Early Christians considered themselves Jews, so did Muslims do the same with Jews or Christians? Was it an early subject of debate, or was the split between the two faiths binary and obvious from the start?
a number of edits have been done to repair mistakes in response to a comment
I'm afraid my internet friend that you have just activated my Honors Thesis, so kindly sit back and I shall tell you a violently revisionist story about historiography and changing ideologies!
(PART ONE)
I shall begin with the best and simplest answer up front - following which I shall dive into the extra, though I really should be doing something else so even that I'll need to restrain myself quite a bit:Islam, during the time of Muhammed, is debatable....*collective gasps from the crowd*
the simple answer to your question is that early Islam was a collection of Christian and Jewish ritual practices with a distinct Arabic flavor, and Arabs pre-'Islam' weren't pagan in the way we think about it but were usually Christians.
Modern understandings of the topic of Islam's early historiographical development have largely come to two conclusions (though this is an area of intense scholarly and religious debate so my answer comes with no certainty lest someone get angry):
Some Basic Factual Background:
Rashidun - Traditionally understood as the 'four great Caliphs', all of whom likely knew Muhammed personally. Abu Bakr, Uthman, Umar, Ali. They have a GREAT amount of history and interesting stories surrounding them, but for the purposes of the detail surrounding this answer it is only important that you think of them as the 'founding leaders after the death of Muhammed'
Umayyad - This Caliphate is where things really got going for Islam. The Rashidun seem to have been far more about capturing territory, loot, and slaves than about setting up any form of state, and the first leader of the Umayyad's Mua'wiya is a VERY controversial figure. One of his successors, Abd Al-Malik can be considered to be real father [a major milestone in the development] of Islam as all the writings we have come from [after] this period. Much like with many ancient empires, when Islam began to settle down and actually create a state is when we have our writing from.
The vast majority of the (referenced sources for) writings we have were funded by Abd Al-Malik, and when historians of early Islam talk about '8th century Arab Historians' they're usually talking about [Authors from the period after al-Malik].
Now onto the story:
I will begin pre-Muhammed, and take you through to the reign of Abd Al-Malik and hopefully this will give you a sense of the story of early Islam with appropriate context.
The Pre-Islamic Arabian peninsula was a fluid, complex, and religiously rich area. The Eastern Orientation of the Byzantine Empire and it's continuous conflicts with the Sassanid Persians had resulted in the neighbouring 'Peripheral Peoples' becoming pulled into Christian-Zoroastrian-Manichaean religious and geopolitical fights. By the time of Muhammed it is estimated that the majority of city-dwelling Arabs were Christians or Jews(note that this means that Monotheism was extremely common, something which later Arab scholars did their best to downplay in an attempt to make Muhammed seem more revolutionary than he was).
To quote the best, in my opinion, current Scholar of Early Islam Robert Hoyland, "the cold war scenario between Byzantium and Persia gave [the religious conversion] additional impetus: being Christian gradually became equate with being pro-Byzantine, and non-Christians were viewed with ever greater suspicion as potential sympathizers with Persia, an accusation frequently leveled at the Jews. In this situation, political conflicts took on a religious coloring."
In addition to the obvious reasons to convert to Christianity, we also see in this the absolute binding between Theology and Governance, which would prove to be the basis for the early Caliphate. The Caliph is not a Pope, though he is the religious head, the Caliph is both Pope and 'Universal King of all Arabs.' at least until the collapse of the Ottomans, but I should avoid being distracted by my other great love, modern Arab Nationalism.
In the late 4th century Himyar, a major state in the south of the Arabian Peninsula, became Jewish - something which immediately did two things 1) make it the enemy of Byzantium and 2) set up a monotheist political structure akin to that of Byzantium.
(Byzantium Byzantium.... they sure seem to be mentioned a lot! And it's true! Early Islam was basically defined by it's relation to Byzantium, and the two of them became two sides of the same coin of West Asia!)
During a fight between Christian (and thus Byzantine aligned) Ethiopia and Himyar we saw a series of religious Pogroms, and a valuable piece of work known as 'Martyrs of Najran' was written, believed to have served as a source of inspiration for Muhammed as it was widely read by the literate class.
This work, alongside the political pressures led to much of the Arabian peninsula converting to Christianity. Persia, while often strong, was always the younger brother to Ever-Victorious Rome from the view of Peripheral peoples, and it's religious institutions were less effective at spreading their ideology beyond their borders. Christianity and Judaism both became ways to join civilization, and remaining Pagan simply left one as the obvious target for one of the neighboring powers who were considered 'civilized'.
