Hijazi Rock Inscriptions, Love of the Prophet, and Very

Early Islam: Essays from Informed Comment

Juan Cole, University of Michigan

1.

New Light on the Arabian Religious

Background of Islam?
June 27, 2018

There is a key problem with our sources on early Islam. Aside from the Qur’an itself, all the
sources we have were written down after the Abbasid Revolution of 750 against the Umayyads.
The first author to compile a complete biography of Muhammad (d. 632), the chronicler
Muhammad ibn Ishaq of Medina, was born around 704 and died sometime between 761 and 770.
He may have been commissioned to write down his epic biography in the 750s by the Abbasid
caliph al-Mansur. Much of what Ibn Ishaq alleges about the prophet contradicts the Qur’an, our
only early seventh-century primary source for Muhammad’s life. Since it the account was
composed 125-30 years after Muhammad’s death, out of materials that had long circulated
purely in oral form, it was deeply shaped by later controversies and is anachronistic. And, all the
other classical biographies of Muhammad are even later and more problematic, some of them
written down 200-300 years after his death.

The Eastern Roman Greek sources and the Christian Aramaic sources do not say much about the
Arabic-speaking peoples of Muhammad’s time. The later Muslim tradition depicts people in the
Hejaz (western Arabia) as having still been mostly polytheists, though a few tribes were Jews or
Christians. Still, the Arabs did worship a creator-God, just called “God” (Allah in the Hejazi
dialect, Al-Ilah in Syria and elsewhere). The Qur’an maintains that the Arabs of Muhammad’s
era in Mecca acknowledged God/ Allah as the creator, but maintained that there were also other
gods, including several daughters of God– Allat, al-`Uzza, and Manat (who had been equated by
Arabs who lived in the Eastern Roman Empire with its Greek heritage to Athena, Aphrodite and
Tykhe). Christian Arab sources in Greek of the 400s and 500s speak of the Arab (“Saracen”)
tribes worshiping Aphrodite or Venus, by which they almost certainly meant al-`Uzza.

I discuss the rise of Islam in my new book, now available:

 Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires,

Available for pre-order at Barnes and Noble

And Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor

And Hachette

And Amazon

The lack of early written sources has caused some modern historians to cast a great deal of doubt
on the stories in Ibn Ishaq and his successors. One source that is only beginning to be explored
by pioneers like Ahmad al-Jallad at Leiden is rock inscriptions in Arabic from the 500s forward.
That there are thousands of rock inscriptions by Bedouin in late antiquity (many of them in
Aramaic) has long been recognized, but it is only in the past few years that they have begun
being found in Arabic with dates attached or other firm indications of their time period, for the
500s and 600s.

A prodigious Saudi scholar on Twitter, Mohammed Abdullah Alruthaya Almaghthawi, who goes
by @Mohammed93athar has been publishing pictures of newly discovered inscriptions found in
the environs of Medina. And this one seems significant:
Unfortunately, it is not clear where exactly in the Hejaz the inscription was found and it hasn’t
been formally published by the Saudi archeological establishment. So caution is advised.
But it says, “In your name, O God. I am `Abd Shams the son of al-Mughira, who seeks the
forgiveness of his Lord.”

What struck the publisher of the inscription was that it appears to derive from a time before
Islam. At least the later Muslim sources repeatedly suggest that converts to Muhammad’s
religion who bore what are called “theophoric” names, i.e. names that honored a god, changed
them to mark their rejection of polytheism. The person who made this inscription was still named
“servant of the Sun god” (`Abd Shams). (See also the canny comments in the Twitter thread of
this posting).

The Arabs of the 500s CE [A.D.] appear to have been henotheists. This is a notion introduced by
Friedrich Schelling and taken up by Max Mueller, to describe religious systems which recognize
many divinities but where one is supreme above all the others and perhaps subordinates all the
others as mere manifestations of himself. The servant of the Arab Sun God, al-Shams,
presumably worshiped his namesake. But he made this inscription in the name of the supreme
Creator-God, Allah.

This situation is precisely the one described by the Qur’an, which complains of the Meccans
worshiping the daughters of God, but at the same time says, in the chapter of Gilded Ornaments
43:87, “And if you asked them who created them, they would surely say, ‘God.’ Why, then, have
they turned away?” see also the quranic chapter of The Groups 39:38: “If indeed you ask them
who it is that created the heavens and the earth, they would be sure to say, ‘God.'”

The Qur’an depicts part of Muhammad’s prophetic mission as convincing his compatriots that
there were no such things as daughters of God or deities who shared in God’s divinity. There is
only God.

There is a story in the biographies of the Prophet that he and the Quraysh of Mecca made a peace
treaty at Hudaibiya in 628. Muhammad wanted to begin with “In the name of God, the Merciful,
the Compassionate.” The Quraysh did not recognize this diction, and wanted to write simply, “In
the name of God.” That is the diction of this inscription.

