Muhammad's Mission: Religion, Politics, and Power at the Birth of Islam

by Tilman Nagel, Josef Spoerl (Translation)

Combining vast erudition with a refusal to bow before the political pressures of the day, Muhammad: Twenty Chapters on the Prophet of Islam by Professor Tilman Nagel, one of the world's leading authorities on Islam, is an introduction to three inseparable topics: the life of Muhammad (570-632 CE), the composition of the Koran, and the birth of Islam. While accessible to a general audience, it will also be of great interest to specialists, since it is the first English translation of Professor Nagel's attempt to summarize a lifetime of research on these topics. The Introduction, Chapters 1-2, and Appendix 1 provide essential historical background on the Arab tribal system and Muhammad's position within that system; the political situation in pre-Islamic Arabia; the history of Mecca; and pre-Islamic Arabian religions. Chapters 3-5 cover the beginnings of the revelations that Muhammad claimed to be receiving from Allah, paying special attention to the influence on Muhammad of the hanifs, a group of pre-Islamic pagan monotheists attested in the earliest Islamic sources. The hanifs claimed to trace their religion back to the putative original monotheism of Abraham, from which they claimed Jews and Christians had deviated by, among other things, abandoning animal sacrifice. Chapter 6 explains how Muhammad's religious message included a thinly-veiled claim to have the right to political power over Mecca, a claim that exacerbated tensions with his own clan and led eventually to his expulsion from Mecca, as recounted in Chapter 7. Chapters 8-10 describe the impact of the hijra on the evolution of Islam. Seeing himself as the true heir to Abraham and the prophets who followed him, Muhammad would demand allegiance from Jews and Christians, as recounted in Sura 2 and other Medinan suras. He would initiate a war against Mecca, not in self-defense, but in order to gain control over the Kaaba, the central hanif shrine and the new qibla or direction of prayer for the Muslims. The Muslim victory at the Battle of Badr in 624 would help to shape a new ideal of a militarized religiosity in which those who waged war under Muhammad's command would attain the rank of "true believers," while those converts who refused to make hijra and to fight for Muhammad were relegated to the lower rank of "mere Muslims," as Suras 8 and 49 make clear. Muhammad's war against Mecca alienated many of his Medinan followers, the ansar. The refusal of the Jews to convert to Islam, combined with the close connection of the Jews to the ansar, led Muhammad to make war on the Jews as well as the Meccans. The surrender of Mecca in 630 (Chapter 11) did not lead to the end of war, for the aggressiveness and military success of Muhammad's movement had made it attractive to a slew of new converts whose desire for booty had to be placated. Sura 9, promulgated near the end of Muhammad's life, served as a broad declaration of war against polytheists, Jews, and Christians. Chapter 12 describes the evolution of Islam late in Muhammad's life into a "religious warriors' movement" that sought to extend the rule of Islam over the entire inhabited world. Chapter 13 covers the final pilgrimage and death of Muhammad, while Chapters 14-20 describe the development of Islamic dogma surrounding the figure of Muhammad and its implications for politics in the Islamic world and interfaith relations with non-Muslims up till the present day. The book concludes with appendices in which Nagel summarizes the state of scholarship regarding the life of Muhammad (Appendix 2) and the tensions between competing varieties of Muslim recollection of Muhammad (Appendix 3). Muhammad: Twenty Chapters on the Prophet of Islam is an erudite and authoritative guide to events of world-historical importance by a scholar who has spent a lifetime mastering the primary sources documenting the birth of Islam.

338 pages, Hardcover

Published July 6, 2020

Reviews

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't the best written or organised book on Islamic origins, but certainly one of the most lucid (probably the most lucid that I've read). I wouldn't recommend reading it without some introductory knowledge of the topic. The stream of Arabic names of people and tribes can be overwhelming and the Pre-Islamic setting is introduced in a clunky way (though it remains fascinating and enlightening). Referencing is surprisingly sparse (and many of the footnotes are of the author's longer, untranslated German works). Like most other histories of this period the Qur'an is critically utilised as the foundational source, but the author also liberally quotes from sira-maghazi / hadith literature, sometimes critically reflecting on their historicity, but often not. The most extensive historiographical analysis is found in an appendix at the end which criticises both traditional and revisionist scholarship without explaining clearly what the method employed in the book is. The last few chapters, focussing on depictions of the ahistorical transcendental / cosmic Muhammad of Muslim piety, while interesting, felt a bit irrelevant to the rest of the work.

