allowed to declared that he (Abd al-Malik) "stood higher in God's view than did the angels and prophets", (what in later eras would be consider blaspheme). His coinage titled him "Khalifa Allah", ("Deputy of God" as opposed to "deputy of the Messenger of God"), and it was through him "that people might 'pray for rain'"  Abd al-Malik and other Umayyad caliphs were described at the time as "Imam's of guidance", guiding the people away from error on the path to salvation.

The son and successor of Abd al-Malik, Al-Walid I, was the first to use the term Muslim to define himself. "In the version of history written by the ulama" the celebrated early khalifa Umar titled himself not "Khalifa Allah" ("Deputy of God") but the more modest title Khalīfat Rasūl Allāh ("Deputy of the Prophet of God") which emphasized the importance of Muhammad, (and has been the accepted definition of khalifa/caliph).

G.R. Hawking things that gradual development with great influence of conquered people would explain why the origin of the Islamic empire did not follow the path of other conquests of more developed "civilized" cultures by fierce nomad warriors -- such as invasions of China and of Roman Western Europe and China -- where the conquerors dominated militarily and politically, but often adopted "the religion and to some extent, the language of the conquered". According to the traditional Islamic narrative, this did not happen with Islam, it was the conquered people of the Greek and Persian empires who took on the religion and (at least many of them) the Arab identity of their conquerors, this being credited to the "strong religious and linguistic identity" of the Arabs (not to mention Allah's "intervention in the historical process"). While this makes sense if Islam was "something brought out of Arabia by the conquering Arabs", revisionists (Carl H. Becker, G.R. Hawting) propose that it was not, and that the religion of Islam was developed after the invasion with the "contribution" of non-Arab conquered people to the new Islamic civilization "was probably of greater importance than that of the conquerors".
 * Formation of Islam

Slaughter and expulsion of Jews
Holland writes that according to traditional Islamic narrative, after Muhammad established the Muslims in Medina, "the three Jewish clans supposedly native to Medina who were said initially to have given their backing to the Prophet, and then after turning fractious", were "said to have been variously driven into exile (the Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir tribes) or massacred and dumped into pits" (the Banu Qurayza tribe).

But according to Holland the three clans "do not feature anywhere in the Constitution of Medina." The sources talking about this exile and slaughter "are all suspiciously late" and "date from the heyday of Muslim greatness" when "authors would have had every interest in fabricating the sanction of the Prophet for the brusque slapping down of uppity infidels." (When the Arabs first conquered Jerusalem they lifted the ban on Jews being allowed into the city. and allowed them to pray on the temple mount.)

(Hans Jansen, also believes the depictions of the slaughter of the Banu Qurayza tribe have a strong political and theological motivation: As the "treaty of Medina" shows, the Jews were initially part of the Umma and were addressed as "believers"; cf. the research of Prof. Fred Donner.)

REWRITE BELOW (MOVED TO HERE) The connection between Muslims and Jews was very close in the early times of Islam. Jews too were called "believers" and were part of the umma. Antijewish texts such as, for example, the account of the slaughter of the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza came into being long after Muhammad when Islam had separated from Judaism. PUT ABOVE. DUPLICATE

Rashidun
Academic scholars have questioned the traditional view of the rashidun (and salaf). Robert Hoyland states that "writers who lived at the same time as the first four caliphs ... recorded next to nothing about them, and their names do not appear on coins, inscriptions, or documents. It is only with the fifth caliph ... Mu'awiya (661-680), that was have evidence of a functioning Arab government, since his name appears on all official state media."

Hoyland also questions the alleged morally superior of the rashidun (or at least Uthman and Ali) to their Umayyad successors, noting Ali was involved in the first civil war (First Fitna) and Uthman had "already inaugurated a nepotistic style of government" for which later Caliphs were condemned.