The best previous evidence for the Hejazi Arab worship of God/ Allah is an Aramaic inscription
from Rawwafa in northwest Saudi Arabia from the mid-second century, during the reign of
Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-180 CE). The Thamud brigade, auxiliaries of the Roman military south
of Transjordan, had built a second-century CE temple with Roman encouragement. The
inscription says, “the temple which Shiddat, the priest of God [Alaha], son of Megido, who is
from Rabato, made for God . . . with the encouragement of our lord the governor.” [See Michael
C. A. Macdonald et al., “Arabs and Empire Before the Sixth Century,” in Greg Fisher, ed. Arabs
and Empire Before Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 50-51, 55-56;and M.C.A.
Macdonald, “On Saracens, the Rawwafah inscription and the Roman army,” in ibid., Literacy
and Identity in Pre-Islamic Arabia (Surrey, Eng.: Ashgate Pub., 2009), ch. 8.]

The temple that the Thamud made to God with Roman encouragement is analogous to the
Kaaba, the cube-shaped shrine to God in Mecca, in the 500s and 600s. The Thamud at Rawwafa
were not monotheists, but his particular temple was dedicated to God (Allah/ Theos) rather than
to any of the other deities in their pantheon. About 450 years separate the Rawwafa inscription
from the Qur’an, which also attests pagan Arab worship of God, but in Arabic.

Mohammed Abdullah Alruthaya Almaghthawi (@Mohammed93athar) suggests that this

inscription could be that of a historical person known from the later Muslim sources, `Abd
Shams b. al-Mughirah b. `Abdullah b. `Umar al-Makhzumi al-Qurashi, who is mentioned in
Ansab al-Ashraf (Genealogies of the Noble).

If that is he, Arabic Wikipedia says his father would have been al-Mughirah ibn ‘Abd-Allah ibn
`Umar ibn Makhzum ibn Yaqza ibn Ma`ra ibn Ka’b ibn Lu’ay ibn Ghalib ibn Fihr ibn Malik ibn
Quraysh.

Al-Mughirah is said by the later sources to have died in 609, a year before Muhammad received
his prophet commission, and had been instrumental in the rebuilding of the shrine to God, the
Kaaba, in 605, four years before his death. He was perhaps the wealthiest male merchant in
Mecca, and paid a substantial portion of the costs of the rebuilding of the shrine. Al-Mughira was
born in Mecca, about 40 years before the Battle of the Elephant (when Abraha of Yemen tried to
conquer the Hejaz, an event I date to 567, which would give his birth date as 527). He is said to
have participated in several Arab battles.

After the prophet Muhammad began openly preaching around 613, the Makhzum clan proved
one of his biggest enemies, being according to the later sources especially wedded to their pagan
religion.

Of course, the identification of the author of this inscription as the son of al-Mughirah is only a
suggestion, though a plausible one.

If it is correct, this inscription might be the first to be found by a member of the clan Makhzum
of the tribe Quraysh. And if it is sixth century, it is the only contemporary witness to pagan Arab
worship of God besides the Rawwafa inscription and the text of the Qur’an.
2.

Early Arabic Inscriptions and the Life of the

Prophet: A new Source for History
Aug. 22, 2018

Among the anecdotes told in the early biographies of the Prophet Muhammad is one about him
being harassed by his immediate neighbors in Mecca, in roughly the period 614-622. One way
they bothered him was to throw sheep offal through the window of his home in Mecca where he
lived with his first wife, Khadija. `Abd al-Malik Ibn Hisham (d. 7 May 833) edited the earlier
biography of Muhammad ibn Ishaq (died sometime in the 760s). In his translation of Ibn
Hisham, Alfred Guillaume gives this passage to set the scene (Life of Muhammad, p. 191; Ar.
276-77):

“Those of his neighbors who ill treated the apostle in his house were Abu Lahab [and
others…]

“I have been told that one of them used to throw a sheep’s uterus at him while he was
praying; and one of them used to throw it into his cooking-pot when it had been placed
ready for him. Thus the apostle was forced to retire to a wall when he prayed.”

Then Ibn Hisham gives an anecdote for how the Prophet Muhammad responded to this petty
harassment:

“`Umar ibn `Abdu’llah ibn `Urwa ibn Zubayr told me on the authority of his father that
when they threw this objectionable thing at him the apostle took it out on a stick, and
standing at the door of his house, he would say, ‘O Banu `Abdu Manaf, what sort of
protection is this?” Then he would throw it in the street.”

The biographers maintain that Muhammad’s own immediate relatives, including the Muttalib
and Banu Hashim of the `Abd Manaf clan of Quraysh, decided to give him their protection even
though they were pagans. It was more important to them that he was a kinsman than that he had
what Mecca pagans considered strange religious ideas. Other clans of the Quraysh tribe in the
city are alleged to have been militant pagans and to have objected to Muhammad’s denial of the
reality of the gods. To a polytheist, a monotheist is a kind of atheist.

