A few days ago, I published an article entitled Why You Shouldn’t Trust Robert Spencer’s Biography of the Prophet Muhammad (I).
I took issue with Robert Spencer’s opening sentences of his biography of Muhammad (p.5 of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam), in which he wrote:
Muhammad already had experience as a warrior before he assumed the role of the prophet. He had participated in two local wars between his Quraysh tribe and their neighboring rivals Banu Hawazin.
I wrote a response as follows:
What Spencer leaves out from this talking point–“Muhammad already had experience as warrior before he assumed the role of prophet”!–is quite telling.
He is referring to what is known in Islamic history as Harb al-Fijar (the Sacrilegious War), a series of conflicts that took place when Muhammad was a teenager. The spark that ignited the war was the unsettled murder of a member of one tribe, which lead to a blood feud. Due to “entangling alliances,” many different tribes in the area found themselves at war with each other.
Like most of Muhammad’s life, the details of this event are contested. This dispute is not simply one between modern-day Muslim apologists and Islamophobes, but rather one that traces its way back to the earliest biographers of the Prophet.
In specific, Muhammad’s level of participation in these wars is disputed. On the one hand, some Shia biographers reject the idea that Muhammad partook in them at all. Meanwhile, Sunni biographers write that Muhammad simply accompanied his uncle but did not directly fight in these wars. He only took on a very limited support role: picking up enemy arrows from the battlefield. At the most, he fired off a few arrows, but did not kill anyone.
Not only was Muhammad’s role severely limited, but even this he would later express regret over. Muhammad later recounted: “I had witnessed that war with my uncle and shot a few arrows therein. How I wish I had never done so!” [1] Spencer conveniently omits this very important fact, one that mitigates Muhammad’s participation in the war, especially in regards to his views about war and peace.
Spencer replied:
In 2006 I wrote the book on the right, The Truth About Muhammad, a biography of the prophet of Islam based on the earliest Muslim accounts of his life, in order to illustrate what Muslims generally believe that Muhammad said and did. In my forthcoming book, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins, which will be published April 23 by ISI, I examine the historical value of those early Muslim accounts. It is an attempt to determine whether what Muslims believe Muhammad said and did, as recounted in The Truth About Muhammad, actually corresponds to historical reality.
There are numerous reasons to question the historicity of the early Muslim accounts of Muhammad’s life. Take, for example, an incident I refer to briefly in yet another book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades):
Muhammad already had experience as a warrior before he assumed the role of prophet. He had participated in two local wars between his Quraysh tribe and their neighboring rivals Banu Hawazin.
That he participated in these wars, known collectively as the Fijar War, or Sacrilegious War, is generally agreed upon, but there is no agreement about what he thought later about his role in them. The Egyptian writer Muhammad Hussein Haykal, in his 1933 biography, Hayat Muhammad (translated into English as The Life of Muhammad), quotes Muhammad expressing regret for his participation in this war:
“I had witnessed that war with my uncle and shot a few arrows therein. How I wish I had never done so!” (Pp. 52-3)
However, the ninth-century Muslim historian Ibn Sa’d, in one of the earliest and most important sources for biographical information on Muhammad, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, directly contradicts Haykal by quoting Muhammad saying this about the Fijar War:
I attended it with my uncles and shot arrows there and I do not repent it. (I.143)So which is it?
Is Haykal right that he really did express regret, or is Ibn Sa’d right that he explicitly ruled out doing so? Haykal doesn’t give his source, but it is possible that he had access to a hadith or some Islamic tradition that flatly contradicted the one Ibn Sa’d recorded eleven centuries earlier — although this is unlikely, since Ibn Sa’d often records variant and contradictory reports and discusses how they can be harmonized, or why one should be accepted and the other rejected. In this case Ibn Sa’d gives no hint of any variants. Haykal may simply have altered this tradition for apologetic purposes. Those who cite him as their source on this, or try to build an argument upon his quotation, do so at their own risk.
Nonetheless, such contradictions abound in the hadith reports. Muhammad can quite often be found saying contradictory things, as I show in Did Muhammad Exist?. In that book also I discuss how this odd situation came about: opposing factions both invoked Muhammad as an authority, and invented traditions to support their point of view.
Spencer is hawking his new book, which he is pushing as a “scholarly work” about how Muhammad didn’t exist. His home page boasts that Robert Spencer is “[t]he acclaimed scholar of Islam”, “[a] serious scholar”, and “a brilliant scholar.”
I have pointed out in the past that Spencer is not a scholar of any sort–especially not on anything related to Islam. He simply does not have the academic qualifications to claim this. What other “scholar” do you know of that doesn’t even have a master’s or PhD degree on the subject he claims to be a “scholar” of? He only has a one-year master’s degree in “the field of early Christianity”. How does that make him an “acclaimed scholar of Islam”?
Another major problem with Spencer’s claim to scholarship is that he simply does not speak or understand Arabic. This much has been apparent in the past, and it becomes painstakingly obvious in his latest response to me (as I shall show below). I don’t think Spencer needs to know Arabic to criticize Islam (as some Muslim apologists insist), but I do think he needs to know it in order to be considered a “scholar of Islam” (a title he claims)–let alone “[t]he acclaimed scholar of Islam.”
