Blogmocracy in action!
Guest post by: Zimriel
An Orientalist scholar from… Tunisia
It looks like the West isn’t the only place where Islamic research gets done.
I went googling around for “q-th-m” in Arabic and I overheard some chatter about a news article published in Gaza, “Tunisian researcher says, the real name of Muhammad was Qutham and he was never illiterate”. Here’s a reproduction. That researcher would be http://www.arabist.net/blog/2008/10/8/on-hichem-djait.html” Hichem Djaï, speaking at a symposium in Tunis “last weekend”.
This news article is linked the first week of April in 2007. The “last weekend” contained, of course, the first of that month. But the book is 4reals. Djaït has since published what he had “said”, in Tarikhiya al-Da`wat al-Muhammadiyat fi Makkat (Beirut: Dar al-Tali`a, 2007); which one might translate, “History of the Muhammadan Da`wa in Mecca”.
The news article, supplemented by the page numbers in this book, goes something like this: <q>Muhammad was born at [earliest] limit AD 580 [p. 143-4], and he was called ‘Qutham’ before his [Apostolic] mission,[pp. 147-9 and p.337 nn.198-9] and he married at the age of 23 [p. 150] and preached at 30; and he was never illiterate.</q> On the name “Qutham”, readers of Ibn Warraq have known that from his translation of Henri Lammens, <cite>Recherches de Science Religieuse</cite> 1 (1910), 25-51 in <cite>The Quest for the Historical Muhammad</cite> (Prometheus, 2000).
But Djaït ignored that Lammens article – at least he didn’t say that he read it, nor Ibn Warraq for that matter. Djaït says instead that he got this “Qutham” idea from al-Baladhuri’s <cite>Ansab al-Ashraf</cite>: <q>as for `Abd Allah b. `Abd al-Muttalib, his kunya is Abu Qutham and it is said that his kunya was Abu Muhammad</q>. Djaït has, however, read a lot of Lammens.</p>
The fun stuff is in the lead-up to that. In the second chapter he notes all the problems the West has with Islam’s account of itself. He notes the Qur’an’s weirdness in pp. 21-6; the different codices appear in p. 23. [I notice that this section was left out of the Table of Contents.] Then he deals with siyar and tarikh as a genre, from Ibn Ishaq to Waqidi and beyond; I haven’t read this, but I’m guessing he calls bullshit on most of that stuff. The third chapter from 43-129 is an historical “anthropology” of the Arabs’ tribes, gods, idolatry, pilgrimage and so forth until, at the end, trade. The fourth chapter starts with Mecca, relying mainly on Patricia Crone’s <cite>Meccan Trade</cite>, which trade he finds irrelevant to the actual trade between Rome and Yemen; and continues to the meaning of “Muhammad”, which he debunks – and then drops the Qutham bomb on us. The book up to this point reads like a translation of a Prometheus book.
The news article reported that in 2007, his Tunisian audience was as aware of German 1800s orientalism as he was. Whether we get more like this out of North Africa remains to be seen.
Best wishes, [Zimriel]