A major author of the time wrote that "Those who were formerly called the wolves of Arabia became members of the spiritual flock of Christ". And in so doing had joined the 'civilized' world.
I'm going to just crimp a whole paragraph from Robert Hoyland here since his work "in God's Path" is a beautiful piece of scholarship, though traditionalists may scoff at it. "The Rise of such [Christian and Jewish] kingdoms in the peripheral regions of the Byzantine and Persian Empires in the fourth to sixth century is characterized by Sociologists as secondary state formation. Groups that enjoyed frequent, sustained, and intensive contact with empires begin to establish rudimentary state structures of their own. Thus in all the border regions around the Byzantine Empire we see hybrid polities emerging: [a list we don't need to see for this]. They retained their own distinctiveness - using their own language among themselves [...] - but they were proud of their ties with the empire. [...] and at the same time vaunted their imperial titles in their inscriptions and their patronage of Christianity."
"Now just what are you going on about?" I hear you ask. "What does this have to do with if early Islam saw itself as distinct or as Christian". If you can't already see the road, I'll continue laying it out for you, but I suspect some of you who read this may see the connections building.
As Hoyland says "Settled people would always draw a clear distinction between themselves and these nomadic Arabs, regarding the latter as devoid of civilized values. Yet despite their apparent marginality, it is the nomadic Arabs who feature more prominently in Late Antique sources, and this is for two main reasons. In the first place, they were converting to Christianity. In this they were influenced by the early Christian ascetic movement, which was the arid lands on the periphery of the Byzantine and Persian Empires populated by Hermits and Monastic communities.[he then goes on about something that's cool but not relevant here]"
Muhammed's famous journey to the cave where he is said to have spoken to Gabriel was an example of Judeo-Christian ascetism!
*collective gasps again*
Some edits:(AN ISSUE EMERGED HERE AND CRUSHED MY SOUL AS THE PART TWO TO THIS WRITEUP WAS DELETED AFTER HALF AN HOUR OF WRITING, I WILL SUMMARIZE IT BUT PENDING FURTHER INTEREST I WILL LEAVE IT UNTIL FURTHER QUESTIONS ARE ASKED AND REFUEL MY HEART)
It isn't until the reign of abd al-Malik that Islam appears as Islam. His reforms were massive:
from wikipedia, which is a cardinal sin but valuable in this case: "In a significant departure from his predecessors, rule over the Caliphate's provinces was centralized under Abd al-Malik, following the elimination of his rivals. Gradually, loyalist Arab troops from Syria were tasked with maintaining order in the provinces as dependence on less reliable, local Arab garrisons receded. Tax surpluses from the provinces were forwarded to Damascus and the traditional military stipends to veterans of the early Muslim conquests and their descendants were abolished, salaries being restricted to those in active service. The most consequential of Abd al-Malik's reforms were the introduction of a single Islamic currency in place of Byzantine and Sasanian coinage and the establishment of Arabic as the language of the bureaucracy in place of Greek and Persian in Syria and Iraq, respectively. His Muslim upbringing, the conflicts with external and local Christian forces and rival claimants to Islamic leadership all influenced Abd al-Malik's efforts to prescribe a distinctly Islamic character to the Umayyad state."
Basically the legitimacy crisis that preceded abd al-Malik's reign which saved Byzantium after the Arab Conquests was resolved by looking back to their history where Muhammed was a religious warlord of a type that was common in Arabia at the time. He leaned into religion as a way to establish institutions to prevent such crises in the future and though it didn't work for him it worked for those who came after him.
It seems u/Swagiken has already done an excellent job of answering this question, but I thought I'd chip in with a different view. I don't have an honours thesis in the subject, so I'm open to correction, but I'll offer what I have and hope it proves an interesting counterpoint. My main issue with their answer is that I feel they overstate the Christian presence within Arabia at the time of Muhammad, and underplay the paganism of the communities particularly in the middle of the peninsula, where Muhammad lived. I also feel he places the date of Islam's definition as its own entity far too late.
There is influence from both Judaism and Christianity on the formation of Arabic belief pre-Muhammad. Direct Christian presence was restricted to the fringes of the peninsula; in the north the Byzantine and Persian fronts were separated by desert, with some client Arab tribes but no contact further into Arabia. There is some Christian presence which comes up from the south from Ethiopia via Yemen, and Persian-leaning communities of Nestorian Christians in eastern Arabia, but it isn't clear that any of this reached the Hejaz, the isolated western desert where Muhammad lived. It does seem, however, that Islam may be the result of a gradual shift within Arabia towards monotheism. There are mentions of Arabic monotheists, with a fourth-century al-Rahman 'the merciful' seen in inscriptions in the south. Quranic tradition criticises other prophetic figures across Arabia, demonstrating their existence, and there is almost a 'substrate' of Syriac Christian language and belief within the Quran - even the term Quran itself is Aramaic in origin, and parts of the Quran seem equally legible when perceived as pure Arabic as they do when read as a Syriac hybrid. Some say, as u/iox007 has pointed out, that Muhammad was illiterate, while others claim he knew the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible which are also foundational to Jewish scripture) and others still say he knew the whole Bible.
