Stavros
06-29-2011, 02:01 AM
Iran’s Minister of Culture has attacked the BBC for making a documentary on the life of Muhammad and the origins of Islam –no, he hasn’t seen it. The 3-part series will be broadcast in mid-July on BBC-2. Iran is already paranoid it will be Sunni propaganda (from the BBC?), I ask will it be a genuinely thought-provoking study or just another example of the formula-tv we get where programmes all look the same, have a figurehead wandering around museums and ruins, and a soundtrack saturated in bland muzak?
It is clear from the Press Release that however interesting the programmes will be, they will steer clear of the core controversies that have occupied scholars in the last 30 years. These controversies are worth rehearsing now, since more heat than light is generated by the origins of Islam, and I don’t doubt the programme will ignore key issues.
The press release is here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2011/06_june/20/muhammad.shtml
Iran’s objections are in today’s Guardian here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jun/28/iran-bbc-documentary-prophet-muhammad
First of all, there are three basic ways of approaching Muhammad and the history of Islam:
The first is to reject it outright as nonsense.
The second is to accept the ‘official version’ which describes Muhammad’s life in Mecca, the revelations he received from God through the angel Gabriel [Jibril], the struggles he had in convincing people they should become monotheists, fleeing in fear of his life to Medina, creating the first Muslim ‘Umma (Community) there, eventually defeating the pagans of Mecca, restoring the annual Pilgrimage [Hajj] and branching out from there across Arabia. This version also lauds Muhammad for giving the Arabs a religion in their own language, with the crucial point being that the Qu’ran is literally the word of God transmitted to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel.
The third approach, developed by a new generation of scholars since the 1970s –departing considerably from the earlier scholarship of RB Serjeant, W Montgomery Watt and HAR Gibb- takes this story out of its insular Arabian milieu, and looks at the origins of Islam in a broader, regional and historical context. Note that for many Muslims, engaging in this kind of enquiry is blasphemous; Crone has been vilified for her work.
The nature of recent controversies can be found in a succinct paper by Patricia Crone (School of Advanced Study, Princeton). I first read her book Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam shortly after it was published in 1987, and find her arguments provocative, fascinating, and worthy of scrutiny. Her claim that archaeology could provide a clue to many missing links in the history of Islam is fundamental to the debate, not least because Saudi Arabia has an aversion to it, particularly in the north-west of the country. She writes in complete contrast to the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi (The Bible Came from Arabia), who places the Biblical story in western Arabia, although his arguments ignore archaeology and rely too much on the similarity of place-names in the Arab world.
The controversies in Crone’s work deal with:
Geography: the location of Muhammad’s life story, which she argues is more likely to have happened near the Dead Sea than in west Central Arabia;
Language: the confusion that has accompanied the earliest scripts of the Qu’ran, the absence of place-names and named people in the surviving text, and the subsequent ‘official’ text which inevitably was a synthesis of several versions;
Theology –the links between Islam, Judaism and Christianity, which to Crone are central to the development of the religion –in another paper she argues that as ecumenical communities all adhering to the belief in the one God, they were in regular dialogue with each other.
Economics: Crone’s re-evaluation of the surviving texts in Arabic and other regional languages (Armemian, Greek, Aramaic etc) leads her to question many of the assumptions about the trading caravans that Muhammad was said to have been part of when he was a young man, and for Crone this is fundamental to the problem of Mecca as the locus parentis of the story.
Gender and Sexuality: Omar will probably rehearse the standard
arguments that Islam was a step forward for women in 7th century Arabia, that it gave women more dignity and respect than they had when they were running around semi-naked (as they are described in the Qu’ran) and so on. I doubt that he will mention the existence of Eunuchs in the holy places where they became the guardians of Muhammad’s tomb for example, and will probably avoid the wider issues of gender and sexuality where these do not conform to a male/female paradigm and in spite of the evidence that there has never been a simple man/woman dichotomy in Arabia, neither in the 7th century nor today; nor anywhere else for that matter.
Like Christianity before it, Islam developed as an organised religion after the death of Muhammad. Even in Muhammad’s lifetime it changed: at first Muhammad and his followers prayed twice a day, once at night, and turned to Jerusalem to pray, and did not prostrate themselves. Even after the flight to Medina, Muslims turned to Jerusalem to pray, it was only after the conquest of Mecca that this changed, possibly to placate the Meccans. Also, the Hajj is a re-construction of pre-existing pagan rituals and was absorbed into Islam as a means of gaining converts: circulating the Ka’aba seven times [Tawa’af], the stoning of the devil are two rituals that pre-date Islam as a religion; the Tawa’af is a re-enactment of Sarah’s (wife of Abraham) search for water for her children, for example.
