Christian monks of the Baḥīrā legend but instead received his teaching directly from God. The nature of Muhammad’s message is also defended. Muhammad brought the truth of monotheism to a people that “had never before received any prophet or any scripture, a nation of ignorant people … worshipping idols.”157 Muhammad’s success in the face of his countrymen’s immorality and infidelity is adduced as proof of the divine origin of his message. The conversion of these barbarous and faithless men to prayer, fasting, piety, and faithfulness verifies the authenticity of Muhammad’s prophetic call and his preaching: “Indeed, only prophets, God’s messengers, and the best of His servants can lead men in this way towards good, prescribing it, exhorting to it, while forbidding sins and transgressions.”158
The letter then shifts to the Islamic conquests, which comprise its final theme. At God’s command Muhammad taught his followers to fight against those who “give partners to God, refuse to recognize Him and worship another god until they come to honour the only God, the only Lord, adopt the one religion”; those who fail to do so are to pay the jizya, by which God will teach them to realize their infidelity (citing Qurʾān 9.29). As a consequence of this instruction, the letter explains that Muhammad led his followers forth out of Arabia against the Byzantine and Persian empires. “In this way, with him in whom we trust, and in whom we believe, we went off [فخرجنا معه تصديقا به وإيقانا به], bare foot, naked, without equipment, strength, weapon, or provisions, to fight against the largest empires, the most evidently powerful nations whose rule over other peoples was the most ruthless, that is to say: Persia and Byzantium.”159 Thus, this early Islamic text seems to confirm the witness of the non-Islamic sources that Muhammad was still leading his followers as they went forth and invaded the Byzantine Empire. Since ʿUmar’s letter is a Muslim text, Hoyland’s questions are largely irrelevant: although it is a polemical text, there is no reason to think that the literary confrontation with Christianity has somehow determined Muhammad’s involvement in the invasions. While the key passage unfortunately does not identify Muhammad specifically by name, using instead the third-person singular suffix pronoun, the immediate context leaves little doubt that he is the one with whom they went forth to fight, and both Sourdel and Gaudeul agree in translating the passage thus.160
Consequently, we have in ʿUmar’s letter to Leo an early Islamic text roughly contemporary with (or at least within a few decades of) Ibn Isḥāq’s biography that appears to preserve a memory of Muhammad’s leadership at the beginning of the Near Eastern conquests. This strongly invites the possibility that ʿUmar’s letter bears witness to the same early tradition signaled by the non-Islamic sources. Quite possibly, the tradition of Muhammad’s leadership during the invasion of Palestine was still remembered by the Muslims of western Syria at the end of the eighth century, even as the Medinan traditions of Muhammad’s pre-conquest death at Medina received official sanction at the court in Baghdad, in the form of Ibn Isḥāq’s imperially commissioned biography.161 Perhaps the author of ʿUmar’s letter did not yet know the new contours of Muhammad’s biography as they were being formed in Medina and authorized at the ʿAbbāsid capital. Or it may be that ʿUmar’s letter adheres to this tradition because it is in dialogue with the Christians, who seem to have known this early tradition rather well. In confronting these religious rivals, it would not be helpful to introduce revisionist history: such dramatic changes to the narrative of Islamic origins would likely not persuade Christians of the truth of Islam. Moreover, western Syria is precisely the location where one might expect to find such a traditional holdout: as will be seen in subsequent chapters, the tradition of Muhammad’s leadership during the assault on Palestine seems to reflect the sacred geography of the earliest Muslims and Umayyads in particular. On the whole, the letter of ʿUmar to Leo offers important and early confirmation from the Islamic tradition that the combined witness of the non-Islamic sources is not simply the result of an unlikely collective mistake. Instead, this anti-Christian polemical treatise, seemingly one of the earliest Islamic texts to have survived, vouches for the antiquity and authenticity of the tradition witnessed by these Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan sources.
Conclusion
These eleven witnesses from the seventh and eighth centuries all indicate in various ways that Muhammad was alive and leading the Muslims when the Islamic conquest of Palestine began.162 While occasionally the years assigned to various events are not correct, this is not at all uncommon in medieval chronicles: such errors occur frequently in the chronicle tradition, and similar mistakes in chronology characterize the Islamic historical tradition as well.163 Nonetheless, even when their chronologies are confused and inaccurate, medieval historical sources such as these are often reliable for their relative sequencing of events, and the consistency displayed with regard to Muhammad’s involvement in the Near Eastern conquests is impressive to say the least. Some of these documents merely indicate Muhammad’s death sometime after the Near Eastern conquests had begun, while others are more descriptive in noting Muhammad’s actual leadership during the invasions. But when all of the sources are considered together, as they are here, their collective witness to Muhammad’s continued leadership of the early Islamic community during the assault on the Roman Near East is unmistakable. While many scholars have rejected or ignored the evidence of these sources, no one has disputed that they do in fact report this.
For the most part, these reports are free from polemic and apologetic interests, and even when these qualities are evident elsewhere in a given text, they do not affect the notice of Muhammad’s vitality and leadership of the military campaign in Palestine. None of these texts connects its report of Muhammad’s leadership during the Near Eastern conquests with any sort of “totalizing explanation” of Islam or an apologetic agenda. Although a few of the authors display marked ideological tendencies elsewhere in their writing, in no instance are these themes linked with their observations that the conquest of Palestine or the Roman Near East began during Muhammad’s lifetime. In every case, the notice of Muhammad’s survival and leadership during the Near Eastern campaigns is mentioned almost in passing, so unobtrusively that its dissonance with the received tradition could easily be overlooked, as indeed it generally has been. The neutral, matter-of-fact manner with which the various sources convey this information suggests that this was the chronology that the authors had collectively received (or perhaps in some cases experienced?) rather than something that they were trying to impose onto their narratives. There is then little cause to suspect that any or all of these writers have invented a report locating the Islamic conquest of the Near East within Muhammad’s lifespan to suit some broader ideological agenda: no evidence would suggest this, nor is there any obvious reason for them to have fabricated such information. Likewise, the possibility of a collective error by all eleven sources seems highly improbable, particularly in the case of the Letter of ʿUmar. While such an interpretation of course cannot be entirely excluded, it does not offer a very compelling explanation for the persistent and seemingly independent manifestations of this tradition linking Muhammad with the invasion of the Roman Near East.164
Several of these documents are of particularly high quality, including the first two and the final two especially. The Doctrina Iacobi, written within months of the invasion of Palestine it would seem, bears near contemporary witness to Muhammad’s presence among the invading “Saracens.” Although the text itself was composed in North Africa, its report concerning recent events in Palestine is said to rely on a document sent by a Jewish resident of Palestine, Abraham, who allegedly obtained his information about the Arabs and their prophet from eyewitnesses. In light of Abraham’s notice that Muhammad was preaching the imminent arrival of the messiah, one wonders if some of his informants were among those Jews who saw Muhammad’s religious movement as the fulfillment of their eschatological hopes. Such contemporary Jewish faith in Muhammad as a divinely appointed deliverer and herald of the messiah is clearly witnessed in the apocalyptic traditions ascribed to Rabbi Shimʿōn b. Yoḥai. Although these early traditions survive only in slightly more recent texts, their identification of Muhammad as one who conquers the land at God’s will is so anomalous with later Jewish attitudes toward Muhammad and Islam that, as numerous scholars have noted, this apocalyptic vision must have been composed very close to the events of the
