Battle of Yarmuk & Islamic historical revisionism

[mindlight]

I wanted to focus on this battle as an example of how we have accepted many false assumptions about the rise of Islam in history books. Is the traditional account broadly described in the Wikipedia article below: true, false or partly true.

1) TRUE: Did this battle actually occur as the narratives suggest?

2) FALSE: Or is this victory actually a fiction created later to explain the advance of Islam in terms of glorious victories over its Christian foes?

3) PARTLY TRUE: Or perhaps it is just an exaggerated account of an event that occurred but which did not have significance or dimensions that were later ascribed to it? For example maybe the number of Byzantine troops was exaggerated (90000).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Yarmouk

versus..

What the Modern Martyr should know - Norbert G. Pressburg

"Pressburg notes there is no evidence this battle ever took place. Contemporary Byzantine chronicles say nothing of it: either its aftermath or the extensive preparations the gathering of such a large army would have required. Mohammedan history tells of how Muhammad sent a letter to the Byzantine emperor ordering him to convert to Islam or lose his empire. Byzantine sources say nothing of this."

http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.de/2011/10/pressburg-hypothesis-did-muslims.html

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

I'd bet on partly true.

We have no Byzantine accounts from the period that survived. As in no accounts on anything. There is a distinct gap in Byzantine histories from about 630 to the 8th century and the later accounts clearly borrowed or garbled earlier accounts. We do not have those original accounts at all.
Much of it also seems to borrow from Arab accounts as well. The later Byzantine accounts all concur the Battle occurred however, even if we don't have contemporary Byzantine accounts.
There are Syriac and Armenian accounts from the period, but they are highly biased and largely interested in other affairs.
Pressburg is a bit disengenuous here.

This does not mean a large battle did not take place, for many battles were and are taken to have occurred based solely on textual evidence, even one-sided, such as the Battle of Dara or Teutoburger Wald (before evidence was discovered for the latter).

A Muslim conquest of the Levant did in fact take place at this time, so a Byzantine defeat of fairly large proportion fits well, perhaps not as decisively as Muslim accounts would paint it though.

So, if you doubt the Battle of Yarmouk took place, with what narrative would you replace it? I don't think another narrative would have more conclusive evidence either.

 

[mindlight]

Yes partly true seems to be most honest with the evidence. There are accounts of other Arab victories of the time which are supported by non Muslim sources and as you say the enormous loss of territory would be hard to explain with any other narrative. For example this fragment dated to the year 636 AD

"In January the people of Homs took the word for their lives and many villages were ravaged by the killing of the Arabs of Muhammad (Muhmd) and many people were slain and taken prisoner from Galilee as far as Beth[disambiguation needed]. . . .
On the twenty-sixth of May the Saqilara went . . . from the vicinity of Homs and the Romans chased them . . ..
On the tenth of August the Romans fled from the vicinity of Damascus and there were killed many people, some ten thousand. And at the turn of the year the Romans came. On the twentieth of August in the year nine hundred and forty-seven there gathered in Gabitha a multitude of the Romans, and many people of the Romans were killed, some fifty thousand."
"
The alternative narrative attempted by Pressburg ( I have ordered his book on the recommendation of a friend but not yet read it) and others is that the earlier Caliphs were not really Muslims at all. But rather a monotheistic (and antiTrinitarian ) Christian sect and that the earliest conquests had more to do with the exhaustion of the Byzantine and Persians empires and their strategic withdrawal or timidity in dealing with this new foe early on. By the time they organised to act it appears it was already too late. It takes the sting out of the view of the idea of an invincible Arab military machine and explains its success in terms of infighting and theological confusion in the Christian world that made it weak at the crucial moment. History was written by later Arab historians in a dominant position in the region and the narratives they wrote seem to have been accepted because the alternative stories were suppressed or discredited in a systematic way in a culture where truth was dictated in a top down fashion and alternatives severely punished. Modern scholarship has only in the last century begun to question these narratives and seek alternatives to it.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

I have read such arguments before and have never considered them compelling. I feel a prophet synthesising his own religion from strands of traditions in his area, such as Orthodox Christianity, Docetism, Ebionites etc. makes sufficient sense that I would need quite a lot of contradictory evidence to refute it.

They have anyway recently discovered a Koran in Birmingham which has been conclusively dated to the century of Mohammed's life so fits the narrative of the third Caliph writing down the Koran. This makes unlikely the much loved argument that the Koran originated as a Christian Lectionary (basically the etymologic meaning of Koran).
It also closely supports the historic narrative of early Islam already being similar to the Mohammedanism we are grappling with today.

I shall look for the book myself at some point, when I have time.