Islam’s Origins: Myth and Material Evidence

Good evening, I'm Terry McCarthy, I'm the President, the Academy is delighted that you could come and join us tonight for the Nina Maria Garrison Lecture, made possible by Nina Fon melting into one of our great supporters and our speaker tonight, Fred Donner, is at the University of Chicago and I promise not to say anything more about the vortex beyond simply reminding you that at Barney Berlin we are now 40 degrees hotter than where Fred normally works, so Fred He's as happy to be here with us this semester as he could be. Imagine this is Peter Beer, he's my professor of Near Eastern history at the University of Chicago, he got his PhD at Princeton, and he taught me history at Yale before I went to the Windy City.

He has written a lot of books, including narratives of the early Islamic conquests. of Islamic

origins

and more recently Muhammad and the Believers, which generated a lot of attention, as I understand it, and while you are here you will be examining the collection of Arabic papyri in Berlin, and Berlin has a very large collection of Arabic papyri, many of them actually does not have them. It's been examined as we understand it and we actually have this papyrus here that's about four thousand years old, so when we go through it later, please be very careful, Fred, we'll explain how it all works and then we'll have a little chat. and then we'll open it up to questions and, but I'll give you Fred Donner.

Thank you very much Terry for your kind words. I think he was wrong. Oh, I think it's four thousand minutes long. We will deliver it later and before continuing. I really start. I would like to thank Terry and the American Academy in Berlin for allowing me to be here this semester. It is truly an honor and a pleasure to be here. A wonderful place. You know, today I met with one of the many wonderful staff members. members of the Jessica Academy to Veda about some routine errands that we all have to do with her and at the end, characteristically, she asked, well, how are you adjusting?

Are you enjoying it here? Is everything okay for you? and I told him. her, well, yes, I love being here, it's like going to heaven without the inconvenience of having to die first, so thank you to the Academy, I thank the Academy, I'm sure that all my colleagues feel the same that they are here like me as colleagues and I thank all of you for coming tonight and I hope that you are avid and generous supporters of the Academy because it is certainly a worthwhile organization so my topic tonight is the

myth

of the

origins

of Islam and

material

evidence

, as most of you surely know, has long existed as a standard. or traditional view of how Islam began in reference to this standard view, the great French historian Anestine said in the 19th century that Islam was born in the light of history and I quote, it's not really a quote because it would have been in French, but is close, but since then it has become increasingly clear that what I call traditional is like an origins narrative that almost everyone accepted with considerable confidence and is much less certain than we once thought at first;

However, I think I need to very quickly outline the outlines of this traditional view of how Islam began for those of you who are not familiar with it and I know there are many people in the audience, many of you are my colleagues from university or from other places and they are very familiar with him, so Citrus News was present for about eight In nine minutes I will finish this, so at the center of this traditional narrative is the person of Muhammad, who is recognized by Muslim tradition as the Prophet who brought the revelation of God to his followers.

The traditional date of death of Muhammad is given as 632. Common Era as early as the first third of the 7th century so he was or is seen as the founder of a new religion which we call Islam and he was originally born and raised in the city from Mecca here a photograph of Mecca not from the time of the Prophet, I'm sorry to say, but around 1900, maybe or in the late 19th century, early 20th century, now the city of Mecca was small even at the end of the century XIX, of course, very small in the 7th century, maybe a few thousand people, but it was a city anyway. which had a pagan or polytheistic population which is people who worshiped many different gods and had an important sanctuary as a center in the center of the town which you can see here the famous Kaaba or so a cube means in Arabic a black building stone There was a courtyard around it, but there was the Kaaba and this was the center of the areas of pagan rites that the Quraysh attempted, the tribe of Mecca supervised and benefited from taking care of all the pilgrims who came to the city, so The Mecca had this important cult. life or so they tell us and it was also a city that was sustained by commercial life because it was the center of a caravan trade in which the merchants of Mehcad organized caravans, headed south to Yemen and north to Syria and the northeast to Iraq and So, carrying various goods, some of them repeatedly luxury items, over great distances and this was part of the economic base of the city.

What am I doing wrong? Wrong button. Well, there is another image, I think it's a little more recent, but closer so you can see. see the Kaaba shrine in the middle and several other buildings around us, around 40 years old. Muhammad was raised in this city in a pagan environment, but he was and seems to have been a promising young man, but around the age of 40 he was in a kind of retreat where he had to go to get away from everything and sit quietly on the outskirts of the city. city ​​and reflect on life or whatever and at one point he began to receive what he took from God's revelations, that is, he felt like he was overwhelmed by this sense of presence that he was seeing and especially hearing things and in a kind of a trance state, they tell us, and when he left there he had a passage of text that was like engraved in his memory and he could recite it, so he proceeded to go back to the beginning with great fear and tell his family and friends about these experiences , some of them later became followers of their new religious ideas that were part of this, so this is in the Muslim tradition.

This is the revelation of the Word of God to the Prophet and he had these Reposado yata Khalid er in his life when he got a new download of more

material

and this material was memorized by him but it was also memorized by the followers of him. He would recite it to them and gradually they would learn it. Someone wrote it down in pieces of material that were written down and after his death all these recitations were compiled by a sort of editorial board and all the written pieces were put together and produced a sort of single text complete with just the text of the Quran. , the Holy Scriptures and Muslims, so for Muslims the Quran is literally the Word of God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad and in case you haven't noticed, of course, the Quran is in Arabic, so God Speaks Arabic, so you know, if you have any sense of wanting to be well taken care of in the afterlife, you should definitely take good care of it.

What were the fundamental ideas he was preaching? We can deduce most of them from the text of the Quran itself, the central Of course, the idea of ​​monotheism is a very strict understanding of monotheism that there is only one God, the Creator God, he creates the world, he creates us , creates everything in the universe and that because this God is all-powerful and all-creative, we owe Him our gratitude. forms of prayer and so on obviously the tradition the package of religious ideas also includes the notion of prophecies and some of Muhammad was a prophet the idea that God selects specific individuals to receive his guidance for humanity and includes the idea of ​​a kind of The revealed book that contains some type of guidance or law for the community of believers is also quite prevalent in certain parts of the Quran and are the warnings about the imminent Last Judgment, that is, the idea that the end of times will perhaps come soon and that we better be prepared for it and that what will happen at the end of time is that we will all be dragged before the divine judge, including all the dead who will rise among the dead, all souls will be awakened, everyone will appear before God and we will all be judged individually depending on how you behaved and this life we ​​have or and then we will be rewarded by being sent to heaven or punished by being sent to hell and this of course means that there is also a strong emphasis on mercy o Fearful of God, this is the idea that if you are going to be saved in this life you really need to behave well, you should not do things that God considers hateful in social discourse, etc., so there is a strong emphasis on godly behavior as well. of this more abstract notion of one God who creates all good, Muhammad's preaching of these ideas, you know, seems to have gained some followers, quite a few, but it also generated quite a bit of opposition for us in the city of Mecca in his hometown. of some of their relatives, the easiest way to put it is because well, maybe they felt that their economic ties were in some way threatened, but mainly I think they were dismayed that the idea that some of their ancestors, since this is a culture that was committed to them, was an organized tribal culture and everyone identified themselves as descendants of some ancestor whom they revered, the idea that these ancestors were pagans and therefore we would go to hell was not good news for them, so they didn't really like this. set of preachings, so there was increasing opposition to Muhammad and his followers, who would try to do their prayers and other devotions from time to time and would be ridiculed or abused in various ways by their inhabitants, so eventually it was necessary for him they did.

