u/chonkshonk

Hello all,

Please click here to find the database files for the EvQ database.

The Encyclopedia of the Variant Readings of the Qurʾān, or EvQ, was a project by Shady Nasser that aimed "to be a critical apparatus of the Qur’an and, through continuing to add data over time, to become a comprehensive encyclopedia and resource on the history and transmission of the Qur’an". It was a useful resource for many, but unfortunately, seems to have been discontinued.

While the website was still up, I was able to gather together the public information listed on the website and organize it into JSON files that should be sufficient to re-build the website from scratch. I'm sure Claude or something like it should be able to re-build the website, especially if you give it snapshots taken of the website stored on the Internet Archive.

I tried to contact Dr. Nasser about this but I did not get any response.

Half a year ago, I made a post titled Quotes by historians about the reliability of the basic outlines of Muhammad's biography.

Originally, it listed quotes by eight historians. Now, I have fourteen, so I thought I would re-make the post. If I missed any, please let me know!

(And don't miss my related megapost, Quotes about the academic consensus that Muhammad existed, which has over 30 references!)

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Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses, pg. 15:

>There is of course no doubt that Muḥammad lived in the 620s and 630s A.D., that he fought in wars, and that he had followers some of whose names are likely to have been preserved. But the precise when, what and who, on which our interpretations stand and fall, bear all the marks of having been through the mill of rabbinic arguments and subsequently tidied up.

Michael Cook, Muhammad, pg. 70:

>For such interpretation [of the Quran] we are naturally dependent mainly on tradition. Without it we could probably infer that the protagonist of the Koran was Muhammad, that the scene of his life was in western Arabia, and that he bitterly resented the frequent dismissal of his claims to prophecy by his contemporaries. But we could not tell that the sanctuary was in Mecca, or that Muhammad himself came from there, and we could only guess that he established himself in Yathrib. We might indeed prefer a more northerly location.

Sean Anthony, Muhammad and The Empires of Faith, University of California Press (2020), pg. 25 [this section also being quoted approvingly in Ilkka Lindstedt, Muhammad and His Followers in Context, pg. 41]:

>Despite the limitations of the Qurʾān for reconstructing the events of Muḥammad’s life, it remains our best and earliest witness to the historical existence of a man named Muḥammad who was revered by a faith community of Arabic-speakers as God’s messenger and prophet, not to mention the message that he preached.

>There are four cardinal sources upon which all research into the historical Muḥammad hinges: (1) the Qurʾān; (2) epigraphic, documentary, and archaeological evidence; (3) contemporary and near-contemporary non-Muslim accounts, written primarily in Armenian, Greek, and Syriac; and (4) Arabic literary sources that are mostly, but not exclusively, preserved in the sīrah–maghāzī literature and the ḥadīth compilations.

>Based on these early cardinal sources, it seems beyond doubt that in the first half of the seventh century there emerged a law-giving claimant to prophecy from Arabia, a Saracen/Ishmaelite merchant from an Arabic-speaking tribe named Muḥammad… who formed a community in Western Arabia and became a ruler in Yathrib.

Nicolai Sinai and William Montgomery Watt, Muhammad [Britannica]:

>… it is distinctly possible that some reports about events in Muhammad’s life emerged not from historical memory but from exegetical speculation about the historical context of particular verses of the Qurʾān.

>… a number of rudimentary details about Muhammad are confirmed by non-Islamic sources dating from the first decades after Muhammad’s traditional date of death. For instance, a Syriac chronicle dating from about 640 mentions a battle between the Romans and “the Arabs of Muhammad,” and an Armenian history composed about 660 describes Muhammad as a merchant who preached to the Arabs and thereby triggered the Islamic conquests. Such evidence provides sufficient confirmation of the historical existence of an Arab prophet by the name of Muhammad.

>All things considered, there is no compelling reason to suggest that the basic scaffolding of the traditional Islamic account of Muhammad’s life is unhistorical. At the same time, the nature of the sources is not such as to inspire confidence that we possess historically certain knowledge about the Prophet’s life that is as detailed as many earlier scholars tended to assume.

Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, pg. 91:

>the historian who wishes to examine the history of the early decades of the expansion must take into account the voluminous body of traditional narratives that the later Muslim community collected on this subject. These narratives are, like the narratives about the life of Muhammad, very problematic for the historian and must be used with great care. Like the narratives about Muhammad, the conquest narratives contain many interpolations of issues of concern only to the later community; in particular, they tend to portray events in an idealized way as evidence of God's favor for the Believers and probably overemphasize the amount of centralized control exercised by the leadership in Medina. But recent study of these traditional narrative sources suggests that we can indeed draw from them a basic skeleton of the course of historical events, both for the later years of Muhammad's career in Medina and for the expansion movement, even though their interpretation and evaluation of those events is sometimes strongly colored by later, rather than contemporary, concerns.

Michael Lecker, "Glimpses of Muḥammad's Medinan Decade" in The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad, pg. 75:

>We may never find out who said what to whom on this or that occasion. But we should be able to reconstruct without fanfare an outline of Muhammad's life that can withstand all but the most extreme scholarly criticism. The fruit of this research will come in shades of gray representing different grades of probability; a black-and-white approach is not nuanced enough to reflect the complexity of the evidence. The historical Muhammad is there waiting to be discovered. We only have to discern the crucial evidence and put aside - for the time being - the masses of insignificant details.

Daniel C. Peterson, Muhammad: Prophet of God, pg. 33:

>If we were to restrict ourselves entirely to the undisputed facts of Muhammad's biography, we would run out of information after only a few pages. After his emigration to Medina, the chronology of his life steps onto more-or-less secure ground; prior to that, we are left essentially to guesswork.

George Archer, The Prophet's Whistle, pg. 14:

>A little murkier, though, is the chronological order in which the Quran manifested itself. The exact chronology of the Quran’s many passages and Muhammad’s precise biography are always subject to question, but the general outline of both is not up for grabs here. Again, while there are historical-critics of early Islam that in several ways dismiss the historical origins of the Quran in the early seventh-century Ḥijāz, such theories are not entertained in this book.

Glen Bowersock, The Crucible of Islam, pp. 12-13 (also quoted approvingly in Juan Cole, Rethinking the Quran in Late Antiquity, pg. 32):

>So the crucible of Islam remains an elusive vessel. Although it may never be possible to describe it in definitive detail, an attempt to delineate its principal contours and the molten ingredients that it contained will oblige us to step aside both from unquestioning acceptance of later Muslim tradition and equally unquestioning rejection of it . . . Minimalism is not the way to throw light on a dark age.

Andreas Gorke and Gregor Schoeler, The Earliest Writings on the Life of Muhammad, pp. 1-2:

>Between these extremes [i.e. uncritical acceptance of tradition and Muhammad mythicism] is the view that there is an authentic basic framework that encompasses at least the rough outline and the most important facts of Muḥammad’s life and that can be regarded as credible in its main features.

From the official OCIANA YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/@OCIANA-OSU

The post below is taken from an answer of mine to a question asked on r/AskHistorians.

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There have been many people, all throughout history, who have perceived themselves to be prophets, Messiahs (see: List of Messiah claimants), fortune-tellers, soothsayers, spell-casters, demon-speakers, shamans, etc. You need to understand that back in pre-modern times, the idea that God (or some other supernatural force) may communicate with you was not seen as unusual or necessarily, even rare. Spirits, demons, jinn, or whatever were salient creatures that regularly acted in the real world, and you told whatever prayers or made whatever oaths you needed to, for protection, on a regular basis. Supernatural forces were behind normal or consequential good and bad outcomes you saw throughout your life.

Islamic tradition itself records numerous examples of Prophet-claimants, including more military-esque Prophet-claimants, shortly before, during, and after the lifetime of Muhammad. Mareike Koertner writes in Proving Prophecy: Dalāʾil al-Nubūwa Literature as Part of the Scholarly Discourse on Prophecy in Islam, Brill, 2024, pp. 147–148:

