One primary source for early Islam is an apocalypse claiming to be from the fourth-century saint Methodius, "predicting" events of the seventh century. Unfortunately I have not been able to find the entire original.
The excerpt most common on the 'Web runs as follows, without line numbers, and translated somewhat idiosyncratically. A longer excerpt, translated differently where it overlaps the first, is quoted by Kaegi (see Bibliography). Kaegi cites: Otkrovenie Mefodiia Patarskago i Apokrificheskiia Videnia Daniela v Vizantiiski i Slaviano-Russkoi Literaturakh ed. VM Istrium, Chtenlia v Imperatorskom Obshchestvie Istorii i Drevnostei Rossiskikh pri Moskovskom Universitetie No. 193 (Moskow, 1897), Teksty, 26-27.
Harmonised, with line numbers supplied from Kaegi, those two read:
A time will come when the enemies of Christ will boast: "We have subjected the earth and all its inhabitants, and the Christians cannot escape our hands." Then a Roman Emperor will arise in great fury against them... Drawing his sword, he will fall upon the foes of Christianity and crush them. Then peace will reign on earth, and priests will be relieved of all their anxieties.
In the last period Christians will not appreciate the great grace of God who provided a monarch, a long duration of peace, a splendid fertility of the earth. They will be very ungrateful, lead a sinful life, in pride, vanity, unchastity, frivolity, hatred, avarice, gluttony, and many other vices, [so] that the sins of men will stink more than a pestilence before God. Many will doubt whether the Catholic faith is the true and only saving one and whether the Jews are correct when they still expect the Messiah. Many will be the false teachings and resultant bewilderment. The just God will in consequence give Lucifer and all his devils power to come on earth and tempt his godless creatures...
[26-27] ...the rulers of the Greeks, that is, the Romans, will fall upon the point of the sword. Just as the Romans killed the rulers of the Hebrews and Greeks, so they themselves will fall upon the point of the sword of the seed of Ishmael, who was called the wild ass, because in anger and wrath they will be dispatched on the face of the earth against men, cattle, all wild beasts, plants and every kind of fruit.
[28-33] The land of Persia... Cappadocia... Sicily will become desolate and her inhabitants will meet slaughter and captivity. Hellas... Romania [Asia Minor] will undergo destruction and her inhabitants put to flight. The islands of the sea will become desolate and their inhabitants will perish through the sword and captivity. Egypt, the East, and Syria will be loaded with an immeasurable yoke of affliction. They mercilessly will be pressed into service and their souls will be lured by an irresistable amount of gold... The hearts of the destroyers will be uplifted and raised in contempt and they will babble incessantly until their appointed time... All men will be under their yoke and birds and all waters of the sea will be subject to them, and the deserts, where their inhabitants hunt, will be theirs. They will register claim for themselves of the mountains as well as the deserts, ... They will have no mercy on labourers, the poor, they will dishonour the aged and will afflict and have no mercy on the weak and infirm, but will mock and laugh at those who are distinguished in wisdom and in political and civic affairs. Everyone will be shamed into silence and will be afraid since they will not have the strength to reply or say anything plainly. All of the inhabitants of the earth will be astonished, and their wisdom and education, of evil origin, will be powerless to retort to or alter their [the Arabs'] proclamations. Their course will be from sea to sea, from east to west, and from the north to the desert of Ethribus... For apostasy is education and it will educate all of the earth's inhabitants...
[40-43] Then suddenly tribulation and distress will arise against them [the Sons of Ishmael]. The King of the Greeks, i.e., the Romans, will come out against them in anger, roused 'like a man who has shaken off his wine' [Psalms 77:65], as one who had been considered by them as dead {Gk: like one whom men had thought dead and worthless}. He will go forth against them from the Ethiopian sea and will send the sword and desolation into Ethribus, their homeland, capturing their women and children living in the Land of Promise [Israel]. The sons of the king will come down with the sword and cut them off from the earth. Fear and trembling will rush upon them and their wives and their children from all sides. They will mourn their offspring, weeping over them and all the villages in the lands of their fathers. By the sword they will be given over into the hands of the king of the Romans -- to captivity, death, and decay.
The King of the Romans will impose his yoke upon them seven times as much as their yoke weighed upon the earth. Great distress will seize them; tribulation will bring them hunger and thirst. They, their wives, and their children will be slaves and serve those who used to serve them, and their slavery will be a hundred times more bitter and hard. The earth which they destituted will then be at peace; each man will return to his own land and to the inheritance of his fathers... Every man who was left captive will return to the things that were his and his fathers', and men will multiply upon the once desolated land like locusts. Egypt will be desolated, Arabia burned with fire, the land of Ausania burned, and the sea provinces pacified. The whole indignation and fury of the King of the Romans will blaze forth against those who deny the Lord Jesus Christ. Then the earth will sit in peace and there will be great peace and tranquillity upon the earth such as has never been nor ever will be any more, since it is the final peace at the End of Time...