Fortunately, just as things were coming to a head, a delegation of people came from the city of Yathrib, which is about 350 kilometers north of Mecca in western Arabia, and invited Muhammad and his followers to coming to Yathrib to be arbiters of their own cities were a kind of internal disputes between different tribal groups, so Muhammad and his followers in the year 622 emigrated from Mecca to Yathrib, which would later be known as Medina, the city of the Prophet. This event is known as the immigration hedge. and it is an important moment because it marks the beginning of the first autonomous type of autonomous Muslim community in Mecca.

Muslims could not be autonomous. There was loss of non-believers who really controlled things, but in Yathreb. or Medina were able to organize themselves as a community as they wished and it is also important like Hydra and 622 because it is the starting date of the Muslim calendar, later it was taken as the starting point of the Muslim calendar, so when You see, the Muslim dates go back to this event in 622, although because the Muslim year is only 356 days long in the decision three hundred per lunar year, it means that you cannot simply subtract 622 from a common era date and get the correct Islamic dates.

You have to go to a table or a conversion program somehow, so Mohammed was living in Yathreb with his followers. There was tension between him and his followers, on the one hand, and some of the people in Yathreb who joined him and became very close. For he and others in Yathrib, who again felt a certain distance, adopted a somewhat more skeptical attitude towards his activities, so he was trying for a long period of seven or eight years, and successfully, overcoming the opposition of these various groups among them. them, the most famous or infamous episodes have to do with several large Jewish clans in the city of Yathrib, he had plans for people who were Jewish but also people who were not Jewish, presumably they were pagans of some kind, they all converted to Islam fairly and they accepted.

The idea of ​​monotheism (the Jews, of course, were already monotheists) did not change at all, but it seems to have developed according to tradition in tents or tensions between Muhammad and his followers, on the one hand, in some of these Jewish clans , which resulted in some pretty ugly episodes where the Jews were expelled from the community or in one case the community was the Jewish clan was basically all the men were executed and the women and children taken as slaves, yeah These stories are true and that is a question about this. All later narration of what happens, but we will come to that another time in any case, while he was consolidating his position in Yathreb or Medina, he and his followers were also beginning to proselytize outside the city of Yathreb and gaining followers among different tribal groups and small villages, mostly pastoral, ematic tribal groups in the surrounding area, it was finally possible to confront the city of Mecca, where it had come from, the Meccans had attacked a couple of times, in fact, finally, after several years, the Prophet was able to return and take control.

Mecca, in a more or less peaceful manner, simply entered and occupied it and the Makkans agreed that they would accept his new faith and admit him into the city, forso he and his followers entered and made a pilgrimage to the site of the Kaaba. and now they were part of this growing state in western Arabia with Medina at its center. The Prophet stayed in Medina. He returned to Dunedin, stayed in his hometown and thus began the process of expansion of the Islamic State which was surprisingly rapid thereafter. After his death in 632, rather than the state falling apart, his followers organized and began pushing to seize larger areas, a process generally called something like Islamic conquest or the Arab conquest.

I don't really like any of the terms, but That is the term that is generally used for this and in the process of this, who can see on the map, sees that there is a very rapid expansion. This dark green is the area that was more or less controlled at the time of the prophet's death within a Within a couple of years, the rest of the Arabian Peninsula had been taken by armies organized by his first successor, a man named Abu Bakr and shortly after From then on, in a few more years, a decade or two, this whole area, including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and much of Iran, was taken and they continued to advance towards the horizons, so that, let's say, in 740 they controlled all the way from Spain to the Indus River Valley here, so it was a very rapid expansion for the first 30 or 4 years, kind of inexplicably rapid, and historians, including myself, have been baffled about this for a long time. time trying to understand how this could be, especially since the expansion began in a place, namely Medina and Western Arabia that, firstly, had no tradition of statecraft and, secondly, had no obvious resources to support an expansion, so how was it possible and in the process overthrowing one of the two great powers of the time?

The sustained empire that had been situated on the Iranian plateau in Iraq in this area completely overthrew it and took away about half of the later Roman or Byzantine Empire, which was centered in Constantinople but had controlled Syria and Egypt and large areas around the world. In the Mediterranean they managed to wrest these territories from these two empires somehow without obvious means of doing so. Here is another map that shows the expansion and shows it in a rather speculative way. I think I can tell the possible roots of some of the armies in this multifaceted process of expansion, okay, so that's basically the outline of the traditional origins narrative.

I've already mentioned some of the problems that seem to be here, but not all by any means, the problems are numerous and in fact very deep, first of all, this image. It is based on a voluminous image, we have tons of details on all aspects, but it is based on sources that are much later, the sources are mostly literary sources, chronicles, biographical dictionaries and the like that come from the later Muslim community and most were not written until two or three centuries after the events that are supposed to describe the life of the Prophet. they are not from the 7th century, they are from the late 8th century or the 9th century, the 10th century and even later in some In some cases, yes, some of these later sources are based on earlier reports that were apparently transmitted orally or perhaps are in doubt in notebooks that have been lost in them, so the reports are included in these later compilations, but there is very little we can do.

Let's be very skeptical about the idea that any of this stuff really goes back to original documents from the time of the Prophet or the early conquests, so in principle there's that kind of problem with the

evidence

that it's later. Another problem is that when looking at the different Muslim narratives about what happened in the origins period, we find many contradictions in the sources between one report and other reports and, well, how are these contradictions resolved? For a century or more, many people try to establish them. accounts and harmonize them, find a way to see if they could all be seen as valid, but it was sort of a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of some little thing, but more and more it seemed like it wasn't possible, there just seemed to be irreconcilable differences.

Among some of those sources, another problem was that the narrative, however it was taken from these Muslim sources of later date, seemed to conflict with the narratives we have from non-Muslim sources from primarily Christian sources that were written a little earlier, were written in the later period. 7th century to the beginning of the 8th century, so before the Muslim sources were written, we have from the Christian community some descriptions of these new people who were coming and what was happening and well, in some aspects they don't follow the sources so badly Muslims in other aspects. They seem to be quite different from what the Muslim sources say and finally, this traditional narrative is based on almost no real documentation, that is, there are no real texts, documents or artifacts that come from the same time and from the same people who were making this history and You know, historians like to work with documents, that is the most secure basis for us to reconstruct the past, but it turns out that there were very few documents available from this period and the ones that were available were basically not used and I think so.

It has not been used by Western scholars for a long time, mainly because Western scholars already had a good history packaged, the traditional big complete history that emerges from these narrative sources, and therefore by working with the actual documents, which are miserable pieces of iris and coins, etc. With all these little bits of information, it's very difficult to get the big picture, it's very difficult to put them together, it's much easier to just correctly read these narratives of what really happened and I think that was one of the reasons why, at least For about a hundred years people didn't really pay much attention to the documentary evidence, but now that people seem to be more aware, since around the 1970s scholars are more aware that we can't continue using the origins narrative. traditional as a base.

As a basis for our own understanding we have to come to a historically more scientific view of what was happening, I think there has been a bit of a paradigm shift but Western academics tried to find ways to get a better picture, one of course was looking at traditional sources like these and trying to make minor modifications to harmonize things, but like I said, that wasn't really a process that worked very well, here are some of the things that have come up over the last few years. I could put my own book in there, but I did a recent one, but I didn't.