But, while the pagan clans gave protection to Muhammad and his followers, they couldn’t be
everywhere all the time, and this anecdote represents the long-suffering Prophet as observing that
they sometimes did not seem to be keeping him very safe from the mischief of enemies.
The Revisionist academic historians of early Islam, at least in their heyday of the 1970s through
recent years, cast severe doubt on these anecdotes about the life of the Prophet, on the grounds
that Ibn Hisham, for instance, was writing in the early 800s but Muhammad died in 632. Even if
some of his material came from Ibn Ishaq, who was presumably collecting these anecdotes from
roughly 100 to 130 years after the Prophet’s death, that still doesn’t get us very close.

Since all the evidence we had was literary, how did we really know that the Prophet lived in
Mecca or that any of the people mentioned in the early sources really existed?

Skepticism is useful in academic study up to a point, since people who hold a particular view of
what happened are pressed to clarify how exactly they know what they think they know, and
what their sources are, and how primary they are. But there is a difference between healthy
skepticism and denialism.

I agree that much in the later Muslim biographies of Muhammad is essentially folk stories and
later elaborations and tall tales. My own rule of thumb is that if the story isn’t like anything in
the Qur’an, then I reject it, or at least see no reason to accept it.

But this particular anecdote isn’t implausible on the surface, and the Qur’an does speak of the
Meccan pagans insulting, taunting and harassing the Prophet and the early Believers. The Qur’an
advises them to meet this behavior with good wishes and prayers of peace for their foes. So a
sigh by the Prophet that his clan protection was imperfect would not contradict these passages of
the Qur’an.

For instance, Qur’an 41:34 (Explanation/ Fussilat)

“Good deeds and wicked ones are not equal. Repel evil with a higher good, and your enemy will
become your devoted patron.”

Arabic names of this period, as with Norse ones, are more a genealogy than a name. The
anecdote about Muhammad’s reaction to being bothered in this way came from a man named
“`Umar” (i.e. Omar). His father was `Abdu’llah, and his grandfather was the historian and jurist
of Medina, `Urwa (d. 712 or 713). His great-grandfather, Zubayr ibn al-`Awwam (d. 656), had
been a companion of the prophet.

Gregor Schoeler and Andreas Gorke have identified eight anecdotes about the life of Muhammad
which were very widely related by early Muslims, and which they attributed to `Urwa ibn al-
Zubayr, the grandfather of the `Umar who told the story about the sheep’s uterus. I compared
these eight accounts to the Qur’an’s own narratives in my book, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace
amid the Clash of Empires

And now for the big reveal. The Saudi scholar Mohammed Abdullah Alruthaya Almaghthawi
(on twitter as @mohammed93athar) has been publishing on Twitter Arabic inscriptions found on
rock faces around Medina, the Prophet’s adopted city from 622.

One of these inscriptions goes this way:

“`Umar ibn `Abdu’llah ibn `Urwa ibn al-Zubayr has believed in God and bears witness
that there is no God but God, and has denied [the idol] Taghut, both in this life and after
death. `Umar has written this in the year 96.”

‫آمن عمر بن عبد هللا بن عروة بن الزبير باهلل شهد إنه ال إله إال هللا وكفر بالطاغوت حيا ً وميتا ً وكتب عمر سنة ست وتسعين‬

96 AH, the Muslim calendar ran from mid-September of 714 to early September of 715. That is,
this inscription claims to be from only 82 solar years after the death of Muhammad in 632. Some
scholars think the Gospel of John was composed about 80 years after the death of Jesus.

The original tweet is here.

This is the photograph of the inscription:

Mohammed Abdullah Alruthaya Almaghthawi, the Saudi scholar posting these inscriptions,
gives `Umar’s date of death somewhere in the years 100 and 110 AH, i.e. 718-728 AD.

Ibn Ishaq was born in 704 and would have been 24 in 728. So it is entirely possible that he met
`Umar and heard this anecdote from him in his youth in Medina.

Of course, this simple inscription does not prove that the anecdote of the Prophet being bothered
with having sheep’s offal tossed at him has any truth to it, only that the alleged relater of the
anecdote actually existed and was a Muslim.
The biographer Ibn Sa`d confirms that `Urwa ibn al-Zubayr’s eldest son was named `Abdu’llah,
so that was the father of our `Umar.

`Umar is said to have heard stories of the prophet from his grandfather, the historian `Urwa,
when he was young. He did not leave behind any children.

This inscription seems to be held in a regional museum in Saudi Arabia, named the Turki al-
Rubayli Museum, which suggests that Saudi archeologists have looked carefully at it. I
obviously cannot attest its authenticity, but do not see a strong reason to doubt it.

Al-Zubayr and his descendants are alleged by later historians to have played an important role in
very early Islamic history. Al-Zubayr led a rebellion in 656 against the fourth Commander of the
Faithful, Ali. His son `Abdullah (`Urwa’s brother, d. 692–not to be confused with `Urwa’s eldest
son) rebelled against the Umayyad ruler Yazid, ironically at first in conjunction with Ali’s son
Husayn (the grandson of the prophet). Both Abdullah and Husayn were killed by the Umayyads.
`Urwa wasn’t political but must have sympathized with his brother. He burned many of his
writings during that rebellion, which he is said later to have regretted.

