ḥanīf,18 which refers to their religion, is an epithet that predated Islam and was only applied to Islam by Muhammad much later on. The ḥanīfiyya religion was preached by Maslama – who was actually known as Maslama al-Ḥanafī – in southern Arabia, namely Yemen, which is under bombardment today.
A: Indeed, as a religion ḥanīfiyya was spread widely throughout South Arabia.
H: In today’s Muslim imagination, Muhammad was born a Muslim. Since there’s a ban on thinking, people don’t even ask themselves what a Muslim could possibly have been before Islam came along. Well, the hagiographical texts claim he was wathanī (a pagan). In his excellent book, Muhammad Mahmūd19 cites Al-Kalbī as saying that Muhammad, like the people of his tribe, was an idolater. We read: ‘For the Quraysh,20 Al-‘Uzzā was the greatest god. It has come down to us that the Messenger of God one day said that he’d made an offering to Al-‘Uzzā.’21 Certain ḥadīths cited in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī22 fit in with that.23
A: Of course. Muhammad was born into a pagan context. But do the works make reference to his religious practices from the time before Islam?
H: Laqad ’ahdaytu li-l‘uzzā shātan wa ’anā ‘alā dīni qawmī (I made an offering to Al-‘Uzzā when I practised the faith of my community). That’s a ḥadīth cited by Al-Kalbī and by Al-Bukhārī. The latter goes further, stipulating that Muhammad was a wathanī, whereas other people in Mecca were ḥanafiyyūn. He converted later to ḥanīfiyya.
A: The fact that he was a pagan and that he converted to Islam might encourage Muslims to see this as a positive point: God chose him.
H: Al-Jāḥiẓ24 reports what Muhammad said to Zayd ibn ‘Amrū bin Nufayl: Yā Zayd! Innaka fāraqta dīna qawmika wa shatamta ālihatahum (O, Zayd! You have cut your ties with the religion of your community and you have insulted their divinities). There are two things we might say about that. First, Muhammad defended paganism as a faith and practice in Quraysh. Second, people in his tribe went on to renounce paganism.
A: Muhammad converted to ḥanīfiyya under the influence of Waraqa ibn Nawfal, his wife Khadīja’s cousin, who was a man of immense erudition, a man who knew all about the religions and religious practices of Arabia.
H: The Qur’anic verse fits in with Muhammad’s conversion:
Did we not expand thy breast for thee,
and lift from thee thy burden,
the burden that weighed down thy back?25
The commentator Al-Ḍaḥḥāk26 says that wizr (burden) is the associationism Muhammad lived surrounded by. Ṭabarī, for his part, explains that God expanded Muhammad’s breast, opening his heart to the right path.
A: Muslims can interpret this story as proof of their prophet’s greatness and of his victory over associationism. He is thereby an example to follow. The verse invites people to follow Muhammad’s lead and abandon their old beliefs. The verse is to be applied to the whole of humanity.
H: Qutada27 interprets ‘burden’ as ‘Muhammad’s grave sins which God has erased’.28 We have a verse that says wa wajadaka ḍāllan fa hadā (‘Did he not find thee erring and guide thee?’).29 It’s clear that the change was gradual: Muhammad broke with idolatry, then adopted ḥanīfiyya before finally settling on Islam.
A: Mecca was a meeting place. Muhammad was well up on the customs of the peoples who flocked to Mecca for trade, bringing with them their stories, their beliefs and their religious practices. On top of that, he himself was involved in trade, which necessitated trips to Shām, today’s Syria. This allowed him to get abreast of the civilizational and religious practices of the region.
H: The hagiographers don’t specify the precise moment at which Muhammad dropped paganism for al-Ḥanīfiyya. We read that the Revelation began when he was forty years old, an age that was seen generally and traditionally as the age of reason. On the other hand, we don’t have any precise historical details about his conversion to ḥanīfiyya.
A: All the hagiographies talk about the relationship Muhammad kept up with Waraqa ibn Nawfal. We know that the ḥanīfiyyūn were against paganism and respected Christianity and Judaism.
H: The al-Ḥanīfiyya religion really left its mark on Islam. The pilgrimage existed in al-Ḥanīfiyya, just as prayer did, just as fasting did. Islam would later be defined as the ḥanīfa (pure or original) religion. The Qur’an mentions ḥanīfan ten times, seven times linking the expression to the religion of Abraham. The prophet of Islam was to adopt the term ḥanīf to refer to pure Islam.30
A: We might remember the figure of Maslama. His education was very similar to that of Muhammad’s and he was known as Maslama al-Ḥanafī. The name was changed to Musaylima al-Kadhdhāb, the forger (liar, falsifier).
H: He preached the dīn ḥanīf, the pure religion – the Islam that was to take on the adjective ḥanīf, that was to fight Maslama. Ma‘rūf al-Ruṣāfī31 says: ‘If Maslama had not been defeated, Islam would have had a different face.’
A: This is where it would be interesting to reread the history of Islam and explore the religious and anthropological context of Arabia in its relationship with other countries. Mecca was a great scene of religious and commercial rivalries.
H: Zayd ibn ‘Amrū bin Nufayl, who was a ḥanīf, played a major role in Muhammad’s religious awakening. Zayd refused to make offerings to the divinities of Quraysh. Muhammad, we read, was later to grant him a place in paradise. That’s how he expressed his gratitude to Zayd.
A: These are interesting examples that invite us to look more closely at the way Muhammad’s religious awakening evolved through contact with influential people in Arabia. But we need to go further and question the very notion of ‘prophecy’. What is prophecy? How did Muhammad succeed in creating a Muslim climate? How was he able to create Islam?
H: The theme of being chosen is traditional and perfectly familiar, and prophecy is a very old concept. It already existed among the Sumerians. Today, we no longer ask ourselves the reason for being chosen. Well, the first Arab hagiographers noted the following thing: ‘The Jews have their prophets and the Christians have their prophet. In contrast, the Arabs have no prophet.’ This remark stresses the psychological dimension, namely the narcissism of a people or tribe deprived of the prestige of being chosen in the context of an Arabia haunted by tribal wars.
A: Quite. Islam as Revelation and prophecy can only be explained in light of the social, intellectual and economic conflict of the day. The story of Abraha al-‘Ashram makes sense here. We should add that at the time there was another crisis, namely the fall of Byzantium which left the world without a great power.
H: I seem to recall that there are several versions of the life of Abraha al-‘Ashram. Ṭabarī writes that Abraha built a cathedral at Sanaa (in Yemen) that was meant to compete with the pilgrimage to the Ka‘ba, and that he tried to destroy the latter some time around 570–571. But his army was wiped out by illness and by the miraculous abābīl birds, which dropped stones on the army.32
A: The conflict between Abraha and the Meccans wasn’t religious, it was economic and political.
H: Abraha wanted to get control of Mecca because it was on a trade route between Yemen and Shām. What’s interesting is that pagan Mecca resisted Christianity, which existed in the north and in the south of Arabia. How did Muhammad later manage to convert Mecca to Islam? Was it ‘progress in the life of the mind’, to borrow the phrase Freud used in describing monotheism? Was it a desire for a distant world or, as we’ve suggested, the desire to enjoy the privilege of prophecy?
A: This is connected to the commercial