Page:An Analysis of Prophet Muhammad’s Covenants with Christians.pdf/3

 and the integrity of their messages. As a framework of analysis, four of the Covenants will be used to explore the concepts of religious pluralism and civic rights in a “Muslim nation”. These Covenants include: “The Covenant of the Prophet with the Monks of Mount Sinai”; “The Covenant of the Prophet with the Christians of Najran”; “The Covenant of the Prophet with the Christians of Persia”; and “The Covenant of the Prophet with the Christians of the World”. The authenticity of each of these documents will be discussed on an individual basis below. It is worth noting that a complete and detailed account of the authenticity of these documents is outside the boundary of this paper. Morrow, however, provides a more in-depth break down on issues pertaining to authenticity (, pp. 65, 99, 109, 139).

Christians have reportedly guarded the “Covenant of the Prophet with the Monks of Mount Sinai” for nearly nine centuries (, p. 65). The French knight Greffin Affagart, who performed a pilgrimage to Saint Catherine’s monastery between 1533 and 1534 CE, provided one of the earliest accounts of this Covenant; he noted the existence and presence of the original copy in his journal (, p. 68; ). Approximately two centuries later, the French General Marie-Joseph de Géramb (1772–1848 CE) confirmed Affagart’s observation and claimed that the document had been kept in the Covenant of the Holy Transfiguration of God at the Monastery of Saint Catherine (, p. 294). Hobbs, who also investigated the authenticity of the Covenant with the Monks of Mount Sinai, stated that the original document was transported in 1517 by military personnel of the Ottoman Empire from the Sinai region to the palace of Sultan Selim I in Istanbul (, p. 160;, p. 148). Indeed, as Ratfliff argues, every authority has accepted 1517 as the year in which this Covenant was taken to the capital of the Ottoman Empire (, pp. 14–15). Perhaps the most convincing argument for the authenticity of the Covenant with the Monks of Mount Sinai came from Burckhardt, who visited the monastery in 1816 and had the opportunity to examine the copy (, p. 68). He observed, “in a note it is expressly stated that the original, written by ‘Ali’, was lost, and that the present was copied from a fourth copy taken from the original” (, p. 68). Despite the observations made by the aforementioned travellers, “[t]he dating of many [of the Covenant with the Monks of Mount Sinai] bristles with difficulties”. As previous copies became old and brittle and started to distinegrate [sic], “new copies of [this Covenant] were created for the sake of posterity” (, p. 66). The claim, therefore, is that the existing copy of the Covenant with the Monks of Mount Sinai is a replica of the original. The monks from Saint Catherine’s Monastery have consistently upheld its authenticity since the early days of Islam, so have the Jabaliyya Arabs of the Sinai. It is also worth noting that scholars of the five schools of Islamic jurisprudence during the Fatimid, the Ayyubi, and the Mamluk dynasties recognized and respected the Covenants by following its orders in relation to the treatment of Christians.

Scholars have also deliberated over the authenticity of “The Covenant of the Prophet with the Christians of Najran”. This Covenant first came to light in Patrologia Orientalis, a body of work that attempts to create a comprehensive collection of the writings by scholars of Eastern Churches including those of the Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, Coptic, Georgian, and Slavonic traditions. Scher, an Assyrian Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Sirrt in Southeastern Turkey, claimed that a copy of the Covenant with the Christians of Persia was based on a document found in the year 878/879 CE. Scher’s claim stemmed from the testimony of Habib, a monk in the city of Brimantha who made a copy from a document originally found in the Library of Philosophy, where he was the curator (, p. 281). Scher, however, dimissed [sic] the authenticity of the document, claiming that it “was forged by the Christians so that the Muslims would spare them” (, p. 282). However, as Morrow duly notes, Scher “did not advance a single argument to support his allegations and did not present a shred of proof to demonstrate that the covenenant [sic] in question was counterfeit” (, p. 109). While Scher also argued that the Covenant with the Christians of Najran is written in flawed Arabic, Morrow again points out that the Archbishop “does not avail himself of his linguistic expertise to support the supposition” (, p. 110). Moreover, as Ibn Ishaq (704–761 CE) reports, the Prophet seems to have been in contact with the Christians of Najran around the second year before the hijrah (the migration or journey of Prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina):

Ishaq discusses Muhammad’s tolerance and hospitality towards the visitors of Najran: