In a World Shaped by Muhammad, the Qur’an Doesn’t Matter
There is a industry of Western scholarship dedicated to the problem of what we can historically recover about Muhammad of Mecca. The revisionist historians, from John Wansbrough in the 1970s through Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s Hagarism and into the more recent popular scholarship of Tom Holland, have mounted increasingly sophisticated arguments that the biographical tradition surrounding Muhammad was constructed decades or centuries after the events it purports to record, that the historical core of the Islamic founding narrative is irrecoverable beneath layers of pious invention, and that the sources through which we know Muhammad, the sira literature, the hadith collections, the maghazi accounts of his military campaigns, were compiled generations after his reported death.
Whether Muhammad existed in the precise biographical form that the tradition describes is a question for historians. Whether the Muhammad who has shaped the horizon of Islamic civilization for fourteen centuries is real is not a question at all. He is overwhelmingly, undeniably, consequentially real, more real, in the sense that matters for understanding human behavior and civilizational development, than most figures whose historical existence is beyond scholarly dispute.
He exists in the collective consciousness of a civilization of nearly two billion people with a specificity, an intimacy, and a comprehensive authority that no other founding figure of any tradition has achieved.
The tradition knows what he ate and how he slept. It knows which hand he preferred for which activities. It knows how he walked, how he smiled, how he treated his wives, how he handled the execution of his enemies, how he responded to mockery, how he negotiated with those he was in the process of defeating, how he organized the distribution of war spoils, how he prayed, how he expressed affection and how he expressed rage. This is not hagiography in the Western sense. It is a comprehensive behavioral template for human existence, preserved with the explicit theological purpose of making imitation possible and obligatory.
The companions who surrounded Muhammad absorbed this model at first hand, sat with him, fought beside him, watched him make decisions, heard his judgments, received his commands, and then carried what they had absorbed into the world with a momentum that is almost impossible to account for on purely material grounds.
Within a century of his death, the culture he founded had conquered the Arabian peninsula, destroyed the Persian Sassanid Empire, stripped the Byzantine Empire of its richest provinces, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Iberia, pushed into Central Asia, and reached the borders of the Indian subcontinent.
These conquests were understood by those who prosecuted them as direct application of Muhammad’s example. Muhammad had himself directed the massacre of the Banu Qurayza, between six hundred and nine hundred adult males executed on his order in a single day, their women and children enslaved, their property distributed among his followers. He had expelled the other Jewish tribes of Medina in campaigns combining military pressure, property confiscation, and forced exile. He had authorized the assassination of specific individuals whose mockery or opposition he found intolerable. He had organized and led raids against tens of the tribes in the peninsula. The companions who carried these precedents into the conquests were transmitting his legacy, faithfully, and specifically.
The Personal God and the Transcendent One
The standard assumption, shared by reformers who want a gentler Islam and by critics who want a simpler target, is that the Quran is the engine of Islamic civilization, that Muslims are shaped primarily by what the book says, and that the central interpretive question is therefore what the book means. This assumption produces the endless Western debate about moderate versus extremist readings of the Quran, about which verses abrogate which other verses, about whether the violent passages are context-specific or universal, about whether a sufficiently sophisticated hermeneutics can extract from the text a version of Islam compatible with liberal democratic coexistence.
The debate is beside the point. The relationship of most Muslims to the Quran across most of Islamic history has been one of memorization and recitation rather than reading and interpretation. The hafiz, the person who has memorized the entire Quran, is a figure of enormous social prestige in Muslim communities worldwide, and that prestige derives specifically from the feat of memorization rather than from any demonstrated capacity to understand, interpret, or apply the text’s content. Children in Quranic schools spend years learning to recite the Quran correctly in Arabic, which is not the native language of the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims. They learn the sounds. They learn the rhythm. They learn the ritual correctness of the recitation. They do not learn what the words mean, and this is not experienced as a deficiency. The Quran’s power is in its recitation, not in its comprehension. God speaks. The Muslim listens and repeats. Understanding is secondary to participation in the divine speech.
