The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam

Chapter 2. The End of Muhammad’s Life in Early Islamic Memory: The Witness of the Sīra Tradition

C h a p t e r 2 The End of Muhammad’s Life in Early Islamic Memory The Witness of the Sīra Tradition Any effort to reconstruct the life of Muhammad and the origins of the religious movement that he founded must confront the difficult problem that there are only a handful of Islamic sources from the early period that convey any information regarding his life—or death, for that matter. Particularly troubling is the complete absence of any accounts from the first Islamic century. While the traditions of the Qurʾān rather probably belong to the first Islamic century, they convey virtually no information concerning the life of Muhammad and the circumstances of his prophetic mission.1 Admittedly, many of Muhammad ’s later biographers claim to relate traditions on the authority of earlier sources, identifying their alleged informants in the chains of transmission, or isnāds, that generally accompany individual traditions about the prophet. Nevertheless , in the Islamic tradition such claims of authenticity through appeal to ancient experts are notoriously unreliable. Isnāds and the ḥadīth (that is, prophetic traditions) that they claim to validate were subject to forgery on a massive scale in early and medieval Islam, as discussed in more detail below, and among the most highly suspect and artificial elements in this system of legitimation are the transmitters named at the earliest stages, that is, the first-century “Companions of the Prophet” and their “Successors.”2 Moreover, while some later sources ascribe written biographies of Islam’s prophet to certain renowned authorities from the later first century ah, many other reports offer contradictory testimony, and the balance of the evidence would appear to favor the latter. The issue of writing itself was the subject of considerable controversy 74 chapter 2 in earliest Islam, and even though some more optimistic scholars have accepted at face value such testimonies of early written biographies, there is general consensus against the written transmission of traditions prior to the second Islamic century.3 Despite some hints that early traditionists may have kept written notes for their own personal use, the transmission of knowledge remained almost exclusively oral for more than one hundred years after Muhammad’s death.4 ʿUrwa ibn al-Zubayr (d. 712), a renowned early authority on Muhammad ’s biography, is among those most frequently alleged to have written a narrative of Muhammad’s life, but most scholars remain deeply skeptical of such reports.5 Nevertheless, a small group of researchers has recently attempted to locate certain biographical traditions credibly within the first Islamic century, focusing especially on traditions ascribed to ʿUrwa.6 Avoiding the question of whether ʿUrwa actually wrote a biography of Muhammad, these scholars seek to identify ʿUrwa as the author of a corpus of oral tradition that is often assigned to his authority by much later sources. Yet despite a well-developed methodology and some very thorough analyses, their arguments are not persuasive . Indeed, the general failure of this approach to identify a significant corpus of early material presents one of the most troubling problems for efforts to reconstruct the history of primitive Islam on the basis of traditional Islamic sources.7 The late formation of the earliest accounts of Islamic origins thus raises significant questions concerning their reliability as historical sources, particularly when they are studied in isolation from other non-­ Islamic witnesses. Excepting only the decidedly “ahistorical” witness of the Qurʾān, there are essentially no Islamic accounts describing the formation of Islam that can be convincingly dated prior to the turn of the second Islamic century , a circumstance greatly limiting historical-critical investigation of the beginnings of Islam.8 The manifold shortcomings of the early Islamic historical tradition, particularly with respect to the period of origins, invite the strong possibility that the beginnings of Islam differed significantly from their representation in the earliest biographies of Muhammad. Not only were the narratives first composed at only an arresting distance from the events that they describe, but modern scholarship on the traditional biographies of Muhammad has repeatedly found them to be unreliable sources. These writings present a highly idealized image of Muhammad and the early community suited to the beliefs and practices of Islam at the beginning of its second century and conformed to a number of literary and theological tendencies. Most importantly, End of Muhammad’s Life 75 however, the chronology of these narratives has long been recognized...