Criticism of Donner (Paul Krause)

His academia page: https://yale.academia.edu/PaulKrause

1. Donner’s Thesis: Donner’s thesis is, as mentioned, part of the broader ecumenical school of Islamic scholarship. Donner lays out his case through a combination of archeology, historical sources, and selective interpretations of key passages in the Qur’an. Donner’s thesis assumes the regular history of Muhammad and the formation of early Islam: Muhammad was an illiterate merchantman in Arabia, centered in Mecca, where he had troubles with the local Quraysh tribe that dominated inland Arabian trade and the Ka’ba shrine in Mecca. Muhammad was perceived as a threat to Quraysh dominance and was chased out and he and his followers fled to Medina. Eventually Muhammad returned to Mecca and the Quraysh ended up supporting him. Muhammad then led the believers out of Arabia, died, and that’s when the “Islamic Conquest” truly began. This is generally accepted as the de facto history of Muhammad. (The revisionist school has a different interpretation of Muhammad, one that places him on the periphery of the Jordanian floodplain, but that’s for another discussion.) Given that Donner accepts this as a given, he then utilizes a combination of early archeology, historical sources (scarce as they are), and Qur’anic passages to advance the thesis that Muhammad and the believers were a largely egalitarian and ecumenical movement that united Jews, Christians, possibly Zoroastrians, and pagan “converts” under the banner of One True God. This early movement was inclusionary, non-discriminate, and advanced religious freedom (the Constitution of Medina being one of the focal historical sources as well as the conglomerate nature of the early believers’ movement which is well testified). It wasn’t until Muhammad’s death and the in-fighting of Umayyad politics that Islam, as we know it today, was born. During the Umayyad era, the need to distinguish the early believers from their newly conquered subjects in the Levant and Iraq and Persia led to the formation of a distinctive and confessional Islam. Thus the birth of the Islamic historical narrative, centered around the Hadith, came into being. Anti-Jewish and anti-Christian polemics began to appear (like on the Dome of the Rock) which enhanced the emergence of a confessional Islam under Umayyad stewardship. Though this constitutes as evidence, Donner asserts that their late arrival represents a later novelty that is distinct from the original movement founded by Muhammad and is best served as evidence for the novelty and innovation thesis distinct from the early movement thesis. As Donner’s book entails with its title, the work is an attempt to return to the “origins” of Islam. And the origins of Islam is a comparatively egalitarian, progressive, and ecumenical movement. So Donner’s thesis asserts.
2. This returns us to the problem of politicization in historical scholarship. The earliest encounters with Islam by Christians pegged them as heretical. Donner, in fact, uses John of Damascus as evidence for how this advances the thesis of an ecumenical Islam: Islam took in sects deemed heretical by imperial Christianity. The problem with this outlook is that Christian sources deemed pagans and Jews as heresies too, not just internal Christian sects whose theologies and Christologies were condemned by the ecumenical councils. (Donner, though a Near Eastern scholar, is woefully undereducated in early Christianity; a subject that I hold a grad degree in from Yale.) Early Christian encounters with Islam, however, were informed by the ongoing political and theological debates in their own time. It is unsurprising that Christianity asserted Islam was heretical; Christianity asserted that any movement outside of its own with comparable outlooks on God, humanity, and Jesus were heretical. It frankly doesn’t prove much. Certainly not as much as Donner attempts to utilize it as.