The Real Origins of Islam

I want to know the true origins of Islam so I invited Dr Peter von Sievers to join me for this episode. He said as he’s been examining the origins of Islam for many decades that there’s an aspect that is not quite understood or studied on the same depth that he has in Islamic origins and what that is is the christology in the christianities that are in the areas of Arabia and the known world from Rome Persia and down into Arabia. The Saracens and the Arabs were they Christians? What kind of Christians? And the earliest voice within Islamic tradition is the Quran. We shouldn’t trust something coming hundreds of years later to take to the bank and Dr von Sievers clearly tells me Derek the Quran is a reaction. Pay attention closely as he educates us on the history he knows world history but also specifically this time period very well on what led up to what we call Islam. We are Myth Vision welcome back to Myth Vision podcast. I have a special treat and I mean that this is going to be highly intellectual engaging in history really getting to the bottom of some ideas and so with that being said I have a special guest and that is Dr Peter von Sievers. Is it Sievers or am I saying it correctly? Sievers. Yeah Sievers. Welcome to Myth Vision how are you? You’re welcome thanks for inviting me. Thank you. I want everybody to know he has an Academia page please go jump on that. I actually joined Academia as well so I have a profile, he has a profile. You definitely want to go there. Many publications he has written and some of the stuff we’re going to talk about today you will find on his Academia to dive much deeper into the data.

I do want everybody to know as well that you you have credentials at you know Salt Lake City Utah but you actually are an emeritus university professor on history but not only Middle Eastern history like world history if I’m not mistaken right? That’s right yeah. So you know a thing or two about history. Okay. I’m a historian a full-blooded historian yes. Can you is there anything I missed in terms of your your education that you might want to highlight for our audience? Yeah well I as you probably recognized from my accent I’m originally from Germany. I studied in Munich and got my PhD there at the University, but I came already to the United States in 1968 where Gustav von Grunebaum invited me to UCLA and since at the same time I also found the love of my life and got married to an American who had come to Munich to learn German in order to prepare for her PhD at the University of Chicago. We got married and I started my career at UCLA and so then I stayed in the United States. Congratulations not everybody finds the one. What piqued your interest if I may as we’re diving into this? Why the origins of Islam? Why was that fascinating to you? Shortly after finishing high school a friend and I wanted to go to Algeria which at that time was fighting for its independence. It was impossible to get visas obviously it was even more difficult to get into a war zone and so instead we ended up in Morocco, but it was so fascinating for me that I when I came back to Munich I studied then Middle Eastern studies history and Islam and so that’s where it all began. Wow well thank you so much for that and I hope our audience will go down in the description there is an episode specifically that caught my attention about Dr Sievers. You want to check it out it will be linked down in the description where he gives a lecture on Islamic origins. Some of the stuff may or may not be mentioned during the episode today, but maybe there’s going to be stuff we talk about that isn’t mentioned in this lecture.

So if you really want to take a deep dive I really recommend you check that out in any of the other links we have down in the description that will be there so you can go check out the material. With that being said today’s discussion is about the backstory of Islam the world in which Islam was born in, and to start with I would like to have a look at the two superpowers at the time Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire. So let’s begin with the Byzantine Empire if I may. This is a map just so people can kind of get a visual idea on the map what it would look like. You see the Persian Empire to the east, you have the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople is right here you see it in the middle. Can you tell us more about this empire? When was it formed? How long did it last for, and who was the emperor during the time of what we call Muhammad? Yeah well so the Roman Empire we actually have to call it, and scholars are debating forever when one should call it a Byzantium or Byzantine Empire. I usually make the transition at around 610 when Emperor Heraclius came to power, and he was of course the one who was beaten by the Arabs when they conquered between or in the early 630s, and so at that time then I say okay it was Byzantium, and the reason for that is that Heraclius made himself a Christian king no longer a Roman emperor so he changed his titles and so on. So the Roman Empire of course was initially pagan, but then became Christian at the waning years of the 300s, and so in the four and five hundreds Christianity then expanded everywhere and so including also in Syria and a good portion of Arabia and so on. So by the time let’s say the mid 500s which would be the period where I seriously begin to look at what’s happening what happened there so that we can then understand half a century later at the beginning of Islam. So in the mid 500s the Roman Empire, everybody called it the Roman Empire even later the Arabs who conquered called it Rome, and that is of course Rome stood for the Roman Empire. So it’s only we scholars who call it Byzantium from about 610 or some call it already Byzantium in the 500s. However that may be I mean that’s not important. The important point however is that in the mid 500s in a fierce christological debate was raging throughout the Roman Byzantine Empire concerning, when I say christological debate, concerning what exactly was the crucifixion? Who was killed on the cross? And the person on the cross Jesus did he suffer or did he not suffer? And so there were some Christians well we have to say of course when Christianity became official in the Roman Empire there were fierce theological debates including the nature of Jesus and so on, and then of course from Nicaea and later Chalcedon there was an orthodox Christianity. Let me call it Chalcedonianism or the Chalcedonian Church. Chalcedon is a city in Anatolia where these doctrines were defined and then officially pronounced.

So the debate in the mid 500s was the Jesus who was killed on the cross was he entirely divine? That was the position of the Monophysites, or let me because that’s a very technical term which I would not want to define so we are not going into the natures of Christ very deeply, let’s say the Jacobites after Jacob Baradaeus who was a proselytizer in Syria converting the Arabs to Christianity. So we have to, we should be sure and I do not believe at all that there was still pagans in Arabia. So there might have been lots of Arab tribes who were not very Christian perhaps, but what else is new? How many real Christians are around today? So there’s no point in quibbling about this. Arabia was Christian. Okay so the Jacobites were the majority, and they believed, they were what is called theopaschites. In other words Jesus was nailed to the cross, but because he was, let me be a bit cavalier now with theology, he was God on earth. Okay so he was entirely divine, he had only one nature that was divine. That’s what the Jacobites said. And so when he was crucified obviously God suffered and died. That was considered to be scandalous, and efforts were made then both in the official Christian church of the Byzantine Empire and then also among a group condemned by those who believed in the full divinity of Christ the so-called Eastern Syrian church, later they were called Nestorians. So let me call them Nestorians even though it’s anachronistic. They believed, let me briefly describe their position, they believed that Jesus had two natures, one divine one human, and when Jesus was nailed to the cross only the human Christ died suffered and died. The divine Jesus obviously couldn’t because God cannot be nailed to the cross obviously. So the the second position which we might describe as let’s say more rational, but it was very difficult to fully combine the two natures, so there were always debates on well were there two persons or one person? How many natures? And so on. Let me make this brief.

The people who later became the Nestorian, the Eastern Christians were essentially pushed out, this was after Ephesus 431, pushed out of the Byzantine Empire, and became the Christians, and now we are turning to the Sasanian Persian Empire. So they settled there and built up the Eastern Christian church which continued to adhere to this new nature theory. Now again a long story short in the course of the 500s when these fierce debates broke out over the nature of Jesus, the main antagonists were on the one hand the Jacobites who believed in the single divine nature and therefore in God’s suffering on the cross, were opposed by the Easterners or the Nestorians who said no Jesus had two natures and it was only the human nature in Jesus that suffered and eventually died on the cross. The reason why I’m getting a, and of course then there was a middle position which the Byzantine, the Byzantines tried to take because of course they had a strong imperial interest in having all of the different Christian churches essentially then from the second half of the 500s onwards to be one under one patriarch in Constantinople, and of course also there was the Pope or the bishop of Rome, and also under the Roman Byzantine authority. If I may just just to poke in as we go because I actually some of these images actually I have are related to exactly what you’re talking about here. So it was a capital, the capital was Constantinople, this was the church just so everybody knows being Constantinople would have looked like back in the time during Muhammad of course without the minarets. So yeah good that you took the minarets off so that one has an impression of the Roman Byzantine period. Exactly. And this right here obviously as well I just want to show an inside look at that same church here you have the Christ right Jesus on the ceiling, and then this is one of the famous paintings we see images on Google when we’re looking up Jesus, we’ve all seen this. I think this is inside that very church.

