Editor’s note. Derek Lambert’s MythVision interview with Juan Cole runs nearly two and a half hours. Below the share button, you’ll find two transcript sections from the same conversation. The first, originally published by Cole at Informed Comment, covers roughly the first 49 minutes. For this ScheerPost edition, we’ve added a second section, edited from YouTube’s captions, so readers can follow the later discussion and audience Q&A.
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Computer-generated transcript, cleaned up and edited with the help of Claude. Caveat Emptor:
Chapter 1: Inspiration for the book
Derek Lambert: Welcome back to Myth Vision. Today I’m joined by Professor Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan, a historian of the Middle East and Islam. He brings decades of research to the relationship between religion and politics. We’re discussing his book Muhammad, Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and how peace, warfare, and religious coexistence shaped Islam’s beginnings.
Professor Cole, welcome to Myth Vision for your first time, my friend.
Juan Cole: Thanks so much for having me on, Derek.
Derek Lambert: Thank you. Thank you. I can’t picture a better time. And I did not plan this. It wasn’t like I said, “Hey, midterms just happened and there’s all sorts of stuff going on and you could just watch the news and see what’s going on and how people are viewing Islam in America.” I did not plan this, but I feel like it’s necessary and I feel like there’s not a better time than to have you join me to discuss your work and various ideas. And of course, I have questions that, you know, I put together pertaining to your book. In fact, I should pull up your book. But we’ll do that as we go. I just want to ask while I’m pulling the book up, what inspired you to write this book, so people can understand.
Juan Cole: So, I’m from the 60s, I’m ancient, and when my generation was young, we were really interested in Eastern religions. Sufism, Buddhism, Hinduism.
And I think a lot of us were very put off that the mainstream Christian denominations had gone all-in on the Vietnam War, and we didn’t want to go to church and hear that stuff from those preachers. And so I got interested especially in the Sufi form of Islam, the more mystical kind. And moreover, I’m an army brat, and my father was an electronics engineer, and they sent him in 1967-68 to Eritrea, then part of Ethiopia, which is, I don’t know, two-thirds Christian, one-third Muslim, maybe half and half; there aren’t good statistics. But there are mosques, we had Muslim friends, so I was, you know, 14, 15, and so I had a direct experience of Muslims and a Muslim culture there in Asmara, as well as Coptic Christianity.
And so that opened my eyes. But then when we got back to the States, it was the Summer of Love, and the Eastern religions were big, and I got very interested in them. I decided to become a religion major because of that. And I did a degree at Northwestern. It was mostly Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism. We just had one graduate student from the University of Chicago come up and teach a course on Islam. And so I took that. But as part of my study of Sufism and Islam, I read books about the Prophet Muhammad, about Islam.
And I went on to do graduate work in Middle Eastern history and Islam, some of it in Cairo at the American University in Cairo. I studied the Quran in Cairo. I studied early Muslim history with the great Welsh scholar Marsden Jones. But then the Iranian revolution took place, and I got pulled into modern history. But I continued to read in the early period and to be interested in the scholarly developments. And so in the teens, the last decade, when you had the rise of ISIL, the terrorist group in the Middle East, and, you know, those guys would quote half a Quran verse, it was almost tragicomic. And then you had the rise of Trump and a very virulent form of Islamophobia in the United States, and the two kind of fed off of one another.
I became annoyed that the representations of the Middle East and Islam that were being made in the media and by politicians didn’t conform with what I knew from, as you say, my decades of study and living in the region. I often have gone back, and I’ve spent entire years doing research there, having dear Muslim friends and so forth, and these things that were coming out of my television were just extremely annoying on both sides. I mean, the ISIL movement in Iraq and Syria was horrible. But people in the Middle East thought it was horrible, and you’d never hear that. And there was a great Lebanese pop singer who was asked about ISIL, Haifa Wehbe. She said, “Oh, you mean the cannibals?” And so we weren’t hearing those voices over here, right?
Derek Lambert: And so we’re always noticing the worst possible caricature, and there are bad actors in every—especially the portrayal that we were given. We were kind of pushed, it felt like, in the media, that every Muslim is this. And in fact, you brought this up before we hit recording. The Michigan Senate right now, with the progressive Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, there is a lot of noise going on right now and so much propaganda, and I watched a video of his. I just want to make a mention of this. I don’t want to make this about that. I want to get into your book, but I think this is important. You mentioned his wife was one of your students, which is fascinating. He was challenged by what sounded like a Christian nationalist in a discussion a while back in some live debate, and I have interviewed several academics.
Several of them are non-believers. Several of them are Christian scholars, or let me rephrase that: they’re scholars who just so happen to be Christian, because that was what was said in the exchange. He put the Constitution above everything else, and I love the way he said it. I’m going to be frank. I mean, it was so well said. When I’ve asked Christian academics, “Hey, so you’re a Christian scholar,” he goes, “No, I’m a scholar who happens to be a Christian.”
And I’m like, okay, that’s interesting, because there are Christian scholars and we can kind of point them out. I feel like there are a lot of apologists, but then you have some people who just so happen to be Christians who are academics, and they try not to allow their religious faith to interfere with their academic research. And I feel like that nuance, being able to kind of separate the two, is something we lack in modern times. That’s just my idea.
Chapter 2: Academic study of religion
Juan Cole: Yeah. Well, this is a big topic of discussion among academics who study religion. And there was a great Lutheran sociologist, Peter Berger, who made a concerted effort and an argument that you can’t bring your personal beliefs into your study of religion, for many reasons. One is that it doesn’t remain intelligible. One of the things we’re trying to do in universities and colleges and high schools is to develop a way of talking that can reach people wherever they are. So when I talk about Islam, I’m hoping that it’s recognizable to Muslims, but also that it’s understandable — what I’m saying — to Christians, to Buddhists, to people all around the world. That’s the aspiration. We don’t always achieve it, but if you foreground a belief in miracles or your theological commitments and so forth, that very quickly becomes inside baseball, and you get the book translated into Japanese and people over there are just going to scratch their heads. So that’s one of the reasons: we’re trying to speak in a way that’s accessible to the human mind wherever it comes from. And again, we don’t always succeed, but that’s the aspiration, and it’s not a commitment to non-belief.
The kind of research and writing that we do should be able to be read by believers and by non-believers. It shouldn’t be offensive. But if somebody has strong commitments and they want to insist that the fulcrum of the argument is some miracle, that’s just not a discourse we can enter into. And I’m not omniscient. Maybe it’s true, but it’s just not something that I do.
Derek Lambert: I challenge that it’s true. But yeah, I’m with you. I’m with you 100%. I guess to the point of making a current thing about Abdul El-Sayed, is he said, “Look, Constitution first. I just so happen to be a Muslim.” So people, I think there’s a lot of propaganda, and they’re like not allowing him to say his words and think about what he’s saying. But then when he challenged the Christian nationalist in the audience, he could not distinguish and could not separate. It was Christian first, and it was like, oh, that’s a very problematic stance you have, and you’re challenging this guy; he’s speaking the right words.
So about the book, I could see that there’s a lot of reason, emotional reason, political, social. Like, this is a very important question, because I have had a Christian apologist come on my channel, and they have obviously a caricature, if you will, the worst possible view, and they can point out some ugly stuff in the sources. They can point out some things today we would obviously frown upon and say that practice or behavior is wrong. And then we can also question those things, like Aisha, was she really nine? These questions. And he challenges, even if that is historical, with the Shia–Sunni split, like maybe she was actually older but they gave her a younger date in order to apologetically deal with the—was she unfaithful or not? And all of these interesting things. So we at Myth Vision love exploring this stuff from a secular critical standpoint, historical-critical method, and your book was written—and ultimately I want to ask, following the point of why you wrote the book, but what do you most want people to reconsider about Muhammad and the beginnings of Islam? Because we have an idea: he was just a warlord. He was an absolute savage who went around and just slaughtered everybody. And nobody wants to follow that, obviously. I mean, it’s easy to put that kind of caricature onto him. But many Muslims that I actually talked to don’t have that vision of him. So we only get to see the worst. We don’t get to see kind of a—maybe this was a human like we are, who has two sides, or he’s mixed with human things that we would do if we were in the same boat. I don’t know. Would you like to share a little bit more about why you did this in that way?
Chapter 3: Reconsidering Muhammad
Juan Cole: Well, of course. I think Islam is the most hated religion that nobody knows anything about in the West. And the Quran is the most hated book that nobody has read. And without wanting to take away the difficulties of entry for a European or American reader, I think nevertheless a lot of effort hasn’t been expended in trying to understand the holy book of Islam or the life of its prophet.
And this is a debate that’s gone on in European intellectual history for centuries. Thomas Carlyle, the 19th-century idealist conservative historian who wrote about Cromwell —- and so he wrote this book on heroes, and he has a chapter in it on Muhammad, in which he demolishes the Christian polemics against the Prophet Muhammad. They accuse him of being a fraud, and he said, well, a fraud can’t build a house, much less a world religion. And there are all these double standards. We idolize David. I think there’s a famous statue of him in [Florence]. And he was a warrior, fought wars and much more according to the Bible. He even occasionally tinkered with things to get rid of his rivals. And yet he’s admired. People named their children for him, there’s art and books and so forth celebrating him. That he was a warrior and also a prophet, or a patriarch of sorts, doesn’t bother anybody in the West. That’s naturalized.
And in fact Christians who were part of the Roman Empire, and especially with the advent of Constantine, who maybe wasn’t what we would call a Christian but certainly backed Christianity, and St. Augustine and so forth, they had this problem that the Roman Empire was an empire. It fought wars. It dominated people. It also suppressed heresies violently. And they didn’t have a role model in the scriptures for somebody who would do that. I mean, it wasn’t very Jesus-like. So, as Christians, they turned to David. And there was a kind of exaltation of David in what we call the period of late antiquity because of that, I think.
So my argument is that the Prophet Muhammad is represented in the Quran as a prophet, that most of the Quran is like the Psalms. It’s praises of God and the way that he works in nature and takes care of us and so forth. And a good deal of the Quran is about ethics, how you should treat other people, how you should be kind to your enemies. There’s a certain amount of turning the other cheek. There’s a verse that says, “And the servants of the All-Merciful who walk humbly upon the earth, and when the unruly taunt them, they reply, ‘Peace.’” That is to say, a prayer for peace for your enemies who are harassing you, and you’re walking humbly upon the -— this is in the Quran. It’s a description of the Prophet Muhammad’s followers. It sounds like something that Acts might say about the disciples of Jesus, right?
But that verse doesn’t get quoted very much. And then late in the Prophet’s life, the Meccan pagans were inimical to the Prophet and his religion. They came after him. They attacked Medina, and he fought them off. And that entry into warfare has been controversial, but what did you want him to do?
Derek Lambert: Yeah, that’s my follow-up to this question. When you call Muhammad -— first of all, two things there. This is interesting. When you call Muhammad a prophet of peace, how do you distinguish a commitment to peacemaking from an opposition to all warfare? Right? So that’s one. The second question is just the point. It’s almost like a statement. Take it as a statement, because like you said, Christians start to reinterpret things. They find a way for just war theory to make sense. All of these ideas as an empire, now they’re creeping in and they’re using the sword. Whereas at least the understanding in the early centuries of Christianity—whatever the historical Jesus may have been, because I have all sorts of scholars who take different stances, even to the revolutionary stance, right? They whitewashed him and made him peaceful. Okay, whatever stance you might take. The understanding was peace, and it was like to-death peace. It was not “bring a sword.” It was literally full commitment to the idea of martyrdom in many instances. Not all Christians took it that way, but there was a lot of early Christians who understood “to be done with this world is to be present with the Lord” kind of thing. And so they were okay with death, at least in their theology. So, to my question about Muhammad, how do we understand him as a prophet of peace in light of warfare being an option, in your estimation?