That said, tales from Muhammad's life are hard to verify. There is no evidence for an Arabic Bible at this time, so concrete Christian thought must have been limited, particularly considering how isolated the Hejaz was. There have been suggestions that Mecca was a bustling trading hub with links to the rest of Arabia and beyond, and that Muhammad's activities as a trader may have brought him as far north as Damascus and into direct contact with an Arian Christian monk. There is no suggestion in the archaeological record that Mecca was anything more than a regional trading hub for the local pastoralists to sell their goods. The traders there organised faires to celebrate their own deities, so clearly were more in touch with paganism than u/Swagiken has suggested, and there is an impression within the Islamic sources that pre-Islamic Arabia was a land of heathens having forgotten the lessons of Abraham.
There was, however, greater influence from Rabbinic Judaism. C. F. Robinson writes that Muhammad's flight to Medina was in part because Mecca was a real pagan hotbed and hostile to his radical ideas, whereas Medina had a large Jewish community who shaped his philosophy while his religious beliefs were crystallising. Most of the Quran was revealed in Medina. and some Messianic Jews even fought with Muhammad against the Byzantines. The Constitution of Medina, the document binding Muhammad's followers together during his exile there, allows for the membership of Jews within the ummah, the community of the faithful. Even at this early point, their religious separation from Muslims was established, and after the Battle of Uhud Muhammad seems to become less fond of Jews, but this separation was still blurry, largely because the Constitution was as much a political and military document as it was a religious one. That difficulty of definition applies to much early Islamic history - the overlap between political, cultural and religious community is so strong it's almost impossible to extract one from the others.
There is, however, an identity that is distinctly Islamic, even from the beginning. Fred Donner says in Early Islamic Conquests that there was a religious duty to expand outside Arabia, demonstrated by the emphasis on jihad within the Constitution of Medina and in Muhammad's teachings which would go on to become the Quran itself, which was not written down definitively until later. A large part of this expansionism came from a belief in righteous conquest being rewarded in the afterlife. 'Holy war' was not a concept that had developed thus far, but was beginning to be used by Heraclius for instance in his campaigns against Persia, and this may have bled into Arabia and indirectly influenced Muhammad. One of the defining factors of early Islam is an incredible zeal for religious warfare, and a desire to expand the Islamic state over the infidels. This rhetoric would not be applicable unless Muslims believed themselves different to those they were fighting. The Muslims knew they were different to the people they conquered under the four Rashidun caliphs after Muhammad's death; they went so far as to live in separate camps outside pre-existing cities, which would go on to form their own cities like Basra and Kufa. Muhammad sent letters to the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, to the Persian Shah, and to the Abyssinian king asking them to convert - again, this would not be necessary for the Byzantines or Abyssinians if Muhammad saw himself as a Christian.
After Muhammad's death, the Islamic state survived largely because of its shared religious views and sense of community, continuing conquest with the beliefs of jihad. Caliph Umar before the end of the seventh century was already building mosques in conquered cities as a sign of further separation between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, or the House of Islam, and the Rest. The pesky entanglement between 'Arab' and 'Muslim' only becomes stronger in the coming years, with the Umayyads (particularly Abd al-Malik) making Islam a definitively Arabic religion and emphasising the role of the Arabic language.
Arabia before Muhammad was a melting pot, with Jews, Christians on the fringes, and native Arabic monotheists and polytheists in abundance. Muhammad lived in an area largely free of concrete Christian thought, with its main influences coming indirectly as currents moving through the world of Arabic monotheism. He took more influence from Judaism than from Christianity in his work, and Jews provided a strong presence in the early ummah to define Islam against. From the beginning they showed themselves to know they were different from the Jews and Christians around them, at the very least as a political movement but certainly as a religious movement by the end of the seventh century, perhaps even during the life of Muhammad himself.
