Part 2 (B) - The Example of The Uninformed
Rejecting the Unrejectable
- Rejecting Muslim sources
Perhaps one of the most clearly unacceptable positions offered by Crone and Cook is their refusal to accept the Muslim traditions outright. One might find room for sympathy in treating the Muslim reports with scepticism, as being liable to bias and exaggeration. Indeed this is the pattern in most historical documentation. It must be recognised however, that material written by non-Muslims is liable to be equally, if not more unreliable. To reject the whole corpus of Muslim documentation is in itself absurd, but to reject it in favour of purely hostile sources is even more ridiculous. We find it even more remarkable that Smith uses this type of argumentation when he has rejected it outright himself when used against his own prophet "Paul."
This grave error in methodology has been pointed out by several scholars in their critique of the "demythologisers":
"This is the argument: it the existence of the Koran is not attested by "hard evidence" till the end if the seventh century, or attested in its historical context before the middle of the eighth, "the historicity of the Islamic tradition is in some degree problematic", and the are no "cogent internal grounds for rejecting it" or cogent external grounds for accepting it" . . . The Islamic sources are not able to "arbitrate" between these two different approaches and "the only way out of the dilemma is thus to step outside the Islamic tradition altogether and start again." That is, two approaches are equally feeble, and therefore the only way is to adopt one of them; if it is the "only way", why is it not unreasonable to proceed in the usual fashion, that is do just the opposite?" (N. Daniel, Journal of Semitic Studies)
What is noteworthy is that the accepted methodology is to use the Muslim sources, and not reject them, something which the present writers cannot escape. N. Daniel comments:
"The first characteristic of the method is the rejection of Islamic evidence, except when it suits . . . The weakness of the method is that the actual evidence used, even if it were true, is not evaluated; nor is more than a cursory attempt made to evaluate the Islamic evidence which was discounted in advance - apart from eighth-century evidence when convenient." (Journal of Semitic Studies)
The charge levelled by Smith in his papers, that Muslims have been afraid to respond to the challenges of modern critical scholarship is either an expression of his ignorance or a blatant lie. He is obviously completely unaware of the devastating refutation against Goldziher and Schacht by the likes of Azmi and others. If Smith's complaints are concerning Hagarism then even Crone and Cook admit in the preface to their book that:
"This is a book written by infidels for infidels, and it is based in what from any Muslim perspective must appear an inordinate regard for the testimony to infidel sources. Our account is not merely unacceptable; it is also one which any Muslim whose faith is as a grain of mustard seed should find no difficulty in rejecting." (Hagarism, ( p.viii)
The fact of the matter is that the so-called Christian and Jewish witnesses are less likely to produce a reliable source for our information about the origins of Islam.
N. Daniel continues:
"It is easier to believe that Muslims are better witnesses to Islam than Christian or Jewish who may more naturally be supposed to have known very little about it. Even after living among Muslims for a millennium they often knew very little; and they do not make more acceptable witnesses for the earliest days. But the authors are happy to take evidence from Christians and Jews in the eighth century, though without explaining why this now becomes acceptable evidence for 'religious events in the seventh century'."
Smith is himself a proof of this very phenomena. We find his work replete with misunderstandings, errors and misinformation concerning Islam. Incredibly simple mistakes are made, such as the Muslim's five prayers all being in the day, and his mentioning the six beliefs of Iman. Even in his paper on the topic of the sources of Islam he misunderstands the significance of different genres, he claims the Qur'an is the "mother of the books" whereas in-fact the "mother of the books" are the preserved tablets in which everything is written concerning the beginning of creation to the end. He also mentions that Muhammed's cousin was Waraka, when in fact it was his wife Khadija's cousin, and that "even Muslim sources state" he was a Catholic, and that Bahira was a Nestorian, whereas in fact Muslim sources say nothing of the sort. This was the propaganda of the medieval polemicists like John of Damascus. In fact Smith is so confused that he contradicts himself later on the same issue. Now if this is the case of someone who has a degree in Islamic studies, how about someone less informed? The fact is that these sources are not only likely to be replete with ignorant statements, but also with outright lies and distortions. Are we to believe, for example, that because Peter the Venerable added nine chapters to his "translation" of the Qur'an, that in fact the Qur'an at that time did have nine more chapters, and that the Muslim sources that report otherwise are not to be trusted, or for example, that Joseph Smith's words are more likely to be trusted in respect to information about Islam than these.
Joseph Van Ess in The Making of Islam arrives at a similar conclusion:
"A second methodological problem is the deliberate reduction of the available sources. The authors proceed from contemporary non-Muslim (Christian and Jewish) reports and leave aside the entire Muslim tradition itself . . . But we should not forget that these texts, though contemporary, only show how the new phenomenon was seen, not how it actually was. If we agree that Islam, at this early stage, was still trying to define its "identity" then we cannot demand that an observer from outside who could even less evaluate the radical novelty of the event should have a clearer concept of what was really happening."