The Emergence of Islam: Classical Traditions in Contemporary Perspective

Chapter 6: Rethinking the Biography of the Prophet

135 Muhammad the Quraan was proclaimed for the first twelve years of the Prophet’s mission in the pagan city of Mecca, where theology would not have been a major concern, Christology would have no place at all, and the Bible would have been irrelevant. For the last ten years of the Prophet’s mission, according to the traditional biography, the Quraan was proclaimed in the city of Mecca, where the young Muslim community competed with Jewish tribes, but where Christians were nowhere to be found. Thus the Quraan’s remarkable interest in Christ and its use of Christian traditions (such as that found in the Protoevangelium of James) seems to clash with the picture of Islam’s emergence painted by the traditional biography of Muhammad. The Muslim scripture and Muhammad’s prophetic experience are so closely linked that one cannot be fully understood without the other. (A. Welch, “The Kuaran,” Encyclopaedia of Islam) The Biography of Muhammad and Exegesis of the Quraan In the previous two chapters, I suggest that the Quraan was proclaimed in a milieu where people were hotly debating theology, and in particular theology involving Christ (that is, Christology), and where they knew the literature of Jews and Christians well. However, according to the traditional biography of Chapter 6 Rethinking the Biography of the Prophet v The Emergence of islam 136 Western Scholarship and the Traditional Biography of the Prophet Nevertheless, Western scholars such as Alfred Welch (who is quoted at the opening of this chapter) generally assume that the traditional biography is basically correct, that Muhammad was the sole author of the Quraan, and that the key to understanding the Quraan is understanding his life. In light of these assumptions, they have long sought to explain the Quraan’s interest in Judaism and Christianity by finding Jews and Christians in the traditional biography of the Prophet. Those scholars interested in Judaism focused on the reports of Muhammad’s contacts with the Jews of Medina. This was the focus of the first important book of critical Quraanic studies (published in 1833), Abraham Geiger’s “What did Muhammad Appropriate from Judaism?” (in German: Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?). Other scholars, such as the Austrian Aloys Sprenger or the Swede Tor Andrae, were more interested in Christianity and the Quraan. This interest meant looking further afield, since in the traditional biography, Muhammad has less frequent contact with Christians. Thus these scholars tended to speculate on Christians whom the Prophet might conceivably have met. Taking their lead from the nature of the Quraan’s discourse on Christ and Mary, they often imagined that Muhammad met heretical Christians, perhaps wandering monks from Ethiopia or Syria who rejected the divinity of Christ (or believed in the divinity of his mother; see Q 5:116). At its worst, their approach reflects the medieval Christian polemical portrait of Muhammad as a Christian heretic (a gruesome example of which is found in Dante’s Inferno). The Quraan and Storytelling But were these scholars right to think of the Quraan in light of the traditional biography of the Prophet? What if that biography was itself written by early Muslim scholars as a way of explaining the Quraan? This possibility is raised by Francis Peters. Once they began to interest themselves in Muhammad’s life, they took up the task of matching Quraanic verses with remembered incidents of the Prophet’s life. Or perhaps it was the other way around: the Quraanic verses, repeated over and over again, promoted wonder at what was happening behind the naked revelation.” (Peters, Jesus and Muhammad, 28) If the biography of Muhammad was written by scholars who did not know the story of how the Quraan was proclaimed and written down but who were “wondering” how this came to be, then it would be perfectly circular to explain the Quraan according to that biography. One reason to believe that this is precisely how the biography of the Prophet was written —at least in part—is the way in which early Muslim scholars offer varying stories to explain different possibilities of reading the same Quraanic verse. For example, those who read Quraan 2:119 to mean, “You will not be asked about those in hell,” explain that it was Chapter 6: Rethinking the Biography of the Prophet v 137 revealed when the Prophet grew distraught about the refusal of the Jews to believe in him. God revealed...