And then just the comment: it seems that Muslims did the same thing with Muhammad under empire circumstances and weaponized him into making him militant and much more than what he may have actually been historically, if I’m understanding that properly.
Chapter 4: Warfare and peace in Islam
Juan Cole: Oh, absolutely. The later Muslim tradition definitely militarized the Prophet Muhammad in ways that are not supported by the Quran, the very early sources. Sure. Well, the first thing to say is that Utopian pacifism of the kind of Amish and Mennonite sort is actually very rare in Christian history. Almost nobody has interpreted Jesus to be asking for that. And his own willingness to accept martyrdom according to the Gospels was because that’s what God willed for him, not because there was an ethical principle of pacifism. The Church Fathers [like Ambrose] said things like, if an aggressor comes to harm an innocent and you don’t stand against him, then you’re not a good Christian. And it is true that they kind of weren’t so enthusiastic about self-defense. If somebody comes at you personally, you might turn the other cheek to them, but if they come for a little child, you’ve got to get in the way of that, right? And again, these are people living in the Roman Empire who are saying these things. So that was a pretty fair consensus among Christians, that you do take up the sword if you have to defend innocents. It was their interpretation of the message of Christ.
So I think the idea we have in our minds that Buddhists and Christians have a pacifist tendency because of their scriptures is not consistent with reality, first of all, because who has fought more wars than Christians and Buddhists? But second of all, it’s not always what even their own scriptures are saying. And then I think that the Quran is judged by this double standard: that yes, there are a few verses in it that talk about the need to defend the community and fight. I don’t believe there are any verses that command aggressive warfare. It’s always defensive, in my view. But they’re also like 0.1% of the Quran. I mean, the Prophet fought three major engagements in his life, and maybe a few skirmishes, but most of his life was spent organizing people, getting them to pray, teaching them ethics, and telling them to wish peace upon the people who were harassing them. It was only when there was a danger of a kind of genocide, of the pagans wiping them out and wiping out the innocents amongst them, that he turned to war. So I don’t think there’s actually an argument to be made that the Prophet was warlike. I think even when you fight a war -— and any great leader who has fought a war will say that they fought it to restore peace, and I think that’s the way the wars are positioned in the Quran. They’re the only way to get back to an equilibrium, which they did.
And I think that’s also, as you say, very much what Augustine was arguing. And again, there’s this double standard. Nobody that I can think of denigrates St. Augustine as a warmonger and questions his allegiance to the message of the Gospels, even though he advocated for just war. And I argue in my book that the just war ideas that are in the Quran are extremely similar to those of Augustine, with the exception that I think Augustine late in life got to the point where he thought it’s all right to use the violence of the state against heretics. And I don’t believe the Quran ever took that stance.
Derek Lambert: If I may ask, because someone watching who may be of the Christian online —- I want to use “online” because they watch a lot of apologetics, they hear anti-Christian polemics—someone’s probably thinking you’re a Muslim. Okay. I don’t know how comfortable you feeling this question, but like, if someone was thinking, well, you’re defending this idea of the Quran and you’re trying to show that Muhammad wasn’t warlike and he wasn’t this—what do they say?—warlord, if you will, and he was much more peaceful, that’s because you’re hiding your true beliefs and that you’re really a Muslim. Would you take a crack at this?
Juan Cole: Well, there was a great early 20th-century American thinker, Groucho Marx, who said that he wouldn’t agree to be part of any club that would have him.
Derek Lambert: He wouldn’t agree to be part of any club that would have him. That would have him. Okay. So, is that your answer to the question? Okay. Awesome. Awesome.
Chapter 5: Historical sources and context
Derek Lambert: So, recovering the historical Muhammad, you give the Quran priority over biographies written generations later. For viewers unfamiliar with these sources, what can the Quran tell us about Muhammad’s life, and where do the later accounts remain useful to you?
Juan Cole: So this is a big problem in Islamic studies, that we have the Quran; there are arguments about how early it is. I think the epigraphic and scientific evidence—and I know you’ve had on some of the people who are at the forefront of that kind of research -— I think increasingly is telling us that the Quran is early. And I personally think it goes back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad, that it -— I’ve made an analogy to the acknowledged letters of St. Paul. And then just as Pauline scholars used the acknowledged letters to try to write biographies of St. Paul, I think we can use the Quran to write the biography of the Prophet Muhammad.
Moreover, if we take that seriously, that the Quran is 610 to 632 roughly, the traditional dates for the preaching of the Prophet—and this is an argument made by some classicists as well -— then what was going on in 610 to 632 in the late antique world? The Quran unfolded largely in western Arabia, although the Prophet Muhammad is said to have been a long-distance merchant, so I think there’s every reason to think he was up in Roman Syria and what is now Jordan, Palestine. And then what we know is that this war broke out between the Sasanian Iranians and the Eastern Roman Empire.
Derek Lambert: Don’t you call it Game of Thrones or something in your book?
Juan Cole: Yeah, it’s a game of thrones. It was Khosrow II versus Heraclius. And Khosrow II came in and took the Middle East away from the Romans for the first time since the Parthians had been there briefly, just before the time of Christ. So the Romans had had these places for a very long time, for centuries, and they had become largely Christian. And the Iranians came in and took Syria, Palestine, what is now Jordan, and Egypt, which was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. And there was a lot of warfare going on.
There were sieges of cities, and siege machines were brought up, and I think the local inhabitants poured down flaming oil on their enemies. And I think some of the imagery in the Quran is coming from scenes that perhaps the Prophet saw of this kind of 7th-century world war, because it encompassed much of the known world at the time. And that’s a context for the Quran that, if you read it in that context, it sheds a different light on it. And it’s not the context that previous biographers of the Prophet Muhammad have brought into play. But then after the Prophet’s death, the Muslim religion became a vehicle for empire itself. What happened to Christianity under Constantine happened even more rapidly to the Muslims.
And I think they were drawn into a political vacuum because the Eastern Romans and the Iranians exhausted each other. I mean, I’ve seen reports that the Eastern Romans were running out of war horses. How do you fight a war without horses? And then there was plague. Both sides suffered repeated occurrences of outbreak of bubonic plague among their troops. The Iranian emperor at one point died from the plague and had to be succeeded by a child. And so there was all this turmoil, and they exhausted themselves, and I think that it created a political vacuum. I suspect local people wanted somebody to come in and restore order. You had Bedouins. A lot of the Middle East is marginal land. So you can make a living by raising sheep and goats and camels and horses and taking them where the pasturage pops up, which means you’re mobile, you live in tents. But you’re a natural cavalry. And so in times of decline of government authority, the Bedouins start raiding the villagers.
And so I think the Arab Muslims showed up, and they were good camel warriors, and they were able to take territory and supply order, and I suspect people wanted them to do that. But in a century, from the time of the Prophet’s death until 732, a century later, Muslims were in southern Spain on the one hand and had all of North Africa, and on the other had extended to the borders of China and Tibet and actually had some skirmishes with the Chinese.
Derek Lambert: [I’ll] show a better map than that one, but go ahead. Sorry.
Juan Cole: Yeah, this is an incredible historical event. I think it can only be compared to a few moments in history. The Mongol Empire came up really quickly like that. Napoleon’s conquest of most of Europe was similar. But the difference was that the Arab Muslims didn’t just establish this enormous kingdom suddenly, but they also were vehicles for a new civilization centered on Islam. And as a result, I think a hundred years after the Prophet’s death, when you read the Quran, you read it differently. All of a sudden, those verses about wishing peace on your enemies who taunted you weren’t foregrounded, because you were at the front fighting wars. So if you could find a verse that seemed to be about warfare, you’d play that up.
And then people started developing a kind of Quran alongside the Quran, of sayings they attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, sayings and anecdotes about his behavior, which became enormous, six-volume sets of these things. And many of them are collected two and three hundred years after the Prophet’s death. So as a historian, I don’t want to offend anybody’s religious beliefs who gives a lot of credence to these stories, and I think they have to be taken one by one, and you can’t dismiss the entire corpus of them. However, you’re getting into George Washington and the cherry tree kind of territory at some point with these later oral traditions.
And then later kingdoms grew up, or caliphates like the Abbasid, whereas early Muslims were reluctant to write entire books about the Prophet Muhammad’s life or about interpreting the Quran. The Abbasids were gung-ho about this and gave, apparently, sponsorship to authors to do it. And so 130 or 140 or 150 years after the Prophet’s death, you suddenly have these voluminous volumes showing up. But again, they’re very late. And some of them may contain nuggets that go back to the seventh century, or may not.
But as you say, many of them are -— because the Abbasids were fighting the Byzantines now in the marches of Anatolia, they needed support for the war effort, and a lot of these books were really undisguised war propaganda. And so al-Waqidi, who was edited by my teacher Marsden Jones and published scientifically for the first time in his generation -— al-Waqidi organizes the Prophet’s biography around raids. There was this raid and that raid, and I know sometimes there are 36 raids and sometimes there are 40-some raids. And then if you look at those raids, some of them don’t actually involve any violence. They don’t seem to be raids at all. But an expedition out to meet some villagers and get them to embrace Islam by preaching at them is interpreted by al-Waqidi to be a raid. And we have no way of knowing whether some of these incidents are historical. If you’re from a family that goes back to Mecca at the time of the Prophet and you’re telling the story of your ancestors, wouldn’t you get some glory by saying, “Well, yeah, he fought in this raid and he fought in that raid and distinguished himself against the pagans”? So, anyway, we just don’t know how reliable those later sources are.
And they also do seem to have an -— in Christian studies, the literature about the New Testament that was produced after Constantine is sometimes called imperial literature. And it’s anti-Semitic, and it brings in all kinds of emphases that weren’t there in the first three centuries of Christianity. And I think much of what we have in the way of biography of the Prophet is imperial biography. And I think if you read the Quran against it rather than with it — because most believers will read it in the context of this imperial literature, and Western scholars picked that up from them as a way of reading it and have been doing that for the last 150 years. But if you read the Quran against the imperial literature, and you read the Quran instead against itself, and then in the context of what else was being written in the early 600s, and in the context of the political and geopolitical events of that period, then it looks very different. So that’s my argument.
Chapter 6: Geopolitics of the 7th century
Derek Lambert: Yeah. I mean, the map I originally was bringing up, but then you brought up the conquest, so I had to show the conquest map of the first two centuries of Islam’s conquest. But this right here would give you kind of a general map of — you’ve got Rome, the Christian Empire, the Sasanian dynasty, and Muhammad ends up arising as the clashing of these empires is taking place. The Sasanians seem to have the upper hand. And he’s a merchant. From my understanding, he’s a merchant who seems to have traveled likely in this eastern Mediterranean, down into Arabia, obviously. My question is, in your book, you pretty much say that this devastating war between Rome and Persia is like where his career takes place. How does that wider setting change the story of Islam’s emergence? And also you say that Muhammad was allied with Christian Rome beyond his sympathy for Roman victory, right? Where would you draw the line between a firm conclusion and a plausible reconstruction, since all we have is the Quran as far as early sources are concerned that we — with the life of Muhammad attached to the Quran, what gives that clue away to you? And thank you for the Super Chats, everybody. We’ll get to your questions here shortly. I just figured I’d ask you, like, what makes you think he sided with Christian Rome over the Sasanians?