The first paragraph and the paragraphs summarised above provide the same information. After the "final peace" of the last paragraph, the "gates of the north" from the Alexander Romance "will be opened", unleashing Gog and Magog, thereby triggering the events of Revelations - assuredly not peace on earth! I therefore take the first paragraph to be a summary of the succeeding ones, but only those.
Both the apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius and the late-670s CE history of Pseudo-Sebeos believed that the Last Days were at hand, and that they would unfold according to the books of Daniel and Revelations. They also saw the sons of Ishmael according to Genesis, as a nihilistic army of terror.
According to Kaegi, the Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati had in 634 CE refused to assign the Ishmaelites to the beasts of Revelation, instead continuing to insist the fourth beast was the Roman/Byzantine Empire. For Pseudo-Methodius, the invasions were a blip, soon to be superceded by Gog and Magog according to plan. Sebeos assimilated both ideas: he reassigned Gog and Magog to the third beast (presumably the Avars), and then made the Arab empire into the fourth. In Sebeos's day, it was already accepted that the Arabs were no mere wave of barbarians, but a new empire with which the Byzantines (and Armenians) now had to deal.
To the apocalypse, the age of the Ethribans is not the end time. It is a temporary interruption in the natural order of things. The apocalypse considers that order to be peaceful subordination to Roman government and to Catholic-Christian faith, to be followed by the trials and redemption Saint John had promised them.
The apocalypse relates that the Ishmaelites deny the Church's keys to salvation, and that they take a lax attitude concerning whether the Messiah has arrived already. Both were comments the Doctrina Jacobi had made in 634 CE, hinting at possible dependence.
Also like the Doctrina Jacobi, the apocalypse did not claim that the Arabs had devised a rival Scripture. However, they do "babble excessively" and create disrespectful and immutable legal "proclamations", implying a non-Christian code of sacred law (c.f. here). By the time of the Dome of the Rock's founding (late 680s CE) they had a Book in Q.3:19-61 at least, but prior to that the matter remains controversial.
In Arabic, the closest word to the "desert of Ethribus" is ytrb - known in English as Yathrib. By 680 CE, Yathrib was known as "Medina", but its other name was still remembered.
Guidi (Chronica Minora, CSCO, Scriptores Syri, third series, vol.iv, Louvain, 1803-1907) printed an anonymous chronicle from Khuzistan, from which Alphonse Mingana published an abridged English translation in The Journal of the Manchester Egyptian and Oriental Society (1916) pp. 223-32 and reprinted it in The Muslim World 7 (1917) pp. 402-14. Ibn Warraq reprinted it yet again in The Origins of the Koran pp. 97-113. It was written after 652 CE but it is not known how long after (Hoyland p. 185).
It runs as follows:
Then God raised against [the Persians] the sons of Ishmael like the sand of the sea-shores, with their leader Muhammad.... As for the Ka'bah we cannot know what it was, except in supposing that the blessed Abraham having become very rich in possessions, and wanting to avoid the envy of the Canaanites, chose to dwell in the distant and large localities of the desert; and as he was living under tents, built that place for the worship of God and the offering of sacrifices; for this reason, the place received its title of our days, and the memory of the place was transmitted from generation to generation with the evolution of the Arab race. It was not, therefore, new for the Arabs to worship in that place, but their worship therein was from the beginning of their days; in this, they were rendering honour to the father of the head of their race... and Madinah was called after Madian, the fourth son of Abraham from Keturah; the town is also called Yathrib.
The consensus is that the apocalypse was originally Syriac: Hoyland (pp. 295-6) cites Kmosko, Reinink, and Alexander; and the Greek has a further interpolation not included here (nor in the Latin translation). In that case Ethribus/-os must be the Hellenistic transcription of 'ytrb. Arabic ytrb, then, would be a third person singular of the Hebrew/Arabic aorist that in Syriac is 'ytrb (Mingana, "Syriac Influence", What the Koran Really Says p. 176). This amounts to a witness to Yathrib even earlier than that of Guidi.
The apocalypse gives "Yathrib" a Syriac form different from its Arabic form, and does not provide a location. This hints that the Syriac peoples knew of Yathrib in advance.
It is no problem from an Islamic perspective that the apocalypse gives the traditional "former" name of Medina; one would expect the author of an apocalypse both to know the traditions of his enemy, and to use them (particularly in a pseudepigraphon claiming a pre-Hegiran date!). What is an Islamic problem, given a mention of Medina, is that there is no mention of Mecca.