The art is absolutely fascinating there. So I just want, I want everybody as, oh go ahead. Why do you have this image? Let me point out maybe one really would have to get close and look at the face, but the face is half human and half divine if you look very carefully. So in other words one half of the face expresses some of the suffering that Jesus experienced on the cross, the other one was the divine Jesus who of course did not suffer on the cross. So here you have a visual presentation, a representation of this. That’s the position that Chalcedon took, which is essentially that of the Eastern Christians, but not entirely so. And the reason why I mention this is now that the Jacobites were outraged in the course of the fight, and I say this deliberately in the course of the 500s and I want to get a little more into the details so that this becomes clear, they were outraged that both Chalcedon, the church that tried to compromise between the two, well let’s call them extreme positions, God being entirely divine and God being half divine half human, the fierce debate in the second half of the 500s was then culminated then in a figure John of Tella, so he died in 538, he denounced the main person of the Eastern Syrian church by being another Judas. So in other words he betrayed the official Christian position according to which Jesus was crucified, according to which the Jews crucified Jesus. Now we know better of course even, even I mean any careful reading of the Gospels makes it clear that the Romans were the ones, not the Jews, but of course the Jews were sympathetic to the Romans taking Jesus essentially off their hands. That’s the situation. Now this John of Tella denounced the Nestorians by saying he is the new Judas because he dares to say that the Jews did not kill Jesus, and therefore he is just after his scandals in the Christian church because we all know that the Jews killed him. So that was the position, the polemics of the Jacobites, and the Quran picked up the polemics and also declared no Jesus was not killed on the cross, it only seemed to the Jews that way. This is a crucial verse in the Quran, it’s 4:157 I think I made a little note here for 4:157 if listeners want to write this down and check in the Quran. It’s a crucial verse because already in the year 437, maybe 637, maybe 640, so in the last days of the Arab conquest of Iraq, the bishop of Nisibis at that time Adiabene had apparently Arab conquerors who informed him what the Arabs were all about, and he said well we should not fear the Arabs who are in the process of conquering us because like us they do not believe that Jesus suffered and died on the cross. So here you have in a nutshell at the beginning of Islam. This is great. Okay I’m going to keep moving here with some images here.

I want, I want everybody to take a look here at the superpower of the time the Persian Empire. This is the map and what it looks like, what it looked like if you will just to give an idea. Can you tell us some more about this empire? When was it formed? How long did it last or who was the emperor during the time of Muhammad? Yeah so Iran of course it’s a very old empire, way back one of the kings of Iran was even a messiah according to the Bible because he was responsible for resettling the Jews releasing them from the Persian Empire so that they could return to Jerusalem and build the second temple. So there you have an old connection between Iran and or the Persian kingdom and Christianity. King Cyrus. Yeah Cyrus. Right now fast forward the Sasanians founded the most recent version of the of the Persian Empire, and in the throughout again the second half of the 500s, early 600s, they were in constant war with the Romans or Byzantium, and in fact they were usually more victorious than the Romans. The Romans were quite defensive, and in the last war the one that was led by Khosrow the second, so he was then eventually the last king because he was overthrown by the Persians themselves in 628 when the Romans finally under Heraclius were able to defeat him. So in 628 that was of course the turning point, Heraclius was victorious. Heraclius the emperor was victorious, the Persians were defeated, and so Heraclius wisely however, because he was not done completely firmly in the saddle, he had come to power only through a coup in 610, he wisely let the Persians fight it out among themselves, and of course then in the subsequent years with a lot of turmoil among the Sasanians eventually the Arabs were able to conquer all of Iraq and then ultimately Iran, and the last king of the Persians then was defeated. But the Sasanian Empire was extremely powerful in the second half of the 500s, and the Romans or the Byzantines found it very difficult to defend themselves now because Iraq, so the western portion of the Sasanian Empire, was Christian in its majority and formed the capital Ctesiphon. I might as well just go through it so people can actually see these. Yeah, and your viewers should actually compare it to the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople because it is just as impressive and imposing, showing you the enormous power that the Sasanians possessed.

Yeah there you are, I just, I wanted to show what a recreation would have looked like, this construction right? Yeah that’s what it would have looked like, this is what we have left just to give you an idea. Now the Christians in Iraq, so those Eastern Christians who were denounced as followers of Judas believing in the two-nature followers of Judas in the two-nature theology of Jesus, and that was even though it was a polemic or originally a polemic of the Jacobites in Syria, it was picked up by the Arabs who were forming Islam in the first decades of the 600s. If you wonder we can come back to this quote formation of the Quran as well, but it is important to be aware that already in 637, so in other words about five, eight years, well 632 is a traditional date of the death of Muhammad, I’m not sure it might have been earlier, but that’s a secondary question, be this as I may, it was just a few years after the death of Muhammad, already at that time the Christians in Iraq knew via Ishoyahb III what all of these conquering Arabs were all about. In other words they were well Christian, but maybe not quite along the official line. But who represented the official line anyway? Chalcedon. But they were contested by the Monophysites as well as the Eastern Christians, although they were outside the empire and so therefore they did not have any particular power political connection with the Byzantine. Nevertheless Heraclius made an effort to reinvite the Eastern Christians into the larger church, Chalcedonian. Heraclius was almost desperately concerned to bring the Christians back together, particularly after he had lost Syria to the Arabs, which happened by 640. So at that time he was just desperate to reunite all of the Christians in order to have something to resist the Arabs. So ask me further questions. Yeah, so during that time there was a version around this period, if you don’t mind, like a version of what we call COVID-19, it was the Justinian Plague which caused huge devastation across the empire.

Can you tell us more about this plague and the scale of the devastation this pandemic caused? Yeah, one cannot draw any particular connection between the plague and the christological developments that we have just been talking about, nevertheless it happened at the time of Justinian, and Justinian was also like Heraclius already at that time, so 550 years or seven years earlier, very concerned about either keeping Christianity together or getting all of the Christian denominations back together. And so it was right in the middle of his tenure that the Justinian plague occurred. We are still not exactly sure from where it came. I believe now, so here putting on the head of the world historian so to speak, historians think maybe that it came from East Asia, but that is still debatable. Furthermore it’s also not completely clear how that plague developed because of course we know one form of the black death is connected with rats, another form is transmitted directly and doesn’t need the rats. So whatever the background there, it was of course devastating in the middle of the second half of the 500s, but it was a first cycle, we don’t know how many were killed, but what is important is there were repetitive cycles reaching way into the 700s. And an interesting detail here is that the Umayyads, the first caliph dynasty who came to power in 660, they suffered these periodic recurrences of the Justinian plague, and instinctively they knew that they shouldn’t stay in the cities on the coast of Syria, or in the interior, so we’re talking about Caesarea, Damascus, Jerusalem, hence whatever, they shouldn’t stay in the cities, but should go into the clean air of the desert where the quote vapors of the black death wouldn’t hit them. And that’s actually part of the background for the Umayyads having these wonderful castles in the Syrian desert that are architectural jewels. Also the paintings there, I mean we all think that Islam is aniconic or against images, but the Umayyads were great lovers of frescoes even of the naked body and of banquets and what have you. So that’s the result of the recurrent cycles, so every 20, 30 years, and eventually the black death petered out only in maybe the 720s, 30s. So we can assume that the overall population in Syria and in the Eastern Mediterranean it was considerably reduced. In fact this black death actually reached also as far as Western Europe, so it was quite devastating. Wow okay, so now we’re getting back into zooming in from world history back into what’s going on with this development. And I actually, it wasn’t too long ago I interviewed Dr Michael Penn,

I don’t know if you know, oh we talked about this, and you know he mentioned the largest church in the Middle East was the church of the Syriac Christian, and they within themselves had different sects. So if I can I’d like to show a few examples of like these different kinds of of sects, and I might have a hard time pronouncing this you can help me here, but the monophysitism is that how you say it? Monophysitism. Monophysitism. And what is this doctrine? What are they teaching? Okay, so here we are back to what I was talking about a little earlier, the Jacobites. So the monophysites in Syria were called Jacobites. They were also predominant in Egypt, and there we call them also Monophysites. I prefer the term Monophysites rather than mono. Mono means one, already a sort of a compromise that was concluded at the beginning of the 500s by Severus who was a bishop of Antioch, he also was inclined toward this reconciliation that Justinian wanted to bring about, and so there were periodic efforts by the emperors and the patriarchs of Constantinople to bring those Monophysites or Monophysites or Jacobites, these are all identical right, just like the Saracens and the Arabs and exactly, and the Tayyaye by the way, and so there we go. So the periodic efforts by the emperors to bring those Monophysites or Monophysites back into the fold, but then the Monophysites always resisted very strongly, and sometimes they were, or most of the times they were aggressively opposed to both the Chalcedonians or the main imperial church. That would be these people it seems on the far left, two unified natures Chalcedon, two is the far left here. Okay let’s stick with this picture for a moment. Yes, I try to avoid this business about two natures, one nature and so on by saying Christians who said Jesus had only one nature, and that’s of course the far right divine, which in many ways is the, how shall we call it, the most natural attitude anyone would take towards Jesus. Because any person one looks at obviously has only one nature. I mean we are talking now here, and I presuppose in my conversation with you, that you are not split into two natures, right? Right. So the common sense attitude is Jesus could have only had one nature, and of course if you have to choose between the two he had to have a divine nature. That’s the most natural position one could take. And so therefore that was the reason why the Monophysites or the Jacobites were so attractive in the 500s and why they had so many supporters and why the Chalcedonian church was so much on the defensive.