Juan Cole: Well, first of all, there’s a verse in the Quran, in the chapter of Rome, 30 — there are a set of verses which seem to refer to the Sasanian victories in the Near East. And the later Muslim exegetical literature largely interprets it that way. They say that these verses came down to the Prophet after the Sasanians took Damascus. So it says in a nearby land — a nearby, I would say, province — the Romans have been vanquished.
And by the way, we have a tendency in the West to call the Eastern Roman Empire the Byzantines, right? But they didn’t call themselves that. They were just the Romans. They thought of themselves as a direct continuation of the Roman Empire. So that’s why the Quran calls them Romans. That’s what they called themselves. They said that they’ve been vanquished. But it says that, well, after a few years they’ll be back. The Romans — the empire will strike back. And their victory will be a cause for celebration among the believers, that is to say, the followers of Muhammad.
Well, I don’t want to be simplistic. There are other ways of interpreting these verses. There’s a big set of debates around them and so forth. But if you read them facially, that looks like Muhammad is a fan of the Eastern Roman Empire in this war, that he’s hoping they will win, and he thinks that the Roman victory will be something that the believers, what we would call the early Muslims, would rejoice over. And then, again, you don’t know how much to put credence in it, but one of the earlier exegetes of the Quran reports one of these sayings from ʿIkrima, the son of Abu [Jahl], an enemy of the Prophet. But ʿIkrima, of course, became a Muslim. He says that at one point the pagans in Arabia were taunting the early Muslims that the Sasanians had won, and that the Sasanians were not from a biblical tradition. They were Zoroastrians. And the pagans in Mecca were represented as interpreting them as kind of ideological allies because of that. Whereas the early Muslims, the believers around Muhammad, were in the biblical tradition like the Romans, and their guys were being defeated. So there is relatively early evidence for this tilt of the early Muslim community towards Rome, towards Christian Rome.
And then there is also an element in the biography of the Prophet — all of the biographers tell this story — that at some points there was so much persecution of Muhammad’s believers in western Arabia, some of them took refuge in Christian Aksum, in what we would call Ethiopia, which we know the Roman emperors in Constantinople had cultivated as potential allies against the Sasanians.
So you put all this together, and there’s at least a plausible case to be made that the very early Muslim community was part of this ecumene of anti-Sasanian biblical communities. And the irony is that then, once the Muslim Empire was very quickly established, one of its main territorial rivals was in fact the Byzantines. And so the later Muslim tradition has difficulty acknowledging this moment in which they might have been allies, because now there was a many-centuries-long struggle between the Muslims and the Byzantines. And it becomes increasingly difficult to think that the Quran might have been endorsing the Eastern Roman cause. And so it drops out of the Muslim tradition, but the nuggets that tell us what might have really been going on are still there in the Quran and the very earliest layer of Muslim literature.
Derek Lambert: In light of that, I’ve talked about — quite a few videos I’ve done in the past where I’ve seen biblical traditions, hagiography. I mean, there’s all sorts of stuff that the Quran portrays to be knowledgeable about in these traditions. So you portray Muhammad as a widely traveled merchant, familiar with Jewish and Christian traditions. What does that help explain about the biblical stories and religious debates we encounter in the Quran? And then also, if you don’t mind, you also argue that he was literate, which is also like — I hear everyone say he’s illiterate, illiterate, illiterate. So you have the debates that we encounter in the Quran pertaining to the biblical stories and religious debates, and then we also have your argument that he was likely literate. What evidence points to his own reading, and what might instead reflect stories, sermons, and conversations circulating around him? So, I know that’s a big question to ask, but maybe you can take a jab at it.
Chapter 7: Muhammad as a merchant
Juan Cole: Sure. Well, and again, I don’t mean to offend anyone’s religious beliefs. I know that many Muslims are very committed to this notion of the Prophet Muhammad having been illiterate. And one of the reasons, it’s apologetic. They’re trying to protect him from charges that he plagiarized the Bible. And so if he was illiterate, he couldn’t have done that. But I think that the premise doesn’t need to be knocked down, because he didn’t plagiarize the Bible. He was retelling biblical stories in a way that we know preachers in the late antique world did. I mean, if you look at Jacob of Serugh or John Chrysostom, they retell these stories in their own way, and sometimes they add details that aren’t in the Bible, just as the Quran does. So I don’t think that what Muhammad was doing was in any way an unusual activity. And it’s certainly original. It’s not plagiaristic. But one of the reasons I say that he’s literate is that, being a historian, if he was a long-distance merchant — and the Muslim tradition seems to be unanimous about this — he can’t have been illiterate. There are no illiterate long-distance merchants.
Derek Lambert: Khadija, what did he — what does it say? You know what I mean? Like —
Juan Cole: Yeah. Yeah. Did we make a profit this month? Who would tell you? Why wouldn’t they run off with the money if they’re the ones who know? He not only was literate, but he would have known something about double-entry bookkeeping. And moreover, if he was a long-distance merchant and he was traveling around, which I think he was, he would have to deal with the Eastern Roman authorities. Well, they used Greek as their language of administration.
And I think the degree to which Greek was still a living language [in the Near East] — it was an urban standard spoken by people in Damascus and elsewhere, and widely used for literary purposes. I think there was a kind of diglossia, whereas in everyday speech you might use Aramaic, or in the southern regions of Syria and Jordan you would use Arabic, and then if you were going to write a letter you would write it in Greek. And this was true into the late 500s, early 600s, the time of the Prophet. There are some historians who have insisted on this, others have been skeptical, but we now have very good archaeological evidence for it, because there was a church in Jordan which had a fire in, I don’t know, 590 or something. And it was an Eastern Orthodox church owned by a local Arabic-speaking family. And Transjordan was probably already largely Arabic-speaking. And they had an annex where they stored all of their letters and records. When the fire happened, it flash-burned the papyri. So it’s just like Vesuvius, that the archaeologists could get in there and subject these papyri to an “MRI” and extract the Greek text underneath, of course.
Derek Lambert: That’s awesome.
Juan Cole: The end of the letter is always gone, because that was what was flash-burned. But the rest was preserved, because papyrus disappears. It’s — for historians, it’s the greatest tragedy in history that people started using papyrus to write on, because it just disappears after a few years, and we think we lost 500,000 documents from the Eastern Roman Empire in the time of the Prophet. But these documents were preserved, and what they show is a network of Christian Arabic speakers who maintained orchards and maintained this church and wrote each other, had localistic beliefs about shrines and so forth, who — all of the letters are in Greek.
So I went and looked at them, and they’re like just 20, 30 years before the Prophet, before the first chapters of the Quran. So — and this was in Petra — if the Prophet was going up there for trade, then he was meeting those people, he was trading with them, and they were conducting their business in Greek. So I think he knew some Greek, and it’s a very controversial thing to say, but I think there’s good archaeological reason to say it. And the everyday language in some of these areas was increasingly Arabic, but also Aramaic was still spoken, and he probably knew some Aramaic as well. I mean, if you’re a merchant — see, it partly is autobiographical, I suppose, because I’m an army brat, and my father was stationed in France and Africa and so forth. When you go someplace, you learn the local language to deal with people. So if he was a long-distance merchant, why wouldn’t he have done that?
Editor’s note. This excerpt from Derek Lambert’s MythVision interview with historian Juan Cole was lightly edited from YouTube’s automatic captions for readability. The supplied captions begin during the conversation and cut off mid-sentence. Brackets mark uncertain wording.
Interview and transcript at Informed Comment
Muhammad as a merchant
Juan Cole: …prophet before the first chapters of the Quran. So if the prophet was going up there for trade—and this was in Petra—then he was meeting those people, he was trading with them, and they were conducting their business in Greek. So I think he knew some Greek, and it’s a very controversial thing to say, but I think there’s good archaeological reason to say it. The everyday language in some of these areas was increasingly Arabic, but Aramaic was still spoken, and he probably knew some Aramaic as well. I mean, if you’re a merchant, it partly is autobiographical, I suppose, because I’m an army brat, and my father was stationed in France and Africa and so forth.
When you go someplace, you learn the local language to deal with people. So, if he was a long-distance merchant, why wouldn’t he have done that?
The Quranic language debates
Derek Lambert: Okay. This is fantastic. Let me ask you this. I’ll get to super chats here soon. There’s some really juicy ones that are in here and if you don’t mind, how much time do you have, by the way? This has been—
Juan Cole: I’m in your hands. It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Derek Lambert: Perfect. Because I think there’s much we can cover. There’s some really interesting things like if he was literate and not only literate like potentially spoke multiple languages or understood multiple languages.
We talked about this being apologetic. I don’t mind taking my gloves off to apologetics because I want people to kind of, you know, engage with historical research and what their faith is. Separate it. Okay, you have a different faith position. Cool. But history, let’s dive into the history. What seems to be the case? And our channel tends to do that. One of the things I find in the Quran is there are accusations of where he’s getting these stories and there’s an apologetic it seems inside the Quran saying well no they couldn’t have because that’s a different language and it’s like well what you’re saying would actually be a defeater of that because it’s like he knew those languages you don’t think he knew how to transfer between one language to the next as a merchant I know that if I have to communicate between crowds or middleman.
Like I have to know how to translate. I have to know how to make it make sense in my own tongue from other people’s tongues. So if he’s listening to people who are telling stories that may be in different languages for all we know because like you said Greek if it’s in the Trans Jordan, who’s to say it’s not further south? Maybe we don’t have any epigraphic or archaeological evidence of the Greek being common in Arabia, Mecca, Medina, but I don’t know. You’d know better than I would about that. But you get where I’m going with this. So, like what do you do with that in the Quran? Is that Muhammad kind of in your view trying to defend himself?
Or is it a later scribe, in your view, kind of saying, “No. You’re accusing him of learning these stories as if he didn’t get them from divine revelation or something”? I don’t know.
Juan Cole: No, I think it’s the precise argument being made that’s important. First of all, by the way, there are Greek inscriptions in the Hijaz in Western Arabia. And they’re made clearly by long-distance merchants. They’re graffiti and in Greek and they kind of peter out in the late 300s. So they’re not contemporaneous with the prophet. But people stopped making so many rock inscriptions generally speaking across the board in the Roman domains around that time around 400 they peter out. So it may not have anything to do with people no longer knowing Greek so much as it was they didn’t they didn’t carve things on rocks as much. In any case, the particular argument that’s in the Quran about the prophet learning from a local is that the Quran says this local guy wasn’t a native Arabic speaker.
And we think maybe he was an Aramaic speaker or maybe a Greek speaker, I don’t know, who was living in Mecca. And there were lots of non-Arabic speakers living in Mecca. There was probably an Ethiopian Aksumite merchant colony and so forth. So they were accusing the prophet of being given passages of the Quran by this guy and then just reciting them as if they were his own. And what the Quran says was that this is not very likely because this guy has a heavy accent and his Arabic isn’t idiomatic.
So, “I can’t just be repeating what he told me to say, or my Arabic passages would be full of these solecisms that a foreigner might make, and maybe I would start speaking like him, with this heavy accent.” It’s saying, “I’m a native Arabic speaker, guys. This is me. This can’t be this guy. He can’t be giving me these passages.” So you were phrasing it in a different way, that maybe he could translate into Arabic, idiomatic Arabic ideas that he got from someplace else. But that isn’t the argument that the pagans were making according to the Quran. It was a direct transfer of text. And he was saying, “Well, the text just wouldn’t look that way.”
