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The Islamic claim to supersede Judaism and Christianity is embodied in the theological assertion that the office of prophecy is hereditary but that the line of descent ends with Muhammad, who is the seal, or last, of the prophets.
While Muhammad had no natural sons who reached the age of maturity, he is said to have adopted a man named Zayd, and mutual rights of inheritance were created between the two. Zayd b. Muhammad, also known as the Beloved of the Messenger of God, was the first adult male to become a Muslim and the only Muslim apart from Muhammad to be named in the Qur'an. But if prophecy is hereditary and Muhammad has a son, David Powers argues, then he might not be the Last Prophet. Conversely, if he is the Last Prophet, he cannot have a son.
In Muhammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men, Powers contends that a series of radical moves were made in the first two centuries of Islamic history to ensure Muhammad's position as the Last Prophet. He focuses on narrative accounts of Muhammad's repudiation of Zayd, of his marriage to Zayd's former wife, and of Zayd's martyrdom in battle against the Byzantines. Powers argues that theological imperatives drove changes in the historical record and led to the abolition or reform of key legal institutions. In what is likely to be the most controversial aspect of his book, he offers compelling physical evidence that the text of the Qur'an itself was altered.
- Sales Rank: #2108420 in Books
- Brand: Brand: University of Pennsylvania Press
- Published on: 2009-08-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.20" h x 1.30" w x 6.30" l, 1.70 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 376 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Powers's ability to think through the creation of the narrative of the sonship of Zayd, his divorce, and Muhammad's marriage is truly compelling. The reader feels that the author is in total control of the material, even though it ranges so widely across the Near East and many disciplines."—Andrew Rippin, University of Victoria
"A vitally important contribution to scholarship on the Qur'an and early Islam."—Fred M. Donner, University of Chicago
"Powers's work is most impressive throughout. . . . Muhammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men is carefully researched, meticulously documented, and cogently argued. He presents a fascinating thesis for Islamic scholars to assess for its validity."—Review of Biblical Literature
About the Author
David S. Powers is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is author of Law, Society and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300-1500.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Fabulously Interesting and Powerfully Argued
By Ulrich
This brilliant book deserves a detailed review. Why should anybody read it? Because this book addresses some of the most fascinating enigmas in the Qur’an, and Powers’ analysis is not only innovative, it's extremely compelling.
The background theme of Powers’ book is that early "Believers" belatedly sought to suppress any belief that Mohammed had successors as a prophet. But in doing so, they had to deal with a body of existing beliefs, practices, and texts, including the Qur'anic claim that Mohammed was the "seal" of the prophets. To establish that Mohammed was the “Seal” of the prophets in the sense that there could be no subsequent prophets, it became necessary to establish that Mohammed's own lineage decisively ended with no arguable prophetic heirs. That most obviously included any male children, which is why Mohammed’s male children reportedly (per the much later hadith accounts) all died in infancy. But this ideological imperative also led early Muslims to take many other fascinating measures during Islam’s formation, including modifying (1) the consonantal skeleton of the Qur’an; (2) several legal doctrines; and (3) historical narratives (in the hadith) about Islam’s rise. The book addresses several such measures.
First is the bizarre hadith story of Mohammed’s repudiation of his beloved adopted son, Zayd. This story puts Mohammed into a bad light: Why would Mohammed conveniently receive a “revelation” that required him to repudiate his adopted son so that he could marry his adopted son’s wife, who he had reportedly developed a blazing lust for after seeing her in a state of deshabile? Early Christians and Jews had a field day mocking Mohammed’s reported behavior on this point. So why did the strange story exist? And why did Islam suddenly repudiate adoption? Why is Zayd the only Muslim mentioned by name in the Qur’an, in addition to those few verses that name Mohammed? Why did Zayd gloriously predecease Mohammed after fighting in foreign jihad, per the hadith?