Now the one people with the twos, what is called here two separate natures, two separate natures destroyed, unfortunately this is wrong. Nestorianism does not talk about two separate natures, it talks about, well it talks about two natures, but it talks about one person in whom these two natures came together. So that is very different, and obviously it’s as close as these guys with the two nature people could come to the idea that the common sense approach that anybody would take is that Jesus was divine. Nevertheless it was very important for the Nestorians to say now wait a minute, it is incredibly important that Jesus had a humanity too because otherwise we cannot explain the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross. And anyone who is not prejudiced and reads the Gospels, particularly Matthew, well Mark just as much, is struck how human Jesus is in the Gospels. In fact I grew up as a Lutheran pietist, for me it was completely natural that Jesus was primarily human and only secondarily divine. Because how could he have saved me or all the other Protestants? How could he have saved us unless he had sacrificed himself? So you can see here how one’s feelings are torn really between the one and the other Jesus. And so I’m commenting here by the way very sympathetically about theological positions you see, right? I’m not talking about a historian in this particular case, I’m talking about very neutrally about why it is that we on one hand want Jesus to be human, but on the other hand why it is also very important that he is divine. Now back to the 500s, the Monophysites or the Jacobites were so aggressive, we can say in an overall sense there was a development in antiquity so from 30 when we assume Jesus was crucified to 70 when the Jewish uprising was violently suppressed by the Romans and all of the Jews were driven out of Jerusalem, from that period on in all antiquity the more aggressive development was towards the divinization of Jesus. So Islam came at the culmination when this divinization process occurred, and Islam is of course the backlash. Okay, Jesus was made human again. Now the Nestorians were the ones who had engaged in the backlash already much earlier, but they were of course driven out into the Persian Empire and so therefore they were ineffective in the Byzantine Empire. That is why the Jacobites and Monophysites were so powerful in Syria. And it is very clear, and I cited this issue at the beginning with this famous verse already in 637, that indicates that there was an awareness of what is called theopaschism, that is God died on the cross and suffered before he died. That position was victorious really, but Islam is a counter reaction to this. So technically, if I may just, I’m a lay person, I really just barely scratching the surface here and I’m wanting to know if I’m right, so this gentleman here Heraclius, who is like literally desperate, decides he’s going to reach over to the eastern side or really the western side of the Persian army or empire where where this is the king who gets end up usurped and what not and get these what we keep calling, let me get this image back up here, the Monophysites, no he he wanted to get the Nestorians, Nestorians, okay the middle, even though this isn’t completely accurate it’s still he’s trying to get the Nestorians to come back.

And so there’s all of this theological war going on, but, but also political, you can’t divorce the two, they’re one and the same. And here is these Arabs who are actually going along with making it’s a reaction to divinity to the point where no he is not a son of God, no he is not God, you know God is not, do not make Jesus God at all. So it’s reactionary, completely reactionary. Exactly. Yeah, wow. So this is what by the end of the year I hope I will be finished with the manuscript of my book, that is where I, where my book begins, and that is why if I may be proud for a moment of my research, that is why I think I have something important new to say that no scholar who is writing at the same time and particularly the scholars whom you have interviewed, because in many ways they are also trying to present a new picture, and I’m definitely presenting a new picture, and so that’s what I’m after. Wow, okay. Let’s keep going because there’s so many good things. I have so many questions. I would like to move on to the border patrols if you don’t mind, because we’re talking about the differences and you did a wonderful job explaining that. I was going to ask is there any other group of Christians that we didn’t mention that might just before we left that are not really popular, aren’t really mentioned, but they’re there? And the reason I ask in light of this, all of these groups you’re talking about, are they all using the canonical text? Because it seems like there’s awareness of literature in the Quran like pseudepigraphical literature that we, I thought that was extinguished. I thought that in the 3, 400s they had gone around and completely destroyed all of this heretical literature, but I’m seeing Jesus turn clay birds into life. Like what’s going on? Is that literature still around, and what groups of Christians maybe are reading this? Oh yeah, no that literature was definitely around. You’re right of course. Once Christianity was adopted in the Roman Empire, so the late 300s, and once the great proselytization conversion efforts of the Christian church had been completed, and that was in the course of the 400s, the Chalcedonian church in Constantinople was successful in suppressing literature that it considered to be unorthodox. So whatever the patriarch and the emperor decided did not fit into the canon was suppressed and it went underground. But of course there were lots of Christians in the east who continued reading them and continued even writing such questionable so-called questionable texts. There was then also the Jewish-Christians for a while, that is Jews who nevertheless recognized Jesus as the savior, but continued to practice Jewish customs and laws. So all of this went on, and we should be, we should be very much aware that the orthodox dictate so to speak by the emperors and the patriarch in Constantinople was by no means successful. And so that is quite understandable. But let me mention also, since you asked a little earlier about is there any other Christian group of relevance, let me mention it, and that is again this is new, nobody has really written about it. In, we were talking earlier about Justinian and the Justinian plague.

Justinian as I said was, well I exaggerated it was desperate, but I get the point we want to make it a little lively to bring the Christians together, so he dictated a piece of liturgy which is called the Trisagion, the thrice holy, holy holy, which is sung in the regular liturgy of Chalcedon where the middle verse was, at the behest of the, you can see here again how important the Monophysites were, at the demand, not biased really, I mean they were really insistent on this, it was changed. And this middle liturgy was sung holy, holy, who was sacrificed for us. Now if you listen to that liturgy it means God was sacrificed, suffered and was sacrificed on the cross, because God is the holy, holy, holy God. The middle verse therefore then officially in the Chalcedonian church from Justinian onwards had to be sung that way. So that’s embarrassing. We are not talking about highfaluting two natures and one person and what have you theologies, and this is so unfortunate because you cannot really represent it accurately like your graph showed, it’s not very accurate. So I want to bring it down to earth. The people in church when they went to mass either daily or on Sundays literally sang that God on earth so to speak who was Jesus was suffered on the cross and died. That was sung every day. Now you can see here why the reaction of the Muslims was so visceral because later on because of what I call the backlash, because of course in the late 500s, early 600s when everybody had to sing it that way including Chalcedonians, we have to be aware that the bishop, that some of the bishops and monks of Jerusalem were vehemently opposed to the singing of what is called the Trisagion, the holy, holy, holy with the middle verse. So in Jerusalem there was a furious resistance in the clergy and among monks in the 620s, early 30s. Bishop Sophronius is very crucial here, the one who actually turned the keys of Jerusalem over to Umar who was the caliph at the time conquering it. So they were furiously opposed to the singing of the God is divine and suffered liturgy. So we have actually a complication here in Jerusalem, and I’m saying yeah that was picked up by the Arabs of southern Syria. So here we are turning to something we haven’t mentioned yet, and that is the Christians of southern Syria and adjacent northern, northwestern Arabia had a capital Petra, of course famous for its ruins which one can visit in Jordan. Petra was probably, cannot be proved without some doubts, but probably was the city in the vicinity of which Muhammad, if we think that he was the unnamed preacher in the early 600s, where he received the beginning of the Quran, the early revelations. So he received Petra, not in Mecca. Mecca did probably not even exist, the first time it was ever mentioned as existing dates to 692. So this is way later in an apocalypse, the so-called Edessene Apocalypse that was published at that time at the end of the 600s when the conquerors were long over and Islam was beginning to form. So if we assume that the earliest revelations came to a preacher later called Muhammad, but unnamed in in the early or in many portions of the Quran, I shouldn’t say early by the way because I don’t believe in it either, but that’s a different point you can ask me about later. Okay, so if we assume that an unnamed preacher lived in Petra or environs, I call the area Madyan or the Romans called it Palaestina Tertia, Palestine. Madyan is the old biblical description because the Midianites of course are very important in the Old Testament.