The inscription by `Umar, `Urwa’s grandson, tells us nothing about politics but does say
something about early Muslim piety in the first century of the faith:

“`Umar ibn `Abdu’llah ibn `Urwa ibn al-Zubayr has believed in God and bears witness
that there is no God but God, and has denied [the idol] Taghut, both in this life and after
death. `Umar has written this in the year 96.”

It is interesting to me that the author of the inscription made a point of denying the existence of
gods. Taghut seems to be an Ethiopian word for graven idols that was adopted into the Arabic of
West Arabia (the Hejaz). Maybe I am reaching and the inscription is formulaic. But I suspect that
it indicates that North Arabian paganism continued to be practiced in rural areas of Arabia,
Transjordan and Syria well into the Umayyad period. Hence, pious Muslims still found it
important to distinguish themselves from polytheists and henotheists, who were around them.

The monk of northern Iraq writing in the 680s, John bar Penkaye had observed of Umayyad rule,

“From every man they required only the tribute, and left him free to hold any belief, and
there were even some Christians among them: some belonged to the heretics and others
to us. While Mu`awiya reigned there was such a great peace in the world as was never
heard of, according to our fathers and our fathers’ fathers.”

Elsewhere, he complained that under early Muslim rule, Near Eastern Christians were making
friendships with Jews and engaging in commerce with infidels (pagans/Hellenes?).

See also for the survival of religions other than Islam in the Hejaz, Henry Munt, “No two
religions”: Non-Muslims in the early Islamic Ḥijāz,” 2 Jun 2015, Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies.
3.

New Archeological Evidence for the Kaaba,

Sanctuary of Peace, in Early Islam
Juan Cole 02/27/2019

During the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, believers circumambulate the square ‘House of God’
called the Kaaba. It is said to have predated Islam, and to have been cleansed of idols by the
Prophet Muhammad in January of 630, when the town of Mecca swung to his leadership by
acclamation.

There is some new archeological evidence for the Kaaba in the form of Arabic rock inscriptions
in Western Arabia, photographs of which have been published on Twitter. I should underline that
this evidence was put up on Twitter by Abdallah Muslih Al-Thumali and Mohammed
Almaghthawi, respectively. All I’m doing is reading my Twitter feed and am grateful to these
intrepid rock climbers who are bringing us this new evidence.

The inscriptions have also been published: Sa’d bin Rashid, al-Suwaydirah : al-taraf qadiman,
atharuha wa-nuqushuha al-Islamiyah, Riyadh, 2009.
Belief in sacred sites like the Kaaba was widespread in that part of the world from ancient times.

In the Hejaz and Transjordan, a sacred site was called in Arabic a ḥaram.

h/t Researchgate

In the Nabataean culture of roughly 300 BC through the Christianization of the 300s AD (after
Constantine’s conversion of 312), such a sacred place or temple was called mḥrmt’ (mahramat?–
we don’t have their vowels) in their sometimes Arabized Aramaic.

Thus we have the inscription:

d’ mhrmt dy bnh cnmw

which means “This is the consecrated place which PN built”

(M. O’Connor, “The Arabic Loanwords in Nabatean Aramaic,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies,
Vol. 45, No. 3 (Jul., 1986), pp. 213-229, this phrase on p. 223).
ḥrm also meant sacred in the sense of inviolable. So tomb raiders were warned by Nabataean
inscriptions that a grave and its inscriptions are sacrosanct (ḥrm) and not to be disturbed.
There was a Roman Greek witness to Arab sacred spaces from the 500s AD. I have written,

‘A Roman ambassador to the Arabs, Nonnosos, observed a few decades before

Muhammad’s birth that they “have a sacred meeting-place consecrated to one of the
gods, where they assemble twice a year. One of these meetings lasts a whole month….
[T]he other lasts two months.” He added, “During these meetings complete peace
prevails, not only amongst themselves, but also with all the natives; even the animals are
at peace both with themselves and human beings.”’

The Qur’an (Stories 28:57) says that people in Mecca have been provided with a “safe
sanctuary” or “secure consecrated place” (ḥaraman āminan), which has been taken to refer to the
Kaaba. As Nonnosos said, such places were “secure” because feuding and fighting were
forbidden in their precincts. In my recent book, I argue that Muhammad, as a member of the
Banu Hashim clan, was part of the kinship group charged with servicing pilgrims to the Kaaba
and making sure violence did not touch it. They would thus mediate feuds and make peace. That
was the background out of which Muhammad came.

The Qur’an also on numerous occasions uses for it the phrase al-masjid al-harām (e.g. 5:2),
probably meaning “the sacred temple.” The Qur’an uses “masjid” for any place of worship,
including synagogues and churches, which confused later commentators, since it is the origin of
the word “mosque” and came to mean a Muslim place of worship. The Arabic masjid in the time
of the Qur’an, however, had a wide signification. The cognate msgd in Aramaic means altar.

