God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything - 2

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Was Muhammad Epileptic? - 2

 

There is some question as to whether Islam is a separate religion at

all. It initially fulfilled a need among Arabs for a distinctive or

special creed, and is forever identified with their language and

their impressive later conquests, which, while not as striking as

those of the young Alexander of Macedonia, certainly conveyed an idea

of being backed by a divine will until they petered out at the

fringes of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. But Islam when examined

is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of

plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as

occasion appeared to require. Thus, far from being " born in the clear

light of history, " as Ernest Renan so generously phrased it, Islam in

its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it

took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes

prostrate submission or " surrender " as a maxim to its adherents, and

demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain.

There is nothing—absolutely nothing—in its teachings that can even

begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.

 

The prophet died in the year 632 of our own approximate calendar. The

first account of his life was set down a full hundred and twenty

years later by Ibn Ishaq, whose original was lost and can only be

consulted through its reworked form, authored by Ibn Hisham, who died

in 834. Adding to this hearsay and obscurity, there is no agreed-upon

account of how the Prophet's followers assembled the Koran, or of how

his various sayings (some of them written down by secretaries) became

codified. And this familiar problem is further complicated—even more

than in the Christian case—by the matter of succession. Unlike Jesus,

who apparently undertook to return to earth very soon and who (pace

the absurd Dan Brown) left no known descendants, Muhammad was a

general and a politician and—though unlike Alexander of Macedonia a

prolific father—left no instruction as to who was to take up his

mantle. Quarrels over the leadership began almost as soon as he died,

and so Islam had its first major schism—between the Sunni and the

Shia—before it had even established itself as a system. We need take

no side in the schism, except to point out that one at least of the

schools of interpretation must be quite mistaken. And the initial

identification of Islam with an earthly caliphate, made up of

disputatious contenders for the said mantle, marked it from the very

beginning as man-made.

 

It is said by some Muslim authorities that during the first caliphate

of Abu Bakr, immediately after Muhammad's death, concern arose that

his orally transmitted words might be forgotten. So many Muslim

soldiers had been killed in battle that the number who had the Koran

safely lodged in their memories had become alarmingly small. It was

therefore decided to assemble every living witness, together

with " pieces of paper, stones, palm leaves, shoulder-blades, ribs and

bits of leather " on which sayings had been scribbled, and give them

to Zaid ibn Thabit, one of the Prophet's former secretaries, for an

authoritative collation. Once this had been done, the believers had

something like an authorized version.

 

If true, this would date the Koran to a time fairly close to

Muhammad's own life. But we swiftly discover that there is no

certainty or agreement about the truth of the story. Some say that it

was Ali—the fourth and not the first caliph, and the founder of

Shiism—who had the idea. Many others—the Sunni majority—assert that

it was Caliph Uthman, who reigned from 644 to 656, who made the

finalized decision. Told by one of his generals that soldiers from

different provinces were fighting over discrepant accounts of the

Koran, Uthman ordered Zaid ibn Thabit to bring together the various

texts, unify them, and have them transcribed into one. When this task

was complete, Uthman ordered standard copies to be sent to Kufa,

Basra, Damascus, and elsewhere, with a master copy retained in

Medina. Uthman thus played the canonical role that had been taken, in

the standardization and purging and censorship of the Christian

Bible, by Irenaeus and by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. The roll

was called, and some texts were declared sacred and inerrant while

others became " apocryphal. " Outdoing Athanasius, Uthman ordered that

all earlier and rival editions be destroyed.

 

Even supposing this version of events to be correct, which would mean

that no chance existed for scholars ever to determine or even dispute

what really happened in Muhammad's time, Uthman's attempt to abolish

disagreement was a vain one. The written Arabic language has two

features that make it difficult for an outsider to learn: it uses

dots to distinguish consonants like " b " and " t, " and in its original

form it had no sign or symbol for short vowels, which could be

rendered by various dashes or comma-type marks. Vastly different

readings even of Uthman's version were enabled by these variations.

Arabic script itself was not standardized until the later part of the

ninth century, and in the meantime the undotted and oddly voweled

Koran was generating wildly different explanations of itself, as it

still does. This might not matter in the case of the Iliad, but

remember that we are supposed to be talking about the unalterable

(and final) word of god. There is obviously a connection between the

sheer feebleness of this claim and the absolutely fanatical certainty

with which it is advanced. To take one instance that can hardly be

called negligible, the Arabic words written on the outside of the

Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are different from any version that

appears in the Koran.

 

The situation is even more shaky and deplorable when we come to the

hadith, or that vast orally generated secondary literature which

supposedly conveys the sayings and actions of Muhammad, the tale of

the Koran's compilation, and the sayings of " the companions of the

Prophet. " Each hadith, in order to be considered authentic, must be

supported in turn by an isnad, or chain, of supposedly reliable

witnesses. Many Muslims allow their attitude to everyday life to be

determined by these anecdotes: regarding dogs as unclean, for

example, on the sole ground that Muhammad is said to have done so.

 

As one might expect, the six authorized collections of hadith, which

pile hearsay upon hearsay through the unwinding of the long spool of

isnads ( " A told B, who had it from C, who learned it from D " ), were

put together centuries after the events they purport to describe. One

of the most famous of the six compilers, Bukhari, died 238 years

after the death of Muhammad. Bukhari is deemed unusually reliable and

honest by Muslims, and seems to have deserved his reputation in that,

of the three hundred thousand attestations he accumulated in a

lifetime devoted to the project, he ruled that two hundred thousand

of them were entirely valueless and unsupported. Further exclusion of

dubious traditions and questionable isnads reduced his grand total to

ten thousand hadith. You are free to believe, if you so choose, that

out of this formless mass of illiterate and half-remembered

witnessing the pious Bukhari, more than two centuries later, managed

to select only the pure and undefiled ones that would bear

examination.

 

The likelihood that any of this humanly derived rhetoric

is " inerrant, " let alone " final, " is conclusively disproved not just

by its innumerable contradictions and incoherencies but by the famous

episode of the Koran's alleged " satanic verses, " out of which Salman

Rushdie was later to make a literary project. On this much-discussed

occasion, Muhammad was seeking to conciliate some leading Meccan poly-

theists and in due course experienced a " revelation " that allowed

them after all to continue worshipping some of the older local

deities. It struck him later that this could not be right and that he

must have inadvertently been " channeled " by the devil, who for some

reason had briefly chosen to relax his habit of combating monotheists

on their own ground. (Muhammad believed devoutly not just in the

devil himself but in minor desert devils, or djinns, as well.) It was

noticed even by some of his wives that the Prophet was capable of

having a " revelation " that happened to suit his short-term needs, and

he was sometimes teased about it. We are further told—on no authority

that need be believed—that when he experienced revelation in public

he would sometimes be gripped by pain and experience loud ringing in

his ears. Beads of sweat would burst out on him, even on the

chilliest of days. Some heartless Christian critics have suggested

that he was an epileptic (though they fail to notice the same

symptoms in the seizure experienced by Paul on the road to Damascus),

but there is no need for us to speculate in this way. It is enough to

rephrase David Hume's unavoidable question. Which is more likely—that

a man should be used as a transmitter by god to deliver some already

existing revelations, or that he should utter some already existing

revelations and believe himself to be, or claim to be, ordered by god

to do so? As for the pains and the noises in the head, or the sweat,

one can only regret the seeming fact that direct communication with

god is not an experience of calm, beauty, and lucidity.

 

Was Muhammad Epileptic?

from: Christopher Hitchens

Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007, at 10:28 AM