On the other hand, there were some scholars who said that this traditional picture is so completely wrong that we should throw it away completely and start again using only documents and a few things and in fact I think this goes too far, the dispute of a scholar John Juan, who was American but taught at the University of London for most of his life, even opined that you know we can never know. what really happened in the early days of Islam and historians should stop trying and well, for me as a historian this is not a very satisfactory way of looking at things.

I think we need to do more. This approach is too radical. The fact is. that there are some documents that confirm fragments of information that we find in the traditional set of sources and therefore we cannot simply discard the traditional narratives entirely, although we have to be very cautious in using them and this, rather complicated, seems brief, wait. It's not too complicated, but you have a light of time at the end of the dates, so Muhammad died somewhere here around 6:30 until the Amaya dynasty passes through more than 660 animals until 715, the Abbasid dynasty overthrows them and 750 and ruled until 1250 BC. the poor, as far as we know, crystallizes well some tradition I would say a crystallization is already hearsay, but I think recent work on manuscripts of the Quran suggests that perhaps it is still undergoing some evolution until about the year 700, in reality we still don't know , this is a job. that is happening as we speak still today, so you have documentary sources produced first by the people in this movement of believers, so I put DS here to give an idea, so we have some in the 7th century and then more and more now. it could be a coin or a strap, uh, papyrus, it may not tell us much, but it does tell us something: the Christian sources, often the literary sources that are a little bit broader, some of them are earlier, so we can get information from them and try to put all this together, so the challenge now is to try to put all this together and fit it into the beginnings of the narrative sources which, as you can see, really start here, get voluminous at this point and They project back what they thought happened.

This period is much earlier, so we have to somehow work with these different categories of material and try to put together a, shall we say, more plausible narrative, so I think it makes sense to start with the oldest information dating back to the 7th century that we know. We can find the true narrative information or whatever type of material we have from the 7th century and then maybe leverage it in the narrative from two traditional sources because we feel like we can connect it and this 7th century information especially comes from two sources of information. from within the community itself, one is the plural and the texts and the other is documentary evidence like, for example, coins or papyri, so I want to start by talking a little about Portland.

I present to you a nicer image which is not very good but it is a nicer document, this is a sheet of a very old Quran that was found in Yemen in the Great Mosque of Yemen it seems to be a document from the 7th century and as I said , the Quran is generally thought to be an ancient text and, well, maybe we can guess we can use it as a quasi-documentary source of information, but the problems with it are several, one in particular being that the Quran texts don't say much. about the events of Muhammad's day when it was supposedly revealed to be the Word of God after all.

Muhammad's word is a way of giving us what we might call timeless moral lessons about how we are supposed to lead our lives, sometimes talking about earlier communities of stranger believers and prophets and what happened to them as moral lessons, so we must be wise and know. how we should behave based on these lessons is full of passages that we can take as moral exports do this and don't do that, but that doesn't really say much about what was happening at the time and then there are some passages and not a few that in They actually give us what we might call legal material or guidelines for conduct, how to behave, how to act in our lives, so that's a problem with the Quran, it doesn't really give us a lot of historical details. harsh as we would like it to be, secondly, the text of the Qur'an itself is, I think, very poorly understood by Western scholars.

What was this text? If you do not accept it as God's revelation to the Prophet, then what was it as a text? When and where? Where he came from? How did it coalesce into the way we have it now? The Islamic tradition, of course, knows that this is the revelation of God as revealed to the Prophet and laid down in a fixed form at a very early date as early as the year 650. For historians who look at this material with an open mind, I think we have to admit that the historical context of the Quran is anything but clear and the amount of time it took to consolidate into a text.

It's not clear, although I think by around 700 or so we can say with certainty that the text was pretty established, but before that I think there are still a lot of questions about what was going on with this text and hopefully only more research will clarify it. that. In question, there are even theories of a much later origin for the Quran. This same scholar I mentioned before. John Wansbrough thought that the text perhaps did not call to us until the 9th century. I think that goes too far and the evidence from the actual manuscripts of the Quran. he suggests it was before that.

He also proposed that the text did not crystallize or coalesce in Arabia, in Medina or anywhere else, except somewhere outside Arabia, perhaps in southern Iraq, where there were many Christian and Jewish communities to which it seemed to refer in Well, as I said, I think the evidence shows that the text of the Quran is for the most part early, although I think perhaps there were some later interpolations from the late 7th century, but even if the text was fixed in its written form, another The problem is that the way Arabic was written in this early period because Arabic did not have a long tradition of writing as a language at that time the writing system was extremely flawed there were many letters with several different sounds they used the same letter shape there is nodiacritical marks that are then given to be able to distinguish between these different letters that are given in the same way the vowels were not written down even the long vowels most of them were not written so that you could look at a set of letters and read them in a lots of different ways sometimes and it brings a different meaning, so even if the writing was stable, the meaning may not have been so stable, so these are all questions about the text of the Quran, as there seems to be first existed in the 7th century, but I think we can say that the text is early enough to give us at least certain things in it that keep the idea of ​​monotheism and a lot of other religious ideas cool and I think we can To say that at least it is enough to give us a good idea of ​​what were the guiding principles, the religious principles and the moral principles of this new community, the only place that suggested to them at the beginning, monotheism, concerned with the Last Judgment, living with righteousness, etc., but when we look at reading the text of the Quran we can immediately notice certain things that do not align with the traditional Muslim view.

One is that we notice that the words Islam and Muslim are rarely used in the text of the Quran, in fact the word Islam appears only eight times more than the word Islam. Muslim appears about 60 times and they mean something different from what I was told and later, after 700 or so, Muslim in the Quran means someone who submits to the will of God, the best. Solana simply means you submit to the DES, just like you. recognize that there is only one god and that he is sovereign over all of us and we have to know that you are dedicated to God in some way, it is not Muslim, then it means that you are submitted to God, but that does not mean you are a follower of a particular religion with the name Islam and similarly the word Islam means the act of submitting to God so well that it is not a name for a religion, but it does not seem to me or the The way it is used in several sentences does Quite clearly we can see an example of this in the Quran verse sura 3 or chapter 3 verse 67 where it says that Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian but was what hadith says and a Muslim, which means something like a monotheist who submitted to the will of God. will, then Abraham was in that sense a Muslim, he was not in the later sense of the capital M, he was so obviously a Muslim that 7/7 is rarely used in the Quran, Islam and even less frequently, instead we see that the main term of address in the people of the Quran to whom it is addressed and the main term of identity for these people was a related word meaning believers, which was a movement of its believers into what we know as believers, which is used about a thousand times in the Quran, it is overwhelmingly more frequent.

