I just have to read his final chapters on 'alternative theories', but from what I gleaned of Townsend's work so far, it makes sense that Islam too was crafted long after the fact and projected back in time. As I understand it, the 'Saudis' of the day broke out of the Arabian Desert - with a leader who may have
claimed he was "doing God's work", but who can't have been the Muhammad of Islamic lore - to institute an ethnic Arab nation, complete with Arabic language/alphabet, and with its capital initially located in Damascus. For some reason though, the first 'mosques' (if that's what they even were initially) were built to line up with... Petra.
Petra is an ancient city in southern Jordan, near the Israeli border, and once the capital of the Kingdom of Nabataea. [Cool sidenote: Petra is
that place in
Raiders of the Lost Ark:
!] This is interesting because Nabataea was a kind of early 'Saudi Arabia' until the Roman Empire annexed it in 106. It strikes me that the initial 'Arab conquests' attributed to Mo and his 'tribe' could have essentially been a national effort to retake sovereignty of this 'old country' from Rome, and that Petra was sacred ground to them for this reason? In any event, their 'reconquest' developed into mega-empire-building over the next century. And they still hadn't created Islam yet...
The first mention of a 'Muhammad' is made in an inscription at the first purposefully-built 'Islamic' shrine... in Jerusalem, at the
Dome of the Rock, which was originally built in 691 - i.e., 60 years after the death of Mo. That's significant because it amounts to a high-profile 'unveiling of Islam' to the world in the most spectacular way possible: at the site of the Jewish Temple Mount in a city then largely populated by Christians.
From there a religion
begins developing, drawing from various regional influences (Zoroastrian, Christian, and pagan,
but predominantly Jewish). The Koran, Mo's biography, and Islam as such all came later, sometimes much later. The impetus at the time, it seems, was to give a religious gloss to regional (re-)conquest, and a competitive edge over the other big religions, especially Christianity. The key take-home for me here is that 'the Muslim conquests' can't have been motivated by religion - they were initially national, then later geopolitical/colonial in nature. Full-clothed Islam doesn't appear until the 9th century, some 2-300 years later.
I still don't get how a half-baked tribal-religious-nationalist enterprise can be accepted so quickly by much of the Byzantine and all of the Persian empires, but I guess that's for another book. Environmental catastrophes must have been significant in why what happened when. So, far from being channelled lock-stock by God to Mo in one go, 'held in people's memories for several decades', then finally committed to writing in the form of the Koran, Islam seems to have begun as an 'open source' religion that absorbed/adapted neighbors' religious beliefs/practices as its political-military adherents absorbed their territories. It's only from the 9th century that Islam begins being codified into the monotheistic religion we're familiar with today.
There are several references in Townsend's book to Jews and Saracens (as in the Arabs, who only later came to be called Muslims) being 'allies', which makes me wonder... Later, 'finalized' Islam is adamant that
The Jew is
The Enemy, but it seems to me that somebody protesteth too much because the Koran even includes a 'massacre of Jews' that never actually took place. Instead, contemporary non-Arabic sources say things like this:
The
Doctrina Jacobi (written between 634 and 640 CE) is a Greek Christian tract. It is perhaps the earliest document that came down to us in which some of the elements of the Arab conquest is described in some details. A key passage reads:
"And they were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens, and that he was proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come. I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him:
"What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?"
He replied, groaning deeply:
"He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword. truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist. Indeed, Isaiah said that the Jews would retain a perverted and hardened heart until all the earth should be devastated. But you go, master Abraham, and find out about the prophet who has appeared."
So I, Abraham, inquired and heard from those who had met him that there was no truth to be found in the so-called prophet, only the shedding of men's blood. He says also that he has the keys of paradise, which is incredible (i.e. 'unbelievable')."
What a curious (apparent) non-sequitur. One moment this eyewitness is talking about the 'anarchists' running around cutting people's heads off in God's name, the next he segues into that 'anti-Semitic trope' about Jews... as if he makes no distinction between them?
On the next page, Townsend includes this non-Arabic contemporary reference to the 'Muslim' conquistadors:
The Armenian Chronicle (written around 660-670 CE) is attributed to an Armenian bishop named Sebeos. Here, finally, we have a reliably sourced reference to Muhammad (called 'Mahmet') in the chronicle), a full thirty years after he was supposed to have died. Even so, the picture presented of Muhammad is, once again, significantly at odds with the traditional Islamic account. It depicts Muhammad as being in alliance with the Jews right up to the end of his life and furthermore implies that Arabs and Jews are still (by 660-670 CE) the closest of friends.
What's
that all about? Why overlay positive relations with contrived tales about
negative ones? It reminds me of the Israeli-Saudi relationship today: officially eternal enemies, but actually strategic allies breeding al-Qaeda/ISIS... Is the manufactured
Clash of Civilizations much, much older than 9/11 and the War on Terror?
Finally, I find it a little freaky that the 'Muslims', before they became known as such, and along with being known then as Saracens, were referred to for a time as...
The Migrants 
). The apocalyptic movement that developed later to become the "early moslems" (salaf in arabic, hence the salafists) was called the "muhadjiroun", or the migrants, and at some level was modelled after the legendary Jewish migration where Mohammed = Moises and Omar =Joshua. That's maybe why Mohammed according to legend died before the "conquest" of Jerusalem (lost the battle of Muatta and then Omar did enter it and built a "cubic temple" (according to some contested early testemonies).
