Boreal
Remembering Uzza
If Islam Was Explained to Me in a Pub
100 Years of Conflicts and Conquests and No Muhammad
Uzza:
The hundred years following Muhammad's death was an extremely violent period,
even by Islamic standards, with non-stop wars of conquest and civil wars. The
second civil war in particular had a transformative impact on Islamic scriptures
and early Islamic history because of the actions of caliphs who decided that
looking at the history of Islam and scriptures through a common lens might put
an end to the violent disagreements among believers.
Archie: And that lens would be, let me guess, the Prophet?
Uzza: Yes, but I am getting ahead of myself. I must first tell you about the first civil war. It is key to understanding the second and what came after.
Bob: You can’t talk about war enough.
Uzza: The first Fitna, as it is called, was a result of the assassination of Uthman, the third successor to Muhammad as leader of the believers, the meaning of caliph. The assassination ignited a bloody war of succession. It ended after another assassination, that of Uthman’s successor Ali by a disgruntled ally who objected to Ali making peace overtures to another challenger for the caliphate, Muawiya, the Governor of Syria. Ali’s eldest son, Hasan, thought it prudent to accept a rich endowment and a promise from Muawiya that he could seek to lead the caliphate upon his death, and so postponed his claim to the throne of Muhammad, his grandfather. The Governor of Syria was proclaimed the new caliph and Damascus became the capital of the caliphate.
Bob: That would mean that two of the Prophet's immediate successors were assassinated.
Uzza: Make that three; his second successor, Umar, was also assassinated.
Gerry: Why all the assassinations?
Uzza: Muhammad, thinking the end of the world would occur in his lifetime or shortly after his death, made no provisions for an orderly transition. What would have been the point? In fact, when he died, people were literally going mad because Muhammad had said that he would be with them on Judgment Day, shielding them from all the horrible things the Koran said would happen that day. If it had not been for Bakr, who quoted a verse that none had ever heard that Muhammad was going to die[378], who knows what would have happened.
Archie: Are you saying he made it up?
Uzza: I did not say that.
Archie: Any other verses that nobody had ever heard that somebody just happened to remember to save the day?
Uzza: If you believe that the Koran is the word of God, then the verse about making the Persians a people of the Book[379] is not something that somebody made up to save the day, but a revelation from a god who could see when such a verse would come in handy.
Bob: I did not know the Persians believed in the Bible.
Uzza: Not the Bible but the Avesta, which provided Allah, or whoever remembered the verse, reason to stop killing them and getting them to accept Muslim rule.
Gerry: Why is there any doubt that this verse was not part of the original Koran?
Uzza: Muhammad's obsession was with the Byzantines who stood in the way of getting to Dabiq before Judgment Day. A verse which made the followers of Zoroaster a people of the Book would not have been necessary during his lifetime, which would see the world come to end.
Bob: But it didn't!
Uzza: Which is why some have suggested that the Koran's message was modified from ‘repent, the end of the world is at hand’ to ‘conquer the world and I will bring it to an end and welcome you into Paradise’ to reflect this new reality[380].
Bob: What has all this to do with the Koran making the Persians a people of the Book?
Uzza: Because there should not have been a need for it. The believers invaded Persia proper in 642, ten years or so after Muhammad's death and the anticipated end of times.
Archie: I get it. But what I still don't get is, why was it necessary to make the Persians a people of the Book?
Uzza: No matter how many Persians the believers slaughtered − the rivers, it was reported, running red with their blood − the Persians refused to submit until this verse was found that declared they, too, were a people of the Book − the Avesta would have to do − and therefore subject to the same life-saving conditions as the Jews and Christians. As happened in Egypt, in only a few generations of being bombarded with the good news, most became believers.
Bob: When did the Muslims invade Egypt?
Uzza: In keeping with this doctrine of ‘conquer the world in the name of Allah,’ the believers invaded Egypt in 639. Unlike the Persian campaign, it was an easy victory, thanks to our friend Muqawqis who was also head of the Coptic Church. He did not care for the brand of Christianity Byzantine wanted to impose on the Copts and thought he could get a better deal from the believers.
Archie: What a fool!
Uzza: The believers said the Copts could continue to practice whatever brand of Christianity they wanted as long as they paid the Jizya. With that assurance, Muqawqis told his flock to offer no resistance to the invaders, allowing a small army of 4,000 or so, who were later joined by Bedouins as it became evident that Egypt was ripe for plundering. As happened in Persia, once the believers were in charge, it was only a matter of time before the Coptic Christians, the overwhelming majority at the time of the conquest, were seduced by the good news; they are now in danger of disappearing altogether.
Bob: Talk about not knowing who your friends are.
Uzza: Allah warned us to only take other believers as friends and to be wary of unbelievers; they will turn us against Islam and then we will be losers and He will no longer protect or support us[381], in the here-and-now or the Hereafter[382]. It is advice that has stood the community in good stead.
Bob: Friends don’t do civil wars.
Uzza: The Americans considered their Southern compatriots friends, but that did not stop them from fighting a bloody civil war.
Archie: One, not two. What was the second disagreement among friends that they had to fight another war?
