Historicity of Muhammad

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Muhammad

Life
Family tree · In Mecca · In Medina · Conquest of Mecca · The Farewell Sermon · Succession

Career
Diplomacy · Family · Marriages · Military leadership

Interactions with
Slaves · Jews · Christians

Perspectives
Muslim (Poetic and Mawlid) · Christian · Historicity · Criticism · Depictions

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The historicity of Muhammad concerns the reconstruction of the life of the historical Muhammad. The most credible source of information for the life of Muhammad is the Qur'an.[1][2] Next in importance are the historical works by writers of third and fourth century of the Muslim era. [3] There are also few non-Muslim sources which are valuable for corroboration of the Qur'anic and Muslim tradition statements. [4] While much writings are available from the centuries following the birth of Islam, the uncertainty and the lack of knowledge about pre-Islamic Arabia among other reasons has caused the attempts to distinguish between historical elements and the unhistorical elements of many of the available reports unsuccessful. [5][6]

Contents

[edit] Information on Muhammad

According to Britannica, Muhammad is "the only founder of a major world religion who lived in the full light of history and about whom there are numerous records in historical texts, although like other premodern historical figures not every detail of his life is known"[7] Attempts to distinguish between the historical elements and the unhistorical elements of many of the reports of Muhammad have not been very successful.[8] A main source of ambiguity in the quest for historical Muhammad is the uncertainty and the lack of knowledge about pre-Islamic Arabia.[6] Harald Motzki states:

At present, the study of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim community, is obviously caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, it is not possible to write a historical biography of the Prophet without being accused of using the sources uncritically, while on the other hand, when using the sources critically, it is simply not possible to write such a biography [2]

[edit] Sources for the historical Muhammad

11th century Persian Qur'an folio page in kufic script
11th century Persian Qur'an folio page in kufic script
  • Two different types of sources on Muhammad's life are available:
    1. Muslim sources written in Arabic, which include the Qur'an and the oral accounts of Muhammad's life as written down by later Muslims.
    2. Non-Muslim sources written in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Hebrew by the Jewish and Christian communities. [2]

Each of these has a certain intrinsic value and importance. The Qur'an is considered the most important source by Muslims, while next in their list of important sources are the traditional accounts of Muhammad's life. Non-Muslim sources are valuable for corroboration of the Qur'anic and Muslim tradition statements. [9]

The Qur'an has some, though very few, casual allusions to Muhammad's life. [2] However,the Qur'an responds "constantly and often candidly to Muhammad's changing historical circumstances and contains a wealth of hidden data that are relevant to the task of the quest for the historical Muhammad." [10] The earliest surviving biographies are the two recensions of Ibn Ishaq's (d. 768) "Life of the Apostle of God", by Ibn Hisham (d. 834) and Yunus b. Bukayr(d.814-815). [10] According to Ibn Hisham, Ibn Ishaq wrote his biography some 120 to 130 years after Muhammad's death. Many, but not all, scholars accept the accuracy of these biographies, though their accuracy is unascertainable. [2] After Ibn Ishaq, the most widely used biography of Muhammad is that of al-Waqidi's (d. 822) and then Ibn Sa'd's (d.844-5). Al-Waqidi is often criticized by Muslim writers who claim that the author is unreliable.[10] It should be noted that these biographies are hardly biographies in the modern sense. The writers did not wish to record the life of Muhammad, but rather to treat Muhammad's military expeditions and to preserve stories about Muhammad, his sayings and the traditional interpretations of verses of the Qur'an.[10] The biographical dictionaries of Ali ibn al-Athir and Ibn Hajar provide much detail about the contemporaries of Muhammad but add little to our information about Muhammad himself.[11] Lastly, the hadith collections, accounts of the verbal and physical traditions of Muhammad, date from several generations after the death of Muhammad. Western academics view the hadith collections with caution as accurate historical sources. [12]

There are few non-Muslim sources, according to S. A. Nigosian, which confirm the existence of Muhammad. None of these date back to before 634 CE and many of the interesting ones date to some decades later. The sources Nigosian cites confirm that Muhammad was a merchant and that his preaching revolved around the figure of Abraham. There are also confirmations of Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina. However, Nigosian also notes there are also some essential differences: some regarding chronology and some related to Muhammad's attitude towards the Jews and Palestine. [2]

[edit] Historical authenticity of the Qur'an

The Qur'an from the 9th century. It is an alleged 7th century original of the edition of the third caliph Uthman but this is disputed since it is written in kufic. The qur'an is located in the small Telyashayakh mosque in Tashkent.[citation needed]
The Qur'an from the 9th century. It is an alleged 7th century original of the edition of the third caliph Uthman but this is disputed since it is written in kufic. The qur'an is located in the small Telyashayakh mosque in Tashkent.[citation needed]

All or most of the Qur'an was apparently written down by Muhammad's companions while he was alive, but it was then as now primarily an orally related document. The written compilation of the whole Qur'an in its definite form as we have it now was completed not many years after the death of Muhammad.[13] The Qur'an is widely regarded by Muslims to be that which issued from Muhammad's mouth from A.D. 610-632. F.E. Peters states, "Few have failed to be convinced that what is in our copy of the Quran is, in fact, what Muhammad taught, and is expressed in his own words... To sum this up: the Quran is convincingly the words of Muhammad, perhaps even dictated by him after their recitation" [6] Peters argues that "The search for variants in the partial versions extant before the Caliph Uthman’s alleged recension in the 640s (what can be called the 'sources' behind our text) has not yielded any differences of great significance." In fact, the source of ambiguity in the quest for historical Muhammad in western academic circles is due to the uncertainty and the lack of knowledge about pre-Islamic Arabia. [6]