That is why in the 7th century I prefer not to talk about Muslims and Islam, but about the movement of believers, because it seems that that was the way these people thought of themselves and what they called themselves, and it is also very interesting when you look at the text of the Quran that there are some passages in the Quran that make it clear that Christians and Jews who after all are monotheists or consider themselves monotheists, those who are adequately pious were considered among the believers, so we have this creation of this. new community that could have included some Christians and Jews Quran 262 for example goes those who believe and Jews and Christians and Sabians those who believe in God and the last day and who act righteously will receive their reward with their Lord and will not fear or feel distress , so they are promised happiness in the afterlife because they are believers in the only God and then on the last day and so on for an hour they live righteously, that is also very important, in short, this first community that Muhammad found did not It appears to have been limited to what we call Muslims today, but apparently it was a kind of monotheistic revival movement centered on the ideas of the oneness of God, the need for piety among his followers, and the fear of the Last Judgment that again the Prophet may have expected. that happened. at any time there are some passages, since yes, the imminence of it now, the notion that some Jews and Christians may have been part of the movement of believers that we see implicit in the Quran, obviously opens many new possibilities of interpretation, for one On the other hand, it forces us to question the appropriateness of the very notion of conversion for the first generations of this movement, that is, in the 7th century, since conversion implies a movement from one clearly defined set of religious doctrines to another or from one clearly defined religious community to another, but in the early believer movement, as far as we know, we seem to have a community in which religious doctrines beyond the idea of ​​strict monotheism are still being palpable or resolved, are still being formed and There is evidence of much fluidity between the Arab believers and others, especially Christians, with whom they came into contact in the lands they took in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, etc., we cannot say the same of the Jews and their later Reans, who also they are numerous in the Near East because I simply don't have any evidence for them, unfortunately we have much more for the Christian communities, they wrote more or more of them as they survived, but remember I said before that the Quran is notoriously difficult to interpret and understand given that Our knowledge of what it was and how it came about is so uncertain, so how can we be sure that, in fact, these people really considered themselves believers and that their movement included Jews and Christians?

Whether we may be deceiving ourselves by being deceived by a deliberate or erroneous interpretation of Well, a couple of passages from the Quran to answer this question. I think we should turn to the documentary evidence of the 7th century and there are several fragments of documentary evidence that are useful here and are quite interesting for the idea. that this was in some way a movement motivated by a religious impulse, above all, some of the early documents, including coins, seemed to confirm this. This image shows that when the new community expanded into the Near East, into Sassanid and Byzantine territory, it took over many things. including the mints of these governments that had been there before, they took over the mints and the mint workers and the dyes for the coins, so after a few years they started minting their own coins using the same mints and the same dyes, and this is how you See here a coin that is exactly like a silver drink ian held and you can see on the obverse the head of the great king here he had a distinctive hairstyle and on the reverse actually has a fire temple with two attendants on each side, not very Muslim images and there is Middle Persian writing around here of various types in Bolivia or Middle Persian, which was a kind of official language of the Austrian ISM and presumably also of the Sassanian dynasty and yet in the margin that you see here there is a counter.

Note that we could call it: they took the original die and added something and this is Arabic and it says grim law in the name of God, so this is of course a very common phrase in Muslim tradition, but it shows that you know who are marking their presence by putting this countermark on the coins and it's an explicitly religious slogan now you can say well, it was all these people in this expansion movement, there are a lot of people who just jumped on the bandwagon because you know, it was exciting, they could go to conquer new lands, they could get plunder, loot, slaves and whatever they wanted, they really weren't interested in monotheism or anything else it may be, but anyway, somehow the organist's leadership inked the religious terminology by Lee. which I think helps reaffirm some of the ideas we find in the final narrative tradition that the movement was led by people, did they consider themselves believers?

Well, we found some inscriptions from the 7th century that seemed to confirm that they thought of themselves this way because we found some inscriptions that speak of the leader of the movement as the immune Amin a commander of the believers so if Hughes the commander of this community and they see me enter to believers presumably believing is what the community thought of itself This is a fairly famous inscription, it was actually first published, I think in the 1950s, by George Miles, found in a thought about Mecca and the hills above Mecca and its description commemorates the building of a dam by the amirul mumineen or Mallya commanders of a believer who ruled from 642 660, I think, and he just did the wrong thing, okay, he went back somewhere you can see here MA, uh I mean what we need commander of the believers and then he goes on and talks more about the construction of the dam and who built it etc. that seems to confirm the character of the movement as a movement of believers who considered themselves believers in the 7th century or we also found some papyri from the 7th century here is a scrap, you will see it several times today in the Vienna collections and one of the things we find in some of these papyri is when they give a date, you know the dating system of the Muslims today, if you look at a date, the date of the coup goes back to the hijra, the migration of the prophet from Mecca to Medina, but we do not find the word Hydra in these inscriptions or in early dates, it was not until about the year 300 of the Muslim era we find what However, find in the 7th century some documents that are dated in something called means the jurisdiction of believers, which again emphasizes the idea that they are believers and if you are an Erebus, you can see it here on the bottom line here. a cloth is missing, but here is the remote nanine illa somewhat correct, so we find several of these documents with this dating formula of Khomeini when referring to the jurisdiction of believers, which means only that his rule was seen as if it were the government of other believers. evidence beyond the Koran for the idea that the movement was open or, say, non-denominational, it included Jews and Christians, as long as, in addition to the Koranic believers, there exists a document or what we can call the transcription of a document that is found in the later narrative. sources, but every scholar who looks at this says that it must be an actual transcription of something very, very old, it is usually called the constitution of Medina or the only document or sahifa, various names, but one of the things it mentions is that it lists a series of Jewish Clans in Medina, yes, rib, which are part of this covenant, thus constituting how this community will be built and includes Jewish plans as part of the Ummah as part of the community, it explicitly says that it seems quite clear that there were Jews. or it was considered that in some way as part of this community and of many literary texts of the 7th century and Syriac, these are the Christian texts that predate the Muslim literary sources and that sometimes tell us about the beginnings of Islam, we know that many Christians served in Dubai eight courts served in the army served in a bureaucracy sometimes even as what we would call Prime Minister John of Damascus is a famous served the Umayyad Caliphs or the Emir Amin in Damascus but we have many references to This too In Muslim sources we find it especially in poetry, there are references to Christians being part of what we generally consider Muslim armies in the 7th century, including a very interesting passage where the Christian writer says that these people came and sent campaigns. every year to the Far Horizons and they conquered and took many captives and brought back much booty and among them were many Christians both from our sect and from the heretics, another Christian section, so it seems that there was some kind of cooperation here between these this new start this movement of new believers and many people in the Christian communities also or another there is a bishop an Armenian bishop in the 7th century called scipios someone using his name the scholars call this text pseudo scipios someone He wrote a chronicle attributed to from places in the 7th century and this gives us one of the first descriptions of the Prophet's career in a very brief and truncated but talks about the Prophet and how he was a teacher and taught them. his followers the laws and so on one of the things that he says a little later after the death of the Prophet talks about how they conquered Jerusalem and says that they appointed a Jew as the first governor of Jerusalem now this is a fact, this information is not confirmed in none of the Muslim sources nor in any Christian source, other Christian source, kind of question, um, was this bishop?

Know? Christian communities in the 7th century were very anti-Jewish and engaged in a lot of anti-Jewish controversy, perhaps. He didn't like these people, these new people and he just wanted to discredit them, so he said they appointed you as a way to defame them, but maybe they did appoint you governor of Damascus of Jerusalem, we don't know if we have. There is no confirmation of this fact, but it is very suggestive in light of all this other evidence about some type of symbiosis orcohabitation between the people we normally call Muslims, who are believers from Arabia and the Christian communities and perhaps from other Near Eastern communities.

How long did this type of open community building last? The change to Islam as we know it occurs I believe around the year 690 700 or begins at least under the Umayyad dynasty. Basically it is a kind of change of focus on believers. They are now defined as those who not only believe in a God in the last day, but also as those who believe in a God in the last day and who follow the Quran as their Scripture and who accept Muhammad as the Prophet who brought the Scripture and really Today, that is still the simplest way to define a Muslim, as you know, Muslims fight each other all the time, as do most people, most religions, she is against of the Sunnis, etc., but one thing that everyone exercises and the two that everyone accepts is that the Koran is the The Scriptures and Muhammad is its prophet in everything else they may differ, but on that they agree and that seems to have been the focus of this new construction of what was the community of believers and in addition to this new construction with this new emphasis on the Prophet. in the Quran also engage in a kind of renaming or renaming of things, they began to extract various words from the Quran and change the meaning from what it had been in the Quran to something else and use it in this new way.