Abrahamic influences
Derek Lambert: Hmm. Okay. My understanding was that he’s hearing—they call him “the ear”—that he’s hearing these things and he’s just regurgitating stories. My understanding was that there was a Zoroastrian, I think, poet who was also retelling stories, competing against Muhammad. I don’t know if this is later biographic you know storytelling about how he had competition but in the Quran my understanding he was identified as the ear because he’s just hearing these things and then retelling stories in his own way for his own group of or I guess you’d say his own cult of followers.
Juan Cole: Well, you know, the passages of the Quran show pride in the Arabicness of the Quran. And in its eloquence as an Arabic discourse and I think what it’s saying is that it’s impossible for that to have come from an outsider.
Okay? And so the argument is not about ideas. Because the Quran doesn’t deny that these ideas are often in the Bible. I mean it says in the Torah there is guidance and light. In the New Testament, in the Injil there’s guidance and light. It seems to be recommending the wisdom that’s in those books. And it’s telling these stories, I mean, for local purposes, as a preacher always does, right? When any preacher who gets up and preaches the Bible on Sunday would probably be trying to relate it to, you know, last year’s drought in Kansas. You know, it’s always the case that there’s an attempt to relate it to local people’s contemporary concerns.
But the stories, the information, the Quran doesn’t, you know, claim to have been inventing these things. It has an entire chapter on the story of Joseph which is a great piece of world literature and inspired Thomas Mann to a four-volume novel in some respects in which by the way Thomas Mann brings in the Quranic retelling. So the Quran shows awareness that this story is in is in the Hebrew Bible, but why is it telling it in Mecca? Because it’s about internecine strife and that was what was going on between the pagans and the new Muslims in Mecca. So anyway, I just think that particular piece of polemic about the prophet being illiterate is a later apologetic.
And the word that the apologists interpret as meaning “illiterate” is ummi, which probably doesn’t mean illiterate at all in the context. It’s it seems actually to mean somebody who was born outside of the biblical tradition, wasn’t a Jew or a Christian or a Samaritan. And so forth, but who then embraced biblical monotheism.
Derek Lambert: Interesting.
Juan Cole: So that’s why Abraham plays such a big role in the Quran. He’s the prototype of somebody who was born in a pagan Iraqi society that worshiped those ancient Assyrian gods or Babylonian gods. And then he broke with that and followed the one God. And so he’s a prototype for Muhammad and really for all of the Arabian converts to a biblical monotheism.
Derek Lambert: You know, I lay my cards out on the table. I’ve always been transparent. I don’t personally follow Jesus. I used to. Not to say that I can’t find some good things that I think he teaches. I could also find things that I think are questionable. I do the same with Muhammad. I would do the same for anyone. But we’re-evaluating the Quran in light of this and trying to separate it from later I want to just use the term rumor meaning we can’t really pin it to the guy. We know that people they portray Jesus in light of themselves and many historians have commonly said you know you want to find the historical Jesus just read the life of the historian who’s claiming they’re portraying the life of Jesus.
You’re going to find that version of Jesus because it’s really a reflection of the historian who’s claiming they’re discovering who the Jesus is. And I wonder if the true that’s the same for Muhammad in any biographers’s, you know, hand. But I want to get to the to the sore spot, the war passages and interpreting these particular ones because this is a very hot topic.
Interpreting war passages
Derek Lambert: How do you understand the Quran’s rules for fighting, particularly Quran 9:5 and 9:29? What leads you to read them as responses to specific conflicts rather than general commands for religious conquest? Because that would like if you and I lived in a city and a certain individual situation happened, then future generations could read it and go, “Hey, we can learn from that.” But that’s not a command by which we must live, like, “This is a commandment from our prophet on how we must behave and what we must do.” But if you historicize it and say hey it’s this conflict over here. We’re not living under that conflict. We don’t need to.
It’s almost like persecution. There are many Christians I meet that kind of have a persecution complex and it’s like you’re not being persecuted my friend. You’re okay. You’re in an okay situation. Just because Paul was under that circumstance or just because Jesus was under that circumstance doesn’t mean you living in a wonderful world compared to them probably are being persecuted. So there’s a sense in which I think a lot of people read these war passages in a general sense as a theological understanding of him teaching it. What gives you the idea that it is a specific conflict rather than a general theological teaching?
Juan Cole: Yeah. Well, Derek, I agree with you entirely and I compliment you on your historical reasoning. I think you put your finger on it that a lot of this kind of polemic about the Quran is orientalism. It comes out of the 19th-century European empires because, you know, what happened was that the Europeans went out and conquered the Muslim world. Most Muslims’ great-grandparents lived under European rule. And it’s very ironic that people in Europe should portray the Muslims as militants. [Laughter.]
Derek Lambert: Interesting.
Juan Cole: You know, the Egyptians didn’t conquer England. It was the other way around, right? And the Bangladeshi Muslims were under British rule for 200 years. So there was a lot of anxiety in colonial Europe about Muslims as being organized and having their own scripture and their own ideology and could you really rule them effectively? Would they be a constant source of problems for the empire? And then and people like William Muir and others who wrote about Islam were doing so in the context of the of the British having conquered India which was a quarter Muslim. And there was even one guy who wrote a book about whether it was sort of whether the Muslims of India were loyal to the queen.
And I saw that when I was young and I thought to myself, well, why would the Muslims of India [Laughter.] be loyal to the queen?
Derek Lambert: Yeah.
Juan Cole: But in London, that seemed like a logical question. So when they read the Quran they would read it as you say and in this menacing way because that was they were worried the local people would read it that way and then and then they wouldn’t be able to tax them and take their resources and rule them.
Derek Lambert: Interesting.
Juan Cole: Actually, the Quran says things like, in surah 8, Al-Anfal, it says if the enemy sues for peace, you have to accept the offer, right?
Well, I maintain that no force that was favoring aggressive warfare would ever say that because as a general principle, if you were a conqueror, wouldn’t the local people always sue for peace, right? You’d never be able to conquer anything. It’s only if you were defending your territory and the enemy sued for peace, it would mean the enemy was attacking and now would stand down that then you must accept the offer.
Meccan and Medinan sources
Derek Lambert: Now, I could see from this just if you don’t mind the little back and forth because this is actually important. I think I can see I first of all two things come to mind. I could see extrapolating a theology out of teachings like this. Okay, even if they had a historical setting in an original context, I could see a later Muslim or someone going, I see that and I can take some of that and apply that to my own life. Okay, some things are just historical and it’s like, well, you could apply it, but under a circumstance that might be equivalent, right? But in light of that, I’ve also heard Meccan and Medina sources.
I don’t know maybe you should address this issue too because from my understanding many people have interpreted and this is in Muslim sources so it’s not like you know this isn’t orientalist made this up that Muslims themselves differentiated between Meccan and Medinan sources I’ve had Javad Hashmi on where he actually contends this and points out he does not agree with this he thinks that they later messed up trying to organize the Quran into these categories where he was innocent sweet gentle a preacher of sorts, nonviolent in Mecca. Then he gets into political power in Medina, Jewish friends, etc. Builds this political power and decides now I have power. Power gets to his head and he kind of starts to do things that are more aggressive.
Maybe you should knock this thing down before we even go further into more war passages so people can at least see how you see it versus what they’ve understood Muhammad through that lens for so long to be.
Juan Cole: Yeah. Well, it is certainly true that the prophet Muhammad in Mecca was an a preacher and a community seems to have gathered around him. It was probably by the way very small few hundred people. We don’t know anything at all about Mecca in the time of the prophet. Some Western historians have doubted its existence. I think there’s archaeological evidence for its existence. But it might have been a very small place, you know, more of a very small town than a city. And so a few people gathered around him from the Quran. It seems that they were harassed about their beliefs and kidnapped. The pagans seem to have engaged in deprogramming.
They would they would kidnap their relative who had started following the prophet and put them in the house and then put pressure on them to recant. And the prophet is in the Quran is depicted as you know as people plotted to throw him out of the city and perhaps even violence against him. And we have all of these verses in this in the Quran from this time, you know, which talk about repelling good with evil. I mean, repelling—
Derek Lambert: No, I know what you mean.
Juan Cole: Repelling evil with good. Some of those verses also appear in the later Medinan suras as well.
When he goes to Medina, he’s brought in, and this is not in the Quran, so you can’t tell for sure, but it’s what the later biographies say. He’s brought in, I think of it as kind of like a sheriff in the Old West. You know, you’d have Billy the Kid shooting the place up. You needed somebody to come in on the frontier. There’s no federal government around to establish order.
And the two major tribes in Medina are said by the later sources to have been engaged in violent feuding. And they kind of agreed that the prophet Muhammad as a prophet as something of an outsider since he was from Mecca although he had relatives in Medina could be a an honest broker and could settle this feud and establish order. So the stories are that he was brought in this capacity. It’s a very different role than the one he played in Mecca where he was he was from a noble tribe that was hosting the pilgrims at the Kaaba the shrine to which people made pilgrimage. But he himself was not any kind of a politician and in Medina I would say he became one.
And the Quran reflects this and it talks about the disputes inside Medina and the various factions and how they argued with the prophet and so forth. By virtue of being sheriff of Medina—this is my analogy—when the pagan Meccans came after them, having put pressure on the early Muslims to leave. They came after them in Medina and attacked Medina. The prophet was in the position of having to organize people for defense, and some of this is actually in the Quran. So like at one point he has a kind of ditch or moat dug around parts of Medina. You know some places you had thick palm groves that were hard for you couldn’t charge through them on a as a cavalry charge.
But then there were some open places. So he’d have a ditch or a moat dug between them. So the horses couldn’t get through of the enemy to get into the city on horseback. And it is said in the later sources that this was a Sasanian technique and one of his followers was from Iran and suggested it. So he was organizing the people in Medina for self-defense and all of those war verses and there aren’t very many I don’t know five or six that talk about organizing for warfare are all about taking defensive measures against this attack, this campaign against them.
The meaning of fitna and jizya
Juan Cole: That’s the context for these verses. And there’s a verse that says that the followers of Muhammad, you know, having been expelled more or less from Mecca were denied the ability to make pilgrimage to the Kaaba, which was a central ritual for all of the people in Western Arabia of, you whether pagan or Muhammad’s followers. And they weren’t allowed to go there. And that violated the pagan ethos. You weren’t you weren’t allowed to fight in the precincts of the Kaaba in Mecca. You weren’t allowed to chop down trees. You weren’t allowed to hunt and kill animals. You weren’t allowed to feud. And so for the pagan Meccans to prevent the Muslims from going there on pilgrimage was a violation of the civic norms not the Muslim norms of the of the region and so the prophet says, you know, they’re trying to coerce our conscience.
The word I read as “coercion of conscience”—and I think there’s very good philological reason to read it that way—is fitna. Later Muslims interpreted the word to mean making a disturbance or whatever. And the European the European historians and this is something Javad Hashmi has made an argument about misunderstood. The Quran says, “Fight them until there’s no more fitna.” I read that verse to say, “Fight them until they’re not coercing your conscience anymore. Until they’re not preventing you from going on pilgrimage, until they’re not, you know, raiding you in Medina. And trying to destroy you and your religion.” The Europeans read it to say, “Fight until there’s no more opposition to Islam.” So they read the verse as a commandment to universal warfare forever against non-Muslims.