The, in that particular area where I think the Quran was revealed and where the particular Arabic that the Quran represents was developed, I mean that’s where it originated probably in the 500s. Putin might have told you about that, although I don’t know, I mean that’s one of his points, although he is not at all in favor of the Madyan theory that I mentioned. Anyway, if the Quran indeed began there, it is very likely that this early preacher whom of whom we have to think that he was highly sophisticated theologically, so he had read not only the canonized Gospels, but also the suppressed literature. One basic methodological principle always, apart from working only with historically verifiable record, is that one should always think of protagonists being of the highest sophistication. They are never dumb or uneducated. So Muhammad, this nameless preacher in some portions of the Quran clearly has to be supposed to be fully familiar, including the Jerusalem patriarchs or bishops who opposed the Trisagion. So in other words, in a way Jerusalem was Nestorian, and that’s why I am so interested in this connection of what the Nestorians had to say about Jesus suffering and dying on the cross, not God suffering. That’s why it is so interesting that this Jerusalem position is exactly the position that then reappears in the Quran. Because the Quran is not entirely clear about whether there wasn’t also a divinity in Jesus. If one carefully reads the particular verse that speaks about the Jews did not kill Jesus, it does not deny that Jesus was not divine, it merely says the divine Jesus couldn’t be killed, and that’s why the Jews were wrong. So that’s a completely different position. So that’s why it is so important to say okay, Petra is part of the picture, and that’s where the early revelations began, and we don’t even know whether there was any Mecca connection. It could be that this preacher in way north eventually in 626, 622, that’s of course when the rise of Medina begins, that’s the famous Hijra, that he made a Hijra from the north to Medina, not from Mecca, and that Mecca came into existence only later, perhaps by dissidents from Medina. But that’s a different story and that’s a bit speculative and I don’t want to go into. This is fascinating, I’m going to keep going because some of the stuff you’re mentioning is relevant to what we’re going to get into, and I’ll have more questions of course as well. So let’s move to the border patrols real quick between these two empires, the what we call Byzantium or Byzantine and Persian, real quick here just to give people a visual, and I’m going to probably butcher the names when I’m going to try the Ghassanids, the Ghassanids right, in Arabic it would say and the Lakmids, who were romanized Arabs and persianized Arabs, and we have an inscription for these romanized Arabs from 568 AD in southern Syria. But before I show those inscriptions here’s a modern day analogy for our viewers so they can understand, and I want them to see this little post here.

This is Arabic and French. The sign here is that sign in Lebanon right now which is in French and Arabic, as Lebanon was under the French rule and in Lebanon French is their second language. Likewise I’m going to show you an inscription in south Syria from these romanized Arabs, and this is something that I believe was in Robert Hoyland’s work, just to give people the inscriptions on the wall of here, but also here it is in black and white so you can actually read what’s going on. And you can see on the left the inscription in Greek and on the right in Arabic. Can you tell us more about these romanized Arabs, the Ghassanids if I will? When were they formed? How long were they around for? Who was their leader during the time of Muhammad? Yeah, well the long centuries of war between the Roman Empire and the Persians of course required that both empires had to think about how would they fortify their borders in order to discourage either side from attacking. And so initially the Romans built of course the famous Limes. There is a scholarly debate about how much the Romans thought of it as being a defensive bulwark, I don’t want to get into this specialized, but let’s say it was sort of a buffer area where there were lots of forts and of course also well-built roads where the Roman soldiers could march and so on. So that was the initial way of defending themselves against the Persians. The Persians because they were usually the attackers before then they were beaten back, they did not build a huge fortification, they relied right from the start on these so-called lapping tribes, and they were Arabs who were then, of course Christianity, they became the Nestorians about whom we have been talking before. So they had they had a capital there Hira, which is right there in the western border today of Iraq, where actually the Sasanians encouraged the emergence of a kingdom, and so the Lakmid kings were quite powerful. And in the course of the 500s, again we are talking here about Justinian, Sasanians with Khosrow as a divisive person, decisive person although he was not the first one who made that decision, Justinian decided that it was too expensive to maintain the limes because he had to have troops in these fortifications in the watchtowers, troops had to be stationed there and exchanged, they had to be paid et cetera et cetera. So he decided that it would be probably much cheaper to turn over the defense, similar to what the Persians did with the Lakmids, to the Ghassanids. So the Ghassanids emerged in the course of the 500s, but they, so when Syria became Christianized the Ghassanids became Jacobites.

Here we are again with the Monophysites. And so they were a defensive force whom the Romans supported, gave important titles to, they became what is called phylarchs, and eventually even in the middle of the 500s they became kings as well or were called that way, and let them fight it out among themselves before then either the Persians or the Romans would have to interfere with their own troops. So that is what happened also in the second half of the 500s and it’s extremely important this development. Yeah, because of course it helped the Christianization of the Arabs, but again you see I’m insistent here it’s not just that they became Christian, it’s that they became Monophysites, and the Quran is forever attacking the Monophysites in it. So you can see here this is this backlash phenomenon that I mentioned, the Quran speaks about what is called in Arabic mushrikun, literally meaning those who associate God with other beings. This is simply the Arabic term for the Monophysites, because you see Muhammad was a preacher when he received his revelations, he was just like the people who went to church and listened to the or sang the Trisagion. He did not write theological treatises, he wrote a homiletic text collection, in other words he preached it to the Arabs in probably Petra or environs Madyan as I said a little earlier. So anywhere there, north northwest Arabia, he preached it to them, and the Ghassanids were the ones who were the mushrikun who who associated other beings with Jesus. So the Quran is really a backlash against the mushrikun, those who add people to God, and that means Jesus and the Holy Spirit. There is no Trinity, that is the strong backlash position that you find represented in the Quran. Wow, okay. So, so we got the Lakmids and the Ghassanids, you don’t have a sound in the English language, but you pronounce it way deep like the French would pronounce it, they played a role in the rise of Islam as you said. Did their military learn skills from the two superpowers Persia and Rome? I know this is probably a silly question, but a lot of Islamic biographies the Arabs are seen as kind of the underdogs who were up against these two superpowers, and their victories were because of God right? And like I talked about before the show I’m looking to not deal with the theology, but unmask and figure out like what actually was on the ground, that God was on their side, but that they did it all by themselves. It’s almost like when we read biblical narrative where it’s like it seems like the Israelites just sometimes even just stood there and God did the war for him.

Hard to believe that this is true, but did they actually join forces? Like did they have help with them from these other superpowers or potentially from other people in their wars and conquering and stuff? Oh yeah, the Romans used primarily foot soldiers, they had of course also their cavalry, but the Ghassanids were practically only cavalry and so they were a very useful supplement to the Roman army, and that’s why when they fought they were very proud. In fact they were so proud that in 581 the Romans even decided, their Byzantines even decided, well we have to cut these Ghassanids down a notch or two, and they ended the phylarchy. Usually historians interpret this as a major mistake that the Byzantines committed because it allowed the Lakmids to develop their superiority in the years after the 580s. Nevertheless they remained critical, the Ghassanids critical all the way up to Heraclius when he began in 610 the war of liberation from the Persians. They were enrolled and played a major part in this war of liberation that Heraclius led, and in fact there’s even a scholar you might actually also try to interview him, Tesi is his last name. He is now with a Korean university, but I think he is, I don’t know whether he’s Italian-based now or still in the United States, but he’s associated with this Korean university. If you google him I’m sure you can find him. Tesi is his last, Tommaso, Thomas, oh okay. He has written quite a bit about this critical role of the Ghassanids. He thinks that they were very important for this. Have you come across this famous verse according to which allegedly in quotation marks Muhammad, the nameless preacher, issued a prophecy shortly before the Hijra 622 that the Romans were victorious? Now that is in 628, when I say a prophecy, a prophecy is always issued after the attacks have happened. Exactly. So he prophesied that initially the Persians would be successful, but ultimately the Romans would be victorious. This verse as I said allegedly a prophecy is always taken as meaning that the unnamed preacher Muhammad predicted that eventually the Romans would be victorious, and so therefore the implication is the people in Mecca were sympathetic toward the Romans and not the Persians. We have not a shred of evidence about that. That is historically undocumented. In fact it was probably the other way around. So in other words it said that eventually the conquering Arabs would defeat the Byzantines, and indeed they did in 636. So the new reading of the Quran, which is not original with me, I mean it’s well known, but scholars are divided whether they should read it as this prophecy about the Persians being defeated and the Romans eventually, or the other way around, that is what Tesi has researched. And this is important because in 622 then when the Hijra happened and then in the subsequent years until the official date of Muhammad’s death in 632, so 10 years later, these were the years, 10 years of gradual conquest by Medina beginning with the surroundings of Medina, Mecca perhaps, we are not sure about this, we have not a shred of proof. The only thing that the Quran says is that there was an encounter by the people of Medina and the people of Mecca in the valley of Mecca. That’s the only mention that the word Mecca has in the Quran, and that ultimately of course the people of Medina prevail.

