Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State.

• Author: Reynolds, Gabriel Said
• Position: Book review

Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State. By YEHUDA D. NEVO and JUDITH KOREN. Amherst, New York: PROMETHEUS, 2003. Pp. viii + 462. $32.

Crossroads to Islam is a work of profound historical and religious revisionism, based on the research and ideas of the eccentric Israeli archaeologist Yehuda Nevo, collected and completed by Judith Koren after Nevo's death in 1992. Nevo spent much of his career in the Negev desert, studying early Arabic inscriptions and rethinking the origins of Islam. In his controversial article "Towards a Pre-History of Islam" (JSAI 17 [1994] 108-41), Nevo argued that these inscriptions reveal a gradual process in which Islam developed from an indeterminate monotheism to the religion we now know through the first two centuries AH. Crossroads to Islam is still more ambitious. Here Nevo and Koren present a radically new vision for the development of Islam and the Islamic empire, in which the familiar events and personalities of early Islamic history--including the Prophet Muhammad and the first four caliphs--are characters of myth, not history.

There is, then, a certain ideological similarity between this work and that of Wansbrough. Indeed, in the conclusion the authors note (pp. 343-44) that their date for the canonization of the Qur'an (late 2nd/8th century), arrived at through material evidence, is not far from that of Wansbrough, arrived at through literary analysis. Crossroads to Islam, meanwhile, is published by Prometheus Press, known for sponsoring projects of religious skepticism, including the second edition of Wansbrough's Qur'anic Studies. Nevertheless, the great intellectual presence looming behind this work is not Wansbrough but rather Shlomo Pines, whose belief in the survival and influence of heterodox Judaeo-Christian movements shapes the Nevo/Koren thesis.

Yet Crossroads to Islam does not begin with religion at all, but rather with history. In part I, Nevo and Koren reconsider the relation of Byzantium with the Arabs through the early Islamic period, rewriting this period of Byzantine history in a way no less radical than their treatment of Islamic history. The Islamic conquests, they argue, were not conquests at all. Byzantium withdrew her forces south of Antioch of her own will, in a gradual process that can be traced all the way back to the third century, when the Roman Emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305) rearranged the Eastern provinces, leaving only one legion to control Syria-Palaestina (pp. 27ff.).

The Byzantine emperors continued to implement this policy through the centuries. The Emperor Maurice (r. 582-602) dismantled the Ghassanid kingdom in the late sixth century (p. 46) with this policy in mind. Heraclius (r. 610-41) chose to campaign against the Sassanians in Armenia and Persia (p. 48)--and not in Syria, Palestine or Arabia (which the Sassanians were occupying)--for the same reason. Meanwhile, the emperors systematically settled Arab tribes in Syria/Palestine in preparation for Byzantium's eventual withdrawal (pp. 72ff.). Thus "the final act of dissociation from the provinces--the barbarian invasion, the popular rebellion--which history records as the sole reason for it, is actually only the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is hidden in the classified papers of the state archives, if indeed it is documented at all" (p. 21).

This, then, is a conspiracy theory par excellence, complete with a government cover-up. What is missing, on the other hand, is a convincing explanation of why Byzantium would want to get rid of three provinces (Nevo and Koren hint that it had to do with trade, pp. 21, 163-65), and, presuming they did, why they would do so in a manner that took four hundred years, and was so secret that no traces have been left of their intentions.

On the other hand, the traditional Islamic accounts of the conquests are indeed troublesome, as Nevo and Koren point out (p. 2). Their method of casting aside the tradition and imagining other scenarios based on alternative evidence (p. 9) is not per se unreasonable. This sort of method was used long ago by Biblical scholars such as Alt, Noth, Mendenhall, and Gottwald, who, rejecting the historicity of the Biblical Exodus and conquest narrative, proposed the models of "peaceful migration" or "indigenous revolt" that are now well known in Biblical Studies. In the field of Islamic Studies, however, few scholars are so adventurous.

Unfortunately, in the first part of Crossroads to Islam Nevo and Koren seem more reckless than adventurous. Not only do they argue that the Byzantines happily transferred the great provinces of the east to their Arab clients (foederati), they continue by arguing that the...