Derek Lambert: Do you think that they read it that way because there were, I don’t know, many Muslims who do read it that way in a sense? Kind of like we talked about earlier, sometimes we hear people who are in a faith tradition that have a certain interpretation and then we end up taking a historical position which just grants what the Christian idea might be if we’re thinking in Christianity and not get back to the source like what you or Javad are trying to do. Do you think that they’re reading that because they’re thinking, “Okay, there’s many Muslims that they know that are doing that and are there Muslims today that read it that way?” That’s kind of my point is h how do we how do we try to understand this as nuanced as we can and what’s really going on?
Because I know that you could you and I could both sit here and talk about some pretty radical interpretations that some Muslims might hold. But many wouldn’t. Like Javad, I’ve talked to him many times on the phone and he’s a very peaceful, loving guy who’s like, “No.” And he I think would actually sing kumbaya with you on all the stuff that you’re saying today as far as I can tell. Do you think the Europeans were taking it from certain groups of Muslims that they were seeing as radical and interpreting it that way or saw their interpretations and interpreted it that way or
Juan Cole: Well, the problem with that way of thinking is that the actually living Muslims that these Europeans were ruling, right? Didn’t all read it that way.
Derek Lambert: Right.
Juan Cole: So, how could the British rule what are now Bangladeshis for 200 years if that was their interpretation of the Quran?
I mean, yes, they contracted with the British, they the merchants supplied the East India Company, the administrators had friendly relations with the villagers that they were ruling over. If that were the mainstream Muslim interpretation of this verse, then British colonialism in the Muslim parts of India would have been absolutely impossible.
Derek Lambert: Well, I the analogy I might give would be the only push back I could imagine in this analogy would be if we look at the Mishnah or the Talmud. Christians ruled Jews like in several empires and we’ll find times where Christians even persecuted Jews. I’ve talked to several scholars, like Dr. Firestone—
Juan Cole: Firestone, yeah.
Derek Lambert: Yeah. Reuven Firestone. And you can find some passages if we want to pull them out from the overall grand scheme of Jewish writings that call the animals or they, you know, they’re not even human. Like there’s just the most hateful you can imagine because they’re so angry at these people because they’re being persecuted by the Christian Empire at large that is treating them like they’re garbage. And I kind of wondered if there’s a chance that well maybe the influence is that there’s some readings under the imperialism that Muslims had that they might have I don’t know adopted from.
Juan Cole: Yeah. But I mean so there may have been but they were small group. And the reason for which great Dutch scholars at Leiden would say these things has nothing to do with that small group. It was because the Europeans had Islamophobia. They were afraid of their Muslim subjects and they were afraid that Quran might be read that way by them and so forth. But you know, you’re certainly correct that there are streams of interpretation and some of them mainstream in the Muslim world which I think turned some of the Quran on its head and did so for Muslim imperial purposes early on and so you mentioned 9:29, which says to fight those who do not believe in God and do not believe in the last day or the resurrection and do not follow the teachings of the prophet or the religion of truth.
Fight them until they pay the jizya, which the Muslims interpreted as a kind of tax. And these, it says, the verse says are those who have been given of kitab the book.
So the Muslim commentators I think maybe universally read this as against the Christians and Jews. The people who have been given the book. The book is Bible or the scripture. But that reading, in my view, makes no sense whatsoever. Because the verses that lead up to it—this is in the ninth chapter of the Quran, Al-Tawbah, or Repentance—the verses that lead up to it are all about what the later histories call the battle of Hunayn, which was a battle between the followers of Muhammad and pagan tribes the Thaqif and the Hawazin according to the later sources, but it’s mentioned in the in the in the chapter in 9:25 says a battle happened at Hunayn and it tells the story of the battle.
It says that at first the Muslims seemed to be more numerous than their opponents and things were going well but then the opponents got the upper hand and a lot of the Muslims beat a retreat ignominiously and then had to come back and save the day in the end.
So this battle with the pagans and they’re identified as pagans as people who associate other deities with God. This battle with the pagans is what this what this pericope in and the beginning of surah 9 is about. Right? Then all of a sudden you get to 9:29 which is just after this battle with the pagans and it says fight those who do not believe in God or the last day or religion of truth. And until they pay the jizya and that they have been given the book. Well, why in the world would you interpret that as being about Christians and Jews? That’s not what led up to it. That’s not the context of the verse.
And you know, the medieval Muslims exegetes often had a very atomistic approach to these verses. They would pull them out say this verse means this and we know this word means this and so forth and they wouldn’t look at them in the context of the of the whole chapter and a lot of western scholars do the same thing so anyway I think if you read this as a narrative, verses 1–29, it’s leading up to this verse. And it is true that Jews and Christians are referred to 18 times or so as those who have been given the scripture.
But the word kitab which can mean scripture is polysemous. You know in linguistics words can have lots of different meanings. And it also is used in the Quran to mean a deed of manumission when you when you free a slave as the Quran recommends that you free the slaves when you write out a deed of a manumission that’s called a kitab and in the treaty of Medina which is extra-Quranic but we think it’s early right it begins by saying this is a kitab between Muhammad and the people of Medina and the tribes of Medina. So it’s a there it means treaty.
So I see 9:29 is saying that the pagans have broken their treaty with the prophet. There was a written instrument, a kitab and the earlier verses of this chapter talk about an ahd, or a compact, a covenant that had been made between Muhammad and the pagans which they broke. And so they had been given this written instrument, this kitab and they don’t believe in God or the last day or the religion of truth. But and so it’s very obvious to me that this is about those pagans and the Christians and Jews in the Quran are never described this way. Quran 2:62, in the surah of the Cow, says the believers—that is, the people around the prophet Muhammad—and the Jews and the Christians and the Sabians, whoever believes in God and the Last Day, will have no fear in the hereafter.
They can be saved. The Quran is pluralistic about salvation for the people of the scripture. So if 9:29 is about the Jews and the Christians, why is it saying “those who don’t believe in God and the Last Day”? Elsewhere it describes them as people who do. It’s the pagans that it talks about that way, not the Jews and Christians. But in 800, if the Abbasid caliphate is fighting a major war in Anatolia with the Christian Byzantines, it’s very tempting to interpret that verse as about the Christians. And then the jizya doesn’t mean a tax at this time. And we have Arabic inscriptions which suggest that it means a reparation. So the pagan tribes who violated their treaty with the mo with the prophet are supposed to pay reparations.
There’s no evidence that the prophet established any kind of a land tax or something. So but they had a Christian big Christian population. In fact in the early Muslim Empire most of their subjects were either Christians or Zorastrians. So they wanted to be able to tax them.
They would use this verse to justify not only fighting them but also then taxing them afterwards. And so when you have the beginnings of modern academic study of Islam in the 19th century, it was that prevailing interpretation of the imperial Abbasid exegetes and historians that the Europeans first encountered and they were already in their own conflict with the Muslim world because they were colonizing it. So, it became a common sense reading of this verse.
Derek Lambert: That’s a very interesting way you painted that verse. And I see what you’re saying. And it’s contextual. It’s very specific. It could apply if you’re like a follower of Muhammad to see how he is behaving and trying to say, “Hey, look, they broke it. They’re coming at us. We’ve got to do this until we get them to stop.” But I feel like your work is needed, not only for the non-Muslim world, but for the Muslim world. Like I really wish more Muslims read what you’re saying and accept a lot more what you’re saying.
Juan Cole: Oh, they do. You know, my book has been translated into Arabic, Indonesian, Persian, Bosnian, Albanian, all of the major Muslim languages. And well reviewed people like it and I couldn’t I’m pleased as punch at this and then it has sold well among the American Muslim community the major failing that I’ve had with it is that I couldn’t get the Europeans to translate it. There’s no French or German edition. And I’m not going to speculate why that is, but I tried and my agent tried. But the Muslims like this book and see the things that I’m saying are not controversial in mainstream Islam. If you’re in Cairo and you hear what I’m saying, people would just nod and say, “Yes, of course.” and of course, I lived four years in Cairo, so, you know, I’m not I’m not a stranger to that discourse.
And I studied the Quran with an Egyptian scholar in Cairo. So these things that I’m saying may seem strange to American polemicists and without any doubt to radicals. I mean it would be denounced by ISIL or al-Qaeda or something. But the mainstream of Muslims, this is more or less the way they look at it.
Yemenite and Zoroastrian ties
Derek Lambert: Interesting. I really appreciate that. That’s a very interesting way to view it. You know, one of the other things I’ve had several scholars, I’m sure you’ve seen, that study early Islam, Quranic studies that have come on the channel and they talk about various things. I had actually two questions I really wanted to get off my chest before we get into this follow-up question which deals with paradise and stuff and this it touches the jihad issues and things like that we’ve had I’ve had Reuven Firestone on and others to talk about his view. And then Javad Hashmi came on and was like, “Nope, I disagree with Reuven.” And here’s why. Before we move forward into continuing on the whole war and violence passages, I want to ask you something doctrinally because I have a Muslim friend who’s going to come on.
He wants to talk to me. He says, “I want to persuade you that you know, he’s coming from a more conservative apologetic point of view about Islam. And I want to have him on to share his views, and I’ll give my personal thoughts. I’m going to be honest with you where I’m coming from and why I don’t why I’m probably not going to be convinced from this discussion. But he pretty much argues that it seems that Muhammad knows about this mundane version of Jesus that isn’t Constantinople’s model, right? You don’t have this trinitarian. [snorts] It’s much more, he would argue, like Q, the hypothetical reconstruction of an earlier gospel. Now, putting him aside, I want to ask you because I’ve had other scholars who’ve come on arguing where they think the doctrines seem to have inspired the thought process or theology of Muhammad’s teaching about Jesus and about God and how he understood these things from the Quran, not the later traditions.
From your understanding of the Quran, what historical Christianities do you think he was rubbing shoulders with? And maybe even Jewish thought, maybe even Zoroastrian thought that you think made him come up with the theology we see. I think of just an analogy. I don’t mean disrespect to anybody, but I look at Joseph Smith and I see Joseph Smith finds not only polygamy, but also finds several gods. He has he has a very different theological interpretation that he seems to be informed by various sources that we could kind of piece together to see his theology develop. What kind of Christianities, what kind of Judaism, what do you think caused him to formulate this idea that he has about Jesus?
And do you have any idea what kind of Christianities you think inspired him?
Juan Cole: Well, the first thing to say, Derek, is that unlike upstate New York and in the 19th century, we don’t have very many contextual sources for Muhammad in the Quran. In fact Ahmad Al-Jallad Michael Macdonald and others who are doing epigraphy Hayam Sidky are giving us some of the first texts that we have that are maybe contemporaneous with the Quran in Arabic and they’re just rock inscriptions the people’s names and pious wishes and so forth. Some of them may be pre-Islamic. Some of them clearly are from the time of Islam. That you can tell by the orthography sometimes that they’re you know 7th century or their 8th century. And so other than that we have some books and pamphlets written in Greek, Aramaic and Persian that are from that century but not much has survived.
Partially the papyrus disintegrated and partly there were a lot of wars and disruption and so forth. When I started working on early Islam in a concerted way, I wanted to just go read all of the contemporary literature, people who were living at the time of the prophet and wrote and I thought it would be a long process and it was I don’t know 25 little pamphlets and books. I mean it was there’s just not much.
Derek Lambert: That’s really a big deal if you’re trying to reconstruct a time period and a guy’s life. That’s going to be near impossible.
Juan Cole: That’s right. So the Quran is our major source. Now there are hints in the Quran and then as we say I say we have the epigraphy you probably know about Sulayman Dost and his work on South Arabia. But the big surprise—Iwona Gajda and Glen Bowersock have written about this—that we did and Christian Robin was the main leader in this area of it. Robin and his successors discovered that around 380, the Yemen elite stopped going to the temples. Himyarite elite in what is now Yemen stopped going to the temples that they fell into disuse. And then the inscriptions that they made were monotheistic.
