Did Muhammad really die after the onset of the Muslim conquest of the Near East? Part 2. After posting Part 1 of this series of threads, I began to doubt whether this is the appropriate medium for such a discussion given the depth, complexity, and number of the issues involved. 
I have, for the time being, decided to go ahead with discussing the sources one by one, over the course of the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned. In response to the previous thread, @ProfessorGeorgy asked me if there was a political side to the depiction of Muhammad as
leading the conquests. The text I’m going to discuss today is one such case. It is known as the ‘Letter of pseudo-ʿUmar II to Leo III’, a fragmentary mediaeval Arabic composition which scholars have held to be a piece of Islamic anti-Christian apologetic. @ceci_pal_,
however, has recently argued, convincingly in my opinion, that this and several other testimonies for an alleged correspondence between the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar II (r. 717-20 CE) and the Byzantine emperor Leo III (r. 717-41 CE) are, in fact, bits and pieces of one larger text, a
Christian-Arabic apologetic composition from the early Islamic centuries. But issues of provenance aside, what does this text say about Muhammad and the Muslim conquests? The brief passage runs as follows:
(translation yours truly, see above for the Arabic original). The final sentence here is a quranic quotation, Quran 9:33. In this passage the wars and battles under Muhammad’s command segue, seamlessly, into the wars of conquests that followed his demise. Why so? Obviously in
order to present the conquests as the fulfilment of the promise made by God in this quranic verse. Adducing military victory as a sign of divine favour and approval had been a staple item in the repertoire of Christian anti-Jewish polemic prior to the rise of Islam (h/t @19Averil
for her work on this subject), but the rise of Islam turned the tables on Christians and Muslims began to deploy this argument against Christians themselves. This is one such example, in which firstly the Quran uses this logic to predict its followers’ victory, and then the
victory itself is later depicted as both a vindication of the Muhammadan message and a proof of the divine nature of the Quran, given that it had prophesied the future correctly. Note that nowhere in this short passage is Muhammad explicitly presented as leading the so-called
conquests (another term which requires to be problematised, but this has to wait for the time being), as this would have been too blatant a departure from historical reality to be maintainable, only that it implicitly tries to associate Muhammad with the conquests in order to
present them as the realisation of the promise/prophecy made in the quranic verse. The takehome lessons from the previous thread are to be repeated here: the ‘Muslim’/‘non-Muslim’ dichotomy is false and to be avoided, as this case, which was thought to have a Muslim author, but
has been proved by Cecilia to stem from Christian circles, amply bears out. This nomenclature doesn’t make any sense either, as it’s not the texts, but rather their authors, that are Muslim or Christian. Secondly, sanguine approaches to ‘non-Muslim’ sources are as likely to
result in debacle as carefree attitudes towards ‘Muslim’ sources. To be continued…
