of his victory over associationism. He is thereby an example to follow. The verse invites people to follow Muhammad’s lead and abandon their old beliefs. The verse is to be applied to the whole of humanity.
H: Qutada27 interprets ‘burden’ as ‘Muhammad’s grave sins which God has erased’.28 We have a verse that says wa wajadaka ḍāllan fa hadā (‘Did he not find thee erring and guide thee?’).29 It’s clear that the change was gradual: Muhammad broke with idolatry, then adopted ḥanīfiyya before finally settling on Islam.
A: Mecca was a meeting place. Muhammad was well up on the customs of the peoples who flocked to Mecca for trade, bringing with them their stories, their beliefs and their religious practices. On top of that, he himself was involved in trade, which necessitated trips to Shām, today’s Syria. This allowed him to get abreast of the civilizational and religious practices of the region.
H: The hagiographers don’t specify the precise moment at which Muhammad dropped paganism for al-Ḥanīfiyya. We read that the Revelation began when he was forty years old, an age that was seen generally and traditionally as the age of reason. On the other hand, we don’t have any precise historical details about his conversion to ḥanīfiyya.
A: All the hagiographies talk about the relationship Muhammad kept up with Waraqa ibn Nawfal. We know that the ḥanīfiyyūn were against paganism and respected Christianity and Judaism.
H: The al-Ḥanīfiyya religion really left its mark on Islam. The pilgrimage existed in al-Ḥanīfiyya, just as prayer did, just as fasting did. Islam would later be defined as the ḥanīfa (pure or original) religion. The Qur’an mentions ḥanīfan ten times, seven times linking the expression to the religion of Abraham. The prophet of Islam was to adopt the term ḥanīf to refer to pure Islam.30
A: We might remember the figure of Maslama. His education was very similar to that of Muhammad’s and he was known as Maslama al-Ḥanafī. The name was changed to Musaylima al-Kadhdhāb, the forger (liar, falsifier).
H: He preached the dīn ḥanīf, the pure religion – the Islam that was to take on the adjective ḥanīf, that was to fight Maslama. Ma‘rūf al-Ruṣāfī31 says: ‘If Maslama had not been defeated, Islam would have had a different face.’
A: This is where it would be interesting to reread the history of Islam and explore the religious and anthropological context of Arabia in its relationship with other countries. Mecca was a great scene of religious and commercial rivalries.
H: Zayd ibn ‘Amrū bin Nufayl, who was a ḥanīf, played a major role in Muhammad’s religious awakening. Zayd refused to make offerings to the divinities of Quraysh. Muhammad, we read, was later to grant him a place in paradise. That’s how he expressed his gratitude to Zayd.
A: These are interesting examples that invite us to look more closely at the way Muhammad’s religious awakening evolved through contact with influential people in Arabia. But we need to go further and question the very notion of ‘prophecy’. What is prophecy? How did Muhammad succeed in creating a Muslim climate? How was he able to create Islam?
H: The theme of being chosen is traditional and perfectly familiar, and prophecy is a very old concept. It already existed among the Sumerians. Today, we no longer ask ourselves the reason for being chosen. Well, the first Arab hagiographers noted the following thing: ‘The Jews have their prophets and the Christians have their prophet. In contrast, the Arabs have no prophet.’ This remark stresses the psychological dimension, namely the narcissism of a people or tribe deprived of the prestige of being chosen in the context of an Arabia haunted by tribal wars.
A: Quite. Islam as Revelation and prophecy can only be explained in light of the social, intellectual and economic conflict of the day. The story of Abraha al-‘Ashram makes sense here. We should add that at the time there was another crisis, namely the fall of Byzantium which left the world without a great power.
H: I seem to recall that there are several versions of the life of Abraha al-‘Ashram. Ṭabarī writes that Abraha built a cathedral at Sanaa (in Yemen) that was meant to compete with the pilgrimage to the Ka‘ba, and that he tried to destroy the latter some time around 570–571. But his army was wiped out by illness and by the miraculous abābīl birds, which dropped stones on the army.32
A: The conflict between Abraha and the Meccans wasn’t religious, it was economic and political.
H: Abraha wanted to get control of Mecca because it was on a trade route between Yemen and Shām. What’s interesting is that pagan Mecca resisted Christianity, which existed in the north and in the south of Arabia. How did Muhammad later manage to convert Mecca to Islam? Was it ‘progress in the life of the mind’, to borrow the phrase Freud used in describing monotheism? Was it a desire for a distant world or, as we’ve suggested, the desire to enjoy the privilege of prophecy?
A: This is connected to the commercial genius of the Quraysh, who managed to generate such power. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with a spiritual need. The history of Islam is devoid of a spiritual horizon. I’ve talked about this often: the mystics, philosophers and poets do not represent institutional Islam.
H: Can we say that there was, nevertheless, a need on the part of the Arabs for a God who transcended the visible world and broke with the divinities man had made up himself?
A: I’d say that the Arabs had a great need for a reference point that could gather them together.
H: Are you alluding to the chaotic state Arabia found itself in – I mean the never-ending conflicts between the Jewish tribes and the interminable wars between the two Arab tribes, the al-‘Aws and al-Khazraj?33 Gathering together, at that point, takes on a political significance.
A: There were indeed many tribal wars and conflicts. The economic strength of the Quraysh was decisive: the people of Quraysh knew how to put their economic genius to work to gain hegemony over the region. And prophecy was the means of consolidating that hegemony. So prophecy is a Qurayshite invention. The passage from paganism to Islam, as you said, was gradual. In the beginning, Mecca kept its paganism and various rites set up a bridge between the old world and the new religion. In this area of the world, where tribalism was powerful, Quraysh triumphed, in actual fact, not from a tribal point of view but in terms of religion.
H: That fits in with the image the hagiographies painted of Muhammad, after the event. Before the coming of Islam, we read, he didn’t get involved in tribal allegiances and he did his utmost to reconcile the tribes whenever they were in conflict.
A: Muhammad managed to take the tribal conflict to another level. And this stance of his, according to which ‘I say nothing, it’s God who says everything’, shows his genius. Because from the moment it’s God that’s doing the talking and expressing himself, Muhammad is no longer part of the conflict.
H: He also drew on the cultural context of Arabia. When he recounts how he heard stones telling him ‘peace and salvation are on you, O Messenger of God!’ or Buhaira stipulating that a cloud protected Muhammad whenever he was on his travels, this appeals to the magical thinking and animism that were so widespread in Arabia at the time.
A: Muhammad knew how to give to a legend a scope and value that were divine. That was his masterstroke. What the Babylonians, Mesopotamians, Greeks, Romans and other peoples saw as imaginary constructions became, for the Muslims, divine truth.
H: There are two different levels: what Muhammad said, and what the hagiographers wove together as narratives and which