In the Jordanian city of Petra north of the west Arabian area called “the Hejaz” from which
Muhammad hailed, archeologists in the 1990s found Greek papyrus rolls in the basement of a
church. Ahmad al-Jallad has found that in the Petra Papyri, produced in the 500s AD in Greek,
the Arabic word masjida is mentioned, with the ‘a’ at the end showing it was a loan word from
Aramaic, as Ahmad Jallad argued:
So here’s what’s new:

A recently discovered rock inscription from near Ta’if dated 78 AH (began March 30, 697),
published by Abdallah Muslih Al-Thumali, mentions “al-masjid al-ḥarām,” likely a reference to
the Kaaba:
It says at the end, “this inscription was written in the year when construction work was done on
the sacred shrine (al-masjid al-ḥarām) in the year 78 [697-8].”

The publisher of this photograph says that he may be referring to the refurbishing of the Kaaba
carried out by the sixth Umayyad caliph, `Abd al-Malik b. Marwan (r. 685-705).
Note that this inscription is only 65 solar years after the death of Muhammad. It is as close to
him as we are, in 2019, to 1954, when Elvis Presley’s career began. Given the lateness of our
manuscript sources on early Islam– with Ibn Ishaq’s biography of the Prophet allegedly being
from the 760s, some 130 years after Muhammad’s death in 632, and existing only in early ninth-
century redactions, this inscription may be our first mention of the Kaaba outside of the Qur’an
(which Muslim tradition dates 610-632).

Another recently discovered rock inscription from the Hejaz in madani script has been published
on Twitter by the renowned Saudi archeologist Mohammed Almaghthawi. It is likely from the
second century A.H. (c. 718 – 815 AD) and inscribed by one Maysara b. Ibrahim, who identifies
himself as “servant of the Kaaba” (khādim al-ka`ba).
Almaghthawi and his colleagues have found thousands of inscriptions in the Hejaz, especially
around Medina, that appear to be from the first and second centuries of the Hijra (622-815 AD).
4.

The Prophet’s Tribe: The First Mention of

Quraysh in an Inscription from the Dawn of
Islam
Juan Cole 06/05/2019

The Qur’an, the Muslim scripture, speaks of the Quraysh as a tribe that engaged in travel and
worshiped at a shrine.

Qur’an 106, “Quraysh,” says, “Because of his benevolence toward the Quraysh, they were
enabled to undertake the winter and summer caravans. So let them worship the lord of this
shrine, who provided them with food to stop their hunger and gave them security against fear.

Later Muslim tradition identified the Quraysh as a tribal federation that dominated Mecca in the
sixth and early seventh centuries, and identified the shrine or temple (bayt) mentioned here as the
Kaaba, the cube-shaped edifice dedicated to God in the center of Mecca.

The name “Quraysh” is rare in Arabic-language rock inscriptions, likely because the Safaitic
inscriptions are from areas north of the Hejaz and in any case peter out around 400 before the
confederation is alleged to have been formed at Mecca.

The Saudi archeologist Muhammad al-Maghthawi has published a photograph of an inscription

in the vicinity of Medina, however, which does contain the adjective “Qurashi,” i.e. “belonging
to the Quraysh.”
The inscription says, “I am `Abdu’llah b. `Ibad b. Hamza b. `Abdu’llah b. al-Zubayr al-Qurashi
then al-Asadi. I ask God for forgiveness.”

This individual belonged to the al-Asad clan, one of those that made up the Quraysh
confederacy. His ancestor was al-Zubayr b. al-`Awwam, the nephew of Khadija, the first wife of
the Prophet Muhammad and the husband of Asma’, the younger daughter of Abu Bakr, the first
vicar (r. 632-634) of Muhammad.

Al-Zubayr staged an uprising in 656 against the fourth Commander of the Faithful, `Ali b. Abi
Talib (the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad). But when he had second thoughts
and withdrew from the fray, he was assassinated in the same year. His son `Abdu’llah (d. 692)
also staged an uprising, in the Hejaz, against the Umayyad dynasty. The `Abdu’llah in our
inscription is the grandson of this `Abdu’llah who claimed leadership and failed.

Let’s say Hamza was born around 650, and `Ibad around 674; then the `Abdullah of our
inscription would have been born around 698 (figuring 24 years to a generation).

So this genealogy mentioning the Asad clan and the Quraysh confederation is likely from the
early eighth century and could be within a century of the Prophet’s death.
5

Very Early Muslim Piety toward the Prophet

Muhammad: Blessings and Intercession
Juan Cole 06/11/2019 (Edit)

The great scholar Annemarie Schimmel quoted Arthur Jeffrey, the Australian scholar of Islam, to
this effect: “Many years ago . . . the late Shaikh Mustafa al-Maraghi remarked on a visit to his
friend, the Anglican bishop in Egypt, that the commonest cause of offence, generally unwitting
offence, given by Christians to Muslims, arose from their complete failure to understand the very
high regard all Muslims have for the person of their Prophet.” And Muhammad is his Messenger:
The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,
1985).