So they found this word Islam submission to the will of God and they turned it into Islam in the name of a reified religion and there are many other examples of this, so what they are basically doing is you could say that Lama dimensions Islam or Ana dimension Islam. They are connecting it to the Quran, they took a series of institutions and practices that had developed in the 7th century, they found words in the Quran that could apply to them and then they applied those words to them and that became the new terminology, the example easier. below is the name of the head of state, amirul mumineen, which is a good term, everyone knows what it means, it is obvious and you know it grammatically and in all other aspects, but it is not found in the Quran, that is why they found a word in the Koran.

Khalifa, which means it is applied to a couple of prophets who were sent to oversee their communities with the guidance of God and it was applied to the ruler of the community, so now we call caelis, this comes from the Arabic Khalifa, so in place of a bad miracle. and you start calling the ruler Khalifa using a Quranic term instead of a term that did not have the Quranic pedigree, you could say, as I say, this is part of a larger process of relabeling or rebranding that is happening seems to start in the century VIII and after, so what am I doing in Berlin?

I'm going to study piracy and will it take me to deliver these 4,000 minute old papyrus sheets to you so that you can have some virus, yes, what I want to do here are two things, in fact, a few years ago I found a lot of oh, let me talk about this picture first, anyway i forgot to go so this is a photo of the inside of the dome of the rock. I'm sure you all know the building, it's the golden domed building in Jerusalem that was built by the Amido Mumineen or Caliph Abdul Malik around the year 692, just as this change is starting to happen and inside it has these beautiful mosaics for all the interior.

From the octagon and included in the mosaics is a long passage of writing and this writing is generally considered to be quotes from the Quran. Various quotes from the Quran, many of them are passages that are very critical of the concept of the Christian Trinity. concept of the Trinity, so it is really drawing a line between the people we now call Muslims and the Christians who believed in the Trinity. He also talks about Islam and he talks about Muhammad, the prophet of God, and somebody, so he kind of emphasizes all these things that I just talked about how Islam is the name of the new faith Muhammad is the Apostle and so on and this It's part of the Koran, so what am I doing in Berlin?

Basically, I have a double project, a part of the project. is to edit fragments of papyrus from the 7th century that I found a few years ago in Vienna and try to edit them no matter how small and miserable the fragments are. I want to edit and publish them so that scholars don't have to. the same and try to find them all again and then try to read them again, you can just look and see what they say and use this in your historical reconstructions because I think that, given the general paucity of documentary evidence for the 7th century, it is incumbent on us as historians to put in circulation as much as we can and that's what I'm trying to do and that part of the project is to try to use this as a way to support, if you will, the narrative of traditional Islamic origins and the The second thing I want to do in Berlin in particular is looking for more evidence of this kind of change in the community in the 7th century, especially searching in the Neues Museum's collections of Arabic papyri that the poppy existed a long time ago.

In the center of the city, this collection appears to have many Arabic papyri, but it was difficult for most scholars to access the collection from 1939 until very recently, during the war. The papyrus collection, like many other things in the museum, was boxed up and a salt mine was placed somewhere for protection. so that they would not be destroyed after the war Berlin was divided the museums are on the east side it was not easy for scholars to work with this material after reunification they consolidated the museum but they had two different cataloging systems so they did not want anyone to see nothing because they didn't know what they really had with two systems, they had to unify the system, so it's only been in the last five or six years.

I think the papyrus collection has really been opened up to scholars. work on this material and with the assistance of the director of the papyrus collection dr. Furr on a leper who unfortunately couldn't come today. I'm looking forward to delving deeper into that material, so I'll be spending some of my days downtown at the papyrus collection. One challenge in doing this is that only a very small percentage of the surviving Arabic papyri are from the 7th century, most of them are from the 8th, 9th, 10th or 11th century. Papyrus falls out of use, paper replaces it in the 11th century in most of the collections I have seen.

The proportion is about papaya from the 7th century or about a quarter of 1% of the total number, so if you go through a thousand you might find two or three, so now you know it might be lucky, it might be good and it might be something bigger than This you know, what we hope is that we find something quite big. Well, how do you know it's the 7th century for Pyrus? That is a good question. Well, fortunately you can do it based on paleography. The writing of the Arabic papyri seems to change. quite dramatically around the year 700, I'm not quite sure why, but that's the way it is and certain letterforms used in the early papyri just stop being used after the year 700, so if you see those letterforms you'll know it's a papyrus from the 7th century in this In case four there is a letter called behind, was it some kind of anomaly?

Needles tomorrow and it has a distinctive letter that in later Arabic has a kind of loop at the top, but in early Arabic documents they make it like a V so you can see a. of them are surrounded in red, there is one open at the top and as a final in the medial or final position it will be displayed like this, so it's a dead giveaway right away if you see one of those, you know you're onto something. early and then you can look at other cards that also change their shape and somehow confirm that this is in fact a 7th century papyrus, so you know you can look at a papyrus for a minute or less and Satan, although it's later, doesn't , it's later.

Note that you are going to do that a lot to finally find some of these pieces, so of course I hope to find many of them. I'm not sure you'll find many and of course the challenge once you do. Do you have to read them to find out what they say and this is not so easy either because often the writing is broken? I mean, this one is pretty clear, what's available is clear, but you know what was here or in the lines above or in You know, we don't know, but you get what you get and you try to work with it.

You hope to find more complete documents and I think it's my last slide. I'll show you a more complete document I found, guess what? everywhere in Chicago it was in the small collection that we have in Chicago of Arabic papyri and I apologize, it is a very dark image, as you can see, it is not without problems to read because after the initial thing that tells you who it is from and and and many polite phrases yes I hope you are well and I know that we worship God and then he says now then he is about to give him the business and then you can talk wait well, we are telling you what it is about but then he says I will continue for another twenty lines Center and it is quite informative, it tells us about the distribution of a relatively small amount of money among a group of people who appear to have been associates.

It is interesting for exchange. It seems to me that he may be the first Arab. letter we have and yet the format of the epistle is exactly the same as much later Arabic letters, so it seems that Arabic letter writing was something that was already well practiced even in the 7th century, suggesting that in Arabic was actually being written. before the rise of Islam, but it turns out we don't have any examples of it, this may be the oldest, it's interesting in other ways too, it has all of these, usually we would say Islamic monotheism which is put in the name of God, the compassionate, merciful in the end says peace upon you and the mercy and blessings of God the mercy of God so that is what I am already excluded from the law but nowhere does it mention the Prophet nowhere does it mention the Quran nowhere it quotes the Koran nor does it have any Christian or Jewish formula it is monotheistic but it does not seem to be confessional that tells us something well if it could fit into the idea of ​​the movement of believers it does not prove it it does not prove it but it certainly does not disprove it anyway.

I'm hoping to find a couple dozen of these, but we'll see. Thank you very much Fred, the actual process of your work sounds a lot like a Sherlock Holmes with a PhD. trying to piece things together, I mean, there's kind of quite exciting parts of this, I imagine because you don't know what you're going to find, no, that's exciting, I don't wear the same kind of hat, no, I notice anyway . There's something like detective work and, as you say, the 7th century, the Pyrus is papaya, it's quite rare, so you must get very excited when you've been through a lot of things and something you get is one that you know when it was working in Vienna.