Uzza: Not unlike the American Civil War, the second Fitna ̶ while also a war of succession ̶ was a war between the North and South; and not unlike the American Civil War, the North won. And, like the American Civil War, the winner tried to find common ground, and that common ground was Muhammad and a Koran that set the believers further apart from the people of the Book.
Archie: Who was unhappy with the guy in charge this time around?
Uzza: A condition of Hasan agreeing to Muawiya becoming caliph was that he would not name his son as successor, leaving the door open for Hasan to seek the caliphate.
Archie: And he didn't do that. What else is new?
Uzza: Muawiya, it is said, had Hasan assassinated[383] then appointed his son Yazid as his successor. When Muawiya died, a Medinan chieftain by the name of al-Zubayr encouraged Husayn to challenge Yazid. He was defeated at the infamous battle of Karbala in 680 and he and his family were beheaded.
Bob: Someone dared to publically execute the grandson of the Prophet? That took guts.
Uzza: Stupidity is more like it. What should have been an unforgivable sacrilege was quickly followed by the pillage of Medina and desecration of the mosque founded by Muhammad. Yazid then marched on Mecca. During the assault, the Ka'ba was burnt to the ground.
Archie: This is priceless. Today, an innocent cartoon of the Prophet can get you killed. A few decades after his death, a pretender to his legacy murdered three members of his family, ransacked the city where he died, attacked the city of his birth − almost obliterating what was to become the holiest shrine of Islam, the Ka'ba − and not only got away with it, but was rewarded with the caliphate for his efforts.
Uzza: You must understand, for the believers of the North, those places did not matter. Even Mecca did not matter that much. In the Koran, it is mentioned only once, and you have to believe the scholars when they say that Bakka[384] means Mecca and not some other place.
Bob: But the Prophet today is everywhere.
Uzza: But not then. Then, like I said before, Muhammad was just another doomsday prophet, many of which roamed the Middle East. What differentiated him from the other soothsayers of his day was the Book and its reputed author, God, that drove the Muslim invaders. They conquered not in the name of any prophet, but in the name of Allah.
Bob: Then why today can a cartoon of a guy who’s been dead for more than a thousand years get you killed?
Uzza: That was al-Malik's doing.
Bob: Al who?
Footnotes
3:144 Muhammad is merely a Messenger, before whom many Messengers have come and gone. If then he dies or gets killed, you will turn on your heels?
22:17 Indeed, the believers, the Jews, the Sabians, the Christians, the Magians and the idolaters – Allah shall decide between them on the Day of Resurrection. Surely, Allah is a witness of everything.
Robert Wright in The Evolution of God speculates that verse 22:17 may have been added after the Muslim conquest of Persia to make Islam more palatable to Zoroastrians by including them as a people whom Allah, who “does whatever He pleases,” may admit into Paradise.
By and large the Koran offers no evidence that Muhammad had contact with the Zoroastrians —except for this one verse where they appear out of nowhere and are suddenly eligible for Paradise. It’s enough to make you wonder whether this verse wasn’t added, or at least amended after Muhammad’s death, when the conquest of Persian lands brought many Zoroastrians under Islamic governance.
The Zoroastrians were a people of a book, not the Book, but a book, the Avesta. But, what about the Sabians?
There is another reason to suspect that this verse is a product of the post-Muhammad era. It grants salvation not only to Zoroastrians but to “Sabians.” To judge by the beliefs of their modern day heirs (sometimes called Mandeans), the Sabians, like the Zoroastrians, would have been hard to fit into the Abrahamic fold; they revered John the Baptist but considered Jesus, Abraham and Moses false prophets. And again (judging by their modern heirs) they would have had another thing in common with Zoroastrians; their residential epicenter was to the east of Muhammad’s turf, in modern-day Iraq and Iran, land conquered not by Muhammad but by his successors.
Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, p. 394
When Muhammad died before the eschaton's (the end of the world) arrival and the Hour continued to be delayed, the early Muslims had to radically reorient their religious vision. The Hour was thus increasingly deferred into the distant future, and in less than a century Islam swiftly transformed itself from a religion expecting the end of the world to a religion that aimed to rule the world.
Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet - The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012
2:149 O believers, if you obey the unbelievers, they will turn upon your heels (turn you away from Islam), and thus you will become complete losers.
2:150 Rather, Allah is your Protector, and He is the Best Supporter!
33:64 Allah has cursed the unbelievers and prepared for them a blazing fire;
33:65 Dwelling therein forever, not finding a protector or supporter.
The death of al-Hasan removed a hurdle to his appointment of his son Yazid to the succession, which Muawiya was eagerly promoting at the time. For while it is true that al-Hasan was innocuous enough and hardly harboured any intentions of reclaiming the caliphate, many of the disaffected, smarting under the divisive Umayyad despotism, had not forgotten Muawiya’s recognition of al-Hasan as his legitimate successor… This situation also lends credibility to the reports that al-Hasan was poisoned by his wife Ja’da at the instigation of Muawiya.
Wilferd Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad – A study of the early Caliphate, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
3:96 The first House founded for mankind is truly that at Bakka (Mecca), blessed and a guidance to all the nations.