It is not for nothing that Muhammad is the most popular name for male newborns in the whole
world.

We have very little securely datable primary source evidence for the attitudes of the first
generations of followers of the Prophet Muhammad. Almost all our accounts come from authors
and editors of the ninth century, though some of these contain some texts and orally transmitted
reports that may be earlier. Coins, a few papyri and thousands of rock inscriptions (most still not
professionally published) are the only datable seventh and early-eighth-century sources. Of the
published and tabulated early Muslim inscriptions in the Hijaz, Frédéric Imbert estimates that
only 9% mention Muhammad. This result would be consistent with the thesis of Professor Fred
Donner at the University of Chicago (Muhammad and the Believers) that the earliest believers in
the Prophet Muhammad formed an ecumenical community of monotheists rather than being a
sectarian movement. But it may also just be that rock inscriptions were used to seek blessings
and security for the individuals who wrote them (something visible in the pre-Islamic Nabataean
Aramaic inscriptions in southern Jordan and northern Hejaz, as well).

Some of the inscriptions about the Prophet Muhammad are eye-opening. One, discussed first, has
been known since the 1930s. The other two below, one dated and the other from the first or
second century of the Muslim calendar (which began in 622 in the Gregorian calendar), are fairly
newly published and interpreted by the Saudi archeologist Mohammed Almaghthawi
@mohammed93athar and Professor Sean W. Anthony @shahanSean.

The first is reprinted at this Islamic Awareness site:

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
The greatest calamity to have befallen the people of
Islam is the catastrophic loss of the Prophet Muḥammad,
may the blessings and peace of God be upon him.
This is the tomb of ʿAbbasa, daughter of
Juraij, son of Sad?. May the mercy,
forgiveness and good-pleasure of God be upon her.
She died on Monday four-
teen days having elapsed from Dhu al-Qa`dah
of the year one and seventy,
confessing that there is no god but God,
alone without any associate, and that
Muḥammad is his servant and his messenger,
may the blessings and peace of God be upon him.

This tombstone inscription is the earliest securely dated text of piety about the Prophet (691 is
only 59 years after his death). It was initially published by H. M. El-Hawary, “The Second
Oldest Islamic Monument Known Dated AH 71 (AD 691) From The Time Of The Omayyad
Calif ‘Abd el-Malik Ibn Marwan”, Journal Of The Royal Asiatic Society, 1932, p. 289.

Its significance and dating is discussed by Jonathan E. Brockopp, Interpreting Material Evidence:
Religion at the “Origins of Islam,” History of Religions, 2015 121-147.

The next dated attestation of piety toward the Prophet in an inscription was published by “The
Desert Team” of archeologists in Saudi Arabia as an appendix to `Abd Allah `Abd al-`Aziz Sa`id
and Muhammad Shafiq Baytar, Nuqush Hismá : kitabat min sadr al-Islam shamal gharb al-
Mamlakah (al-Riyad : al-Majallah al-`Arabiyah, 2018).

The “Desert Team” photo was shared on Twitter by Mr. Almaghthawi.

It says, “O God, bless Muhammad the Prophet and accept his intercession for his community,
and show us your compassion through him in the next world just as you showed us compassion
through him in this world. This is being written by Bakr b. Abi Bakra al-Aslami at the
completion of the year 80 [January 700].”
Professor Sean W. Anthony @shahanSean was the first to notice this inscription in English,
having seen Almaghthawi’s photograph of it.
These two dated inscriptions 59 and 68 years after the Prophet’s death (632) show a pious
affection for him. The Muslim social circle of the convert from Christianity, `Abbasa the
daughter of George who wrote her tombstone may have included an elderly person from the
Hejaz who had moved to Upper Egypt and who had actually seen the Prophet as a child. Or they
included persons who knew such women and men. The sense of loss is palpable.

The second inscription, from 700, speaks of Muhammad as an intercessor and as a source of
divine compassion, twice. Once was the mercy God showed on human beings by sending him in
this world as a Prophet. The second is his ongoing intercession from the hereafter.

There is a similarity between this idea of Muhammad as an intercessor and the late-antique
Christian notion of exemplary saints interceding for the salvation of ordinary believers. But in
Christianity the locus of the departed saint was bodily– the relic or the tomb. These inscriptions
instead focus on the personality of the Prophet as a transtemporal figure who straddled this world
and the next.

(Sixteenth and seventeenth-century Protestantism in Christianity and eighteenth-century

Wahhabism in Islam, both critiqued the idea of intercession, but has been a widespread belief in
those religions up to the present).

A third relevant inscription, this one undated, was also published by Mr. Almaghthawi and
commented on by Professor Anthony.
This rock inscription from near Medina, likely from the first or second century of Islam, calls
upon God to accept the intercession of the Prophet for Muslims and asks God to make the author,
Tamam, a friend or companion of the Prophet in heaven.

