As today is the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, it seems a propitious time to bring to your attention a new book, Jesus and Muhammad: Parallel Tracks, Parallel Lives, by the American academic F E Peters and published by Oxford University Press this month.
Peters’s purpose is not to examine the theological issues frequently aired in connection to the religions founded by his subjects, but to look at what we know about the two men: an enterprise sometimes undertaken with wariness. For, as he writes:
The Jesus quest has become not a path but a crowded highway, while the search for the historical Muhammad has been transformed for some into a dangerous passage, not because it is crowded but by reason of certain outraged bystanders who resent any traffic along this particular road.
He starts with an openly declared scepticism, describing the siras, or early biographies of Muhammad, as being “as openly tendentious as the Gospels”. But his target is not faith, more to discover what kind of “demonstrated knowledge” can be discerned, a venture that he argues both flocks could benefit from, given that mutual misinformation has been a difficulty from the moment of their first interaction, when what the two religions had in common, not their differences, caused the problem. As Peters puts it: “At first appearance Islam appeared to Christians too similar to their own faith to be a species of the familiar paganism. Islam looked and sounded like a Christian heresy.”
From a historian’s point of view, much is absent. “We have no baptismal records from 1st-century Judaea or the 7th-century Hijaz, no marriage registers or tax receipts.” The literary accounts are plentiful, but frequently contradictory, disputed or displaying evidence of changes that sit uneasily with claims to immutability. Peters runs through what will be by now, to many, the familiar tales of the Apocryphal and Gnostic Gospels – of Thomas, Judas, etc – and of the mysterious source material “Q” that supposedly informs both the gospels of Matthew and Luke.
With Muhammad, he faces a different task. Though he says “there is an almost universal consensus that the Quran is authentic”, he notes that “of Mecca and the Meccans, even of Muhammad, we are told very little. It is not what the Quran is about.” And Peters is not all that impressed with what has for centuries been presented as truth. If Jesus was about 30 when he began his ministry, he writes, Muhammad was “likely about the same age, though the Muslim tradition makes him, without good reason, 40”. He adds later, exasperated with the dates ascribed to the Prophet’s birth and career, “we throw up our hands at the chronology”.
Throughout the study, Peters casts doubt on many of the stories accepted by believers about both Jesus and Muhammad, such as those in which they are recognised in childhood as showing early signs of their exceptional roles. “Both may have been good young men; it is unlikely that either had a light over his head.”
What he does not do, however, is engage in the type of debunking that some might hope to find. Here it is relevant to turn more to Muhammad than to Jesus, for while many non-believers are content to accept Jesus as a teacher with an attractively pacific and redistributive message, Muhammad has often been the object of far more malign judgements. Peters, however, dismisses them in turn. “The question of Muhammad’s illiteracy is irrelevant,” he writes in connection with the language of the Quran (bear in mind that he does not regard its divine provenance as “demonstrated knowledge”). “Most oral poets, and certainly the best, have been illiterate.”
The issue that is most often seized upon, however, and done so in a manner that its proponents must know is gratuitously offensive, concerns the youthfulness of the Prophet’s wife, Aisha. As Peters deals with this in such an admirably matter-of-fact way (and brings in the parallel with Jesus’s mother, Mary, which critics of Islam neglect to get so worked up about), I am going to quote the passage in full.
They were betrothed at Mecca when she was six and the union was consummated at Medina when she was nine. Modern critics are here more bothered by the girl’s age than were their medieval predecessors and far more than the Muslim reporters, who were not bothered at all. In many societies marriages can be contracted – for that is what they are, contracts – at any time by the principals’ agents, and desirable spouses of either gender are spoken for early, sometimes, with royalty, in the womb. And in many societies, too, the age of puberty is the de facto age of consent. Aisha we assume reached puberty, not altogether unusually, at nine, just as we assume that Jesus’ mother Mary was perhaps about twelve – betrothed at ten? – when her pregnancy was announced.
In this and in general, Peters is clear-eyed about the need to see both his subjects in the context of their time. With Jesus, this, on the surface, may appear less of a point of contention – but it is necessary all the same; otherwise his declaration “Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God” could seem merely to be a crafty and rather cowardly get-out rather than a foundational statement for the doctrine of the separation of church and state.
With Muhammad, it is more urgent lest he be seen as what Peters calls “the devil of Christian polemic”, a successor version of which has been enthusiastically propagated by Islam’s critics today. Peters’s assessment is quite different, though it will come as no surprise to those who have read objective biographies before. “Politically Muhammad was relentless, even ruthless: pragmatic rather than an ideologue . . . possessed of piety but the very antithesis of pious; famously uxorious yet married, monogamously, to the same woman for 24 years . . . excessive in little besides energy and profound conviction; and generous, always generous.”
This is not quite the picture some have in mind. It may be too much to hope for, but those of violent words on both sides of the argument when it comes to Islam could benefit from reading this thorough, concise and often amusingly wry book. After all, there is precious little pragmatism, still less generosity, in that debate.
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