Powers argues, quite convincingly to my mind, that Mohammed’s reported repudiation of Zayd as his son, and the insertion of a proscription of adoption into the Qur’an, and his early death, were all created by later Muslims to establish that Mohammed had no heirs, and was the Final Prophet. The story about Mohammed taking his son-in-law’s wife was concocted to explain this repudiation of his adopted son, who was already well-known and could not simply be erased from the narrative: With the abolition of adoption, he was no longer a son, and neither he nor his children could be Mohammed’s prophetic heirs. The awkwardness of these stories reflects the fact that they were created late, and accompanied by awkward Qur’anic revisions.
Contrary to G-Man’s Amazon review, Powers does not argue that the Zayd story is just an amalgamation of prior stories, but rather that it reflects how prophecy was generally understood to work in Judeo-Christian tradition. The Qur’an itself goes to incredible lengths to establish its succession to that tradition (it does not stop yammering about Jewish and Christian prophets), although modern Muslims, interestingly, often seek to downplay this blindingly obvious fact (as G-Man's review does). Any new reader of the Qur’an is usually astounded by its endless Jewish/Christian references; per modern scholarship, much of "Islam" was created via later tradition, which sought to differentiate itself from its forebears. But the Qur'an itself (or parts of it) long preceded that later Islamic tradition, as reflected in the hadiths.
Second, Powers attacks the incredibly fascinating puzzle about the disputed term “kalala," allegedly Arabic, as used in the Uthmanic Qur'an. It’s hard to concisely explain why this term, which is used in just two Qur’anic verses (4:12 and 4:176), and relates to an obscure inheritance issue, was so fascinating for early Muslims and for modern scholars. But once you read this book, you will likely be hooked on this puzzle. Quoting Powers: "The second caliph Umar b. al-Khattab appears to have been obsessed with this word for much of his adult life. He is reported to have said that he would rather know the meaning of kalala than possess the equivalent of the poll-tax levied on the fortresses of Byzantium. The word puzzled the earliest commentators. Eventually, they defined it as a man or woman's relatives except for parents and children, i.e., collaterals. No big deal."
But as Powers shows, kalala has remained a big deal for many reasons. First, the “collaterals” translation makes no grammatical sense, requiring 4.12 to be interpreted as having horribly awkward and incoherent Arabic grammar. Second, there is no other recorded Arabic use of “kalala,” nor does it have any equivalent in any other Semitic language. Third, the early Muslims plainly were boggled by the term, and the later tradition reports them as having violently disagreed about it, giving various different interpretations of which “collaterals” was just one. Fourth, translating "kalala" in any of the normal senses means that 4:12 and 4:176 give facially conflicting rules about Islamic inheritance (later Muslim scholars sought to explain this away with awkward casuistry). Fifth, the incredibly awkward addition of 4:176 to the end of Surat An-Nisa, which is the only other Quranic mention of “kalala,” is so obviously a later interpolation designed to explain away the bizarre new 4:12 term “kalala” that I must invite any interested reader to simply check it out online and witness how out-of-place it is. 4:176 has no cognizable relation to its immediately preceding surah text, but (quite unlike 4.12(b) when “kalala” is translated as “collaterals”) actually has comprehensible, correct Arabic grammar. 4:176 is very straightforward about being a response to public confusion about what “kalala” was supposed to mean. 4:176 begins “they request from you a legal ruling,” and then attempts to explain what the kalala term means for inheritance. If an objective reader can read 4:176 without recognizing that it was blatantly added to try to explain away the baffling term “kalala” in 4.12, then I congratulate you. So you have to ask, why was 4:176 later jammed into the end of the Surat An-Nisan, where it plainly does not fit?