Hoyland hypothesises that idea of a divinely guided "golden age" of early Islam came from religious scholars who needed to establish the idea that those who passed down the "teachings and legal decisions" of Muhammad (i.e. Muhammad's companions, and in particular the first four caliphs) "to the next generation and the wider world", had done so "correctly and carefully". While the successors caliphs should defer in religious matters to the scholarly class. Consequently the companions were "given a makeover" as "model's of piety and beyond reproach". REWRITE of the eighth and ninth century who wanted to "demonstrate that they, and not caliphs, were the true heirs of the prophet and so had the sole right to serves as guardians of Muhammad's laws and to make new laws." The first four caliphates had either been close to Muhammad or had supporters the ulema did not want to alienate and so were made distinct from later caliphs. Hoyland estimates that it was not until the mid-ninth century when it was embraced by Ahmad ibn Hanbal that the idea of the rashidun being followed by tyrants caught on among Muslims who called themselves "Sunni".

Criticism of Revisionism
Muslim Islamic scholars are unsurprisingly opposed to revisionism. Seyyed Hossein Nasr calls criticism of Hadith by Wansbourgh and others "one of the most diabolical attacks made against the whole structure of Islam," that destroys "one of the foundations of Divine Law". Academic scholars who support "the position of the classical Islamic tradition that the Quran as it exists today is a seventh-century document,” point to the carbon dating of parchment and infrared photography of original ink of palimpsest parchment of the Birmingham Quran manuscript to the time of Muhammad, which "render[s] the vast majority of Western revisionist theories regarding the historical origins of the Quran untenable."

The consequent historical-critical analysis of early Islam met severe resistance in the beginning since then provocative theses with far-reaching meaning were published without sufficient evidence. Especially Patricia Crone's and Michael Cook's book Hagarism (1977) stirred up a lot of harsh criticism. Important representatives of Revisionism like Patricia Crone or Michael Cook meanwhile distanced themselves from such radical theses and uncautious publications.

Criticism is expressed by researchers like Tilman Nagel, who aims at the speculative nature of some theses and shows that some revisionists lack some scholarly standards. On the other hand, Nagel accepts the basic impulse of the new movement, to put more emphasis on the application of the historical-critical method. A certain tendency to take revisionists seriously becomes obvious e.g. by the fact that opponents address their criticism not any longer to "revisionism" alone but to "extreme revisionism" or "ultra-revisionism".

Gregor Schoeler discusses the revisionist school and depicts the early controversies. Schoeler considers revisionism to be too radical yet welcomes the general impulse: "To have made us thinking about this all and much more remarkable things for the first time -- or again, is without any doubt a merit of the new generation of the 'skeptics'."

François de Blois rejects the application of the historical-critical method to Islamic texts. He argues that this method was developed for Christian texts and thus there is no reason to apply this method to Islamic texts, too.

Concerning Holland's claims that a rabbi contemporary to the [Zoroastrian priests] who had ‘converted to the religion' of their conquerors the 'Ishmaelites,’ wrote that 'part of their religion [i.e. Zoroastrianism] still remains within them', Jonathan Brown writes that source is a forgery. Hollands source is "based on an unreliable nineteenth-century forgery of a supposedly twelfth-century work from France quoting an eleventh-century rabbi in Baghdad quoting an eighth century rabbi from near Kufa", according to Brown.

According to historian Andrew Rippin and religious scholar Herbert Berg lack of interest by non-Muslim scholars in the ideas of John Wansbrough and revisionism in general can be traced to the fact that Wansbrough strays from the path of least effort and resistance in scholarship by questioning the vast corpus of Islamic literature on the history of Islam, the Quran, and Muhammad; "destroying" what had been historical facts without replacing them with new ones; calling for using the techniques of Biblical criticism, requiring competency in other languages than Arabic, familiarity with "religious frameworks" other than Islam, and locations other "than Arabia on the eve of Islam". and treading on very sacred territory in Islam. Berg concludes quoting scholars who call for not "throw[ing] the scientific baby out with the colonialist bath water", avoiding "the sin" of anti-Islamic hostility of colonial Orientalists, without abandoning "the basic question" of science: "How do we know?"