They have 20 to 25,000 more or less usable pieces. They have 65,000 papyri in Vienna or session numbers, but 40,000 of them are like stamps, little pieces, you know, or in one case it was a big sheet with a word in the corner. I'm not going to tell you much, but they have about 20,000, you know, sizable pieces of papyrus, at least as big as the one I showed you in the little corner that is informative and many are complete Texas, but luckily they have them all. on microfilm. in the 1960s, now yeah, it's black and white microfilm and you have to sit down at this reading machine, you know, and boot up, but it was cool because I could just go through and look at one image, they look at another image, wait, look , in order to work. through you know, I worked with those 22,000 and about two and a half months it was a very efficient way of working and every hour someone says yelling I have one every week or so every week I found one it was actually interesting because a lot of them came up in a group right in the middle around 11,000, so I was working for weeks and discovered that anything other than this is really a pain, you know? and finally, all of a sudden, I found this mother lode of about 40 of them.

There were more or less catalogs to get it, so there were probably a lot of them that had been found together in Egypt and they were sold together to a dealer and they were bought by the guy who gave them to the Austrian library together and they were cataloged together and so they were, you know, while many of the others were from other parts of the rubbish heap that were from a later date, you know, that's where most of them came from, when the people in Egypt over the centuries, you know , they had old documents. They were no longer useful, you know, your grandfather's letters: they were thrown away, they were thrown into the garbage heaps outside the villages and then the peasants discovered that it was organic material, so they put it with a fork in their wheelbarrows, They would take it and spread it on their fields as fertilizer, you know, it helps things grow and then around 1850, and including these papyrus documents around 1850, they found out that these crazy Europeans would buy this stuff, so they started to save them and sell them to antique dealers and they ended upat, you know, the antique market. and then the enemy zooms, that's how actually the ones from Berlin are different the ones from Berlin came from excavations from excavations in the early 20th century they were excavated in Elephantine and I think they found a lot of papyri somewhere in some layer in the excavations and then They put them all in big wooden boxes and sent them to Berlin in about 1906 or 1907 and many of those boxes and if any of you know a financier who could finance the papyrus collection quite generously - to process all this the material has to be opened carefully and these sheets need to be preserved, you know, so they are put under glass, etc., they need a big subsidy to do that.

Now that we're in Indiana Jones, it becomes a real thing in the Middle East. In the Muslim world in general there is a variety of views: they are moderate and converge towards the extremists, the Salafists, the Wahhabis, how is your work seen in the Muslim world? Do people see it as a threat? Do you look at it with interest, how would you say the reception is and where is that to address the questions? No, it's not too broad a question. The answer would be too broad to answer. You probably know that the reaction is obviously mixed and there will be some people who will say, "Well." He is an unbeliever, what do you expect?

You know he's going to hell anyway, what a week, yeah, they don't seem to care too much about what unbelievers say, but I think there are some Muslims who are really open to new points of view. from the origins of Iceland and particularly in Indonesia, I have been told that there are many Muslims who are uncomfortable with the traditional way that the Wahhabis present Islam, you know, that it is just a hobby form of Islam, very conservative, that has been dominant in Saudi Arabia since the 18th century has been driven because the Saudis have so much oil money that they can send preachers and they can build mosques and Islamic centers and spread their version of Islam and try to undermine the more moderate versions of Islam, so I'm going to go to mine.

Shiism have been doing this for half a century with our own money, so this is a conservative form of Islam that has been heavily subsidized, you could say, but there are Muslims, especially in Indonesia, who are very uncomfortable with this because they say that you know this form of Islam is too Arab, we are not Arabs, so we have a different social society, a totally different type of society and this does not fit well with us, we want to find a way to be good Muslims. but in our own way and in the modern world, that's why they are very interested in at least some revisionist interpretations of how they started Islam because then they can say, well, you know, they like this one, especially my point of view, because they can say , well, you know.

This provides an opportunity to be ecumenical with Christians and Jews hostile to them, so the text of the Quran is quite sacrosanct to Muslims and, as you say, it is not really historical material per se and what is being very controversial even among Muslims. The scholars in the world of Muslim scholars have been the hadiths, the sayings, suppose you are saying to the prophets, right, hele prophet, do you add, suppose yes, and, and, and, there are all these categories of how reliablelike saying how many people have supposedly written it once and whether their work would have any impact on that whole debate that is still ongoing among Muslims, I don't really want to say, I basically avoided using hadith material, yeah my feeling is you know That, undoubtedly, there are some hadiths that are authentic, something that the Prophet actually said in this collection of material, but there are many other things in there that we know he could not have said and the problem is that there is no way to distinguish one from the other. , there is no kind of foolproof method to discriminate or decide what is an authentic prophetic hadith and what is just something that someone later wanted to put in their mouth, and as a historian, I feel like I can't really use any of this, you know?

I didn't really use it in my own work as support as evidence of something. I just don't think we can. I don't know if there will ever be a way to make the Muslim have been tested very hard, you know, Muslim scholars are already in in the 9th century, but very aware that there were a lot of studies, there were people who made up things that said that the Prophet had said, you know, to reinforce his own particular political view or social opinion or whatever his theological position was. but the Muslim scholars were aware of that and so they developed a method to try to separate this material from the false material and they did so based on the chain of authorities that conveys that actually referring to a hadith consists of a text. in a short text you usually know that you should drink a certain type of beer, well, no, there was nothing about that, but you should do something in a certain way and then he would say: you know, someone told me, my teacher told me with authority from their teacher about that is already from history, Choi and Thai, who heard from the Prophet that this was what you should do well.

These chains of authority were then examined by Muslim scholars and they said, well, you know, it says it went from A to B to C, but B, you never studied with C C died before B was born, you know, so this is a weak hadith. , it can't be true, so they did that kind of thing, you know, it was due diligence, it was formally and they built a final collection of hadiths that is like one. Percent of the total number of sound hadiths, someone had strong chains of authority, but even in those collections of sound hadiths, there are many that we know must be fabricated in which the Prophet is considered to predict things that happened two hundred years after his death. death, I mean, yes, he was a prophet, but I really don't think he foresaw that he would authorize the best of the banquet, so we know that the method that hadith scholars developed was not adequate to rule out fraudulent Hadiths and no one else has come really.

To find a better system, modern scholars keep trying and work with something close to the same method. I mean, they look at Assad, the chain of authorities, but they also look at the body of the text and try to coordinate them, and one thing we can do. By looking at these analyses, try to decide when this hadith came into circulation. We can see if it has many different transmissions. You can see how the chains of authority converge on someone and that person is probably the person who put it up. circulation even though he said that he got it from three generations before, if you don't have other transmissions, he probably put it into circulation, so he invented it or his teacher invented it and spread it, so one more question and opens. to the ground because there are people much smarter than me and it caught my attention when you put up one of your slides that you had, I think, six or eight books of scholars analyzing the historicity of the founding narrative of Islam and Of course, much of the Studies on the historicity of the Christian religion were done here in Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries and how would you compare those types of studies if you could or else?

I think they are. very very similar to what you are seeing in the case of the Christian tradition, first of all, you are looking at the Hebrew rival in the New Testament gospels and analyzing those marriages and the thing is that it is a little difficult to describe. The Quran and the Islamic narrative sources that crystallize in the 8th century, 9th century and later together are a kind of analogy with the Hebrew Bible or with the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, which are kind of more historical books, right , I mean everything. The whole New Testament is really a kind of historical.

