Pour un usage critique des sources non musulmanes sur les débuts de l’Islam : compte rendu de Stephen Shoemaker, A Prophet Has Appeared: The Rise of Islam through Christian and Jewish Eyes. A Sourcebook

Abstract

This contribution presents some critical discussions on Stephen Shoemaker’s last Sourcebook as well as two of the author’s publications from 2012 and 2018. His thesis defends the possibility of Muḥammad being an “eschatological Prophet” of an ecumenical messianic movement whose supporters attempted to rewrite his confessional message and communal identity to adapt their religious ideology to the reality of their leader’s death. We first recall that Muḥammad appears in the older Syriac sources as a political leader, never as a Prophet, and that the eschatological moment is more probably the late First century than the time of the conquest. Concerning the vocabulary issue, we show that his revolutionary idea of calling the Ṭayyōyē “Nomads” – while “Saracens” inconsistently remains – might be irrelevant, while the systematic translation of mhaggrōyē as muhājirūn, though popular among researchers, is still not firmly grounded. In fact, they seem to have had their specific Christological credo, according to the most ancient sources that designate them as such. As his revisionist theory is almost entirely based on a single Greek short excerpt within the very long Byzantine apologetic Doctrina Jacobi, we remark how he never analyzes this single and isolated source with the hypercritical methodology arabicist accept to apply to Arab-Muslim sources. Finally, this skeptical approach needs to be applied – diachronically – for every middle eastern sources, the Muslim as well as the Christian ones, and thus could show many circulations from the first to the second.