Donner, F., The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton, 1981)
Robinson, C. F., ‘The Rise of Islam, 600-705,’ in Robinson (ed.) New Cambridge History of Islam (Cambridge, 2010) vol.1
The term Early Christian is often used to describe the Christians of both the Apostolic Age (from the ministry of Jesus, to about 100 CE) and the Ante-Nicene era (100 - 325 CE). The Christians during this long period were an evolving group of communities with different conceptions of the Jewish Scriptures and its role in each of these groups' theology (for illustrative example, in Lost Christianities, specialist of Early Christianity Bart D. Ehrman discusses the diversity of these early groups).
An attempt to answer this question pushes us to deal with the origins of Islam, and the community (or communities) at the heart of its inception. The Jewish-Roman historical background against which Early Christians is set is relatively well-known, compared to the still obscure largely polytheistic pre-Islamic Arabia. Most of our knowledge of this era comes from Islamic sources themselves, which are, as already known to many, compiled over the three centuries following the death of Muhammad. In their introduction to 'The Rise of Historical Writing Among the Arabs', Abd al-Azîz Ad-Durî et al. summarize the issues that a historian of Early Islam faces when dealing with the sources:
The study of early Islamic history, more perhaps than most historical fields, has been plagued by uncertainties about the reliability of its written sources. No branch of history is, of course, entirely free of such historiographical controversy; but the disagreement and debate over sources for early Islamic history and their reliability have hung like an ominous cloud over the field [...] the historiographical debate is more than just a reflection of the efforts of a fairly young historical field to define itself; rather, it also derives in large measure from the nature of the sources themselves. For the great majority of the information about early Islamic history on which modern historians rely is derived not from contemporary documents, but from literary compilations that only attained their present form a century or even two centuries or more after the events they purport to describe. The relatively late date of the sources does not necessarily make them fraudulent, of course, and it became generally accepted by modern historians that some of the information in these sources - perhaps most of it - is considerably older material that was preserved and transmitted until it found its way into the literary compilations now available to us. But the lateness of the sources does, at least, mean that the existence of anachronistic and tendentious accounts of a spurious character that might be woven in with more authentic older material cannot be dismissed out of hand. As a result, sharp disagreement has persisted among historians of Islam on what and how much material in the extant sources is older, as it has on the question of how old this "older" material actually is and what interests and attitudes it reflects. Finally, it has been asked how - and even whether - scholars can discriminate between "authentic" older material and tendentious, fabricated, or anachronistic accounts of more recent provenance".
On the subject of the identity of the first followers of the faith and movement that became early Islam, there is still some debate, mostly related to the nature of the early Islamic message, its purposes, its reach and even its geographical origins. Broadly speaking, one can distinguish three main schools of thought when it comes to the acceptance, or rather degree of acceptance of the Arabic sources and their reliability when it comes to constructing the early history of Islam. The first, a traditionist (not to be confused with traditionalist theology), which is more in line with the traditional exegetical work of Arabic historiography by late Antiquity Muslims, argue that there is very little to be skeptical about the sources and the way the traditions have been transmitted orally, and in written form, before reaching their final compilation. On the other end of the line, the hypercritical approach questions the previous notion, and following an analytical approach based on source-criticism and form-criticism, either dismiss the majority of the Arabic sources as useless for a proper reconstruction of early Islam, or fully reject them as unreliable (Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, and John Wansbrough represent varying specialists of this Revisionist school). A third school, seeking a middle ground between an unquestionable analysis of the source material and an unnecessary rejection of the best sources we have at hand, argues that a meticulous investigation of the historiography itself and the traditions transmitted to us can help us make the case for consistent criteria upon which we can identify which elements are reporting historical facts, and which are legends, myths and stories that have gone through the filters of theological exegesis.
I will go here with the latter school, expressed more or less in the work of Fred M. Donner, a scholar of Early Islam, on the early community of followers of Muhammad. These individuals, who were monotheists calling themselves the Believers, adopted much of the present traditions, practices and elements of beliefs in the region, but have set themselves certain rules and teachings to identify themselves from the other non-Believers and the Believers that didn't conform to their strict rules and rigorous way of life. They represent, in this sense, not a continuation of the orthodox forms of Christianity and Judaism as we know them. in his book Muhammad and the Believers, At the Origins of Islam, Fred Donner writes :
The earliest Believers thought of themselves as constituting a separate group or community of righteous, God-fearing monotheists, separate in their strict observance of righteousness from those around them - whether polytheists or imperfectly rigorous, or sinful, monotheists - who did not conform to their strict code.
For an understanding of a minority view, the Revisionist school, see P. Crone & M.A. Cook, 'Hagarism, The Making of the Islamic World', John Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu. Some have also pointed to me Hans Jansen, De Historische Mohammed, which I have not read.