Derek Lambert: Mm-hmm.
Juan Cole: And maybe Jewish or Judaizing. And we have those inscriptions and the Himyarites used to also write in a diminutive script on strips of juniper bark. And we have collections of those in German museums and so forth. People have learned how to read them. But there seems to have been a tremendous religious reformation in what is now Yemen in 380 and after that led the at least the elite to become monotheists of some sort and maybe even to have converted to Judaism. This was not known 50 years ago. This is this is new archaeology. And we’re still, of course, Yemen is such a [Laughter.] a mess now. The poor things are embroiled in wars and civil wars and international wars that there’s probably not going to be a lot of new archaeology coming out of there for a while.
But the what was done until 2012 or so when things started going downhill still is being worked over and so that Yemen tradition included people who started calling God “the All-Merciful.” In Himyarite they put an N at the end of everything. So it was Rahmanan instead of Rahman which is the Arabic and the Aramaic. And this is also a Hebrew root. God is called rahum in the Hebrew Bible. So but there were some people who mainly called God the all merciful in Himyarite domains and who sometimes seem to differentiate themselves from the Jews. So there may have been an indigenous monotheistic movement there and South Arabia is just not very far from Mecca.
So that in southern Arabia you had the emergence of this monotheistic tendency in the c two centuries before Muhammad is probably pertinent. And then there are some phrases in the Sabaic—the Himyarites spoke a language called Sabaic, which is close to Arabic. But in the Sabaic inscriptions there are some phrases that are identical to things that are in the Quran about rituals and ritual washing and so forth. So that’s an emerging field.
Theology of the Quran
Juan Cole: If you want to know where Islam is coming from, where Muhammad is coming from, there’s probably a Yemenite Himyarite dimension. There’s evidence in the Quran that the prophet knew about Zorastrianism and there’s a verse in which he talks about two Zoroastrian angels and seems to accept that they were angels so you know in Zorastrianism there was a notion more or less of the one god although he had a kind of evil twin that he fought with but he won in the end. So the evil principle is not all-powerful. So this one god, Ahura Mazda, or Mazd, sends prophets with revelation and several are mentioned who are called messengers [unclear]. And this schema of holy history, that there’s one god fighting with evil who sends messengers to human beings, trying to enlist them on the side of the one God, because if all the human beings join up in the good god’s corner then evil will be defeated more quickly.
That’s why in Zoroastrianism you don’t tell lies, you don’t cheat and so forth because that gives strength to the evil principle. So you have to live a very upright life.
Well many of these Zoroastrian ideas about the one god and sending a series of coequal prophets. They’re not different from one another in their functions and so forth. That’s very similar to the Quranic idea of God and sending what are called messengers or rasul. And when the Muslims conquered Iran and they wanted to translate payghambar, they used rasul. The word for messenger, or for divinely sent envoy, for prophet, is equivalent there in those coins and so forth. So I personally think that some of the holy history schema of the Quran is Zoroastrian. Because the word apostle which would be the equivalent apostolos in Greek would be the equivalent of rasul, or messenger, is not used in that way in Hebrew, in the Septuagint.
In fact, in ancient Greek, the apostolos was a ambassador a secular figure so that the Quran has this idea of serial messengers it’s probably in my view Zoroastrian There are other things.
There’s lots of Persian in the Quran. The word junah is from gonah, which means sin. Kanz is a treasure. It’s from ganj which is Persian for a treasure. So there’s reason to think that there’s some Persian influence. And then the those two Zoroastrian angels are mentioned outright. And there’s a verse in the Quran which talks about the that God will judge between the Jews and the Christians and the Sabians and the Muslims and the and the Zoroastrians and the pagans. But what’s interesting about that is that the Zarastrians are differentiated from the pagans and they’re in the same it’s mentioned in the same breath with the other recognized religions in the Quran.
So there’s some evidence for some Zoroastrian influence. Some people make more of it than others.
And then what kind of Christianity the prophet was interacting with, we just we just have no idea. A and I don’t think it matters so much because whatever the prophet encountered with regard to Christianity I think he already had a framework into which he would he would fit it. And then there are localistic concerns like in that surah nine that we were talking about he goes on after reprimanding the pagans for breaking their treaty with him to talking about the way the Jews and the Christians used the phrase “son of God” in Arabic and reprimanding them for this. This is this sounds too much like what the pagans say because he’s thinking about Zeus and you know Athena is the daughter of Zeus and so forth.
So he’s think you say son of God you’re getting into that pagan territory with your diction. And so he reprimands them.
So I mean you can’t read the New Testament or the wisdom books of the Jews without encountering that phrase. So I if the prophet had any experience of those books and even oral experience of people reading them out as homilies and so forth then he would have encountered that phrase in them but he rejects it right he’s already got a framework in which that diction is just it gives too much comfort to his pagan foes and he can’t accept it.
Derek Lambert: There is so much, my goodness. I had a scholar on who was talking about the endless debates of deicide and all sorts of theological issues that were going on. Clearly, Muhammad’s not a fan of God dying. And there were certain Christians who were making strong cases that with this theology you guys have, in a sense, you’re forcing it to be that God dies on a cross and stuff. And so it seems like he would have sided with those voices that at least were opposing the idea that God died on a cross and then therefore might explain and I don’t know if where you land on this. I know Sean Anthony has made an interesting argument.
There was a polemic against Christianity in Jewish circles about the crucifixion of Jesus and maybe Muhammad had this material in some sense and saw something out of it that and he sided with the Christians in that particular material. We don’t have time today to cover everything here. So I want to bring one more question, then get to super chats, because we’re already at an hour and 43 minutes.
Fighting and paradise
Derek Lambert: I’ve enjoyed this. Quran 9:111 links fighting in God’s cause with paradise. Now we’ve been really trying to get the viewers to stop just assuming— maybe someone has a case. Bring the case. I’m fine with it. But just assuming that if it mentions fighting in God’s name and paradise and things like that it’s an alltime revelation that everyone should follow and this is how we should live and oh if I can find a bad verse in the Quran, everybody follows it. Well, I don’t know about you, if you’ve probably watched some of my content, Dr. Dr. Cole, you probably know I’ve highlighted quite a few biblical verses that show some pretty ugly images about things in the Bible that we could look at and go, “Oh, so do are Christians, you know, going out doing these evil things that we might say are really bad from the Bible?” They’d say, “No, that was back then.
It was for this moment.” Okay. Okay. What if that’s what’s happening in the Quran? All right. Quran 9:111 links fighting in God’s cause with paradise. My understanding is that there was a fervor of apocalypticism in the Christian world, and even the Sasanians had this. With Zoroastrianism, the eschatology overlaps in some ways, even though it’s a different belief system. This idea of dying in combat and entering into paradise—Christians, once just war theory became predominant, saw fighting on behalf of God’s empire, God’s kingdom, in a sense the same way a martyr would have through being killed by violence. By committing the violence, it gets kind of reinterpreted over time to, “If I fight and I die in combat in this just war, then I get instant access to heaven.” So I’m wondering how you deal with Quran 9:111 when it talks about linking fighting in God’s cause with paradise and even if the fighting is defensive, how do you distinguish a just war from a religiously sacred one?
Juan Cole: Well, first of all, I made the argument that these battles that the prophet was and his followers were involved in were defensive. So, I read the verse to say that if you die defending your community from its attackers that you’ll be rewarded with heaven. I should hope so. And what religion doesn’t say that? I mean, I don’t understand the polemic around this verse. It’s only if you assume that it’s saying that they should go out and conquer the world aggressively and they’ll be rewarded with paradise if they attack people unprovoked, that it would be controversial. But there’s no reason to read it that way. Everything in the Quran points to these battles being defensive.
And that verse itself goes on to mention the Bible, the New Testament and the Torah, right? I mean, it’s implying that this principle is true in all of the scriptures, which I think you could make a case.
Derek Lambert: There’s a lot here. I’ve got You know what’s crazy? You’re going to laugh at me. I’m at number six in terms of my questions and I had 20 questions. Like now mind you there’s sub questions under them but like we can’t even get through them all. So I guess this is my last one.
Critical feedback on the book
Derek Lambert: What is the strongest criticism of your work that you think has some merit, in the sense that, like, okay, this is a good, difficult criticism? Because you know I like to ask like scholars sometimes the tough question and that is what’s your weak spots? What do you think isn’t as certain? Because a lot of academics are nuanced. They’re not certain. Things are probabilistic. They’re trying to reconstruct. But what’s the strongest criticism of what you’ve brought forward in this book that you think, you know, has good merit or could be the case? You’re not persuaded, but you know, there’s a chance that they could be right.
Juan Cole: So Derek, your question puts me in a difficult position. Because first of all, this book I didn’t want to write a specialist tome that would sit in the library and not be read by people. I thought the moment called for a trade book. So I wrote it for a general audience. It’s why you read it and you’re having me on your show.
Derek Lambert: Yes, sir.
Juan Cole: So if I had written it the way the academics often write, it would be impenetrable and cost $150 and have been published in some obscure European city. So because it’s a trade book, however, the academics didn’t review it for the most part. It didn’t get a review in the in the specialist journals and I think some of my colleagues thought well it’s for a popular audience it’s not for us and we won’t I can’t get them to read it and I’ve been writing some specialized journal articles with some of these arguments in them in order to try to reach that audience because they won’t trust they just won’t go near a trade book.
So there haven’t been that many reviews. I mean, your the premise of your question is that, you know, somebody took it seriously and wrote this review and took apart my argument and how do I respond to that? I wish that had happened. I’d love to have this debate. But it didn’t. And so you know there’s one colleague who just said that this is a product of my imagination. One called it eisegesis instead of exegesis. It’s just one very individualistic kind of approach and I think Sean Anthony and I have had some behind the scenes internet discussions and in which he’s raised questions about my chronology and so forth that I would take seriously, but not I don’t see anything that so far that has undermined my general argument.
And so I think that all the things that you’re talking about where I’ll be challenged and have to rethink will and should happen if I continue to write in this in this subject area and especially if I can reach my colleagues with more specialized work that’s phrased in a way that they can you know engage with but at the moment you know, the main way in which I would rewrite this book now is that I you know, it came out in 2018. It was obviously written in the years just before then. There’s been an avalanche of work on epigraphy since then.
Derek Lambert: Yeah.
Juan Cole: And we know a lot more about think the story I told you about the Yemen that was known the kind of outlines of it but there’s much more detailed work now and so forth. So some of the context I would be able to do better at but you know the other thing to say though is that I think I’ve won some people over with some of my arguments. For instance, I went to Justinian’s Codex and I found a law that he issued for highway robbers basically for people who were disturbing the peace of the empire. In which he says that such people who engage in violent robbery, it’s not about embezzlement, on the sea or if they’re pirates or are on land if they’re highway robbers.
That they should be exiled or they should be executed or a limb should be cut off. It gives a series of possible punishments. There’s a verse in the Quran that is almost identical.
Derek Lambert: Wow.
Juan Cole: And so I made an argument that the Quran is functioning in the framework of the of the of the Eastern Roman Empire that it you can you can see a intertextuality between Justinian’s laws and the Quran. And that article I published in a specialized journal, well-regarded journal. It was refereed half to death and it got through [Laughter.] and it I see it now cited and people are beginning to accept the argument because there had been an old there had been an old point of view that the Hijaz that the western Arabia was cut off from the rest of the world. That was a you know a backwater and had nothing to do with the Roman or Sasanian empires of the time and I you know I chipped away at that idea of the isolation of the Quran as a text from its wider world and so I think that’s beginning to be to work its way through the scholarship.