LINKS
I provide links here to two of Crone’s articles (there are others online if you google her name), the second one is a book review.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-europe_islam/mohammed_3866.jsp
(http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/42023/among-the-believers/)
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/42023/among-the-believers/
Gender and Sexuality:
I recommend the following to anyone interested in exploring some of these issues:
Everett K Rowson,‘The Effeminates of Early Medina’,Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol 111, no 4 (1991) 671-693.
Rowson discusses what he calls effeminate men in Medina in the first Islamic centuries, known in Arabic as mukhannathun. As with Eunuchs, these men were assumed to have no interest in women and so were able to act as marriage brokers and participate at weddings; they were also known as musicians and entertainers.
Shaun Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society (Oxford University Press1995).
Publisher’s abstract:
In this thought-provoking interdisciplinary work, Shaun Marmon describes how eunuchs, as a category of people who embodied ambiguity, both defined and mediated critical thresholds of moral and physical space in the household, in the palace and in the tomb of pre-modern Islamic society. The author's central focus is on the sacred society of eunuchs who guarded the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina for over six centuries and whose last representatives still perform many of their time honored rituals to this day. Through Marmon's account, the "sacred" eunuchs of Medina become historical guides into uncharted dimensions of Islamic ritual, political symbolism, social order, gender and time.
Unni Wikan, ‘Man becomes woman: transexualism in Oman as a key to gender roles’
Man (N.S.) 12 [1977]; 304-319.
Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan completed her doctoral research in Oman in the 1970s and produced these studies, generating a lot of controversy in the process. She realised that she was in the presence of Xanith at a wedding ceremony where men and women are usually segregated, and went on to interview a few. They were all failures on their wedding night, typically being married around the age of 14-18; the failure to perform sexually on the wedding night led to anger, a return of the dowry and shame on the boy’s family. The Xanith she interviewed were then cast out, living in their ‘female’ form and working as prostitutes but, ironically in some cases learning enough about sex in the process, and gaining enough confidence to marry successfully a second time. There is a poor photo of a Xanith in the book, but the article is definitely worth exploring.
I have not read this book but some people might find it interesting:
Sexuality in the Arab World, Edited by Samir Khalaf and John Gagnon
Saqi Books, 312pp
In one of two chapters about homosexuality, Sofian Merabet explores the creation of “queer space” in Beirut - a half-private, half-public world of illicit encounters which the authorities generally prefer not to notice, despite a Lebanese law forbidding “all unnatural intercourse”. Another chapter, by Jared McCormick, examines Beirut’s embryonic gay community and the growth of Helem, the first gay and lesbian rights organisation to function openly in an Arab country. A “gay identity” is clearly emerging in Lebanon, but there are questions as to how much of it has been borrowed from the west. In this, as elsewhere in Arabs’ changing perceptions of their sexuality, the internet seems to be playing a major role.
It is clear from the Press Release that however interesting the programmes will be, they will steer clear of the core controversies that have occupied scholars in the last 30 years. These controversies are worth rehearsing now, since more heat than light is generated by the origins of Islam, and I don’t doubt the programme will ignore key issues.
The press release is here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2011/06_june/20/muhammad.shtml
Iran’s objections are in today’s Guardian here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jun/28/iran-bbc-documentary-prophet-muhammad
First of all, there are three basic ways of approaching Muhammad and the history of Islam:
The first is to reject it outright as nonsense.
The second is to accept the ‘official version’ which describes Muhammad’s life in Mecca, the revelations he received from God through the angel Gabriel [Jibril], the struggles he had in convincing people they should become monotheists, fleeing in fear of his life to Medina, creating the first Muslim ‘Umma (Community) there, eventually defeating the pagans of Mecca, restoring the annual Pilgrimage [Hajj] and branching out from there across Arabia. This version also lauds Muhammad for giving the Arabs a religion in their own language, with the crucial point being that the Qu’ran is literally the word of God transmitted to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel.
The third approach, developed by a new generation of scholars since the 1970s –departing considerably from the earlier scholarship of RB Serjeant, W Montgomery Watt and HAR Gibb- takes this story out of its insular Arabian milieu, and looks at the origins of Islam in a broader, regional and historical context. Note that for many Muslims, engaging in this kind of enquiry is blasphemous; Crone has been vilified for her work.
The nature of recent controversies can be found in a succinct paper by Patricia Crone (School of Advanced Study, Princeton). I first read her book Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam shortly after it was published in 1987, and find her arguments provocative, fascinating, and worthy of scrutiny. Her claim that archaeology could provide a clue to many missing links in the history of Islam is fundamental to the debate, not least because Saudi Arabia has an aversion to it, particularly in the north-west of the country. She writes in complete contrast to the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi (The Bible Came from Arabia), who places the Biblical story in western Arabia, although his arguments ignore archaeology and rely too much on the similarity of place-names in the Arab world.
