A Prophet Has Appeared: The Rise of Islam through Christian and Jewish Eyes, A Sourcebook

by Stephen J. Shoemaker

Early Islam has emerged as a lively site of historical investigation, and scholars have challenged the traditional accounts of Islamic origins by drawing attention to the wealth of non-Islamic sources that describe the rise of Islam. A Prophet Has Appeared brings this approach to the classroom. This collection provides students and scholars with carefully selected, introduced, and annotated materials from non-Islamic sources dating to the early years of Islam. These can be read alone or alongside the Qur'an and later Islamic materials. Applying historical-critical analysis, the volume moves these invaluable sources to more equal footing with later Islamic narratives about Muhammad and the formation of his new religious movement.

Included are new English translations of sources by twenty authors, originally written in not only Greek and Latin but also Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, Hebrew, and Arabic and spanning a geographic range from England to Egypt and Iran. Ideal for the classroom and personal library, this sourcebook provides readers with the tools to meaningfully approach a new, burgeoning area of Islamic studies.

Genres: Religion, Islam, History

322 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 2, 2021

About the author

Stephen Shoemaker (Ph.D. ’97, Duke University) is a specialist on the history of Christianity and the beginnings of Islam. His primary interests lie in the ancient and early medieval Christian traditions, and more specifically in early Byzantine and Near Eastern Christianity. His research focuses on early devotion to the Virgin Mary, Christian apocryphal literature, and Islamic origins.

Prof. Shoemaker is the author of The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), a study of the “historical Muhammad” that focuses on traditions about the end of his life. He has also published numerous studies on early Christian traditions about Mary (especially in apocrypha), including The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford University Press, 2002), a study of the earliest traditions of the end of Mary’s life that combines archaeological, liturgical, and literary evidence. This volume also includes critical translations of many of the earliest narratives of Mary’s Dormition and Assumption, made from Ethiopic, Syriac, Georgian, Coptic, and Greek.

Prof. Shoemaker has recently published a translation of the earliest Life of the Virgin attributed to Maximus the Confessor (Yale University Press, 2012), a pivotal if overlooked late ancient text that survives only in a Georgian translation. Currently he is finishing a book on the beginnings of Christian devotion to Mary and completing the translation of several eighth-century Christian martyrdoms from the early Islamic Near East. In addition, he is preparing a new critical edition of the early Syriac Dormition narratives.

Prof. Shoemaker has been awarded research fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Reviews

[Syed Nouman Hasany · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a useful sourcebook which primarily concerns itself with texts written within the first hundred years of the Islamic calendar; Shoemaker's comments on these texts, however, can often be safely ignored without any significant loss to the reader.

[Dennis Ashendorf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rated as five because of its importance and self-skeptical honesty. History as you expect history to be: 40% of the book are notes and references. And it's easy to read.

The remaining texts covering the years around 640 are fragments. Correlating many fragments yields the most likely truths. Summary/Spoilers follow:




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1. No mention of the Quran or any Islamic scriptures appears during the first decades of Islam's existence. However, absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence. Still, it's reasonable to assume that the Quran appeared later.

2. Mohammed created a group of "believers" who had to accept ONE GOD and THE END OF DAYS IS UPON US." Eschatology was strong throughout almost all religions at the time. In short, pagans, Christians, and Jews joined Mohammad's group.

3. The Temple Mount was the Goal of Mohammad's believers. The End of Days required rebuilding the Jewish Temple.

4. Strong evidence that all early believers prayed facing Jerusalem, not Medina/Mecca.

5. Because of the trinity, Christians appeared to drop out of the Believers first, but Jews may have lingered longer - which caused Christians to despise Jews even more. Christians hadn't treated Jews so well for quite awhile.

6. The initial rulers of Islam appeared to treat Christians well in many places at many times, but not all places at all times.

There is far more than the above, but they are the takeaways from a well-argued book that accepts and argues with previous scholars with respect for all. Again, History as it is meant.

[Lincoln · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's always interesting to see how a religion measures up to investigation of its historical claims. Of course, not all religions are susceptible to weakness here (even if every historical fact in existence were disproved, some strands of Hinduism--e.g Advaita--could still be held on to). But Islam, and in similar ways Judaism and Christianity, face challenges here.

Muslims who hold to the Koran as literal word of God will be offended by this work. Islamic tradition about the early days of the Faith is not given much corroboration. But the book is nevertheless an invaluable resource for everyone else interested in the study of Islam.

[Abu Raihan Khalid · Rating 2 out of 5]

A valuable sourcebook.

Despite Robert G. Hoyland's book 'Seeing Islam as Others Saw it: a Survey & Evaluation: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam', 1997 is the standard text in the matter, I chose this work by Stephen J. Shoemaker because of his declaration in the book that "in contrast to Hoyland’s book, the focus here is on the texts themselves, each of which we give in translation—something that Hoyland does only piecemeal and selectively". (Introduction of the book).

That is beneficial indeed.

However, I was extremely surprised by author's decision not to provide any reference for his opinions and information that he brought in the course of interpreting the texts in question. The author provided an explanation for this:

"As a further point of clarification, I would note that in the endnotes I frequently refer readers to my earlier publications for further clarification of various points. This pattern should not be taken as a sign of vanity—as if to suggest that only my work on these topics is worth consulting. Far from it: this is a matter of convenience. Since in these works I have already engaged a wide range of scholarship on a variety". (Introduction of the book).

I found this dangerous and extremely harmful, to say the least. How is it sufficient that you make an argument in the present book that we are reading and the reason for the argument and the reference for that information is provided in a different book, which the reader may or may not have access to?

This is to deprive the reader an opportunity to judge the propriety of the information or the argument that the author has provided and form a justified opinion in his mind on the matter he just read. It is a serious deception.

I recently read another book after finishing this one: Donner, F.M., Muhammad and the believers _ at the origins of Islam, 2010. In that book Dr. Donner does not provide an apology for not mentioning a single reference for his history book, like Dr. Shoemaker did.

Are these writers writing for young children or a mature audience? Do they want us to learn only what they are telling us?

[David Blankenship · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting collection of writings from the mid to late 7th century describing the events of the rise of Islam and the reactions by Christians and Jews. What I found most interesting was that the feeling towards Islam was varied. Rather than terror and death, as I had always thought, some welcomed Islam initially as being a better overlord than the Romans or Persians.