I think the core of Tran is that it is not a historical book, it is not structured as a narrative and it does not attempt to relate to the story of the Prophet, so it comes in the narrative sources of the chronicle. authority and many other types of Chronicles and the biographical dictionaries in that material is, although analogous to many of the historical books of the Hebrew Bible and the gospel narratives, but there is a similar cut, you know, in some respects I just wonder It is generally thought that the Christian scholars of the Christian and Jewish tradition of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament were the ones who disappeared and the tradition criticism, the source criticism and so on, and that the Western Muslim scholars who worked on this collected those tools. and applied them, but actually one of the first scholars of the Islamic tradition to work on the Islamic tradition in the West was a great Hungarian Jewish scholar, the seer Ignatz Gould, who wrote some of his first works in the 1880s and now It is one of the first higher education books.

The critic in the West is Hermann Gunkel, I think, and it's like the 1890s, so maybe he got it from the golden seer and not the other way around. You know, it's really interesting what the pedigree is, but there were so many more scholars working in the Christian tradition that there was a much more rapid development of scholarship, critical scholarship on Christian and Jewish texts than there was on Muslim taxation is just for infinitely more people working on it, so there was a lot more debate in the dialogue, etc., it is like that. They were developed quickly and, more precisely, some materials were not worked on except by a few people, so progress is very slow until about the 1970s, when a couple of revolutionaries, I think, made books that really managed to blow the roof off. . everyone is doing this now, so it's become kind of a growing industry since then, but we're late to catch up, yeah, hmm, so we have a microphone.

Johann has a microphone and if he wants to ask a question, prepare his hand, please ask. Question, there are no conferences. There is a gentleman back there. I think Eva Rincón is not a historian, but perhaps if an interdisciplinary question is allowed, given the lack of evidence. As a lawyer, I am inclined to think more about the three question marks and starting with the fifth. question marks. We will always address the question of the interdisciplinary approach. Is there any collaboration, say with Ball Callused s, around the world that could potentially derive some information, at least not as evidence, but at least as a theory that perhaps climate change could have forced sentient beings? population desert their religion opening the doors of Damascus to the new independence movement or whatever or is it simply a

myth

thank you I am somewhat deaf it does not affect me when I speak but when you speak it is very difficult for me I listen like Meza.

It's hard for me to understand the question. Could you perhaps repeat it more briefly and louder so we can get an interdisciplinary approach to the lack of evidence that perhaps volcanoes around the world could link volcanic exposure to mega photonic explosions in Nicaragua at the time led to a potential climate change in the region potentially leading or connecting the population's prudential distrust of the Byzantine Empire of the Sassanian Empire with their own Empire perhaps leading to this membrane that eventually led to this independence movement that took a new religion as a merely influential impetus to say: ok, we follow the new religion to become independent from the formal religion that volcano scholars used to lean towards.

Oh well, we have plenty of koala volcanic remains throughout the Near East. Arabia NHS, where Islam is believed to have started and in Jordan and places like that, a salt desert, etc., but these volcanoes, volcanoes, I think they date back to 20,000 BC. C., they are long before the emergence of Islam and I do not know of any. evidence of volcanic eruptions in this part of the world in the first millennium of the Common Era I don't think that in the Byzantines or for the Muslims we will not find any evidence that Noah died, yes, oh Nicaragua, maybe yes, but not in the Arabs .

Area no, let's ask another question. Thank you very much for the presentation. I'm not a historian either. If I understand correctly, you're saying that this community of believers didn't really make a distinction between Jews, Christians and Muslims, especially in the beginning, which is fine, but my question is whether there were any practical material implications for this, e.g., everything jizya's theme. I don't know what that means in English, the excise tax is that Christians had to pay, so there must have been some kind of demarcation between a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew, otherwise there would be no justification for paying this tax, so how would you explain this in the context of your arguments?

First of all, I don't think if there was this kind of broad acceptance of other believers, let's call them Arab believers or something because we don't know what to call them, otherwise he can't, we don't call them Muslims over you at home and Christians and Jews, did not. accept all Christians and Jews, they only accepted those who were righteous for the appropriately righteous, you know, it was quite clear in the Quran, those who believe, who are pious and do good work are the ones who are part of the movement of believers regarding the word jizya, which is often taken as thename for the head tax in 9th century Islamic law and later becomes the term for the head tax applied to non-Muslim communities, Christians and Jews, and to our Austrian sewers under Muslim rule, but in the early years . years, as we know from the papyri, jizya seems to mean other things, it seems to mean tribute or tax in a more general way, it is not clear, so it does not seem to have this later meaning of specific attacks on non-Muslims like us.

I would say that using the later terminology with Muslims separate from Jews and Christians, yes, that is why it is really difficult to talk about it without us having to escape these categories and it is very difficult to clear our minds of these categories that have been instilled in us. you always know, but you already know, the term Jewish, see, is also one whose meaning is somewhat fluid in the early period, we find, for example, in the classical Islamic law of the later period, we find the juiciest term for the head poll tax. tax on non-Muslim Christians and Jews in particular and another bordering word is the term for land tax, but we find papyri that speak of jizya of a community on their lands, it is not a head tax, it is a tax on the earth, so these terms seem to have had different uses over time and we have to make sure that we use them in a way that is appropriate for the time we are talking about in the 7th century, I don't think they were still very fluid?

Both terms are probably also found in the Talmud, which is the Jewish Scriptures compiled in the 6th century. For the most part, this potamia is generally also a Jerusalem Talmud, but in Aramaic it uses the term cutting egg and eating gus as terms for taxes, so Arabic in the Quran using jizya and then Islamic law using courage It seems to be a sort of continuation of these notions of taxation that come from before the Islamic period, this gentleman, let's go there and then we'll come here. some thanks, thanks a lot Fred for an amazing talk it's inspiring just to see the kind of work you're doing and I'm so glad you're doing it because I'm not sure how many people there are.

My question actually relates very closely to the question that was asked about this process of assimilation or the process of dismantling a sin in the process of drawing lines, as you said, between who constitutes a Muslim and who does not, and I appreciated what you said. said. he said, but I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the broader sociopolitical context that led to it or what the impetus was for drawing this line between a Muslim and someone who simply believed in one God and therefore included certain appropriate behaviors pious Christians and Jews versus then drawing this much narrower boundary of a person who believed in one God and that God was Muhammad than the next being the Quran, so I wonder what the impetus was at that time in the kind of you guys who know . general impulses of what led to the drawing of this line, so it's almost a question before the previous one that talked about the implications, but I'm more interested in when and what I would know when, thanks to you, but why was that line okay, well, I think you know, I can't say I know, but it seems to me that this is a distinction that starts to emerge around 706 90 and 700 in the time of Calif or Melek and I think it's kind of the consequence of the Empire you know, right now this government rules it, we have a movement that starts in Arabia, all the people in the leadership are people from these Meccan tribes and closely affiliated tribes of the Quraish tribe and then they have many other tribes and members of tribes who are subordinate to them, but they all speak Arabic and they go out and say to conquer the world or subdue it in any way, put it under their control and collect taxes, etc., there is a civil war and many other things to fight and, Ultimately, he is optimally able to win and defeat his rivals, but I think he realized two things first that he realized after about sixty years of ruling many people who were not from Arabia and who did not speak Arabic: these people are different from us and they also realized that Christians stubbornly adhered to this notion of the Trinity and said: how can three be one?