The controversies in Crone’s work deal with:
Geography: the location of Muhammad’s life story, which she argues is more likely to have happened near the Dead Sea than in west Central Arabia;
Language: the confusion that has accompanied the earliest scripts of the Qu’ran, the absence of place-names and named people in the surviving text, and the subsequent ‘official’ text which inevitably was a synthesis of several versions;
Theology –the links between Islam, Judaism and Christianity, which to Crone are central to the development of the religion –in another paper she argues that as ecumenical communities all adhering to the belief in the one God, they were in regular dialogue with each other.
Economics: Crone’s re-evaluation of the surviving texts in Arabic and other regional languages (Armemian, Greek, Aramaic etc) leads her to question many of the assumptions about the trading caravans that Muhammad was said to have been part of when he was a young man, and for Crone this is fundamental to the problem of Mecca as the locus parentis of the story.
Gender and Sexuality: Omar will probably rehearse the standard
arguments that Islam was a step forward for women in 7th century Arabia, that it gave women more dignity and respect than they had when they were running around semi-naked (as they are described in the Qu’ran) and so on. I doubt that he will mention the existence of Eunuchs in the holy places where they became the guardians of Muhammad’s tomb for example, and will probably avoid the wider issues of gender and sexuality where these do not conform to a male/female paradigm and in spite of the evidence that there has never been a simple man/woman dichotomy in Arabia, neither in the 7th century nor today; nor anywhere else for that matter.
Like Christianity before it, Islam developed as an organised religion after the death of Muhammad. Even in Muhammad’s lifetime it changed: at first Muhammad and his followers prayed twice a day, once at night, and turned to Jerusalem to pray, and did not prostrate themselves. Even after the flight to Medina, Muslims turned to Jerusalem to pray, it was only after the conquest of Mecca that this changed, possibly to placate the Meccans. Also, the Hajj is a re-construction of pre-existing pagan rituals and was absorbed into Islam as a means of gaining converts: circulating the Ka’aba seven times [Tawa’af], the stoning of the devil are two rituals that pre-date Islam as a religion; the Tawa’af is a re-enactment of Sarah’s (wife of Abraham) search for water for her children, for example.
LINKS
I provide links here to two of Crone’s articles (there are others online if you google her name), the second one is a book review.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-europe_islam/mohammed_3866.jsp
(http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/42023/among-the-believers/)
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/42023/among-the-believers/
Gender and Sexuality:
I recommend the following to anyone interested in exploring some of these issues:
Everett K Rowson,‘The Effeminates of Early Medina’,Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol 111, no 4 (1991) 671-693.
Rowson discusses what he calls effeminate men in Medina in the first Islamic centuries, known in Arabic as mukhannathun. As with Eunuchs, these men were assumed to have no interest in women and so were able to act as marriage brokers and participate at weddings; they were also known as musicians and entertainers.
Shaun Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society (Oxford University Press1995).
Publisher’s abstract:
In this thought-provoking interdisciplinary work, Shaun Marmon describes how eunuchs, as a category of people who embodied ambiguity, both defined and mediated critical thresholds of moral and physical space in the household, in the palace and in the tomb of pre-modern Islamic society. The author's central focus is on the sacred society of eunuchs who guarded the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina for over six centuries and whose last representatives still perform many of their time honored rituals to this day. Through Marmon's account, the "sacred" eunuchs of Medina become historical guides into uncharted dimensions of Islamic ritual, political symbolism, social order, gender and time.
Unni Wikan, ‘Man becomes woman: transexualism in Oman as a key to gender roles’
Man (N.S.) 12 [1977]; 304-319.
Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan completed her doctoral research in Oman in the 1970s and produced these studies, generating a lot of controversy in the process. She realised that she was in the presence of Xanith at a wedding ceremony where men and women are usually segregated, and went on to interview a few. They were all failures on their wedding night, typically being married around the age of 14-18; the failure to perform sexually on the wedding night led to anger, a return of the dowry and shame on the boy’s family. The Xanith she interviewed were then cast out, living in their ‘female’ form and working as prostitutes but, ironically in some cases learning enough about sex in the process, and gaining enough confidence to marry successfully a second time. There is a poor photo of a Xanith in the book, but the article is definitely worth exploring.
I have not read this book but some people might find it interesting:
Sexuality in the Arab World, Edited by Samir Khalaf and John Gagnon
Saqi Books, 312pp
In one of two chapters about homosexuality, Sofian Merabet explores the creation of “queer space” in Beirut - a half-private, half-public world of illicit encounters which the authorities generally prefer not to notice, despite a Lebanese law forbidding “all unnatural intercourse”. Another chapter, by Jared McCormick, examines Beirut’s embryonic gay community and the growth of Helem, the first gay and lesbian rights organisation to function openly in an Arab country. A “gay identity” is clearly emerging in Lebanon, but there are questions as to how much of it has been borrowed from the west. In this, as elsewhere in Arabs’ changing perceptions of their sexuality, the internet seems to be playing a major role.