>Before, during, and after Muḥammad’s lifetime, there was a continuous stream of self-proclaimed prophets. The concept of prophecy permeated the Near Eastern world and Late Antiquity, from the prophets of ancient Israel, early Christian groups like the second-century Montanist sect, or the third-century Mesopotamian prophet Mani, who established Manichaeism as a major religion.6 With the concept of prophecy being so widely known in the pre-Islamic Near East, it is not surprising that claims to prophecy continued during Muḥammad’s lifetime. Among the contemporaneous prophets, Khālid b. Sinān allegedly performed miracles, while Musaylima b. Ḥabīb from Yamāma tried to establish relations with Muḥammad but was eventually killed in battle. The prophetess Sajāḥ, who hailed from northeastern Arabia was reportedly married to Musaylima for some time; in addition, Aswad b. Kaʿb al-ʿ⁠Ansī from Yemen and Ṭulayḥa of the Banū Asad emerged as self-proclaimed prophets. All of them held political and military aspirations in addition to religious ambitions and some indeed rose to prominence as political leaders.7 As claims to prophecy were (at times successfully) tied to political control, it is also not surprising to find that self-proclaimed prophets after Muḥammad’ death occurred geographically closer to new centers of power in Syria and Mesopotamia. The most famous of these claimants was Mukhtār al-Thaqafī, who rebelled against the Umayyads in Kufa in 66/685 and remained in control there for two years until his rebellion was quelled by Umayyad forces.8 Mukhtār’s main ideological rallying points were his pro-Hashimite leanings; he rebelled in the name of ʿ⁠Alī b. Abī Ṭālib’s son Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyy (d. 81/700). Rebellions by self-proclaimed prophets persisted until the end of the Umayyad dynasty. A Jewish rebel by the name Abū ʿĪsā l-ʿIṣfahānī and his movement rose against the caliphate during the reign of ʿ⁠Abd al-Malik (r. 65–86/685–705); he mixed Jewish and Muslim elements in his teachings.9 Between the 110s/730s and 130s/750s, several individuals claimed prophecy, including three different rebellions in the town of Kufa.10 The self-proclaimed prophets Bayān b. Samʿān al-Nahdī and Mughīra b. Saʿīd al-ʿIjlī organized the first of these rebellions in 119/737. While their aspirations for the rebellion are not clear, their threat was considered great enough to merit a public execution, which was presided over by Kufa’s governor, Khālid b. ʿ⁠Abdallāh al-Qasrī.11 The fact that claims to prophecy remained common in the decades after Muḥammad’s death shows that the concept of prophecy was well enough established to provide a potentially powerful ideological conduit for the political ambitions of numerous individuals who sought to wrestle power from the Umayyads. Furthermore, it highlights the reality that the doctrine of Muḥammad’s prophetic mission held neither the theological sophistication nor the exclusivity of later generations. As we noted, the continuous challenges to political power through claims to prophecy contributed to the Umayyad’s growing interest in defining and implementing notions of orthodoxy with the full coercive power of the state apparatus in an effort to consolidate their own power.

There are certainly conversations to be had about the extent to which these traditions are historical (for a more critical perspective, see Gerald Hawting, "Were there Prophets in the Jahiliyya?"), but at minimum, this does show that people from this time period themselves did not really take the existence of such Prophet-claimaints to be overly unusual or rare. No one made any considerable effort to figure out how someone could have possibly come to believe this about themselves; at face-value, numerous possible explanations exist (wishful thinking, delusion, dishonesty, etc.) and, since we have very little direct psychological information about Muhammad and especially since we have virtually no reliable psychological information about him before or early on during his Prophetic period, we will likely never know the exact reason or cause behind this. Basically everything remains possible, although some indirect speculations are suggestible from the Qur'an itself; in the Qur'an, Muhammad responds to accusations from his opponents that he is a soothsayer (Q 52:29; 69:42), which was an actual phenomena in pre-Islamic Arabia (e.g. see Agostini, "The masʾal oracle: a survey of an ancient South Arabian divinatory practice") and it seems like Muhammad's opponents may have seen his activities, at least early during his Prophetic period, as resembling this sort of practice. Possible further corroboration for this is that the earliest portions of the Qur'an occur in a style of writing known as saj', a form of speech commonly attributed to pre-Islamic soothsayers. So, some level of speculation may suggest that the pre-Islamic institution of the soothsayer may be a promising lead to understanding the early phenomenology of Muhammad's self-understanding or where he was coming from.

Dr Hugh Thomas is an expert Arabian archaeologist at the University of Sydney with a focus on the prehistoric archaeology of north-western Arabia.

He publishes actively, and one can find a lot of his work here. More importantly for the community here, he is by and far one of the best communicators of the research scholarship in this area to a general audience. He made his YouTube channel, "Dr Hugh Thomas", last year and now has around 20,000 subscribers.

His two most popular videos, for anyone who wants to give his channel a quick look, are What Is This? 7,900-Year-Old Structures Found in Saudi! and The Mystery of Harrat Khaybar: The Densest Archaeology on Earth?.