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Muhammad and the Origins of Islam (Suny Series in Near Eastern Studies) Paperback – April 6, 1994
by F. E. Peters (Author)
4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 6 ratings
3.8 on Goodreads
25 ratings
An inquiry into the religious environment of the person Muslims hail as the "Envoy of God" and an attempt to trace his progress along the path from paganism to that distinctive form of monotheism called Islam.
Review
“Peters writes very well. The scholarship is excellent, and the book fills a gap in the available material. There are several lives of the Prophet, but none that does what this one does. Most are written to prove a particular thesis about the nature of the Prophet’s career. This one simply puts down what can be known with any certainty about the career of Muhammad from the point of view of the contemporary secular historian.” ― William C. Chittick
“This book will become a major point of reference for years to come.” ― Said Amir Arjomand
About the Author
F. E. Peters is Professor and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literature and History at New York University’s Near Eastern Center. He has written a number of books, including The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; Jerusalem; and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: The Classical Texts and Their Interpretation. Most recently, he has published a three-volume history of Mecca and the celebrated Islamic pilgrimage called the Hajj.
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Product details
Publisher : State University of New York Press; First Edition (April 6, 1994)
Language : English
Paperback : 352 pages
ISBN-10 : 0791418766
ISBN-13 : 978-0791418765
Lexile measure : 1420L
Item Weight : 1.14 pounds
Dimensions : 6 x 0.8 x 9 inchesBest Sellers Rank: #1,841,399 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)#437 in Muhammed in Islam
#934 in History of Islam
#151,096 in Reference (Books)Customer Reviews:
4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 6 ratings
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F.E. Peters
F. E. Peters
Francis Edward Peters is Professor Emeritus of History, Religion and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. A native of NYC, where he attended Regis H.S. he was trained at St. Louis University in Classical Languages (AB, MA) and in Philosophy (Ph.L.), and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in Islamic Studies. Peters, though formally trained as both a classicist and an Islamicist, is best known as a historian of religion, a field where he was a pioneer, and is now the leading scholar, in the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is a subject on which he has written more than twenty books, most notably the two volume The Monotheists (Princeton, 2003), The Children of Abraham. A new Edition now in the Princeton Classics series (Princeton, 2018) and The Voice, The Word, The Books: The Sacred Scriptures of the Jews, Christians and Muslims (Princeton 2007). His most recent, Jesus and Muhammad: Parallel Tracks, Parallel Lives appeared from Oxford University Press in 2010, and he has contributed as well to the Oxford Bibliographies Online. .
In addition to his more than forty years teaching everything from Homer to Hasidism in the classrooms of NYU (where he chaired both the Classics and the Middle Eastern Studies departments and won a number of teaching awards), as well as accepting visiting professorships and guest lectureships at many of America's and the Middle East's top universities and has served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, Peters has been featured on CBS' TV series Sunrise Semester and on a variety of TV documentaries and served as New York's WPIX TV anchorman for the original moon landing. He has three audio courses on tape and CD in the Barnes and Noble Portable Professor series. and has assisted in curating public exhibitions at Holy Cross College, The British Library and The New York Public Library.
Peters is currently working on a study entitled "The Construction of Christianity," a process that was begun by his followers immediately after his death and reached the initial stage of its formulation early in the second century with the first bundling of the four Gospels and Paul's letters into a New Testament. His research has resulted in a number of essays that will eventually be integrated into the finished book but are currently available on Peters' ongoing blog. available at fepeters.com. The blog also includes a number of studies on Islam, a series of autobiographical chapters from what is tentatively called "Scenes from a Life" and some not very edifying fiction. "
Top reviews from the United States
Gary Johnson
5.0 out of 5 stars Get the collectible edition if you can - this one should hold a place on your shelf.Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2017
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Over 30 years after its initial publication, F.E. Peters' scholarship remains impressive in his Muhammad and the Origins of Islam. I have read dozens of biographies and orientalist works on the subject. Peters seems to have one hand in the Oriental camp and another in the Revisionist school of thought. He walks the fence and rises above both.
2 people found this helpful
Muzaffer Muctehitzade
4.0 out of 5 stars A Life of Prophet MohammedReviewed in the United States on May 28, 2001
One of the best books about Prophet Mohammed (PBH), his life and religion of God. Author provides first a good history of Arabia prior to birth of Prophet where you get a good understanding of the environment, there are a lot of references to old greek, persian and Byzantium historians. Than mostly relying on Ibn Ishak's "Life of Mohammed" the birth and life of Mohammed is written. There are few references to Hadiths that may not necessarily be sahih or reliable but considering that they are muslim sources, author seems to take them as they are. I found this book written very nicely, all key events are described with quotations from the original sources and time to time author makes interpretations or value judgments. I found the ancient history of arabia very useful, provides you perspective and who is who type of information.