The Khuzi chronicler only knew the Ka'bah as the Arabs' traditional place of Abrahamic pilgrimage (Q.5:95,97 developing concepts from Q.3:97). Q.14:38-42 has Abraham endorsing the "circuit" of the "house", which can only mean the rituals that still take place to this day in Mecca. I think it likely that the Chronicle was referring to the Abrahamic Ka'bah. But it may not have been in Mecca then.
Mecca seceded from Damascus roughly 680-690 CE. That was the time when 'Abd al-Malik was building the Dome. As late as 'Abd al-Malik's accession, as the Dome proves, it was not yet necessary for a believer in Muhammad's message to believe in a Meccan Ka'bah. The Arabs which the apocalypse's author had met were Syrian and may have viewed that Ka'bah as illegitimate, even idolatrous.
Not reproduced here, the apocalypse further notes that the Arabs were not only Ishmaelite, but Midianite (Hoyland p. 266). The Khuzistan Chronicle from Guidi also notes the Ishmaelite - Midianite connection. Midian was of the six Banu Katura, the third wife of Abraham. In the Qur'an, some suras are consciously Ishmaelite (suras 3 and 14), and some leave off Abraham's direct line entirely (suras 5 and 7); but others are more generally Abrahamic (suras 4 and 6).
The chronicle is neutral toward Midian, in the way of Genesis; the apocalyse treats Midian as a plague, like Judges.
The Ethribans had imposed a "yoke" upon Egypt, Arabia, and "Ausania" (Aswan?). They were also in the process of attacking the "sea provinces". This "yoke" involved the servitude and expulsion of Christians, and the despoliation of their lands. In this age, the Ethribans include women and children in their ranks; our author did not wish for mercy upon them but repeatedly prayed for their chastisement.
The "yoke" could have been pre-Umayyad, when Arab propaganda appealed to Arab-Jewish ties against Rome; or it could have been post-Marwan Umayyad, when the Arabs were proclaiming a divine revelation explicitly denying Jesus as the Son of God.
The apocalypse need not have been written at the time of the "yoke". Sebeos lived during Mu'awiya's reign, although outside it, and considered that regime a time of tolerance within and peace without. But Sebeos did not flinch to describe the excesses of Muhammad and of 'Umar - and of Mu'awiya himself while he was governor for 'Uthman. Memories of the bloody initial conquest died hard among Christians.
The apocalypse states that the Ethriban attacks are God's revenge for the Romans killing the rulers of Hebrews and Greeks. It also states that Sicily was one of the lands the Arabs ravaged, and emphasises the Arabs' control of the sea. In fact the Arabs did kill a Byzantine Emperor - Constans II, in 668 CE, in Sicily.
If the apocalypse had been written in the Marwani era, there should have been a mention of the kitâb of God. There also should have been a mention of Mecca - and of the life of Muhammad, the Prophet whom 'Abd al-Malik was touting on his monuments. A work of later years should also have attempted to fit the amirate into the schema of Daniel, as Sebeos attempted.
The apocalypse claims to concern either the "seventh" or the "tenth week of years" AH. Hoyland notes that 70 AH was also a good Islamic apocalyptic topos, and besides there had been wars, plague, and famine in the late 680s CE according to contemporary historian John bar Penkayé (Seeing Islam As Others Saw It, Darwin Press 1998 p. 264). This work was however revised often following the 690s CE (ibid p. 268). There is no reason to doubt that it is itself a revision, in which case one version would have seven weeks and the second, ten.
Some of the events better mirror Mu'awiya's actions than the actions of 'Abd al-Malik. According to the Maronite Chronicle (Hoyland pp. 135-6): Mu'awiya prayed at Golgotha (to God's disapproval), subjected the Christian hierarchy to a tax, and renounced the wearing of a crown. Elsewhere, inscriptions and papyri show that Mu'awiya called himself "Amir of the Believers" and not "king". For Pseudo-Methodius, the priests should not pay tax, and the King of Constantinople should pray at Golgotha and plant his crown upon the Cross (Hoyland pp. 265). Pseudo-Methodius also did not see that anyone was actually ruling a kingdom so much as presiding over tribal warriors; 'Abd al-Malik did much to centralise the nation, and the apocalypse should have "predicted" this.
I expect the apocalypse was possibly started in the 640s CE before the Arabs had a Book, but certainly revised to account for the Midianites and Mu'awiya in "week seven" / the 660s CE; after which it may have been revised again during "week ten" / the 680s.
Any thoughts? e-mail me :^)
zimriel@sbcglobal.netThe first version of this project was written 10-15 Feb 2003 from notes made at work. 16 Feb, keyword fix. 10,16 March: found Kaegi, who has a lot more on Doctrina Jacobi and Pseudo-Methodius. 19 March 2005: I'd deleted the reference to this page and I had thought I'd deleted this page entirely; but I was emailed by a kindly soul who located it and liked it. So I'm giving it a refurbish based on what I've found in the last couple of years. 25 March: some more Hoyland helped here.