Anyway, the important point here is when this gradual expansion of Medina occurred somewhere around 629, it’s very difficult to determine exactly, a messenger was sent to the Ghassanids telling them give up your version of Christianity, adopt ours, because the message that Muhammad preached was there’s only one God, and that Jesus was a prophet, and whether he was killed or not in as the Quran says, that is unknown. So it was not yet clear at this time 629 what the situation was. So he sent a messenger up to these Christians telling them join us against the Romans and we together conquer Rome, because it’s the promised land, the Jews have forfeited Jerusalem, the Romans have conquered it, but now we are coming and we are conquering Jerusalem from the Romans, help us, be our associates. So that was the functioning, the final function of the Ghassanids, they helped the conquering Medinans in the 630s to conquer Syria. Wow, this is something that you don’t hear every day. Okay, so let’s dive a little deeper here if you don’t mind. Now I’d like to move on to the possibility of the location of Mecca and Medina not being in modern day Saudi Arabia, but somewhere else, and I have some early sources which I found in Robert Hoyland Seeing Islam as Others Saw It that I’d like to show. The first is about Mecca, and this is found in the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle 741, and this one right here, “He came finally to Mecca, the home of Abraham as they think, which lies between Ur of the Chaldees and the city of Haran and in the desert.” So if I may, where exactly is the location of Mecca as described in this chronicle? And here’s a map to give you kind of a something to maybe go off of. Do you have an idea or? Well let’s see, I know you got to get the glasses off, get my glasses. Yeah, the map actually shows Haran to which I referred a little earlier, that was the capital of the Lakmids, and as I said the Lakmids were, well let’s be loose here in nomenclature, Nestorians. So the ones who believe in the half divine, half human nature of Jesus, they did not play any direct part in the whole conquest. So it’s only the Ghassanids to whom I referred a little earlier, because they participated in the Medinan army in the 630s in the conquest of Syria from the Romans. Okay, I just switched maps to maybe give you a better, yeah because the names are there, the Ghassanids or whatever, and the Lakmids on the left or western side you see the Ghassanids are the top left western part of Saudi Arabia if you will. Yeah, okay, so back to this quotation that you showed me in the chronicle of 741, which is very important because we have for these early years after the completion of the Arab conquest of Syria no reliable sources for the Arabs. We have only Christian sources commenting on the conquering Arabs, and there by the way we are opening also an extremely interesting chapter about which you might want to ask me later. But this chronicle that you, where you mentioned this quote, it shows that the Christians of this period who reported about it, now the chronicle of 741 is already a chronicle of 40 years after the first mentioning of Mecca. I said earlier we don’t have any proof that Mecca existed during the 600s. It is mentioned once, but only in the, in the Quran only in the form of in the valley of Mecca, so that does not mean that there was a city or or a sanctuary.

We only can indirectly conclude that perhaps there was a sanctuary because the valley of Mecca was the place where the Quran says that the Medina people met and were about to battle the Mecca people, but God interfered and withheld the Meccans from attacking because they were also sympathizers for Muhammad in Mecca and therefore he didn’t want to have any blood to be spilled. That’s essentially this particular verse that I’m referring to. Okay, that’s all we know. So we know about Mecca then eventually through this Edessene Apocalypse 692, and then subsequently and this source of 741 clearly shows it, Christians knew that there was a Mecca. Now the Christians of the 600s who commented on the conquering Arabs after 640 knew nothing about Mecca. A first inkling that there was something going on there way south north of Medina came only in 683 when there was a counter caliph who disputed the power with the Umayyads, and he allegedly was in this place in the south, but it’s not named where there was a sanctuary. So we know that there was a sanctuary in the south north of Medina, that’s about all. And Hoyland who showed you this particular source was a bit late here. 741 is already way beyond the original emergence of Islam. So that’s when we can say okay, at that time yes there was a Mecca, there was a Medina, there was an Umayyad caliphate, it was the dominant one in the Middle East and so on. And Hoyland has written quite a good book about it, I’m using it quite a bit, but he nowhere goes into the details about the Monophysites and the Nestorians etcetera etcetera. So let me, let’s probe a little deeper here because I also have a description of where the Arabs were located from a Frankish chronicle written in 658 AD. Where exactly is the location of the Saracens as described in this chronicle? So let me show you that, this one right here, and it says the Hagareens, if I’m saying that right, that’s another name by the way for the Arabs after Hagar the slave wife of Abraham. I’d like to get into that a little bit too if we have the time. The Hagareens, the Hagareens who are also called Saracens which were also the Arabs, a circumcised people which is quite interesting as well, that kind of tells you something, who of old had lived beneath the Caucasus on the shores of the Caspian in a country known as Arcolia. And I think I figured I’d just show the map again to give you, is there a way to describe where that would be on this map, or maybe I go to this map, where would they, where would it be describing? Okay, you would have to go into let’s say the northwestern border of, it says actually if your readers can read it, Albania, you see that right next to the Caspian Sea, I’m looking now, so it would be between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Okay, okay. And there it says on the coast of the Caspian Sea, Albania. Got it, okay. That’s where roughly this particular source locates them. That has to do a lot with apocalyptic speculations at that time, that’s again another chapter, the famous Alexander legend up there in the in the northwest. So yes, there were lots of Christian speculations in the 6th and 700s, particularly in the apocalypses that became quite numerous in the early 700s. There’s a lot of speculation then about where the different places are to be located. There’s of course also the famous early map that allegedly locates Mecca under the name of Macoraba, have you come across that? No. Oh, there’s also a long speculations about that, so the so-called Ptolemaic map. So no, but the episode of all of this is there’s not a shred of evidence about where to locate all of that. Very vague knowledge in the 600s, I’m at the point now also, I published or in the process of publishing two articles on this, even though the Arabs had completed the conquest of Syria in 640, nobody knew at that time that these conquering Arabs had a person by the name of Muhammad who was their prophet. They knew the name Muhammad, but they always described him as a king or a military leader. Perhaps he was. Shoemaker is making a big point of that, that Muhammad was allegedly alive when the beginning of the conquest in Syria occurred, but Shoemaker is in my opinion dead wrong when he says that there was already a text at that time, perhaps 634 or maybe following years around 640, the famous or infamous Doctrina Jacobi. Did he mention it? Yeah, we’ve talked about it yes sir. Yeah, that mentions the prophet Muhammad, but there are very good reasons to say the Doctrina does not come or was not composed in these early years in the 630s, but instead probably between let’s say 670, 695 in Carthage, because Carthage during these years 670 to 695 was hanging on to the city by their fingernails to save it from the conquering Arabs. That’s when it was written. Anti-Judaism was extremely powerful in the course of the 600s. And did any of your interviewers viewers mention Sebeos? Yes, the bishop. Okay, I have great doubts about him. That text of course comes from the 660s, he mentions Muhammad, but he does not say he was a prophet.

That’s very important. If I may just, just for the sake of the show just so everybody understands, here it is for the first time in dominion someone talks about Muhammad and mentions him by name and says a little bit about what he did. Sebeos himself was talking about the events around the year 630 which was before Muhammad had actually died. Sebeos gives a surprisingly accurate account of Muhammad’s background and teachings, translating from the Armenian at that time, “A certain man whose name was Mahmet, which is the usual name for Muhammad, a merchant, as if by the command of God appeared to them as a preacher. Now Muhammad gave them laws namely not to eat carrion, not to drink wine, not to speak falsehood, and not to engage in fornication.” Is that Thomson? It is. Okay, yeah, I’m using his translation when he’s, he had of course colleagues also in the process of making Sebeos available. His additional translation of the text is extremely important and I use it all the time and I find it very helpful. What Thomson doesn’t mention is Sebeos can be doubted because he is of course the one who says that the Arabs conquered Jerusalem because they considered it the promised land, and I mentioned it briefly earlier in our discussion. My feeling is that he wrote that or that he, let’s put it in quotation marks, invented that particular aspect of his description of the rise of Muhammad and the Arabs, which by the way is embedded also in an apocalyptic thinking. Sebeos thought that the world would come to an end very soon, that in these last times the Arabs were destined by God to conquer Jerusalem because the Jews had forfeited it because they killed Jesus, the Romans had lost it because they lost the war, Heraclius was defeated, we now the Arabs, sorry they the Arab Sebeos of course talks about the Arabs as an Armenian. Armenians by the way were Monophysites, very important here also to consider in this whole attitude that Sebeos took, because Sebeos was very anti-Jewish. So in my opinion he invented this entire story about the promised land, and one has to be very careful about proving it or making a good case for it, because actually the Quran is not very clear about why the Arabs conquered Jerusalem or what they exactly wanted to do with Jerusalem once they had conquered it. Severus and Sebeos of course were of the opinion that they, that the Arabs wanted to rebuild the temple for a third time I guess, or whatever. The Arabs knew what they were doing, as I said they were not only anti-Monophysite, also anti-Chalcedonian, except Jerusalem which I mentioned is this exception because of the Trisagion, but they wanted to have something completely new. They wanted to have their own sanctuary there, and of course Malik built the famous Dome of the Rock, which is one of the most famous sanctuaries that the Muslims possess, and one should not mix it up with a temple. It was a sanctuary that possibly could have been a pilgrimage center.

