a spiritual horizon. I’ve talked about this often: the mystics, philosophers and poets do not represent institutional Islam.
H: Can we say that there was, nevertheless, a need on the part of the Arabs for a God who transcended the visible world and broke with the divinities man had made up himself?
A: I’d say that the Arabs had a great need for a reference point that could gather them together.
H: Are you alluding to the chaotic state Arabia found itself in – I mean the never-ending conflicts between the Jewish tribes and the interminable wars between the two Arab tribes, the al-‘Aws and al-Khazraj?33 Gathering together, at that point, takes on a political significance.
A: There were indeed many tribal wars and conflicts. The economic strength of the Quraysh was decisive: the people of Quraysh knew how to put their economic genius to work to gain hegemony over the region. And prophecy was the means of consolidating that hegemony. So prophecy is a Qurayshite invention. The passage from paganism to Islam, as you said, was gradual. In the beginning, Mecca kept its paganism and various rites set up a bridge between the old world and the new religion. In this area of the world, where tribalism was powerful, Quraysh triumphed, in actual fact, not from a tribal point of view but in terms of religion.
H: That fits in with the image the hagiographies painted of Muhammad, after the event. Before the coming of Islam, we read, he didn’t get involved in tribal allegiances and he did his utmost to reconcile the tribes whenever they were in conflict.
A: Muhammad managed to take the tribal conflict to another level. And this stance of his, according to which ‘I say nothing, it’s God who says everything’, shows his genius. Because from the moment it’s God that’s doing the talking and expressing himself, Muhammad is no longer part of the conflict.
H: He also drew on the cultural context of Arabia. When he recounts how he heard stones telling him ‘peace and salvation are on you, O Messenger of God!’ or Buhaira stipulating that a cloud protected Muhammad whenever he was on his travels, this appeals to the magical thinking and animism that were so widespread in Arabia at the time.
A: Muhammad knew how to give to a legend a scope and value that were divine. That was his masterstroke. What the Babylonians, Mesopotamians, Greeks, Romans and other peoples saw as imaginary constructions became, for the Muslims, divine truth.
H: There are two different levels: what Muhammad said, and what the hagiographers wove together as narratives and which are constructions created after the event. The problem is that these constructions have never been analysed as such. By way of example, apart from the cloud protecting Muhammad, Buhaira was supposed to have seen the Seal of Prophecy. It’s as if the Seal of Prophecy were material, tangible, palpable, visible. Which is a de-metaphorization of, and a limiting of, the faculty of representation and imagination. Only, since sacralization rules out all questioning, Muslims still give these legends full credence, thereby investing them with the status of celestial truth.
A. Exactly. There was a certain exploitation of the cultural context and intellectual conditions of the time. When Muhammad speaks of jinns,34 or spirits, he reinforces a belief and gives it religious legitimacy, as you say. He talks about Gabriel in a way that’s similar to the way he talks about spirits. This begs the question: why did Muhammad adopt Gabriel?
H: Gabriel appears in the Old Testament. In the Book of Daniel,35 Gabar means ‘force’ and El means ‘God’. The Arab name Jibril (Gabriel) is very close to Gabar since the two languages have the same Semitic roots. In the New Testament, Gabriel announces the birth of John the Baptist, and he is the angel of the Annunciation.36 The angel is a familiar figure in monotheism. He is designated as the luminous face, while Satan is the dark face.
A: Why does Muhammad choose Gabriel?
H: Maybe because in the imaginary realm, traditionally and classically, divine dictates require an intermediary, and that intermediary is an angel. Islam did in fact draw on the traditions and teachings of the time. The story of Satan (the Devil) – such as it’s related in the Gospel of St Matthew – who comes along and vainly tempts Jesus, was to be taken up by Muhammad on his own behalf.
A: But the Gospels don’t constitute a revealed divine text.
H: Gabriel already existed as a Messenger of God. Muhammad takes Gabriel up again as a Messenger of Revelation, but Islamizes him by giving him other roles, such as being a warrior fighting alongside Muslims in battle. Gabriel took on the guise of a friend of Muhammad’s or a defender, or counsellor … Which can’t fail to remind us of Zeus’s metamorphoses in the Greeks or Jupiter’s in the Romans.
A: It’s all very complex, since Muhammad, who is God’s emissary, steps aside to make way for Gabriel. In the various hagiographical texts, as in the sunna and in the Qur’an, all he did was repeat the word of Gabriel. Even though it was Gabriel who revealed to him that he’d been chosen. We need go over everything again, starting from scratch.
H: Just as we need to go back over the story of Gabriel, who appeared to Muhammad, thereby plunging him into the throes of doubt (was he an angel or a devil?). The books of hagiography recount that the angel disappeared when Khadīja, Muhammad’s wife, uncovered her hair. Head hair is the pubic hair of the mother, Freud tells us. From a psychoanalytical point of view, the story stacks up. On the other hand, from a historical point of view, this story proves to be a late construction, as the veil was only imposed on Muhammad’s wives in Medina, and this was only after Khadīja’s death.
A: Of course, it’s a made-up story, which was only written very late in the day. To get back to Gabriel, Muhammad was able to create a pyramidal hierarchy: he obeys Gabriel who, himself, obeys God. What I’d like to do is deconstruct the structure of power in Islam. Why is power so important in the Arab world? Why does it take up the whole stage?
H: To work on the overlap of politics and religion, we need to go back over the texts that constitute the corpus of Islam. Let’s start by way of example with the phrase: bu‘ithtu li-l-nāsi kāfatan (I have been sent for the whole of humanity): if they do not believe in me, it is for the Arabs, if they do not believe in me, it is for Quraysh, if they do not believe in me, it is for Banū Hāshim,37 if they do not believe in me, it is for myself.38 What sense could a prophecy that can do without other people possibly have?
A: The ‘if’ is very important. To my mind, prophecy is the operation of power, and so, it’s political. Muhammad is the one who drew up this political agenda. The Qur’an says: ‘I have not created jinn and mankind except to serve Me.’39 The aim of the creation of mankind is to serve God, to worship Him. Worship is absolute submission to God’s will. How will God’s will be translated? Muhammad was the first model of such submission. Hence the: ‘I say nothing by myself. Everything comes to me from God. And I obey God.’ He asks other people to submit to his word, just as he has submitted to Gabriel, who submitted to God. The shar‘ was invented so that this submission could be firmly rooted in people’s minds and the social fabric. As a result, we can say that Muslims are born intellectually obedient and submissive. Islam, fundamentally, is not just a faith but a shar‘ that you have to apply and to which you have to submit.
H: I might seize this opportunity to say that people who translate ‘Islam’ by ‘peace’ are a bit too quick off the mark, reducing as they do all the complexity of the term.40 If ‘Islam’ comes from s.l.m, which gives us salām (a general salutation, like ‘hello’) and silm (peace), that sense of the word is qualified by a reservation, the author of Lisān al-‘Arab tells us, since the greeting (a kind of blessing) is only meant for those who have taken the path of al-hudā (the ‘right path’), preached by the Text. A salīm heart is a heart free of unbelief. Submitting to God is then understood as ‘submitting only to the laws of the sharī‘a (sharia)’ set out by the prophet. Sharia becomes ‘submitting before the conqueror’. And since the Arab language is full of ’aḍḍād (words with opposite meanings), salām also refers to the individual who enjoys