The Quest of the Historical Muhammad (Peters)
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- For other uses, see The Quest of the Historical Muhammad (disambig)
"The Quest of the Historical Muhammad" is often referenced essay by Francis Edwards Peters, published in August 1991 in the International Journal of Middle East Studies[1]
It is about the comparison between research on the historicity of Muahmmed and Jesus and the problems researchers encounter.
The essay is quoted in among others[2], Ibn Warraq's Quest for the Historical Muhammad[3].
[edit] Review
A quote regarding this writing found in the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society webpage is as follows:
- Peters' starting point is an attempt at a comparison between the quest for the historical Muhammad and the quest for the historical Jesus. The problem with this approach is that the conclusions reached depend upon who is taken as an authority, and on what grounds. For reasons he does not explain, Peters chooses for his authorities on Christianity three committed Christians of a conservative stripe: J. A. T. Robinson, Stephen Neill, and Tom Wright. Not surprisingly, he concludes that the quest for the historical Jesus is not at all hopeless and has made real progress in recent times; we can be sure that he existed and was not unlike the gospel portrait. This situation is contrasted with that of Muhammad and the Qur'an:
- Quite simply, there is no contemporary and contopological setting against which to read the Koran. For early Islam there is no Josephus to provide a contemporary political context, and no Scrolls to illuminate a Palestininan 'sectarian milieu'. ... The Koran in fact, stands isolated like an immense rock jutting forth from a desolate sea, a strong eminence with few marks on it to suggest how or why it appeared in that watery desert. ... The fact is that, despite a great deal of information supplied by later Muslim literary sources, we know pitifully little about the political or economic history of Muhammad's native city of Mecca or of the religious culture from which he came. (446)
- No revisionist would disagree with these statements, especially the last. So much so that there is no good reason to take seriously the traditional Muslim account of Muhammad at Mecca in any way at all. However, this is precisely what Peters proceeds to do in the rest of his essay. He knows the revisionist view and probably agrees with it, but chooses to play it down by relegating it to asides and footnotes. It is only by taking the traditional views of Christian and Islamic origins at face value as real history that the quests for the historical Jesus and Muhammad can be compared as valid enterprises. From the revisionist point of view both are equally worthless exercises in self-deception. [4]