And here is a fourth such inscription (in addition to `Abbasa’s tombstone), from the first or
second century AH. It says, “Our God, bless Muhammad, your servant, your messenger and the
best of your creation. God give him blessings and peace.”
6.

The First Inscriptional Evidence for the Wife

of the Prophet Muhammad, Aisha
Juan Cole 09/29/2019

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) –

The Saudi archeologist Muhammad al-Maghthawi has published a photograph of an inscription

in the vicinity of Medina that seems to be the first to mention the Prophet’s third wife, `A`isha. It
seems to date from the first century of the Muslim era (A. H.), and is probably from the late 600s
A.D. In fact, its diction is such that it may even date from a time when A’isha was still alive (she
is said to have died in 674). It says,

“O God, forgive `Aṭā’ ibn Qays and ‘Āʾisha, the spouse of the Prophet.”
We do not have any securely dated early accounts of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, who
died in 632. The first extended book on the subject dates from the 760s, by Muhammad ibn
Ishaq, commissioned by the Abbasid rulers who came to power in 750. It was followed by works
by Ibn Rashid, al-Waqidi, Ibn Sa`d and al-Biladhuri, which are even later. Most of these
biographies appeal to oral narratives and scattered notes stemming from earlier decades, and they
suffer from the folk process and oral fluidity.

The Qur’an permits up to four wives, assuming, it says, a man can treat them all equally. Muslim
modernists have argued for monogamy on the grounds that it is impossible actually to treat them
all equally, as the Qur’an remarks. The later sources suggest that in a society without a state, and
in a small community with few support mechanisms, polygyny was a way of taking care of
widows and unmarried women. From the Medina period (622-632), Muhammad’s followers
were forbidden to marry pagans. There therefore were not many available mates, given how tiny
the early community was. There are several possible reasons for which women also may have
been over-represented in the early community. Typically there are 5% more women than men in
a population (this is true of the contemporary US). Women may have converted to the new
religion at greater rates than men, for all we know. Men were constrained with regard to
conversion by social taboos because their livelihood was at risk from social boycotts, whereas
women may often have been less vulnerable to this pressure. The early followers of Muhammad
had to fight several defensive battles, in which dozens or hundreds of their men were killed.

The later Muslim biographical tradition attributes to Muhammad more than four wives, but there
is nothing in the Qur’an to make us think he married more than four at any one time. Roman
custom was monogamy, which Western Christianity inherited (it wasn’t Jewish law; Solomon is
said to have had 700 wives and concubines). As a result, Christians through history have been
appalled at Muhammad’s marriages, which they interpreted as lascivious. Somehow they don’t
view Abraham or David through the same lens.

All the accounts of Muhammad’s marriages are late and full of improbable details, and almost
certainly reflect Abbasid politics and claims on authority for certain Muslim families rather than
telling us about 622-632, the period in which the Prophet was said to contract further marriages
after his first wife Khadija bint Khuwaylid, died in 619 or 620. The great scholar William
Montgomery Watt debunked the lascivious interpretation of Muhammad’s marriages, pointing
out that he was married to Khadija alone from the time of his marriage to her at age 25 until her
death roughly two and a half decades later, according to the Abbasid sources. Rather, in Medina
Muhammad became a kind of tribal chieftain in addition to being a prophet, and Arab tribal
chieftains used marriages to make political alliances.

`A’isha was the daughter of Muhammad’s friend, the great merchant Abdallah ibn Abi Quhafah,
c. 573 A.D. – 634 A.D, known as Abu Bakr. Abu Bakr was one of the first to embrace
Muhammad’s new religion, around 610, and was only a little younger than Muhammad, being
roughly a contemporary. Abu Bakr became Muhammad’s successor or vicar on the Prophet’s
death in 632, rather as Peter was said to be the vicar of Christ. Abu Bakr died after only two
years, in 634.

The later Abbasid sources make A`isha only a girl when she married Muhammad, but such
details cannot be proved to be historical and we should be careful with them. Some authors may
have fixed an early date for the marriage in order to underline the legitimacy of Abu Bakr’s
succession. That is, the marriage could have occurred in the late 620s after Muhammad had
acquired other ambitious fathers-in-law, but been backdated in the form of a child betrothal to
624 by Abu Bakr’s partisans. Ironically, some of today’s writers who are scathing in rejecting
the validity of the Abbasid historiography of early Islam are at the same time eager to put exact
dates and ages to A’isha from these suspect accounts. I think in both cases, they just don’t like
Muhammad or Islam.

