“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

If one were to open the pages of Muslim tradition and peer into the dawn of Islam, one would encounter the stirring tale of a prophet who rose from the sands of Arabia in the early 7th century – Muhammad, the final Messenger of Allah. He received the Qur’an from the archangel Gabriel and proclaimed these divine revelations in Mecca and Medina, eventually uniting the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula into one ummah under his religious and political leadership. After the Prophet’s death in 632 AD, large Islamic empires were established under the leadership of the “Rightly-Guided Caliphs”, continuing under the Umayyad Caliphs with their capital in Damascus, and culminating with the Abbasids, who made Baghdad their seat of power.

This tidy little narrative, accepted uncritically by Muslims, is inherently unreliable. The earliest biographies of Muhammad, such as those by Ibn Ishaq (d. 768 AD) and Al-Waqidi (d. 822 AD), were written over a century after his death. Later biographies like those of Al-Ya’qubi (d. 898 AD) and Al-Tabari (d. 922 AD), which also cover the lives of Muhammad’s successors and key events of the Caliphates – including the Ridda Wars, the First Fitna, and the rise of the Umayyads and the Abbasids – were written even further after the events they describe, during the 9th and 10th centuries. Recognising this, the Islamologist Snouck Hurgronje dismissed the standard biography as “tendentious fiction”. To quote from his classic work Mohammedanism:

Of Mohammed’s life before his appearance as the messenger of God, we know extremely little; compared to the legendary biography as treasured by the Faithful, practically nothing.

The hadith literature – records of the sayings, actions, and approvals of Muhammad, a key source of Islamic teachings alongside the Qur’an – is similarly unreliable. The six canonical collections of hadith – those of Al-Bukhari (d. 870 AD), Muslim (d. 875 AD), Abu Dawud (d. 888 AD), Ibn Majah (d. 886 AD), Al-Tirmidhi (d. 892 AD), and Al-Nasa’i (d. 915 AD) – were compiled several centuries after Muhammad’s death. These collections, based on oral traditions transmitted across generations, are susceptible to variation, embellishment, and political influence. Indeed, the fabrication of hadiths for political gain was a defining trait of the Umayyads and the Abbasids, and became an industry in itself. As the great Ignaz Goldziher once observed:

The handing down of hadiths sank to the level of a business very early. Journeys (in search of hadiths) favored the greed of those who succeeded in pretending to be a source of the hadith, and with increasing demand sprang up an even increasing desire to be paid in cash for the hadiths supplied.

Upon assuming the seat of the Caliphate, the Umayyads swiftly moved to consolidate their authority and suppress dissent. To this end, they commissioned many fabricated hadiths, whose principal beneficiary was Mu’awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan – the first Umayyad Caliph. Numerous hadiths were composed in Mu’awiyah’s favour, portraying him as divinely approved and exceptionally virtuous, thereby bolstering his legitimacy in the eyes of the public and religious leaders alike. Here are three examples of such laudatory narrations:

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: “Allah entrusted His revelation to Jibril (Gabriel) in the heavens, to Muhammad on the earth, and to Mu’awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan.” [Arabic original]

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: “O Mu’awiyah, indeed Allah, the Exalted, has written for you a reward equal to the number of everyone who recites Ayat al-Kursi from the time it was revealed until the Day of Judgement.” [Arabic original]

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: “Call Mu’awiyah to me.” When he stood before him, he said: “Entrust him with your affairs, for he is strong and trustworthy.” [Arabic original]

In his Kitab al-Mawdu’at, the esteemed hadith scholar Ibn al-Jawzi classified these reports as mawdu (fabricated), citing dubious chains of transmission (isnads) and clear political motivations. Indeed, they emerged against the backdrop of Mu’awiyah’s intense conflict with Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s son-in-law and the fourth Caliph. Following the assassination of Uthman ibn Affan, the third Caliph, Mu’awiyah – then governor of Syria – refused to pledge allegiance to Ali until Uthman’s killers were avenged. This dispute ultimately led to the Battle of Siffin and the first major schism in the ummah. In this context, attributing prophetic praise to Mu’awiyah would have served to validate his rule and counter the religious and moral authority of Ali.

Under the Abbasids, the fabrication of hadiths greatly multiplied, with the express purpose of proving the legitimacy of their own clan against the Alids – those who claim descent from Ali. For example, the Prophet was made to say that Abu Talib, father of Ali, was sitting deep in hell: “Perhaps my intercession will be helpful to him on the Day of Resurrection so that he may be put in a shallow fire reaching only up to his ankles. His brain will boil from it.” (Sahih al-Bukhari). Naturally, this was countered by the theologians of the Alids who devised numerous hadiths to heap praise upon Abu Talib. “In fact,” Goldziher says, amongst the Alids, “the mischievous use of tendentious traditions was even more common than the official party.”

Thus, it is clear that the established narrative of Islam’s origins, being based on the biographies of Muhammad and the hadith literature, is less an impartial history than a collection of ideologically charged accounts. This makes it nigh on impossible to extract objective facts from these sources. To get a proper understanding of the first two centuries of Islam – one that is grounded in historical reality, rather than retrospective theological interpretation – we must instead examine the material evidence available from this era.

In recent decades, the traditional story of Islam’s origins has been directly challenged by datable and localizable artefacts from the 7th and 8th centuries. These include coins, manuscripts, and inscriptions like those found on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. In The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research Into Its Early History, ten leading scholars investigate these early artefacts to piece together how Islam actually emerged. Their findings are startling, revealing a far more complex and gradual evolution than the ‘official’ narrative suggests – among them, compelling evidence that Islam may have originated as an offshoot of Christianity. As Karl-Heinz Ohlig writes in the foreword to this major work:

It will be proven that the numismatic discoveries from this period, as well as the inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, actually concern Christian texts and symbols, which document Syrian-Arabian theological ideas: that God is one and single, and that the one he has sent (Jesus) is to be praised (muhammad). Such statements were aimed at demarcating the texts’ communities from Byzantine conceptions of the Trinity and of Christology. They document the proud attempt of an Arabian Christianity and the empires shaped by it to create and defend their own identity.

In addition, it will become clear that, long before the appearance of the idea of a Hijra, there was an Arabian-Christian reckoning of time, which began with the year 622 and was only later “converted” to a Muslim meaning. Until approximately the end of the eighth century, so it seems, Arabian-Christian tribal leaders governed the regions of the Near East and of North Africa – indeed, the Umayyad leaders and even the early Abbasids were Christians.

To bring these crucial insights to a broader audience, this series will distil the contents of this seminal volume into a concise and accessible format. Drawing upon historical-critical methods and a range of evidence from archaeology, epigraphy and philology – including the influence of Syriac-Aramaic traditions on the Qur’an – we will explore how Islam did not emerge as a fully formed religion in the 7th century, but rather as the product of a centuries-long transformation of pre-existing monotheistic beliefs among Arab populations.