Combine (1) not having any academic qualifications whatsoever with (2) not knowing Arabic and you have a situation like this: imagine some random blogger claiming to be “a world renowned physician” without ever having (1) gone to medical school and (2) without ever having studied or learned anatomy. Such a blogger might be able to bring up good points about the field of medicine, but nobody in their right mind would consider him a “world renowned physician”–and if he claimed any such thing, his credibility would be shattered.
The need to understand Arabic in order to be a “scholar of Islam” cannot become more apparent than it is now with Spencer’s latest reply. And here’s why: Spencer argues (see quote above) that the hadith (saying of the Prophet Muhammad) found in Haykal’s Hayat Muhammad contradicts the one in Ibn Sa’d’s Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir. He argues that Haykal may have reproduced another hadith that contradicts the one found in Ibn Sa’d’s book, or even that Haykal may have engaged in academic deceit (i.e. “altered this tradition for apologetic purposes”). That’s a serious and bold claim to make against Haykal.
Yet, had Spencer simply been able to read Arabic, he would have realized that the hadith in Haykal’s Hayat Muhammad and Ibn Sa’d’s Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir are the exact same! They are word-for-word identical. In other words, Haykal took the hadith from Ibn Sa’d’s book. That Spencer couldn’t see this speaks volumes about his “scholarship.” So, Spencer’s blathering on about Haykal finding another contradictory hadith or of manipulating the text is indicative of his sophomoric “scholarship.”
How could Haykal have reproduced another hadith or have manipulated the text when in fact the wording in both Haykal’s book and Ibn Sa’d’s is the exact same? Here is what is found in Haykal’s book:
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Source: Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, Hayat Muhammad [The Life of Muhammad], 14th ed. (Cairo: Dar al-Ma’arif, n.d.): 134
And here’s the exact same found in Ibn Sa’d’s book, which Spencer quoted to “trump” Haykal’s hadith (stupidly not realizing they are the exact same!):
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Source: Ibn Sa’d, Tabaqat al-Kabir, edited by Ali Muhammad Umar (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khaniji, 2001) 1:106
To Robert Spencer, who doesn’t read or understand Arabic, that looks like a whole lot of jibberish. One can imagine Spencer saying: “That’s Greek Arabic to me!” But, if we help Spencer out by underlining as we did above, even he should be able to verify that they are the exact same–word-for-word.
So, if the two quotes are the exact same, why does Spencer’s quote seem to say the exact opposite as what I quoted? Why did I translate it as such:
I had witnessed that war with my uncle and shot a few arrows therein. How I wish I had never done so!
Whereas Spencer used the following:
I attended it with my uncles and shot arrows there and I do not repent it.
Why the difference?
Being the “acclaimed scholar of Islam” that he is, Spencer relied on Google search to find this English translation of Ibn Sa’d’s book and/or was forced to rely on an English translation of the book (due to his inability to read the source text). In doing so, Spencer didn’t realize that the sentence he reproduced was a faulty translation.
In Arabic, the underlined part is:
وما أحب أني لم أكن فعلت
In transliteration (for Spencer’s sake), it would be:
wa ma uhibb anni lam akun fa’alt
It translates to:
and what I wish is that I had not done it!
Breaking it down, we have:
وما (wa ma) – and what
أحب (uhibb) – I love/wish (See Hans Wehr for the meaning of this verb)
أني (anni) – is that I
لم أكن (lam akun) – had not
فعلت (fa’alt) – done [it]
The translator Spencer used made a mistake with the word ما (ma), which is a participle in Arabic that is modified by the words surrounding it. Hans Wehr lists nine different uses of the word ما (ma), one of which is indeed negation. However, from a linguistic standpoint, the “negative ma” cannot be used in this particular sentence. Indeed, it would render the sentence into a nonsensical “double negative”:
And I do not love that I had not done it.
Huh? If you translated it like so, that would actually mean that Muhammad did not participate in the war. So, even still, this would actually be proof against Spencer’s claim that Muhammad took part in it.
The translator Spencer relied upon saw two negatives and just tried to “simplify” the text to read: “and I do not repent it.” This, even though the word “repent” does not appear anywhere in the text. It is completely imagined. It should be noted that the translator’s native language was neither Arabic nor English. He didn’t know what to do with the nonsensical double-negative–a sentence that would actually mean that Muhammad did not love the fact that he did not participate in the war.
In reality, the word ما (ma) was being used as a “relative ma“:
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Source: Ryding, Karin C., A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 326
The translator can be forgiven for making a mistake, but Robert Spencer, being “[t]he acclaimed scholar of Islam” should have known better. The only correct translation of this text would support the translation I used, namely that Muhammad regretted his participation in the war, which was the point of my article. It was this fact that Spencer failed to include in his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). Instead, he tried to give the exact opposite (and false) impression, i.e. that Muhammad was already a “warrior” before he became a prophet.