That all said, the book is worth reading for several reasons. Tilman Nagel is arguably the most esteemed Islamic historian of Germany, and this book represents 50+ years of research. If the referencing is imperfect, the method for parsing out the historicity of hadith / sira sources isn't always laid out, and there isn't too much engagement with recent scholarship - meaning laymen should double-check certain claims rather than taking them at face value - we can at least confidently trust that the content is the result of over half a century's research by a veteran scholar with an authoritative command of the source material.

The main strength of this book is that unlike many (if not most) historians of religion, Nagel doesn't treat religions "in an apolitical way, as if each religion were a path for individuals seeking wisdom and not a discourse intimately connected with the exercise of power," as James Laine describes the problem in Meta-Religion. This problem is arguably the most egregious with Islam; as Aaron Hughes puts it in Theorizing Islam; "the scholarly study of lslam has become ever more insular and apologetic. Academic lslamic Studies [...] has effectively avoided discussion of [...] social, cultural and ideological issues. Many scholars of Islam have presented themselves to their colleagues, the media and the public as the interpreters of Islam and have done so with an interpretation which tends, almost universally, to the liberal and egalitarian." Ever since a surge of Islamophobia was unleashed in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror, countless liberal westerners have made the mistake of confusing defending Muslims with defending Islam itself, as if Islam - like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and nearly all other organised religions - isn't intimately involved with power and oppression, on top of being the second most popular and fastest growing religion in the world and the ruling ideology of a plethora of oppressive regimes and non-state structures - and therefore deserving fair but ruthless criticism. Both the overwhelmingly (neo)liberal academy and popular authors alike are often anxious to obsequiously defend Islam and thus preserve the social harmony of globalised multicultural neoliberal capitalist society - what Slavoj Žižek has called "multiculturalism without the Other," in which different cultures are fetishised and essentialised yet simultaneously emptied of any foreignness or uniqueness that doesn't conform with 21st century (neo)liberal values. This is done by whitewashing history, writing apologetics, and engaging in a sort of postmodern benevolent orientalism by composing what Nagel calls "gushingly infatuated narratives inspired by the tradition of Islamic hagiography," such as those by Reza Aslan, Karen Armstrong, Juan Cole, Annemarie Schimmel (and before them, Montgomery Watt), in which anything and everything negative associated with Islam is blamed on corruption by external forces after Muhammad died and the Qur'an was written, as if Muhammad's theocratic empire was a kind of utopia and the Prophet was incapable of sin or error (ironically this fallacious ideal of "True Islam" is a view shared by Islamist fundamentalists). This absurd situation cedes virtually all criticism of Islam to unscholarly and hateful anti-Islamic neocon polemicists like Robert Spencer, Douglas Murray, Yehuda Nevo, Karl-Heinz Ohlig, and Ibn Warraq.

This is why it's so refreshing to read a no-nonsense work of history by a seasoned expert in the field with a critical eye, subjecting Islam and its founder to the same rigorous political and socioeconomic analysis and criticism as is usually done with Jewish / Christian history and any other movement or figure in history without a sacred taboo enclosed around them, not shying away from presenting the most venerated non-deified man in history in an unflattering light, and (in what should be stating the obvious) presenting a religious movement arising among 7th century Arabian warriors - a movement idolised in the Qur'an and by its believers as "the best community ever raised for humanity" (3:110) - as reflective of its historical, social, and ideological context: that is, being intimately rooted in, enforcing, and celebrating authority, patriarchy, militarism, slavery, imperialism, intolerance, tribalism, state-building, and dogma.