21 people found this helpful
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Benjamin Schneider
14 reviews · 1 follower
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February 2, 2013
An extremely well-written and comprehensive look at the life of Muhammad and the sources of knowledge about his life upon which historians rely. Peters provides an exceptional treatment of the conflict and interaction between paganism, the pre-Islamic Meccan cult and 'Abrahamism' in the early development of Islam and the Quranic verses.
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https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/the_histories
Recommended Citation
Schwartz, Christopher () "A Review of Peters' Muhammad and the Origins of Islam,"
The Histories: Vol. 6 : Iss. 2 , Article 7. Available at: https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/the_histories/vol6/iss2/7
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Scholarship at La Salle University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Histories by an authorized editor of La Salle University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact careyc@lasalle.edu.
The Histories, Volume 6, Number 2 35
document to what Muhammad said.”1 *
The chief difficulty of using the Koran, however, lies in the fact that it is a text without a context: its chapters, revealed to the first Muslims gradually over twelve years,
have been arranged according to length, not chronology, and as Peters notes, the scripture is exceptionally vague to historical events. “For Muhammad, unlike Jesus, there is no Josephus to provide contemporary political context,” he explains. “No literary apocrypha for a spiritual context and no Qumran scrolls.”2* Hence his turn to the other sources,
which are even more problematic than the Koran in that they have been encrusted, often deliberately, with dogmas and traditions. As a result, this is first and foremost a biography, and though it stays close to its sources, it does have a tinge of revisionism as Peters periodically attempts to extrapolate alternative meanings from the texts.
Peters’ work, serving simultaneously as capstone for two centuries of scholarship and a diving board for the next century is immensely valuable. This is not to say that it is
not without problems. For example, almost from the beginning we run into difficulties. Although Peters alleges to have written this book for a general audience, the way in which it references sources and Islamic terms without much explanation clearly indicates that this is not a work for the uninitiated.
The book consists of twelve chapters, with a preface and an appendix. This appendix, entitled “The Quest for the Historical Muhammad” was written following the conceptual lines of an article by him which appeared under the same title in The International Journal of Middle East Studies3 It is among the richest and most valuable sections of the entire work in that it discusses the numerous technical problems which
await the historian who attempts to engage the Koran and Hadith, problems that originate
in the obscure—and, for the pious, controversial—editorial processes which gave birth to
the documents. Judging this “daunting stuff,” Peters opted to have it in the back of the book. Ironically, this appendix is among the most readable of all his chapters, presenting its information in a succinct and pre-digested manner; if there is one bone the reader
should have to pick with him, it is that this wasn’t the very first chapter.
The book really picks up speed in its last seven chapters, when Peters delves into Muhammad’s life, from his lineage to his birth and marriage through to his war with Mecca and his death. However it is a bit of a slog in its opening five chapters, when he details the situational backdrop, namely, the al-Jahaliyya, the “Age of Ignorance,” otherwise known as pre-Islamic Arabia. This is the weakest section of the text due to its tendency for incoherence. For example, his depiction of Meccan geography is, to be frank, garbled. This incoherence makes it seem as though Peters has never stepped foot inside the holy city, which is very probable given the Ottoman and later Saudi authorities’ dislike for khaffir - intrusion—and it also seems that he never conferred with anyone, Muslim or not, who has.
Another example of the weakness of these chapters is that Peters’ description of pre-historic Mecca, especially its founding, is overly dependent upon the legends recorded by Ishaq, at-Tabari, al-Kalbi, and some tafsiris (Koranic commentators).4 He
1 Peters, F .E. Muhammad and the Origins of Islam. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994): p. 257
5 Ibid., p. 259
1 Peters, F.E, “The Quest for the Historical Muhammad.” The International Journal of Middle East Studies.
23 (1991), 291-315. Available in full text online at JSTOR. 4 Peters, Muhammad, pp. 1-30
The Histories, Volume 6, Number 2 36
does an admirable job of including what little is known of the Romans’ Arabia Felix and Arabia Deserta, as well as Abyssianian, Persian, and Yemeni perspectives, but he gives too short shrift to tantalizing references in other sources, such as “Makoraba,” the city’s possible cameo in Ptomely’s work, or “Bakkah,” an alternative name for Mecca which appears in the Koran’s third chapter.5 His discussion of pre-historic Mecca is also the first warning that, although Peters surpasses his predecessors in his incorporation of relevant scholarly research findings published during the 1970s and 80s, he cannot escape the narrative order imposed by the Muslim writers. Indeed, a solid third of the entire book consists of excerpts, many of which are pages long—academically it is surprising that he opted for such a style.
The professor is seemingly trapped not only by his Muslim predecessors’ historical framework, but also their exegetical system, in which the Koran is all too neatly and conveniently divided into Meccan and Medinan chapters. Peters does little—indeed, he is little able—to posit alternative approaches beyond merely casting reasonable doubt upon certain verses and at other times offering revisionist ideas on the why’s and how’s about such-and-such sentence or word. Nonetheless, whenever he does decide to exercise his speculative muscle is also when the book shines. The two best examples of this is his whole eye-opening treatments of the “Satanic Verses” incident and
Muhammad’s cantankerous relationship with the Jews of Yathrib (later, Medina), during which he utilizes the Koran itself as his primary point of engagement.