As Powers shows in this book, the earliest Qur’anic manuscript we have in the standard Uthmanic tradition (following Deroche’s dating), gives a critical answer: The original term was not written as “kalala,” but rather as “kalla.” The scribe later changed that into “kalala.” Written as “kalla,” 4:12 did not originally refer to intestate inheritance of “collaterals,” but rather the testate inheritance of a daughter in law. Only later was the term “kalla” written out and replaced with a meaningless new word, kalala. The manuscript shows precisely such a change. Moreover, the manuscript also includes a section where the Surat Al-Nisa *would* normally have ended … which was ripped out of the text, leaving a stub, followed by a page which ends the Surat Al-Nisa with 4:176 (suggesting that the end of the surah was originally written without the 4:176 appendix, and thus had to be torn out when “kalla” was changed to “kalala,” adding the crude 4:176 explanation of what it supposedly meant). Notably, 4.12 makes perfect grammatical sense under Powers’ interpretation. The reason this change was made is because when the manuscript was written (again following Deroche, early in the Umayyad period), the Qur’an had already been circulating in various forms, so only relatively minor changes to existing verses could be made. You could add new verses, or purport to discover a new surah, but your ability to revise existing, already known verses was comparatively limited.
As to the argument that the Qur'anic text could not have been changed in this manner, these were relatively minor changes that are entirely consistent with what modern scholarship has indicated about variations in the early Qur'anic manuscripts ... and to repeat, this is arguably the earliest such manuscript known in the Uthmanic tradition. Given what we now know about Qur'anic variations, particularly those set forth in the earliest palimpsests, as well as the fluid state of the Qur'an during the later half of the seventh century, these changes are consistent.
G-man’s Amazon review fervently objects that there is no evidence that “kalla” was ever an Arabic word, but in doing so he ignores Powers' argument on that point, and what his review does say is erroneous. As Powers explains, what is the word for daughter-in-law in every other West Semitic language? Ugaritic: klt. Hebrew: kallah. Syriac: Kallta. Aramaic: Kallta. Old South Arabic: Kela. The morphological Arab equivalent of these shared terms for daughter-in-law is "kll", hence read "kalla" with short vowels added. Now, either all of these West Semitic languages quite magically came up with the exact same term for daughter-in-law, or that term was in their shared ancestor -- which was also Arabic's ancestor. The question is not whether such a term existed in ancestral Arabic, but rather when and where the later Classical Arabic equivalent term replaced it -- that Classical Arabic term not being "kalta" (as G-Man incorrectly asserts) but rather “kanna.” Formed from a “knn” root. That's the change Powers is talking about, from kll (which Powers maintains was the original Qur’anic term for daughter-in-law, and which was originally written in 4.12 in the early manuscript) to knn (the Classical Arabic term). Powers argues that this Classical Arabic term knn is patently sound-shifted from the ancestral term kll. Powers notes that for a Semitic language to soundshift l to n is commonplace (n being extremely similar to l as a phonetic, just nasally aspirated rather than orally aspirated ... try it yourself!).
As Powers notes, the term for "son in law" is plainly derived from the same shared root across these languages. Akkadian: hatanu. Ugaritic: Hatnu. Hebrew: Hatan. Aramic: hatna. Mandaic: hatna. Old South Arabic: Htn. Arabic: Khatan. Yet we are expected to believe that when it comes to "daughter in law," the term “kanna” in Classical Arabic was not likewise derived from the corresponding shared West Semitic root, kll; this is just a huge magical coincidence? Powers rather plainly has the upper hand on this one, I believe.
As to the complex relationship between Classical Arabic (as defined by later Muslim writers) and its relationship to the language of the Qur’an, scholarly volumes have been filled on this subject. Suffice to say, it's a contentious and difficult issue.
I note, parenthetically, that another very early Quranic manuscript has recently been brought to light that treats “kalala” in yet another bizarre manner: [...]
G-Man makes one other criticism in his review, and I think this one has more legs, which is that Powers says the scribe who wrote “kalla” in this earliest Qur’anic manuscript was also the same scribe who later erased “kalla” and wrote “kalala”; thus isn’t this just a correction? But there are many explanations for why the scribe might have done that, starting with the fact that he was writing the term as he had previously known it (per the prior Qur'anic text), and then either later realized or was told that it was now supposed to be changed for Qur’ans, even if it didn’t make overmuch sense. Powers’ theory is, after all, premised on the idea that this was a relatively late change, imposed on an existing Qur'anic text that significantly constrained the potential scope of such modifications (hence the extraordinary awkwardness of the kalala verses). Again, Powers' position here is practically the polar opposite of Wansborough, so to lump them together is confused.
