ASHTINAME: Should we trust John Morrow's Assessment? (7thC.-02)

Should we trust John Andrew Morrow's assessment of the Ashtiname in his book on the subject, entitled “The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World”? I asked Dr Mark Durie, a friend who has read this book that question, and below are his responses, with additions of my own. We will need to look at 5 specific areas to answer that question. 1) Morrow's arguments against Bernhard Moritz's analysis of the Ashtiname (Mt Sinai Covenant forgery) are disappointingly weak. Dr Bernhard Moritz's 1918 assessment is considered the classical response concerning whether the Ashtiname is authentic or not. He considered it a forgery. -Morrow suggests that Moritz's claim that the Ashtiname is a forgery is “without foundation”, but he does not engage in any serious way with Moritz's arguments. Moritz found the document fraudulent because of its Date, style and contents. -Instead, Morrow launches into a long ad-hominem attack on Moritz for being a Muslim-hating German spy. At one point he called him "a man who wanted Muslims to kill and persecute Christians".  Pages of such bile are no substitute for engaging with Moritz's substantive arguments! 2) Morrow’s analysis, he claims, is unique: He suggests that "no serious repudiation of the Covenant has ever been formulated".  -Yet what about the classical analysis by Bernhard Moritz in 1918, or the more recent research on the Ashtiname by Mubasher Hussain, Dr Pat Andrews, Dr Mark Durie, Amidu Olalekan Sanni, and Dr Gabriel Said Reynold? 3) Morrow’s Analysis: -Strategy: If a report favours Muhammad it is factual, but if it is not favourable it is merely an allegation (i.e. the genocide of the Qur'ayza is an allegation only, with Morrow concluding that, “the obstinate male members of the tribe are alleged to have been beheaded while their women and children were reduced to slavery". -A further example; When Muhammad threatened the Banu Qaynuqa' a Jewish tribe of Medina, to convert to Islam or face the same fate as the Quraysh (i.e. death), Morrow criticizes the Jews for not responding tactfully. How does one respond tactfully to death threats?  -Morrow describes the Jews of Medina as “treacherous treaty breakers”, so that Muhammad's violence against them was justified. Notice their names are not on the treaty. -Rayhanhah, a Jew, was taken as a sex slave after her husband was beheaded by Muhammad. She was taken to Mohammad past the headless and burnt body of her husband. Yet, Morrow's account: "One such captive, Rayhanha bint Zayd ibn 'Amr, married the Messenger of Allah and eventually embraced Islam". That's it! -Isn't this similar to the Yazidi women with ISIS in Iraq recently? They watched their menfolk killed before their very eyes, and then became sex slaves of their husbands', fathers' and brothers' killers. All this Morrow describes as "marrying the Messenger". -The Jews, Morrow opines, rejected Muhammad for racist reasons. -Islam, Morrow says, afforded "protection for members of minorities", despite the majority populations conquered by Islamic armies, which was a brutal occupation of native peoples, so not an example of tolerance to minorities.  -On p.62 he reports that an Umayyad Caliph returned a church to the Christians, which had been commandeered as a mosque, using this as proof that Muhammad was good to Christians, saying, "If this is how the Ummayads, the most wretched rulers of Islam behaved, one can only imagine the exalted treatment of the Prophet and Imam Ali reserved for their subjects." 4) Scholars Assessment of Morrow: -Durie’s Conclusion: "This is a disturbing book - pious, hateful propaganda, and not a work devoted to the telling the truth in love". -Gabriel Said Reynolds review: “The translator, John Andrew Morrow (an author of the Encyclopedia of Islamic Herbal Medicine) insists that they [the covenants of Muhammad] are all genuine and prove decisively that Islam is tolerant of Christianity…Evidently, his interest in arguing for the authenticity of these covenants is not unlike the interest of those who forged them in the first place” (Gabriel Said Reynolds is the professor of Islamic studies and theology at the University of Notre Dame) 5) My assessment: -Morrow didn’t engage with Bernhard Moritz, and simply called him racist...why? -He came across as very egotistical, thinking his study to be unique, yet it wasn't. -He either wasn’t aware of the 6 other studies, or disregarded them, due to their conclusions. -His reporting was certainly biassed, and not very academic. -He doesn’t like Jews, which does little to engender the reader to his conclusions. -The scholars who read his book were not impressed. -Morrow makes it difficult for us to trust Muslims concerning their own history. -There seems to be an inability in Islam to be self-critical. © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2020 (27,460)