Given that the Prophet’s earliest biographers were writing almost two centuries after his death, how far can we legitimately accept their presumption that seventh-century Mecca was genuinely a place of great significance and wealth—the “Mother of Cities”? It is plausible enough that it might have been a centre of pilgrimage for the local pagans, but that it ranked as the Dubai of its day, a prosperous and cosmopolitan trading hub brought to flourish in the depths of the desert, is most certainly not. What incentive could there possibly have been for anyone with an eye for a profit to base himself in a barren valley many hundreds of miles from the nearest consumerist fleshpot? Even the few camel-trains that still plodded northwards from Himyar, heading for a Roman market that had long since lost its appetite for incense, went by a road that bypassed Mecca altogether.
A merchant from Alexandria might cheerfully discourse about the trading opportunities in entrepôts as far afield as India, and never even so much as allude to Mecca—on his doorstep though it effectively was. In gazetteers written by Muhammad’s contemporaries—whether diplomats, geographers or historians—mentions of it are notable by their glaring absence. Even in the Qur’an itself, the word appears just once. “In the belly of Mecca, it was God who held their hands back from you”—an allusion that might as well be to a valley as to a city. Otherwise, in all the vast corpus of ancient literature, there is not a single reference to Mecca—not one. Only in 741, more than a hundred years after the Prophet’s death, does it finally crop up on the pages of a foreign text—and even then the author locates it in Mesopotamia, “midway between Ur and Harran.” Clearly, then, whatever else Mecca might have been in the early seventh century, it was no multicultural boom-town.
So how is it, in a book supposedly composed there in Muhammad’s lifetime, that the monotheisms of the far-distant Fertile Crescent should have been given such a starring role? It is all very mysterious; and made even more so by the fact that Mecca is not alone in seeming to have had a spectrally low profile in the early decades of the Arab Empire. So too did the Qur’an itself. As with the reputed birthplace of the Prophet, so with the compendium of his revelations: there is not a single mention of it in writings of the period. In the first flush of the Ishmaelite takeover, the Patriarch of Antioch assumed that his new masters’ holy book was the Torah. Such a presumption, of course, might well have reflected nothing more than wilful blindness—except that it was far from being confined to bishops. More than a century after the death of Muhammad, Muslims—as they were now starting to call themselves—might betray a very similar ignorance.
Even as Christian bureaucrats, tracking the peculiar beliefs of their Arab overlords, began to note the existence of various “frivolous tales” composed by Muhammad, Muslim scholars, in their concern to identify precisely what the Prophet might have taught, were still perfectly capable of overlooking the Qur’an altogether. How, for instance, did God wish adulterers to be punished? To this question, hadith after hadith provided the same unyielding answer as was to be found in the Torah: He wished them to be stoned. Yet this was not at all what was taught in the Qur’an. There, it could be read that God, “ever-compassionate,” merely wished adulterers to be given “a hundred lashes.” How to explain such a discrepancy? If the Qur’an truly originated in the lifetime of Muhammad, and had been preserved and cherished by his followers ever since as the unchanging word of God, why was it that so many Muslim jurists—and prominent ones at that—had disregarded it as a source for their rulings?
The mystery seems only compounded by the complete absence of any commentaries on the Qur’an prior to the ninth Christian century, and by the fact that even then different communities of the faithful preserved different versions of the holy text. Perhaps it is hardly surprising, then, that many a scholar today, confronted by the dogma which teaches that the Qur’an derives unaltered and immaculate from the lifetime of Muhammad, should be tempted to raise an eyebrow, at the very least.
--Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