Gerald Hawting whom you should also by the way interview if you have a chance, Hawting, he has recently written a very interesting article where he wonders whether the Dome of the Rock wasn’t supposed to be a pilgrimage center competing with Mecca that was barely existing at the end of the 600s. Remember 692 is the earliest date when Mecca was mentioned. So Hawting is also on to something very interesting in this whole origin of Islam debate. And Sebeos by contrast, even though the scholarship of course of Thomson is extremely important and valuable, Sebeos can be interpreted in quite a few different ways than he was proposing. Wow, okay, so that would be a little contrary to Shoemaker’s apocalyptic approach saying that, yeah. So you don’t think that Muhammad was like an end-time prophet thinking that the end was going to happen? No, no, he, no, no that is indubitable, but, okay, but there you are. Now I always think there’s this mission concept that he talks about this, or at least it’s in line with what we’ve seen with Crone and Patricia Crone and and Cook, and right, and then of course Hoyland had the, he’s not so sure, he’s very open to being not sure about anything, but it seemed to me when I read some of this literature where it talks with the Saracens or the Ishmaelites and the Jews are going to conquer together, it seemed like they had some type of, almost like a, here’s our contract, we have a contract to capture Jerusalem, and then there’s some apocalyptic, it sounds like apocalyptic, but it could be what I think Shoemaker thought was a copy of Joshua’s conquest, this idea of going up and conquering Jerusalem again and it lists like the 12 tribes of Ishmael.

Okay, okay, so you think that’s a complete fictional? Oh yeah, that’s entirely fictional. Now Shoemaker is perfectly correct by saying that the motivation for the conquest, although we have in indicators of that motivation only from the 631, 634 onwards, so not the early period after the establishment of Muhammad of the preacher in Medina, but Shoemaker is perfectly right, the at that time in the 630s the Arabs were driven by the idea that the world would come to an end soon, because that’s after all what the Quran is all about, the world will end soon. We hear it still today, like the Hadith says, I did this, you know, see the gap between my finger, that’s right, exactly. But of course on the other hand the Quran, the unnamed preacher is very careful, he never says it will happen tomorrow, it will happen very soon. Now there you are entering something again new that is very important to take in, and that actually is something that Shoemaker in my opinion didn’t consider sufficiently, and that is the Quran up to 622 is actually a Quran that preaches yes the end of the world, and is also opposed of course to the mushrikun, those associators who think that next to God there was also a divine Jesus. So that means different versions of Christianity. Exactly. So that the entire early period prior to 622 was a peaceful period, so the preaching of the end of the world was be patient, let me help the unnamed preacher, let me help to spread the message, because yes if the world ends tomorrow you don’t want to sin anymore, you want to repent, you want to ask God for forgiveness, you want to enter the Kingdom of God when the eschaton the end comes. And that of course will be accompanied by horrible events, and we all know what these various earthquakes and splitting of the moon and whatever else there is. So Shoemaker is perfectly alright, that’s what one calls eschatology, but Shoemaker is not entirely clear, it was only in 622 that the peaceful preaching, okay you cannot hit people over the head and force them to believe that the world will end tomorrow, all you can do is preach it peacefully and hope that the people to whom you preach it will be persuaded by what you are doing.

And that is actually the great mass of verses in the Quran, only in 622 when Muhammad established himself in Medina, and that we know 622 is a firm date, it’s externally verifiable, the again the historians are the ones who delivered the documentation to us for this, only then Jihad was preached. And this is extremely important, there is a German scholar who made his name in analyzing the great prophets of the Old Testament, Karl Friedrich Pohlmann, Pohlmann, who just about two, three years ago wrote a very important book by saying the Quran actually consists of two major elements, the peaceful preaching which makes up the great mass of the verses, and then in 622 the preaching of holy war which is mostly concentrated in Surahs 8 and 9. And that that was a fateful event in, hold on just a moment. You’re fine. Let me double check something that my wife just gave me. Listen, my I’ve got a wife as well and okay, she gave me some important information. Okay, so Pohlmann therefore then said we can, we have to presuppose that in the Quran that was formed essentially between the years or up to the years let’s say the 60s, 70s or whatever, that was the period when the composition of the Quran took place. So after the conquest when nobody knew anything about the Arabs, that’s the time when the Quran came together, that during that time there was a fierce struggle between the so-called peace party and the so-called Jihad party, and we can identify verses in the Quran where the two directly clashed. There is one, let me get my glasses in, I want to be sure that everybody knows about this, it’s Surah 48 verse 4 and verse 74. If you read these two verses you have a clear proof of the peace party verse 4 in Surah 48 clashing with the end of the same Surah 48 74 where the exact opposite is being said. What is being said in these two verses? The first one is God will be pleased if you continue preaching, essentially the last verse means, or close to the end 74 means, God will only be pleased, you will be a good Muslim only if you go on Jihad. So there is a direct clash in the Quran. Pohlmann makes the point there was a peace party, a Jihad party, and they were battling it out during the years roughly 620s, 30s, 40s, 50s until we have the first signs that there is a Quran information probably in the 680s. Now back to Shoemaker, Shoemaker considers only the Jihad party, he does not consider the peace party in this whole, in these whole events, and we should not presuppose that the peace party disappeared just because there was a Jihad. And that’s the important consideration that one needs to have when one deals with the alleged promise of Jerusalem to the conquering Arabs replacing the Jews and the Byzantines. Real quick, when you mentioned the final compilation if we will of the Quran, what do you do with the palimpsest, the lower text? How do you, how do you address dating these and, you know, I guess you would disagree with some of the others on this? No, no, you’re, you’re well informed by the way, thank you for asking me about that. That is of course the period then the 680s which I mentioned when now we know it through carbon dating, although carbon dating always has this the spread of years, you can never really decide, it’s like 50 plus or minus or something, exactly. So let’s say around the 680s, yeah there is an upper text and a lower text, but I don’t think that the discovery of these two texts has added terribly much. Yes there are two versions and there is eventually of course also an accepted version, but the discarded version so to speak in the palimpsest is not that different, right? And so we have to say that probably much of the Quran was in existence at around that time in the 680s.

Okay, let’s move on to something else, I got a couple more questions for you if you don’t mind. We have a modern day map of Iraq and we could see that there’s a Yathrib there as well. If we add up everything do you think the original locations of Mecca and Medina are up in the north in the region of Iraq? Here is that map just to kind of show you, probably won’t be able to see the text, really small print here, but it is very north, it’s like up there toward Iraq. Did you want to make a quick comment on that? Do you think that, no they are, they’re often repetitions of, or I mean particular names that appear in various places, okay. So that is very unlikely, so we can be I think the Quran is pretty clear here and also the early sources because the Quran speaks, are Christian sources, so because we don’t have the Arab sources from the 600s, Medina is very clear, it’s mentioned Yathrib, sorry Medina is of course the Islamic name for the same city, the city of the prophet right. So Yathrib is an old oasis, we have reports about Yathrib in existence already early Persian empire etcetera, right. So there’s no doubt about that, so Medina is well established and that it emerged as the place of Jihad preaching. You see that’s where we only get hold of this unnamed preacher calling himself four times then in the Quran in the context of Jihad, the name Muhammad appears only in these verses of Surahs 8 and 9 that deal with Jihad. So the Quran is really split here in the sense one wishes one could divide the Quran into the peaceful Quran and the Jihad Quran and say okay the true Quran is the peaceful Quran, the one that preaches and does not call for holy war. The, so Medina is well established and we don’t even though Yathrib of course could appear also in other places, that’s very unlikely that we should take that seriously, right. But also the point now concerning Mecca, since Mecca was not known to have been in existence, because of course the Quran is the beginning of this, Hawting is very much of the opinion that this whole transfer of what Jerusalem is or was for the Jews to Mecca, so in other words it’s a pilgrimage place when one circumambulates the sanctuary in Mecca, one runs between Safa and Marwa back and forth because one repeats or commemorates Hagar’s search for water for the newborn Ishmael and so on, that is of course a conscious transfer of everything that once took place in Jerusalem to Mecca, and that is of course the Islam that we know today. That Islam however is not the Umayyad Islam of the 600s and 700s, it’s Islam of 750 and the Abbasids who then made Mecca the center of Islam, and they are the two creators of the Islam that we speak about today. So, but at that time Jihad was long over, right? Right. Okay, this is interesting, some people say that Muhammad as a title like Caesar is to the Roman emperors, and that Muhammad is not his real name, Muhammad means the praised one as you said, and his real name is shown in this Hadith.