Patricia Crone and Michael Cook challenge the traditional account of how the Qur'an was compiled, writing that "there is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century." They also question the accuracy of some the Qur'an's historical accounts. [14] It is generally acknowledged that the work of Crone and Cook was a fresh approach in its reconstruction of early Islamic history, but their alternative account of early Islam has been almost universally rejected.[15] Van Ess has dismissed it stating that "a refutation is perhaps unnecessary since the authors make no effort to prove it in detail...Where they are only giving a new interpretation of well-known facts, this is not decisive. But where the accepted facts are consciously put upside down, their approach is disastrous."[16] R. B. Sergeant states: "Hagarism[the thesis of Crone and Cook]…is not only bitterly anti-Islamic in tone, but anti-Arabian. Its superficial fancies are so ridiculous that at first one wonders if it is just a ‘leg pull’, pure ’spoof’."[17] Gerd R. Puin's study of ancient Qur'an manuscripts led him to conclude that the Qur'an is a "cocktail of texts", some of which may have been existent a hundred years before Muhammad.[14] Karl-Heinz Ohling comes to the conclusion that the person of Muhammed wasn't central to early Islam at all, and that at this very early stage Islam was in fact an Arabic Christian sect, which had objections to the concept of the trinity, and that the later hadith and biographies are in large part legends, instrumental in severing Islam from its Christian roots and building a full-blown new religion. [18] John Wansbrough believes that the Qu’ran is a redaction in part of other sacred scriptures, in particular the Judaeo-Christian scriptures.[19][20] Prof. Herbert Berg writes that "Despite John Wansbrough's very cautious and careful inclusion of qualifications such as "conjectural," and "tenative and emphatically provisional", his work is condemned by some. Some of negative reaction is undoubtedly due to its radicalness...Wansbrough's work has been embraced wholeheartedly by few and has been employed in a piecemeal fashion by many. Many praise his insights and methods, if not all of his conclusions."[21]

There is considerable academic debate over the real chronology of the chapters of the Qur'an.[22] Carole Hillenbrand holds that there are several remaining tasks for the Orientalist Qur'anic scholars: Few Qur'anic scholars have worked on the epigraphy of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem whose foundation inscription dates to 72/692 and the antique Qur'an recently discovered in the Yemen, the Sana'a manuscripts. The Carbon-14 tests applied to this Qur'an date it to 645-690 AD with 95 percent accuracy. [22]

[edit] Historical authenticity of the hadith literature

Western academics view the hadith collections with caution. Bernard Lewis states that "the collection and scrutiny of Hadiths didn't take place until several generations" after Muhammad's death and that "during that period the opportunities and motives for falsification were almost unlimited."[23] In addition to the problem of oral transmission for over a hundred years, there existed motives for deliberate distortion. Early Muslim scholars were also concerned that hadiths may have been fabricated, and thus developed a whole science of criticism to distinguish between genuine sayings and those that were errors or frauds. Modern historians point out that a chain of authorities may be easily forged and that rejection of some relators implies the victory of one thought over the others.[24] It is argued that by the time the oral traditions were being collected, the Muslim community had grown and also fractured into rival sects and different schools of thought and each sect and school had its own, sometimes conflicting, traditions of what Muhammad and his companions had done and said.[citation needed]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Encyclopedia of Islam, Muhammad
  2. ^ a b c d e f S. A. Nigosian(2004), p.6
  3. ^ William Montgomery Watt, Muhammad in Mecca, Oxford University Press, p.xi
  4. ^ S. A. Nigosian(2004), p.7
  5. ^ Wim Raven, Introduction on a translation of Islamic texts into Dutch by Ibn Ishaq, Het leven van Muhammad (The life of Muhammad), ISBN 90-5460-056-X.
  6. ^ a b c d F. E. Peters (1991)
  7. ^ Encyclopedia Britannica, Muhammad
  8. ^ Wim Raven, Introduction on a translation of Islamic texts into Dutch by Ibn Ishaq, Het leven van Muhammad (The life of Muhammad), ISBN 90-5460-056-X.
  9. ^ S. A. Nigosian(2004), p.7
  10. ^ a b c d Encyclopedia of Islam, Muhammad
  11. ^ William Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, Oxford University Press, p.xii
  12. ^ Lewis (1993), pp.33-34
  13. ^ William Montgomery Watt in The Cambridge History of Islam, p.32
  14. ^ a b Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, and Gerd R. Puin as quoted in Toby Lester. "What Is the Koran?", The Atlantic Monthly, January 1999. 
  15. ^ David Waines(1995), p. 273-274
  16. ^ van Ess, "The Making Of Islam", Times Literary Supplement, Sep 8 1978, p. 998
  17. ^ Sergeant, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1981, p. 210
  18. ^ Karl-Heinz Ohlig, Der frühe Islam, 2007, ISBN 3-89930-090-4
  19. ^ Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (1978) by Wansbrough.
  20. ^ http://www.derafsh-kaviyani.com/english/quran3.html (Discusses Wansbrough)
  21. ^ Herbert Berg(2000), p.83
  22. ^ a b Carole Hillenbrand in The New Cambridge Medieval History, p.329
  23. ^ Lewis (1993), pp.33-34
  24. ^ Peters (1991), pp.291-315

[edit] References

  • Fouracre, Paul (2006). The New Cambridge Medieval History. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521362911. 
  • Holt, P. M.; Bernard Lewis (1977a). Cambridge History of Islam, Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521291364. 
  • Nigosian, Solomon Alexander (2004). Islam: Its History, Teaching, and Practices. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0253216273. 
  • Peters, F. E. (1991). "The Quest for Historical Muhammad". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 
  • Waines, David (1995). Introduction to Islam. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-42929-3. 

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