The Death of a Prophet. Stephen J. Shoemaker
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Morisco forgery but instead a very faithful translation of this early Arabic text, validating Gaudeul’s identification of the Anonymous Pamphlet with ʿUmar’s lost letter. Thanks to Gaudeul’s meticulous research, ʿUmar’s letter has now been recovered from these two manuscripts, thus restoring the other side of this interreligious debate from the early medieval Near East.
On the basis of this newly recovered text, Hoyland has introduced some important refinements to the dating of this early Islam polemic. Although Gaudeul largely follows Sourdel’s initial dating of the Anonymous Pamphlet in assigning ʿUmar’s letter to the late ninth century,146 Hoyland’s more thorough analysis of the Leo-ʿUmar tradition complex convincingly identifies the eighth century as the likely milieu for this epistolary contest.147 First, Hoyland answers Stephen Gerö’s proposal that Łewond’s letter of Leo is a medieval Armenian forgery added to the text by a later reviser. According to Gerö, Łewond’s History as we now have it is the work of an eleventh- or twelfth-century redactor, who heavily revised a now lost chronicle that was actually written by Łewond in the late eighth century. Among his amendments was the introduction of this epistolary exchange, inspired by brief mention of such correspondence in Thomas Artsruni’s early tenth-century Armenian chronicle.148 Łewond’s editor, however, wanted to incorporate a more detailed account of the Leo-ʿUmar correspondence than he found in his source.149 Consequently, Gerö postulates that the redactor took an existing Armenian anti-Islamic polemical tract and reshaped it to create the illusion of an exchange of letters. The scheme involved forging a letter from ʿUmar that corresponded with the main points of the anti-Islamic treatise and then “lard[ing] the Christian tract with allusions to the ʿUmar letter.”150
Gerö’s theories regarding Łewond’s History and the Leo-ʿUmar correspondence in particular have not found much acceptance. Experts on the Armenian historical tradition continue to regard Łewond’s chronicle as an authentic work of the late eighth century, and its genuine witness to an early tradition of a polemical exchange between Christians and Muslims in the guise of letters authored by Leo and ʿUmar seems widely conceded.151 Nevertheless, Hoyland responds to each of Gerö’s arguments point by point and convincingly demonstrates both that Łewond’s History as we now have it is a work of the late eighth century and that his version of Leo’s letter is not an adaptation of an Armenian work, but in fact translates an older Greek text that was part of an early tradition of epistolary polemic between Muslims and Christians.152 Gaudeul’s study, published subsequent to Gerö’s work, is particularly decisive in this regard. Gaudeul’s recovery of ʿUmar’s letter leaves Gerö’s scenario rather improbable, and the close rhetorical connections between this Muslim text and Łewond’s account of the correspondence suggests that they reflect an actual polemical exchange between Christians and Muslims in the early medieval Near East.153
Although Gaudeul (and Sourdel) would locate this exchange as late as the end of the ninth century, the date of Łewond’s chronicle, the late eighth century, would seem to indicate that it had reached a fairly mature state more than a century earlier. Many of the main themes from this confrontation are in fact, as Hoyland notes, paralleled in other sources of the late eighth century and the early ninth.154 Moreover, both letters have the appearance of responding to an earlier tradition of correspondence, which leads Hoyland to propose that over the course of the eighth century a series of Leo-ʿUmar / ʿUmar-Leo letters were composed, and “what has come down to us is a compilation from or rehashing of such works.”155 Perhaps most importantly, however, the Aljaimado text of ʿUmar’s letter begins with an isnād, that is, a chain of the text’s early transmitters. Although such efforts to authenticate Islamic traditions by providing an intellectual pedigree were frequently forged and are thus generally viewed with a high measure of suspicion, Gaudeul and Hoyland are both correct to note that in this instance the letter’s isnād seems worthy of some historical consideration.156 The isnād identifies a series of three scholars who are known to have been active in Ḥimṣ (Homs in western Syria), and the fact that the isnād does not attempt to link the letter with ʿUmar himself seems to speak for its authenticity. The earliest of these transmitters died in 798, a date that would be consistent with the origins of these epistolary polemics in the eighth century. On the whole then, as Hoyland rightly concludes, the evidence strongly favors the emergence of a literary tradition of polemical correspondence between Leo and ʿUmar, and more specifically the composition of ʿUmar’s letter, sometime before the end of the eighth century. This would make ʿUmar’s letter one of the oldest Islamic documents to have survived, making it a precious witness to the beginnings of Islam.
The relevant passage of ʿUmar’s letter for the present question comes at the very end of the text, in the early Arabic fragment published by Sourdel. As the letter draws to a close, it undertakes an extended defense of Muhammad’s prophethood. Invoking passages from the Qurʾān as evidence, “ʿUmar” contends that Muhammad was not taught by the 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,