Watch how this hadith from Ibn Sa’d’s book–which Spencer is currently using as his strongest proof–will be quickly tossed away by Spencer now that it doesn’t support his argument any more. This is, after all, his methodology for “finding the historical Muhammad”: any hadiths that paint Muhammad in a positive light are jettisoned, whereas those that do the opposite are trumpeted and used as a club to hit Muslims over the head with. With such a biased “methodology”, do you really want to trust Robert Spencer as a source for Muhammad’s biography or for anything related to Islam?
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The bottom line is that Spencer relied on an incorrect translation to write a response to my article. This has two implications:
1) Our entire discussion underscores how important it is for a “scholar of Islam” to read, understand and have mastery of the Arabic language. This is what is expected of a scholar at any credible university, and this is what must be expected of Robert Spencer if he wishes to don the mantle of a scholar of Islam. It is exactly because of situations like these where knowing how to read Arabic can make or break the argument.
2) Specifically with the Prophet Muhammad, Spencer’s biography is misleading because it portrays Muhammad as “already [having] had experience as a warrior”, which is meant to purposefully mislead the reader. It is intended to paint a portrait of Muhammad as a fierce warrior–hence, Spencer’s choice of title, “Muhammad: Prophet of War”.
What Spencer leaves out is the fact that, at most, Muhammad’s involvement in the war was menial–mostly just in a support capacity. This is a far cry from the “fierce warrior” image that Spencer is trying to portray.
Muhammad not only expressed regret for participation in the war, but more importantly, after hostilities ceased he supported the League of the Virtuous (Hilf al-Fudul), which was similar to the League of Nations formed after World War I. The goal of the League of the Virtuous was to bring an end to bloodshed, violence, and war. Muhammad’s participation in this–and his ringing endorsement of the League even in his later years of life–tells us a lot about how he viewed the war (and warfare in general). Under the entry of Hilf al-Fudul, Thomas Patrick Hughes’ A Dictionary of Islam says:
A confederacy formed…for the suppression of violence and injustice at the restoration of peace after the Sacrilegious war. Muhammad was then a youth, and Sir William Muir says this confederacy ”aroused an enthusiasm in the mind of Mahomet [Muhammad], which the exploits of the Sacrilegious war failed to kindle.”
The war Muhammad was not too keen of. But, the body designed to bring peace on earth was something he was deeply inspired by.
These are facts that Spencer wouldn’t have the reader know. Yet, whereas there was disagreement among biographers about Muhammad’s participation in the war, there was–as far as I know–no difference of opinion about his participation in and support for the League of the Virtuous. Why is it that Spencer’s biography focuses on contested facts but stays clear from a more accepted occurrence? It is only because one event helps build his case against Muhammad, and the other does the opposite. So, he includes what helps and ignores what doesn’t. Should you really trust Spencer’s biography then?
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Spencer also writes in the same article:
Nonetheless, such contradictions abound in the hadith reports. Muhammad can quite often be found saying contradictory things, as I show in Did Muhammad Exist?. In that book also I discuss how this odd situation came about: opposing factions both invoked Muhammad as an authority, and invented traditions to support their point of view.
Robert Spencer has recently argued that Muhammad didn’t in fact exist. The desire to negate Muhammad’s existence altogether is born out of his strongly pro-Catholic, anti-Muslim views.
Yet, Spencer should know that historians have doubted the historicity of Moses and Jesus as well. Almost all of the arguments used against the historicity of Muhammad can be applied to Moses and Jesus. Some scholars have doubted Moses and Jesus’ existences altogether, just as Spencer doubts the existence of Muhammad. Once again, what is good for the goose is good for the gander, but try arguing this point and Spencer will cry “tu quoque, tu quoque!” How dare you apply the same standards to Spencer’s religion and beliefs that he does on a routine basis to others!
However, most scholars don’t believe Muhammad didn’t exist, just as most don’t deny the existence of Jesus. But, the details of Muhammad’s life are far more controversial and up for debate, just as is the case with Jesus. Finding the historical Muhammad is, like finding the historical Moses or Jesus, an important endeavor.
Yes, contradictory hadiths abound, but that’s no different than is the case in Christianity: Bible scholars argue that the Gospels, for example, are highly contradictory to each other, especially with regard to Jesus. I can hear it now already: tu quoque, tu quoque!
The fact that contradictory reports exist just means that scholars need to exert energy to determine what’s more reliable and what’s not–and there will always be a level of guesswork and doubt about it. But the correct way to find the historical Muhammad is not the way Spencer does it: agree with whatever casts Muhammad in a bad light, and dump everything that doesn’t.
Finding the historical Muhammad is an important endeavor that modern scholarship will need to undertake, and you won’t find me disagreeing with that. Yes, it might call into question stories that many Muslims take for granted, but it will also cast doubt on events that Islamophobes like Robert Spencer rely on to bash Muslims over the head with.
Danios was the Brass Crescent Award Honorary Mention for Best Writer in 2010 and the Brass Crescent Award Winner for Best Writer in 2011. For the writing of this article, Dawood (guest contributor) was consulted.