Spoerl / The Levantine Review Volume 2 Number 1 (Spring 2013)
I will be using Alfred Guillaume’s English translation of Ibn Ishaq, published by Oxford University Press,[1] quoting passages in roughly the order of Ibn Ishaq’s narrative. (In what follows, page numbers in the text in parentheses refer to Guillaume’s translation; all other references are given in footnotes.) My main concern will be with the ideological conflict between Muhammad and the Jews, and only secondarily with the military and political aspects of this conflict. My thesis is that the root of the conflict between Muhammad and the Jews, as depicted by Ibn Ishaq, was Muhammad’s insistence, and the Jews’ denial, that the Jewish scriptures unambiguously identify Muhammad as the final prophet for whom the Jews have been waiting for centuries. This theological conflict underlay the political and military dimensions of the conflict and led Muhammad to unleash an intense campaign of anti-Jewish propaganda that spawned anti-Jewish stereotypes that endure even today in the Muslim world.[2] This paper will provide evidence supporting Neil J. Kressel’s assertion that “far from being a byproduct of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Jew-hatred has roots in the long history and complex theology of Islam.”[3]
LIFE OF MUHAMMAD UP TO THE HIJRA (570-622)
Ibn Ishaq sets the stage for Muhammad’s relations with the Jews early in the sira with his account of a trip to Syria on which the very young Muhammad accompanied his uncle, Abu Talib. “When the caravan reached Busra in Syria, there was a monk there in his cell by the
- ↑ Alfred Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah (Oxford and Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1955). Ibn Ishaq’s life of Muhammad was in fact embedded in an ambitious “universal history” that covered the history of the world from the creation up to Ibn Ishaq’s own time (the Abbasid caliphate). For a reconstruction of Ibn Ishaq’s history covering the period before the time of Muhammad (that is, the portion leading up to where Guillaume’s work begins), see Gordon Darnell Newby, The Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Muhammad (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 1989).
- ↑ Fred M. Donner has argued that Muhammad led an ecumenical movement that welcomed Jews and unitarian Christians as well as ex-polytheist converts to monotheism. Donner maintains that Islam did not emerge as a distinct religious confession until several generations after the death of Muhammad and that classical Islamic writers of later centuries anachronistically interpreted the Koran, and re-told the life of Muhammad, so as to make it seem that Muhammad led a movement of pure Muslims who professed the classical Islam of later centuries. Donner would thus presumably dismiss Ibn Ishaq’s sira as a product of this later anachronistic mindset and therefore minimize the extreme and even violent tensions between Muhammad and the Jews as recounted by Ibn Ishaq. See Fred M. Donner, “From Believers to Muslims: Confessional Self-Identity in the Early Islamic Community” Al-Abhath 50-51 (2002-2003), pp. 9-53. If Donner is right, it would not affect the thesis of the present paper, which focuses entirely on the contents of Ibn Ishaq’s sira while prescinding from the question of its historical accuracy.
- ↑ Neil J. Kressel, “The Sons of Pigs and Apes,” p. 1.