His discussion of Muhammad’s conflicts with the Jews highlights the crux of Peters’s entire project, namely, that the Koran is not (or not only) a scripture, the eternal, unchanging Word of God, but also an artifact of history, as much shaped by events as also a shaper, and that Muhammad was himself as much a product of circumstances as a
visionary and prodigy. The reason that this book even needs to exist lies in the fact that “Muslim tradition found it increasingly difficult to accept that Muhammad had been, perhaps for most of his life, before his call, a pagan. The doctrine of Muhammad’s ‘impeccability,’ [as well as the Koran’s eternality] was grounded, like its Christian counterpart, Mary’s perpetual virginity, on the principle of quod decet.”6
Again and again in-Peters’s book we are reminded of how Muslim tradition has encrusted the historical sources. That Peters is even able to wedge in as many reconsiderations as he does makes his endeavor very worthwhile. Yet, it must be pointed
out that there are some glaring oversights in the text. Most startling is when he fails to discuss the historical origins of one of Islam’s most distinctive features, namely, its unitarianism vis-a-vis Christianity. Though the Koran deems Jesus Christ the al-Masihu, “the Messiah,” and appears to incorporate miraculous stories of him from apocryphal sources, including possibly the Gospel of Thomas, it seems to reject the Crucifixion, and it is outright in its opposition to the Trinity, which it deems a kind of hidden theological polytheism.
These notions have been at the root of Islam’s competition with Christianity, but their appearance in the Koran are somewhat startling and puzzling, considering that Muhammad had no direct conflict, armed or otherwise, with peninsular Christians. What few fights he did have with Christians occurred only in the form of ill-conceived raids into the far-away lands of Sinai and Syria. Moreover, after “The Year of the Elephant,”
5 Ibid., p. 64 and Koran 3:96
6 Ibid., p. 131
The Histories, Volume 6, Number 2 37
in which an Abyssian-backed Abraha expedition was trounced by Meccan forces forty
years before Muhammad’s ministry began,7 Christians were never serious competitors for the prize, that is, West-Central Arabia.
Another major oversight on the part of Peters is the Koran’s notion of al-khatam- an-nabbiyin, “the seal of the prophets.” The term khatam refers to a wax seal or ornament, something moldable and with the implication of authority. Muslim tradition has conflated its meaning with the term khatim, which literally means “final” or “last.”
This interpretation sparked civil wars between orthodox and heterodox forces within the Caliphate, heaped fuel onto the Sunni-Shia fire, and dangerously constrained the development of mysticism in Islam, a natural aspect of most organized religions but one about which most Muslims have been undecided, often violently so, as with the recent case of the Baha'i. How and why this important notion, which appears only once in the Koran, ever occurred at all, and what exactly it might really mean, is not discussed.
There is one more oversight, indeed, a critical flaw: the complete and utter dearth of archeological information. Historians tend to conceive of their discipline as dealing with sola biblia, texts alone. Yet, in order to understand pre-historic societies such as Muhammad’s (the Koran literally birthed the literate age of Arabian civilization), it is absolutely vital that they include material cultural sources in their analyses. Nowhere is this flimsiness of archeologically uninformed history more pronounced in Peters’s book than in his description of the founding of Mecca, as well as when he is discussing Muhammad’s wars with other settlements and cities, especially the polytheist redoubt of Ta’if and his failed invasion of Byzantine Syria.
Truth be told, this may have been something beyond Peters’s control. Modem archeology’s emergence as a discipline over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has coincided with the rise of the House of Saud, a royal family who has pegged their political fortunes upon an ideology of religious primitivism and as a result has been very hostile toward scientific investigation of Islam’s origins. While the various regimes of Ethiopia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, even Yemen, have welcomed archeologists,
the Saudis, who enjoy clinging to such erroneous beliefs as the Arabian peninsula being “100% Muslim” (disregarding the presence of Bedouin polytheists in the central regions, or the legions of Filipino Christian workers in the midst of their cities), have shunned them as possible “threats to the faith.”
This brings home the final and crucial point: historians of Islam mustn’t continue to accept the hoary assertion that Islam was bom “in the full light of history.” They must
not be fooled that the “original” sources, by virtue of their being so copious, so variously
attested, and their redaction so clear and “unambiguous,” are accurate. Neither we moderns nor our predecessors are in any position to know exactly what happened and how this grand religion grew from such humble, unlikely, and uncooperative beginnings. Peters’s book, therefore, is a reminder that the origins of Islam may, when all is said and done, have to be sought outside the dominion of historiography; the truth of what happened—why it happened—is probably to be found in the same place from which all other great religions are bom: inside the human being.
New York: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Pg. 334 List Price: $29.95
7 Ibid., pp. 84-88