So I’m going to pop up this Hadith, I’m going to try and read this small fine print, this is probably not the best version of it. Let me get the highlighted version here real quick, let me do this, sorry, forgive me for one second while I get this actual version that has the highlight, because I want people to be able to see what I’m doing here. Okay, I got this and I am about to pop it up here. Now I actually went and actually added the highlighted part to make it visible for anybody who’s watching this podcast to be able to see. It seems pretty obvious to me there’s something going on here. Okay, so I’m just going to read the lower part here and I might butcher names here. “Abu Sufyan then added when Heraclius had finished his speech and had read the letter there was a great hue in the royal court, so we were turned out of the court. I told my companions that the question of Ibn Abi Kabsha, the prophet, the prophet Muhammad has become so prominent that even the king Bani al-Asfar Byzantine is afraid of him.” And this is in a Hadith. So is that another name for the prophet Muhammad? Yeah, the red-skinned people, the Banu al-Asfar. Yeah, no that is the so-called Islamic tradition, right? The Islamic tradition began probably in the 670s, 80s, again we are talking about decisive events at the end of the 600s where we then have sources that we can be talking seriously about. So at that time, so we are talking there now about a generation of people after Muhammad who are maybe the grandchildren of the people who lived at the same time and were his companions of Muhammad, or maybe the great-grandchildren. Now we cannot presume that those grandchildren, great-grandchildren remembered anything accurately, right? Even if they were serious and did not want to invent, now we have to bear in mind of course there was great competition among the people who come when they were conquering to be the most glorious, the most victorious, the most successful, what have you. And so this so-called Islamic, I mean not so-called, this Islamic tradition that came into being is extremely unreliable. We cannot determine what is genuine and what is not, what is invented and what might be serious. Yes, there are esteemed colleagues in the field who say well in cases where the traditions contradict each other and where later traditionists went with let’s say one version and rejected the other, that the rejected versions is perhaps closer to the truth. Well to a degree that is debatable, but overall the Islamic tradition is extremely unreliable. And this whole business about Abu Kabsha is merely one example, there are other names as well that were allegedly given to this unnamed preacher. But we have to bear in mind that the Quran, you see this is one of the very attractive parts of the Quran, the Quran deliberately is vague about anything historical. So when I mentioned a little earlier this business is about Petra being the place where the first revelations happen, the Quran uses the word umm, which literally means mother of the villages or mother of the towns. Now officially the Islamic tradition, later than Islamic theologians, said oh you know that’s a clear reference to Mecca, and so ever since still in modern scholarship it’s believed that that means that particular verse in the Quran means Mecca. Petra was conquered by the Rome, when the Romans conquered and defeated, I mean conquered of course also Petra, and shortly after that in the 114 I believe, Dean of the Islamic, no no you’re talking about 114 AH, because that’s a few calendars here like right. Okay at that time, so this was after the Romans conquered of course Palestine, this is before 130 or whatever, this is in between the wars that are happening in Jerusalem, it was customary for the Roman emperors to give elevated titles to some of the cities that had been conquered in the Roman Empire. So Petra received the title of metropolis. Well if you translate metropolis it means mother polis, polis, mother of the cities, and that’s exactly what the Quran says in technical terms, it’s a calque as we say. So in other words the unnamed preacher took the name of Petra, mother of the cities, translated into Arabic, and that’s what Petra is. There’s another indication that actually we are not wrong, it’s not a misinterpretation, because in other verses there appears the word Raqim. I don’t know whether anybody has mentioned that to you, I don’t know about it. R-A-Q-I-M. It’s allegedly the name of the dog of the at the entrance of the cave, no, in company the so-called Seven Sleepers, the church of Ephesus. Yeah, I know about this, yes. Okay, there’s got to be a genetic mimetic connection between the Quran and the earlier Christian tradition.

So the in quotation marks real cave is in Ephesus, so there we are way north in Anatolia. The indications of the Quran as it exists wanted to move the Seven Sleepers story to, or wanted to be known, it was probably already the case that this particular cave was actually in Petra or near Petra, and so Raqim is actually the name for Petra in Aramaic. So you have an indication here because Raqim is mentioned in the Quran in conjunction with the cave in which the Seven Sleepers were, as the as part of the inscription of the names of the people who were in the cave, and unfortunately they are Islamic scholars, Griffel for example, who believe that this inscription, scholarly, but de facto Raqim is a well-known ancient name for Petra. So there you have another element that indicates that we are talking about the so-called peaceful Quran being revealed in what I saw, what I called Madyan or Palaestina Tertia, until in 622 the preacher turned up in Medina and ultimately then in conjunction with the beginning conquerors took on the name Muhammad, the praised one. So that would be the story. Amazing. Okay, last thing here and then, and then I just have a couple questions as I let you go here. Some people suggest Ibn Abi Kabsha, the word, is another form of the individual in Tabari Volume 5. And if I may show that here, I’m going to, the first words there is obviously it’s written in, it seems a different language in particular the way it’s pronouncing this, but as governor over all Hira and the other former territories of al-Nu’man or Nu’man. Yeah, so I didn’t know if you thought they were the same person or that was. Okay, a very different one. Kisra is of course the name for Khosrow the second. Nu’man was the last Lakmid king, and that’s an interesting little detail. When the Romans cut down the Ghassanids and made them lower level defenders so to speak of the Byzantine Empire, although not so low that they wouldn’t be still faithful and help in their helper hellos in the reconquest. Okay, so whenever Khosrow saw that the Romans had done that to the Ghassanids, he decided well I don’t need the Lakmids either as kings on my western border, they are pretentious anyway with the title king, so let me get rid of these guys as well. So he poisoned or otherwise killed, we don’t know exactly, Nu’man who’s mentioned in what you showed me, that particular passage in Tabari, and that happened in 602.

The Lakmids were outraged about this and went and immediately rose militarily against Khosrow. It took quite a while for Khosrow to be, until ultimately he was able to defeat them, and it was only then in 610, so eight years later, that he was quite successful. But then there was yet another Arab revolt, and at 610 they inflicted a defeat on the Persians, on the Sasanians. That particular defeat is reported only in Tabari, so Islamic tradition we are not absolutely sure, Tabari has to be read with extreme caution. So we don’t know whether this uprising really occurred or this victory by the Arabs over the Persians really happened, but Tabari and then also a Christian source, actually the Chronicle of Sebeos, say this 610 was the beginning of the preaching career of the preacher in Mecca, sorry in Medina. Yeah, so you have an interesting connection there between the Persians, Sasanians and the Lakmids and so on in the early 600s, and the alleged beginning preaching career of this unnamed preacher in 610, allegedly in Mecca, but we don’t know because we have proof of anything happening down there in Mecca, Medina, only in 622 when the Arab kingdom emerged. All right, so let’s recap for a second, okay, as we, there’s no more images, there’s just, just recapping what we see is Christianity in its various forms. The wrestling point is on Jesus. I wish I had all these images I’ve used in Robert Hoyland episodes to pop up to get your thoughts on, and I’ve done this with Shoemaker and I’ve done it with Michael Penn, and I mean I really delete all of this stuff when I’m done and then I, you know, redo something for other scholars to get your thoughts. But what I understand is this, you know, when I wrestle in my head I’ve heard theories that people try to say well there was a version of Judaism or a Jewish-Christianity that escaped when all that happened kind of like what we see with the Ebionites etcetera, right? And they survived all the way through history all the way down to 7th century, and I’m thinking to myself it’s a little tough to accept. All the academics I talk to say no, no, no, that’s not, that’s not the case. Most academics deny that outright. There’s no Jewish-Christianity that survives for seven centuries down in.

