In Early Islam, 'Believers' were Multi-Faith, Inclusive and Muslim, Jew or Christian | Javad Hashmi

Three Ramadan Nights with Harvard Scholars, Qur’anic Topics, MIT, April 17-19, 2023 (Ramadan 1444)

Lecture 2:
In 2010, Fred Donner published Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam, a follow up to his 2003 article, “From Believers to Muslims: Confessional Self-Identity in the Early Islamic Community.” In these works, Donner argues that the Prophet Muhammad’s followers were actually called Believers (muʾminūn) as opposed to Muslims (muslimūn). Moreover, the early Believers’ movement, as he calls it, was “ecumenical” and consisted of Jews, Christians, and (potentially) other monotheists. Initial reactions to his theory were mixed, but the concept of a Believers’ movement (as opposed to a reified Islamic religion in the lifetime of the Prophet Muḥammad) has resonated widely with scholars. I argue in this study that although Donner was broadly correct in his thesis, he made a basic mistake, which has been subsequently reproduced by numerous scholars since.

The mistake Donner made was to accidentally swap the terms muʿmin and muslim. My close reading of the Qurʾān, as I will expound herein, reveals that the term muʿmin (as well as alladhīna āmanū) refers to a Believer in the Prophet Muhammad and in the Qurʾān (i.e. a follower of Qurʾānic law). As such, it is actually the narrower term, referring to what we today think of as a Muslim. Meanwhile, the term muslim in the Qurʾān itself refers to a Submitter — or, more specifically, a Submitting Monotheist — and encompasses not just muʿminūn (composed mostly but not exclusively of Arabian pagan converts) but also Jews and Christians. As such, muslim is the wider term. The umma muslima (the Submitting community) of the Prophet Muhammad thus consisted of Believers as well as Jews and Christians.

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