The standard Roman age of marriage was 12, which is also the age specified in the Jewish
Talmud. If she was around that age, the marriage would have been unremarkable in that era.
Those Muslim-haters who smear Muhammad on this issue should consider whether they also
want to smear all Orthodox Jews (wouldn’t it be anti-Semitism to say their Talmud is
pedophiliac and many of their marriages through the ages were, too?). Or shall we smear the
entire Roman population for a millennium in the same way? The marriage age in many
American states was 14 (the same as in Roman Catholic canon law) until very recently. I’m all
for protecting teenagers from early marriage today, but as a historian I’m just wary of
anachronistic puritan pronouncements. Human beings have had lots of arrangements about
marriage through history and likely there were advantages and disadvantages to each in that
particular historical and social context. Tibetans had a custom of brothers sharing a wife.
Apparently it was hard on the wife.

In any case, Muhammad certainly married A’isha to cement his political alliance with Abu Bakr,
a prominent merchant and powerful member of the Abu Taym clan of the Quraysh tribe, at a
time when some Quraysh leaders in Mecca were determined to conquer nearby Medina–to which
the early believers in Muhammad’s message had repaired in 622. The later sources suggest,
however, that Muhammad had secret admirers among some clans in Mecca in the 620s, and in
some ways the militant Quraysh pagans were undermined by the attractions of Muhammad’s
message for their own constituents. The respected Abu Bakr, who fought beside the Prophet, was
an asset in this propaganda war.

A’isha lived many decades after Muhammad’s 632 death, passing away in 674. She at times
entered politics, most dramatically in 655-56, when she championed the cause of the murdered
third commander of the faithful `Uthman, who was assassinated that year by disgruntled
tribesmen. They then backed Ali ibn Abi Talib, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, as the
new commander. When Ali did not move against the anti-`Uthman faction, A`isha joined a
rebellion along with her brother-in-law al-Zubayr ibn `Awwam and Talha ibn `Ubaydallah.

As later chroniclers told the story, A’isha briefly emerged as a sort of Arab Muslim queen,
commanding large numbers of troops at engagements such as the Battle of the Camel and
sending them against Ali’s forces, conquering Basra. I don’t think she was either veiled or
secluded.

The al-Zubayr faction was defeated, and Christian sources say Ali was assassinated at Najaf in
Iraq not too long afterward in 658 (later Muslim sources put this event in 661). After Ali,
Mu`awiya, a relative of `Uthman, came to power, establishing the Umayyad Empire that ruled
until 750.
In her later years, A’isha held informal classes or a kind of salon at Medina in which she taught
young people the story of the Prophet Muhammad as she heard it in her childhood and
experienced it in her youth, and biographical snippets said to go back to her may be the earliest
capsule biography of Muhammad. They are typically conveyed by her nephew `Urwa ibn al-
Zubayr or one of his students. Some of these snippets have a ring of authenticity, though there
are thousands of them and many seem to me folk tales of later generations falsely attributed to
her.

Several early inscriptions mention al-Zubayr and his children and descendants, which is natural
if the Zubayrids had the Hijaz as their power base.

But this is the first inscription known to mention A’isha herself.

7.

The Prophet Muhammad’s Wives and

Muslim Women in Early Arabian Rock
Inscriptions
Juan Cole 02/23/2020

Ahmad Bin Ghanim al-Ida’ published on Twitter a photograph of an inscription he found south
of al-Ula (near ancient Hijr) in Saudi Arabia. It was picked up and transcribed by Saudi
archeologist Mohammed al-Maghthawi.

The inscription says, “God, forgive Muhammad the Prophet, and join with him his wives, and,
God, forgive the male and female believers, and forgive Salih.
As Mr. al-Magthawi notes, this is an extremely valuable historical document, likely from the first
or second Muslim century (600s or 700s). It, like other early inscriptions, shows piety toward the
figure of Muhammad, who is here called simply, “the Prophet.” He is depicted as human, and as
needing God’s forgiveness.

It is the first inscription known to mention the wives (in the plural) of the Prophet. Another
inscription published on Twitter by Mr. al-Maghthawi mentioned A’isha bint Abi Bakr, , whom
later Muslim sources identify as the third wife of Muhammad.

I presume that the phrase “join his wives with him” is a prayer that they join him in paradise.
The inscription calls Muhammad’s followers “the believers” rather than “Muslims,” which
University of Chicago historian Fred Donner has argued was the typical diction in early Islam.
This way of speaking may indicate that the inscription is first century A.H.

The inscription is especially attentive to women, mentioning the Prophet’s wives as well as the
Prophet, and the female believes as well as the male ones.

These recently-discovered rock inscriptions are so valuable because our literary sources for early
Islam are either very late, from the 760s into the ninth and tenth centuries, or are by outsiders
writing in Greek or Syriac.

The Qur’an itself, the Muslim scripture, is said by the Muslim tradition to have been recited by
the Prophet 610-632 A.D., and archeological and other findings increasingly make those dates
plausible. The Qur’an speaks about the wives of the Prophet, though it does not mention any by
name. So the rock inscription supports the historicity of those verses.

Mr. al-Maghthawi also recently published an early inscription by a Muslim woman named
Zubaydah.

It asks God to forgive her her sins and acknowledges that this will not take place unless God is
well-pleased with her:
NB: More inscriptions archived here.