So that kind of thing but this book you know I had one colleague I went to a conference and I gave a paper on the idea of reconciliation or peace in the Quran. It’s a technical term, sulh. It’s different from the with in this book and it was the first it’s the first chapter in a book that ever dealt you know in 30 or 40 pages with this concept in the Quran. It’s bizarre. Nobody’s interested in the peaceful side of things. So I gave this paper and someone asked me, you know, why do you why do you care so much about this? I mean, is that an academic question?
I mean, but obviously the person just thought that I have a thing about finding peace verses in the Quran and that it’s odd. And but in biblical studies, what I was doing wouldn’t be considered odd at all. And yeah, so I just think that even in our academic field, some of the push back I’m getting is a little bit blinkered.
Derek Lambert: Yeah, I definitely that’s why I asked the question because I already know how some people who watch my channel would behave or how they would think and I can guarantee you they would feel like, “Oh, this is he’s an apologist or something.” You know what I mean? Like that’s why I brought that up.
Juan Cole: Well, I’m willing to have those arguments with people who think it’s apologetic and they should just bring their best Arabic.
Derek Lambert: There you go. There you go. You’re willing to have that debate. Okay, super chat time. This is the fun part.
Did Muhammad exist?
Derek Lambert: Everybody can ask a question. Feel free to super chat your questions. Critical thought, you know, hopefully relevant to what we’re discussing. Sometimes people want to tell you what they ate on Wednesday. And you know, anyway, thank you so much for becoming a member, Lena. I really appreciate that. Jojo freelancer, thank you. Did Muhammad exist? Thank you for the super chat.
Juan Cole: Oh, that’s an easy one. The we have a Syriac and Greek mentions of Muhammad within 20 years of his death. So you know Patricia Crone who was a great scholar at Princeton and who was known as a skeptic about the Muslim sources wrote a piece in 2008 I think in which she talked about what we can know about the prophet Muhammad but she dismissed this one immediately. The ex existence of the prophet is not in question. We have good historical evidence from outside the Muslim tradition that he did exist, and in this regard I think Islam is ahead of some of the other religions.
Derek Lambert: Thank you so much Jojo. Appreciate the super chat. Achara thank you so much for the super chat. All said and done, Muhammad’s historicity is extremely dubious. After Abbasid revolution, his sira was rewritten. Probably hate verses were added there upon. Thank you for the super chat. [sighs]
Juan Cole: Well, I agree with part of what the listener said is that the biography of the prophet or the biographies of the prophet that were written in the imperial period have an imperial edge to them. But we have very early manuscripts of the Quran and there I think there’s every evidence to think that the Quran is an early 7th century document and there’s no evidence that anything got added to it after that period.
Derek Lambert: Yeah, I think I had Marijn van Putten on recently and he was very clear about this and he’s skeptical like he’s like me. We’re both completely skeptical, but we nerd out on this stuff, as you know. So thank you so much, Achara, for that.
Sunni and Shia views on jihad
Derek Lambert: Jojo Freelancer, back again, says, “Sunni Islam has jihad and conquest.” I believe they mean Shia Islam does not.
Juan Cole: Well, the distinction between the two is that the Shia believe that after the prophet Muhammad’s death the community should have been led by his son-in-law and first cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib and then Ali married the pro prophet’s daughter Fatima by their children, lineal descent after him, after Ali.
Derek Lambert: Like a bloodline. Yeah.
Juan Cole: By blood. But the problem with bloodlines, as any student of history can tell you, is they die out. So what do you do when the there isn’t a next one? And that happened to the Shia, to the Twelver Shia. The 12th imam is said to have gone into occultation like Jesus is said to have ascended into heaven and one day will return. The 12th imam has disappeared from the eyes of men at least and of human beings and will one day return.
So the Shia theologians and jurists believe that many of the functions we associate with the Muslim community can only be undertaken by the Imam. There isn’t any imam visible or accessible to us today. And one of those is jihad is fighting wars. So only they kind of say that the defense of the community can be organized on a common law basis. But legitimate Muslim warfare can’t be declared except by the imam. So many jurists have been reluctant to declare jihad in the Shia tradition. However, it has happened in history. So for instance in the early 19th century the Iranian clergy put pressure on the Iranian government to go to war against Russia and they issued fatwas of jihad.
This was a failure of judgment on their parts because the Russian army had artillery and made mincemeat of the of the Iranians and took a lot of Iranian territory which why you have two Azerbaijans and so forth. But they did that. So there has been dispute within the Shia juridical community about this principle. But I think the classic jurists would say you can’t have jihad without the imam’s approval. The Sunnis don’t have that drawback.
The influence of Judaism
Derek Lambert: Thank you so much Wade Rogers. Thank you so much Wade for the super chat and being a member of the channel. I worked with a Muslim who was a [clears throat] a project manager and one of the sharpest people I have met. Cultural exposure is the cure for bigotry. My question is how did Judaism influence the founding of Islam?
Juan Cole: Well, the first part of what the listener said is certainly true and the poll polling bears it out. Americans who’s who have actually met a Muslim have a much higher estimation of the religion than those who’ve never met one. So the early the Quran’s you know encounter with the Judaic tradition is profound. And there’s evidence of there being a Jewish community in Medina at least with which the prophet had things to do. Fred Donner argued the great historian at the University of Chicago that there that actually the early community around Muhammad was multifaith that there were followers of Muhammad who remained Jews or Christians and who contributed to the community and to its defense.
And this also the principle seems to be in the treaty of Medina outside the Quran. On the other hand there are polemics between the Jews and the and the Quran in the Quran itself which are mentioned and the Quran shows some knowledge of the Judaic tradition. Obviously the Bible stories are there but even there’s [clears throat] one verse which refers to the Talmud.
You know in the Talmud there’s a verse in the in the Jerusalem Talmud there’s a verse that says whoever kills a soul has killed all of humankind and whoever saves a soul has saved all of humankind. In the Babylonian Talmud, it says, “Whoever kills a Jew has killed all humankind, and whoever saves a Jew has saved all humankind.” But the Jerusalem Talmud has a more universalistic expression of it, and it’s the one that Maimonides, the great Jewish thinker, preferred. In any case that Jerusalem Talmud verse is or statement is quoted in the Quran and the chapter the chapter five the chapter of the table. So there’s a place in the Quran where it says that there’s a nation among the Jews.
There’s a group of the Jews who are upright and you know it has that sense of being a light to the nations.
Then other verses of the Quran castigate Jews for being narrow-minded or I think it’s a quote another Talmudic quote but it says that you know if you if you say you follow the Torah but you don’t really understand it you’re like a donkey that’s somebody put the Torah in its saddle bag. So that’s in the Quran too. So it’s a really mixed picture and it’s complicated to understand entirely this relationship because it’s positive, it’s negative, it’s here all over the place and then the terminology is various. So sometimes the Quran talks about the children of Israel. Some people have argued that refers to the biblical community and not to the contemporary Jews of Medina.
Other people have said, “Well, no, there’s evidence that it also could mean the contemporary Jews.” So, when it’s talking about them, who exactly is it is it talking about and why? And so, we don’t have you know, a really close context for this. But one of the things I would argue is that the Quran sees the Jews as a potentially saved community in the sense that if they believe in God in the last day and do good works, then they’ll they can go to heaven. So it’s part of that what the Muslims later called the people of the book. Which is an ecumene beyond the Muslim community. The children of Israel in the Bible are praised to the skies.
The Torah is said to be full of guidance and light and so forth. But then there are conflicts between the prophet and the Jewish community in Medina which are alluded to in the Quran in which the Quran sometimes castigates contemporary Jews. So it’s that thing you were saying Derek that whe whether you read the verse as under eternity and universally applicable or about a particular situation is important.
Derek Lambert: Thank you so much Steve Watson. Thank you so much for the super chat Steve and for being here. In short or quote in short Muhammad had to conquer. His followers liked to conquer and his deity told him to conquer. What more do we need?” End quote. Patricia Crone, [unclear name], another bunch of apologetic historians need to get over themselves.
Juan Cole: So, I don’t know what to say to something like that. It’s just not true. It’s a series of absolute statements which have no basis in fact. And if you’re going to invoke Patricia Crone, you have to be careful because she changed her mind. Later in life she wrote about Muslim warfare for the in encyclopedia of the Quran and she and then she wrote a few popular articles. She repudiated almost everything that she had earlier said in life. She said the early Muslim sources are probably generally right. Muhammad was a historical individual and his ideas of warfare if anything were much gentler than the contemporary ideas in the Byzantine Empire.
Derek Lambert: Interesting. And then Steve Watson again, thank you for the super chat. You can’t legislate educate for stupid, neither can you cure it.
Juan Cole: Yeah, you know, you’re talking to an educator. I’ve taught at the University of Michigan since 1984. I’ve taught thousands of undergraduates. I’ve never met any human being who isn’t educable. I think that’s simply not true. And I think if you go through life thinking that way, you will cut yourself off from a lot of really important experiences of a positive nature.
The historicity of Mecca
Derek Lambert: Thank you so much for your answer to that. Acharia thank you for the super chat again. Too many assumptions prove human settlement in Mecca by corroborating with mentions from any surrounding imperial sources since antiquity till [unclear]. I’m not sure of the time here, but: “Too many assumptions. Prove human settlement in Mecca by corroborating with mentions from any surrounding imperial sources since antiquity till I don’t—
Juan Cole: I think the person is bringing up the question of the historicity of the city of Mecca which some academics have brought into question because it’s not mentioned in any external sources. Medina is which was called Yathrib. Yathrib is mentioned in inscriptions. It’s mentioned in a Sasanian administrative manual. But there isn’t any mention of Mecca in external sources. Ahmad Al-Jallad was looking at inscriptions on the way from Taif to Mecca and he found them facing away from Mecca. And he argues first of all people were obviously going from Taif to Mecca and making these inscriptions along the way otherwise they wouldn’t be facing that direction. So he’s argued that there’s some epigraphic and archaeological reason to think Mecca was there.
And he you know I think personally I don’t think there’s any reason to doubt that Mecca existed and Sean Anthony has shown that it was widely referred to in 7th century Syriac sources. I think the whole question only arises from you know an extreme use of the Cartesian method which was common in the 19th century with regard to Christianity as well. You know, you doubt everything until it can be proven. And I think that can be useful to doubt things as an academic way of proceeding. But it also can be taken to extremes and become ridiculous. And I think, you know, doubting the Mecca existed is one of those. The other problem is that it’s orientalist.
There were lots of cities in the world that the Greek sources and the Syriac sources don’t know about. There were millions of people living in those places. So that it doesn’t show up in geographical works written in the in the Eastern Roman Empire is not an argument for it not existing unless you think that the Eastern Romans are kind of white people and only white people’s knowledge really counts. So I worry a little bit about an orientalist substrate to a question like that.
Derek Lambert: Yeah, you could do that with Nazareth as well. And we have heard people say that.