Bottom line: This is a fascinating book, which through these seemingly-narrow puzzles illustrates how early Islam developed. It is a dazzling demonstration of scholarship.
27 of 58 people found the following review helpful.
Difficult to see where the impartiality lies...
By G-Man
So, basically, here we have a book which postulates a set of theories based on a remarkable number of "ifs, ands and buts". The author argues that the narrative of Zayd, the Prophet's adopted son is essentially the result of an amalgamation of several stories from the Old Testament. Of course, the links are so tenuous that the entire idea is implausible and almost laughable really. If Dr. Powers has ever read any Joseph Campbell, he would have realized that quite remarkably, the actual number of stories that one can create regarding anything and anyone are actually extremely limited. There will be similarities and differences between any and every story ever written. In Powers' opinion, because such similarities exist, they must have been stolen from the Old Testament. Once again we have another great example of Orientalist scholars refusing to grant Islam any originality and repeating the charge that Islam is merely a wonderful "borrowed concoction" of Judeo-Christian lore. This is, of course, one of the great failings of Western scholarship in the field of Islamic studies-- the tendency to want to view Islam in the shadow of it's Judeo-Christian predecessors and to judge it by the same standards.
Then we come to the main charge of the book-- that the Quran was altered. Dr. Powers makes this assertion on a great number of unlikely hypothetical situations and proceeds to argue from there. He charges that the word "kalala" (meaning collaterals) in the 4th Surah in the Quran should be in fact "kalla" (which he claims should mean "daughter-in-law" or "adopted daughter") based on an First century Islamic manuscript from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Dr. Powers first acknowledges that the word "kalla" does not even exist in Arabic and has never been spotted in any Arabic literature of any sort before or after the rise of Islam-- essentially shooting himself in the foot before he starts rewriting the history of Islam and the development of the Arabic language. He digs an even deeper hole for himself by acknowledging that there already is a classical Arabic word for "daughter-in-law", kalta. THIS BEGS THE MOST OBVIOUS QUESTION: WHY WOULD YOU INVENT A WORD FOR A WORD THAT ALREADY EXISTS WITHIN A GIVEN LANGUAGE? The entire premise of Powers' book looks silly in this light. He even acknowledges that it was the compiler of First century manuscript (Facsimile 328b) who initially wrote the word "kalla" before realizing his error and writing the correct word "kalala" later, and that this editing was not done by a later revision to the manuscript. Of course, Dr. Powers chooses to read this is a cover-up attempt by the scribe.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that Dr. Powers arguments regarding the early history of Islam are made exclusively from Sunni sources. He completely ignores any and all Shi'a material regarding all of the events which he addresses. This is of course convenient given the completely different histories of Islam presented by both sides. The only reason he gets 2 stars instead of 1 is because he is a fluid writer who has at least cited his sources in an orderly and academic manner-- no matter how badly he has used them. Another failed modern attempt to prove that the Quran has been altered despite the overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary. Powers has been advocating his "daughter-in-law" theory for quite some time now, this time in a slightly modified and updated package. Numerous Western scholars have already demonstrated that the "problems" Powers allegedly points out with reading the word "kalala" as "collaterals" don't actually exist. Some scholars with an axe to grind simply cannot comprehend the idea nor consider any possibility that any religious text, let alone that of Islam, has not undergone revision in the past. Crone, Wansbrough, Powers and co., you are boring us with your amateur scholarship. It seems like change for the sake of change.
I don't have a problem with Western scholarship in the field of Islamic studies, even though I may disagree with many scholars' conclusions. For example, I agree with little of what Angelika Neuwirth has to say, yet I respect her work as work that is driven by academic motives. I cannot say the same for the school of Wansbrough which seems hell-bent on creating a revisionist history of Islam based on some ulterior motives masking under the guise of "objective scholarship".
13 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Muhammad's sonlessness was a function of theological imperatives
By ROROTOKO
"Muhammad Is Not the Father of any of Your Men" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. The book interview of Professor Powers ran here as cover feature on September 4, 2009.
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