But I always ask myself, you know, the Ishmaelites, those who are from Hagar, or Hagarism as you know Crone talks about, but the Hagarenes and the Jews together are like uniting under certain fronts, but Jesus is in the picture, and by this time Jews don’t seem from what I understand historically big fans of Jesus. In fact he’s blamed all throughout the Talmud for why the temple’s destroyed, I mean at least in certain locations, depends on the redaction. So I thought why is Islam obsessed with having Jesus in the picture? I can’t see how a Jew practicing Judaism would even venerate the guy or even bring him in. So it makes better entrance if I were to try and find a causality that it was some form of Christianity, and there’s even Fred Donner, I’ve emailed him to try and get a hold of him haven’t got a response yet, he has this hypothesis there’s multiple monotheistic groups that are probably under one umbrella or something. Yeah, what do you think of that? What do you think of some of this stuff? Hoyland is very skeptical, and in fact most of the people in the field, Donner developed a thesis in 1994 actually already, which is actually built on, are you familiar with Judah Nebel who wrote an important, he’s dead now so you cannot interview him, but Donner developed the thesis according to which these years of 640 roughly let’s say, or 638 the end of the Arab conquest to, well we were then talking about the end of the 600s which is this big black hole so to speak where we don’t have any Arab sources and where we have to rely on the Christian sources. Donner’s argument there is precisely because there are no Arab sources, because the Islamic tradition is so doubtful, and he’s willing to admit that now in an earlier phase of his career he actually worked almost entirely with Islamic traditions, so he argued now that this these 50 years roughly this half century that is the black hole was the period of an ecumenical Arab conquering society. So in other words there were these Arab conquerors, but they did not think anything about Monophysites or Nestorians or Jews, right?

They simply let all of these communities practice their religion freely, they enrolled them even no questions asked in their army and administration. All they required was to recognize a caliph and to subscribe to the idea of the unity of God, the oneness of God, which of course then ultimately was the central thesis in the Quran. But there is no proof for it, we don’t know, there is no source. Yes, the conquering Arabs made freely use of Christians and Jews who wanted to participate in the administration, or in the case of Christians the Ghassanids in the army. And the, that doesn’t prove anything about what they believed or didn’t believe, and in fact you see though there are in my opinion they are very important details which one can prove, I’m thinking of three examples that I just demonstrated stand against this idea of ecumenism I guess one would have to call it. Not at all, there were fierce confessional clashes during this time. So the Umayyads who eventually emerged in the mid 600s participated lastly in all of these discussions about who Jesus was, was he divine, was he not, was he put on the cross or not. So everybody at that time was sort of vaguely of the opinion that the Arabs were some sort of Christians. John of Damascus in the early part of the 700s was still of the opinion that they were Christians, but heretical. So that was sort of the gist of it in the 600s, and Donner I don’t think did very well, and actually this thesis has not gotten very far. Shoemaker is a great supporter of the thesis of the ecumenic form, but he is very concerned to make this whole Arab conquest eschatological end time empire so to speak sound like it is a logical evolution of Jihad, which is doubtful in my opinion. But yes, so rather than it being like the way it seemed was and I’m painting in my head that they were united, they were united at first, they got along, everybody’s under the umbrella, we’re going to go conquer Jerusalem against these what we call Orthodox Christians, but they have a trinitarian, there’s all sorts of stuff going on and they’re like no, we’re going together. And and there is some strange things that I thought were interesting, maybe you interpret the data differently, is like there are tombs facing jerusalem, there are from what I understand even the prayer was facing Jerusalem initially and that changed later. Like this is this idea that, and this gets into that question I asked them and if you don’t mind addressing some of these facing Jerusalem ideas, but also just one caveat I want to add to that is the idea is that they’re getting along, they’re facing Jerusalem, they have a mission together, and then something happens in this community where now they have friction. So the Islamic narrative has Muhammad die in 632, and I’ve actually had Muslims engaged again, why would you say 632 and why would you say later than than 632? Our Islamic sources say he died in 632, and I’m like well should we trust those or not? And the question is are there Christian sources that seem to say he was alive during the conquest of Jerusalem? Was Muhammad alive? This has been like a recent discussion I’ve had on some of the episodes.

there’s like 11 or 12 sources, some of them are probably later like you said, but is this, they were united under the front and even Muhammad was going to lead them as this apocalyptic figure thinking we’re going to rebuild and this is going to like bring the empire idea as Shoemaker talks about, that’s going to cause the greatest empire and God’s going to come down from heaven and it’s going to establish heaven on earth and the whole nine. That’s what I had in mind when I was interviewing them, but you make me want to reget a whole new canvas and like get a brush and like repaint it starting from theological disputes within Christian communities. I don’t know, there’s so many questions I have, it’s just where do we go? Yeah. Okay, so since we are coming to the end of our discussion now, the whole question of the direction of prayer hangs together of course with the whole idea, is Mecca the place where the center of it all is, or is Jerusalem this place? And that was a debate that took place in the 600s, and it was, it culminated actually then in the period between 685 and 705, which is a period of Abd al-Malik, the famous caliph, and it is under this caliph where we have the first inklings really of Islam, the famous inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock. So yes, controversy is about, is it really Mecca’s center or is Jerusalem the center? And that was carried out then in the course of the 700s. In fact you see it was even unsettled in 750, and that’s the main reason why the Umayyads were overthrown, because the party that emerged at that time, the the revolution in Iraq and Iran and which brought the Abbasids to power, was a revolution to make Mecca the center, and the whole negativity that the Abbasids subsequently developed towards the Umayyads, and then that’s why there is now the scholarship on the Umayyads to rehabilitate them so to speak.

Hoyland is a great promoter of this idea. All of this has to do with these fights in the emerging Islamic tradition, the emerging Islam over the proper direction of prayer, the proper way of performing all of these rituals. We didn’t touch for example on the parallel and competitive pilgrimage with Mecca, that’s the pilgrimage to Arafat and Mina, which is these are places outside and that’s where the famous throwing of pebbles against the devil occurs about which I’m sure you’re familiar. I’ve heard of it, yeah. So these are all these are all elements that belong into this long struggle which then evolved once Abd al-Malik was beginning to create the the institutions that we call, okay that’s Islam then in around 700. Man, I can’t tell you how much I want you to have, I definitely want you to come back Dr von Sievers. I really enjoyed this, and for those who don’t know be sure please go check out the video, you want to hear the lecture he gives, this is a BYU Kennedy center, really, really interesting, just getting into this. I like your approach, it’s very hands-on, and it kind of puts the focus on what was really going on at the moment. It’s not this satellite view guessing game of, are these Ebionite Christians who, you know, like no, this is like what’s going on on the ground at the time. And please go check out his academia.edu website. If there were any final words you’d like to tell our audience before we go, because I want you to come back, I don’t want to burn this bridge. Okay, well what I want to say is keep reading the Quran, keep believing in the Quran, but become aware that Jihad in the Quran is a relatively minor segment mostly in the beginning of the Quran, and not accidentally by the way in Surahs 8 and 9, but the rest is peaceful preaching and it’s not conquest. And so when it became conquest it was a conquest to make Islam superior among all other religions, that’s what the Quran says explicitly. So it’s not the Arabs who should be victorious, but it’s the faith that should be superior to the others. And it’s also not proselytizing, because if you conquer you cannot proselytize easily, you subject people, you don’t preach to them. But the most of the Quran is actually preaching peacefully prior to 622, and I assume it began already in the early 600s or thereabouts in as I said Madyan or Palaestina Tertia, so way north, north west in Petra. That’s what perhaps Muslims who are open to rethinking their faith should think about. So I’m not attacking the Quran at all, it is a very important scripture, but I read it for reading about where, what is it, what I should do with my life when I have to think tomorrow is the end of it. Well we are in a political situation by the way where the world can end when we have to think about a tactical nuclear bomb exploding over Warsaw perhaps and nuclear stuff raining over all of Europe. We don’t know, the end of the world is not something that we can easily dismiss as a thing that will not happen. So that’s what the Quran is really about, we should take it seriously, and that is not something that we should pooh-pooh. Well thank you so much, I really appreciate your time, your information. And never forget ladies and gentlemen we are Myth Vision.