You know, there is one man, there are not three men, you know, there are very interesting passages in the Koran where it says you know at Christmas, don't say three, it says yes, it also says that it is unseemly for God to have a son, the idea that Jesus was God and the Son of God is you know this is a non-starter for them they believe in this this unique and abstract God in some distant and remote place and you know he doesn't look anything like a human being, he's not going to have a son, this is like you talked about it, so we were specifically attacked by those doctrines of Christianity in very brief terms in several places. on the show and I think it was the kind of awareness about that that made the alcoholic and his advisors say we're in control for sure, now we can draw the line and we're going to rule these people like a Wheelin caste ruling elite and they are different from us, it may also have come from the Christians and Jews themselves, who may have accepted the believers when they arrived from Arabia as new rulers because they had new rulers arriving periodically from other places anyway, so why no other? pay taxes and new people and what, but at some point they realized that no, these people are different and have a different religious view on things, so the awareness of the difference may have come from both sides, that's not It's really an answer, but it's my stab.

Thank you very much, my name is Jurgen, right, Maya. I want to thank you for a fascinating lecture and talk. I would like to bring you up to today if you will and ask you about the opportunities you have during your time. here as a scholar in Germany you are a historian and you could say a scholar in Islamic studies if that can be correct in that and I want to draw a distinction there in that with Islamic studies there you would probably have or in In the field of history that you represent , you have some or numerous classmates in Germany with whom you interact quite naturally, but you may also be aware, I am sure you are aware, that the German state governments that are in charge of education in their respective states are creating and funding a body of scholars of the Islamic religion, theologians of Islam whose intention and purpose would be to teach students of the Islamic religion to become imams or themselves teachers.

Have you interacted with this probably much smaller group of people? I found them receptive to their ideas. They are especially valuable and fruitful interlocutors in your discussions. Perhaps I would ask you to make this distinction between Islamic studies and Islamic theology as academic subjects. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. It is a very interesting question. I had a lot of questions in contact with what you could call the seminar and training categories, although 10 years ago 11 now I attended a lecture here in Berlin that was given by the oldest former Grand Mufti of Yugoslavia, who is he? Out was a student of ours in Chicago, so I knew him pretty well and when I heard about this lecture I notified someone who was at the o and they said, "Oh, you should come give the lecture," so I came and he stood up to give his was a very nice talk, a kind of ecumenical and open-minded talk.

He is a wonderful man and kindly acknowledged me. He said that he felt very honored to give a lecture in front of his former professor. I had to stand up and everyone. After finishing the conference a woman came to me who introduced herself and said that she worked for the German Ministry of the Interior on the German government's relationship with Muslims. The interesting thing was that her name herself was Muslim her father was German her mother had been Turkish and her name was Leila Bonner, there was another name after her husband's name, but it was like, wow, someone, but my name is Muslim, but no, I haven't had much contact with people in that line of work who are trying to train responsible moms. taking care of their own Muslim communities, you know, which is a way of classifying Saudi Wahhabi indoctrination from these very conservatively trained, even a source coming from Saudi Arabia, to people with a much less overt form of Islam.

I would say it's even though you know. that is a question for Muslims to decide, not for people like me. I'm not, it's not. First I would like to thank you for the really stimulating talk from him, but I just wanted to ask you, it's like finishing, it actually seems like the initial one. The reaction to Islam or the initial scriptures was more like an expansion of already existing monotheistic religions in some ways and then the process of institutionalization of the religion basically created an erasure of history and recreated a new understanding of Islam and Muslim tradition , but what I wanted to ask I don't know if you could comment on this topic, but somehow I already thought about the Golden Age of Islamic philosophy and also the 13th century and Sufism, where you have a new understanding of Islam that you don't really focuses on the demarcation between these three religions but rather the similarities and intersections, so could you comment on that?

Do you think that this erasure happened from time to time and that it created a fixed understanding of institutionalized Islam without any new current of Islamic philosophy emerging with a new interpretation because I feel that Sufism has a potential that breaks with this institutionalized understanding. Well, I'm not sure I followed everything and there was a lot to you and the various aspects of what you mentioned. You know, I think about Sufism and Islamic law and if you think about religion and how people respond to religion, it seems to me that there are two ways that people do it and Sufism, on the one hand, in Islamic law. and, on the other hand, it manifests itself as two forms in the Islamic community, one is a very spiritualistic form, it is touchy-feely or something that is very internal and personal to you has to do with your feelings in a sense of connection with the deity and everything. that and the legalistic details are not so important and another way is to emphasize the legalistic details and that is what I don't like about Sharia.

It's about focusing on exactly what you need to do to achieve salvation. You know how you should walk, how you should brush your teeth, how you should pray, how you should do all this. things, if you make a contract, you should do it this way because it is fair, the right way and this is what will help you be a good person and achieve Felicity in the afternoon, so it is very legalistic and focused, for what these represent two different. In general, there are completely different views of religion. I think you will find us in all religions with this divergence between these two forms and who can say which one is right.

Liz Ali showed that they were mutually compatible. You know it was her great contribution. You demonstrated less than Sufism. that mysticism was not something that was a violation of the law literally, so it was legal from the point of view of the jurist to be a Sufi, although the hobbies do not accept it, you know that is a very strict formulation of Islamic jurisprudence that let's not accept Sufism as an acceptable form of Islam, let's take one more and then we'll stop next door, so where would you draw the line between the historical Muhammad and the mythical Muhammad?

As difficult as it may be, there is evidently a mythological aspect to which Muhammad travels. the heavens and towards the sky and there is a historical aspect clearly, but some people go so far as to say that the religion of Islam that you mentioned did not arise in the Mecca and Medina area but in the Jerusalem area, so where would you draw? the line about Arabia and South Arabia and again, how would you portray the political interests that led to the way the figure of Muhammad was interpreted over the decades, if not to say over the centuries, you know that there used to be people who argued that Jesus never existed because you know we don't have real documentary evidence as we only have evidence within the religious tradition but I think the people who argue that are quite stubborn and overlook a couple of pieces of document evidence, we're not all documentary exactly, but there is, for example, a fragment of Syriac text dating to something like 634, which is just a couple of years after the death of the Prophet, who speaks in Syriac of the thigh and mathematics about someone's nomads.

The name resembles Muhammad, so almost immediately after his death there is a non-Muslim, let's say not, from the community of believers, a reference to an event that involves a raid by these people and they are associated with the name by Burroughs, name FN. so I think we have to accept that yes, the Prophet is there. You know how much more of the, let's say, mythical construction of the life of Muhammad that we find in traditional marriages that, as I summarized here before, we want to accept is a really difficult task. ask and there is no answerWe can, we can't give you an obvious answer, but my own sense is that, let's put it this way, when the day of judgment comes and all the truths are revealed, including its dark trees, when we get to that point.

We'll find that I think the traditional Muslim narrative is not completely off base, that maybe eighty or ninety percent of it is more or less what happened, but that there are certain points where it has put a totally different spin on aspects of that development and I think that, for example, the notion of community identity is one of those areas where the real image could have been quite different from the one we are given in the traditional type of narrative, the mythical image, and there may be other aspects There is a marked divergence, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that something like the conquests happened anyway, more or less as described.

You know, we can't be sure, but that's my hunch. At this time I was asked about the Day of Judgment that is coming soon. I hear. I'm sure someone in the audience has been practicing their 7th century Arabic on that papyrus to try to fool you, but I know there were other questions. Let's move on to the next one. room and Fred, I'm sure you will be available to lower the concentrations that