96 No god but God
and, in the words of F. E. Peters, “refashion Islam as an alternative to
Judaism.”
There are two problems with this theory. First, it fails to appreci-
ate Muhammad’s own religious and political acumen. It is not as
though the Prophet were an ignorant Bedouin worshipping the ele-
ments or bowing before slabs of stone. This was a man who, for nearly
half a century, had lived in the religious capital of the Arabian Penin-
sula, where he was a sophisticated merchant with firm economic and
cultural ties to both Jewish and Christian tribes. It would have been
ridiculously naïve for Muhammad to assume that his prophetic mis-
sion would be “as obvious to the Jews as it was to him,” to quote
Montgomery Watt. He would need only have been familiar with the
most rudimentary doctrine of Judaism to know that they would not
have necessarily accepted his identity as one of their prophets. Cer-
tainly he was aware that the Jews did not recognize Jesus as a prophet;
why would he have assumed they would recognize him as such?
But the most glaring problem with this theory is not how little
credit it gives to Muhammad, but how much credit it gives to Me-
dina’s Jews. As mentioned, the Jewish clans in Medina—themselves
Arab converts—were barely distinguishable from their pagan coun-
terparts either culturally or, for that matter, religiously. This was not a
particularly literate group. The Arabic sources describe Medina’s Jew-
ish clans as speaking a language of their own called ratan, which al-
Tabari claims was Persian but which was probably a hybrid of Arabic
and Aramaic. There is no evidence that they either spoke or under-
stood Hebrew. Indeed, their knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures was
likely limited to just a few scrolls of law, some prayer books, and a
handful of fragmentary Arabic translations of the Torah—what S. W.
Baron refers to as a “garbled, oral tradition.”
So limited was their knowledge of Judaism that some scholars do
not believe them to have been genuinely Jewish. D. S. Margoliouth
considers the Jews of Medina to have been little more than a loose
band of monotheists—not unlike the Hanifs—who should more
properly be termed “Rahmanists” (Rahman being an alternative title
for Allah). While many disagree with Margoliouth’s analysis, there are
other reasons to question the extent to which Medina’s Jewish clans
would have identified themselves with the Jewish faith. Consider, for