Personal background and politics
Derek Lambert: Stephan Byer, thank you for the super chat. Did you resign from the Bahá’í Faith? Why did Iran claim it would wipe Israel off the map or simply that it would disappear from the pages of history? This is more of a political and a personal—
Juan Cole: Yeah, I think you’re getting pretty far afield with those questions. I was a member of the Bahá’í Faith when I was young. But for various reasons it wasn’t my cup of tea in the end. That’s all I would say about it. And I you know I’ve written till I was blue in the face about this allegation that Ahmadinejad said he would wipe Israel off the face of the earth. And so I think you can look that up pretty easily on the internet. Well, he didn’t say that. It was a mistranslation of what he said, but it became a tagline for all the articles ever written about Israel and Iran. Actually, the evidence seems to be all on the other side of if anybody wipes people off the map, seems to be Netanyahu.
The Ebionites and Islam
Derek Lambert: Byproduct of Will. Thank you so much for the five jewels, my friend. Steve Watson is back again. Thank you, Steve. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Harvest and sort the wheat from the tares in the barn. Those that have ears listen. Thank you for the super chat, my friend. Not a question. Appreciate the statement. Pegman Pageman, forgive me if I’m terrible with names. I apologize. Thank you so much for the five jewels. Go team. I really appreciate that. And then hippie hermeticist with the last super chat I have in here is do you think the Ebionites are the philosophical ancestors of Islam? They both have low Christology if you compare them to the Constantinople trinitarians and such.
What are your thoughts?
Juan Cole: Yeah, you know, those are I think Gabriel Said [Reynolds] has argued that this kind of 19th early 20th century chase for heresiographies in the background of Islam is fruitless because you know to the extent that the Ebionites existed and were as commonly believed there’s no evidence that they existed in the time of the prophet or in Western Arabia. So why not just say that he has a low Christology and that there have been other movements that did.
Derek Lambert: Yeah, that’s a great way to respond. Thank you, Hippie, for being here, brother. You know, I love you. Stefan Byer again just dropped the super chat as we were speaking. We need Juan Cole to come back and discuss Bábism. Is it Bábism?
Juan Cole: Bábism.
Babism and the Bahá’í Faith. Well, that’s not going to happen. That’s a part of my life I’ve put behind me.
Derek Lambert: Okay, Stefan, you heard the man himself. Thank you so much for the super chat.
Noah and ancient flood stories
Derek Lambert: Master Builder, thank you so much for the super chat. Noah is considered a prophet in Islam. My question is, quote, “Is the Noah story a myth version of a natural ice age? Were Noah and Abraham allegorical?” End quote.
Juan Cole: Well, the Noah in the Quran is just a retelling of the Noah story in the Bible. And that’s Noah’s story in the Bible is a trope that existed in ancient Near Eastern mythology. It’s you know a form of it exists in the in the Gilgamesh literature from ancient Mesopotamia.
So the idea of the long lived sage Utnapishtim and the flood, and all of these things, those were just general Near Eastern ideas we know pre-existed the written bible by millennia. So all of those stories come from a Near Eastern environment.
Derek Lambert: All right, I think we ran out of super chats, and I’ve kept you here for far too long. I hope you don’t mind me calling you one, but, you know—
Juan Cole: No, we must— I can’t think of anybody who ever amounted to anything who was called professor.
Islamophobia in the West
Derek Lambert: Well, I got one question and I think it needs to this needs some breathing room. I need think people need to chew on this and think about this. There’s a lot of fear-mongering that we have in our in our propaganda about Islam, about Muslims in general in the West, our political situation that we’re in. And the question is more of a final address by you to the Western world, which is the predominant world that watches my channel, of people who are being told that there’s a takeover that’s going to happen. You need to be terrified of Muslims. We’ve got people in the Senate now that are Islam, that are Muslims who practice Islam.
There’s all sorts of stuff right now that is in the air. You’ve been studying it for a long time. You’ve met thousands of Muslims. You know both sides. You’ve heard and seen both worlds. What is your wisdom, advice, encouragement, you know, for people who are afraid and being told by their news, their favorite news channel. You don’t even have to name them. They’re all over as you know. To be worried that we are under threat, that this is a takeover, that all these kinds of things. What kind of encouragement would you give to them?
Juan Cole: Well, the first thing I would say is that, you know, I’m a very widely traveled person and have lived in many different countries, traveled to many different countries, and human beings just aren’t very different from one another. If you think about it, if the geneticists are right and Homo sapiens is roughly 200,000 years old, there hasn’t been time for us as a species to differentiate very much. If you do a genetic analysis of the Irish and the Chinese who are at the two poles of the human expansion through the world out of Africa that their genes are identical. So you know we make a big deal out of the phenotype or the way people look but that’s just an ad adaptation to the natural environment.
You know, if you get a lot of UV rays, you there will be a selection for darker skin. If you get too few UV rays because you need it to make vitamin D, there will be a selection for very light skin. A longer nose helps you to insulate the brain from really cold air. You don’t need that in a tropical area. So people have pug noses but that phenotype is a very tiny part of the human genome and our brains are all the same. They all work the same. We all smile. There are lots of things that are universal. We all show compassion. So this idea that people are different from one another is just wrong to begin with.
And we exaggerate the phenotypal differences, the outside differences, how people pray, how they look, how long their nose is, all those sorts of things which are irrelevant to character. And so that’s the first thing to say is that the whole premise of prejudice and bigotry as based on human difference is wrong because we aren’t different from one another to begin with. And then this Islamophobia that we’re living through now has a history. You know, it’s as a historian, I can tell you back in the 80 back in the 80s when the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan and it was the height of the Cold War, the many forces in the United States on the right felt a real need to help the mujahideen the people who fight jihad.
In Afghanistan against the Soviets.
And they did a biblical checklist which they handed out across the nation to advise people how they should vote for Congress and Senate. And one of the 10 principles that you had to uphold to be a biblical representative in Congress was that you supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan. You supported the jihadis, the Muslim jihadis in Afghanistan. So obviously we’re not there anymore, right?
The Soviet Union fell. Then in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, you had 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and so forth. So the Muslims be, you know, got substituted for the Soviets as the enemy in some ways. Although it never made any sense because if you look the United States keeps a list of major non-NATO allies. They’re mostly Muslim. Egypt, [clears throat] Bahrain, Pakistan.
We have very few non-NATO allies in Latin America and outside of NATO, you know, in Europe itself. But then we have all of these major non-NATO allies who are Muslim. So how could they be the enemy if they’re also the ally? It doesn’t it doesn’t really make any sense. It’s just I really have to say I think there are people in the United States who are very wealthy too wealthy they should be taxed more. Who feel that they can divide the Americans. We Americans can be divided so that we don’t notice that they are robbing us every day that there’s corruption that there’s in social injustice and they could concentrate us on look over there these are the people you have to worry about this is the real threat and they you know pe people have done this through American history my family was originally German Catholics when they came to this country and it was a time of the Know-Nothings and cath German Catholic churches were sometimes set a fire as happened in Philadelphia in the 19th century.
And you know it’s a trick we play on the most recent immigrant group to make them the enemy somehow and to make that a basis for the elite to rob the rest of us. And unfortunately nowadays they’ve decided that the Muslims would be a good tool for this purpose. It’s nothing to do with Islam or Muslims. If you know, as I said, actual Muslims, they’re the nicest people. The major I say the major danger they pose to us is that they are very generous and they’re universally food pushers. So, we have to be careful about putting on weight around them. [Laughter.]
Derek Lambert: Okay. First of all, I love what you said there. And I think if I’m not mistaken, the population in America is like 1% or somewhere around there. It’s not a very high percent. And there’s people who are losing their minds, worried that like we’re going to lose America, I don’t know, to Islam. And I think there’s so many, like you said, fears and phobias about Muslims or Islam. And I just felt like that was an important statement needed by you.
And I agree with you again. It’s I can’t disagree with the billionaire statement and the idea of taxing some of these people to help people just at the bottom survive. I will never be a billionaire unless I can’t imagine it happen. I mean, goodness, it’d be amazing if someone actually left me their estate or business and somehow I ended up there. I just don’t ever see myself even being a millionaire. I’d be I’d love that, but I just don’t see it happening. And so many of us are just trying to live and survive. And I think there’s a good way of dividing by pointing at an enemy that isn’t an enemy.
Creating one, a ghost, so to speak, that you know is they’re
Luqman and Greek philosophy
Derek Lambert: Making it bigger than what really any of it really is. Again, my friend, I’m going to butcher your name and I don’t even want to play around butchering your name. Thank you for the super chat. “Can you please ask him what he thinks about Luqman [and] Luke in the Quran?” I don’t know exactly where this is coming from.
Juan Cole: Luqman is a figure in the Quran a wisdom figure. And I argue in one of my articles and it’s not my original discovery but I think there’s reason to think that it’s actually a reference to an ancient Greek philosopher Alcmaeon. And that mention of Luqman in the chapter of Luqman is evidence of the Quran’s approval of the Greek philosophical tradition.
Derek Lambert: Interesting. So you wouldn’t take it as Luke. You are saying this is a Greek philosopher, Alcmaeon?
Okay. Okay. So that’s something else there. Thank you for the super chat, my friend. I’ve had, you know, a mixed review of people who’ve been watching. My audience is mostly skeptical, right? And they don’t believe. But you could see some people who are like, “Oh, you’ll see. They start off nice and then they take over, etc., etc.” Right? You have these kind of views from people based on our last thing we’re discussing. And then others who are like, “Yeah, thank you for speaking up and trying to help you know, lower some of the fear people are having because this they’re freaking out.” I know this and I only know this because I have family members who also fear this and so they’re conservatives and they are definitely fed this idea the enemy you know Muslims Islam etc.
And it’s like guys I have friends who are Muslims and they don’t and I think if you had more friends who are Muslims you would realize the human on the other side. I don’t believe Islam. Like I’m very open and upfront about I lay my cards out on the table, but I love learning history. I love studying religions. I love learning where they come from and why I think they, you know, how these things happen. And that alone to me is my passion. I don’t need to believe it in order to befriend people. Now, some people might be fundamentalist. Trust me, I got plenty of Christian nationalists who hate me.
Okay? But there’s plenty of Christians who don’t and they love me and I love them back. And the same goes for Islam with Muslims. And so I just wish right now we had a little of critical thinking and people not being fed BS on TV, the worst possible news. I’d love to have you back again in the future so we can dive deeper into some more topics because you have a lot to talk about and a lot that you have learned over the years. If that’s something you’d be willing to do. I’d love to have you back.
Closing remarks
Juan Cole: I’d be glad to come on anytime, Derek. This has been fantastic.
Derek Lambert: Everybody, I hope you had a great Sunday. This was MythVision Church today. MythVision Mosque, if you will. Okay. This was absolutely fantastic. And I hope that we can get some of the academics who are in the arena that watch MythVision and check out what we do with Islam, the Quran, etc. Maybe they have something to say and maybe I can have them join me to discuss and echo sentiment, maybe bring criticism. I don’t know. I mean, you know, I always encourage these kinds of things. So, any last words from you? I like to give my guest a final say before we wrap it up.
Juan Cole: Well, you know, as an author, the last word is always buy the book. Read it and make your own judgment about it, and see what you think.
Derek Lambert: Get the book, ladies and gentlemen. I think I already added it in the description. I’ll double-check. Either way, you got to get it. Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. Even if you’re going to criticize, go leave a review. I want to hear what you have to say. Hopefully, we get some positive ones to help his book get some more attention here. I want more people to check this out because at the end of the day, whatever happened in history, whatever really happened, I do this with Christianity. I do this with any religion. What would you rather? I mean, like, let’s if your interpretation, let’s say we could flip a coin was 50/50, Dr. Cole, and you had a violent version or you had a positive version.