The Death of a Prophet. Stephen J. Shoemaker
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of Islamic origins would likely not persuade Christians of the truth of Islam. Moreover, western Syria is precisely the location where one might expect to find such a traditional holdout: as will be seen in subsequent chapters, the tradition of Muhammad’s leadership during the assault on Palestine seems to reflect the sacred geography of the earliest Muslims and Umayyads in particular. On the whole, the letter of ʿUmar to Leo offers important and early confirmation from the Islamic tradition that the combined witness of the non-Islamic sources is not simply the result of an unlikely collective mistake. Instead, this anti-Christian polemical treatise, seemingly one of the earliest Islamic texts to have survived, vouches for the antiquity and authenticity of the tradition witnessed by these Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan sources.
Conclusion
These eleven witnesses from the seventh and eighth centuries all indicate in various ways that Muhammad was alive and leading the Muslims when the Islamic conquest of Palestine began.162 While occasionally the years assigned to various events are not correct, this is not at all uncommon in medieval chronicles: such errors occur frequently in the chronicle tradition, and similar mistakes in chronology characterize the Islamic historical tradition as well.163 Nonetheless, even when their chronologies are confused and inaccurate, medieval historical sources such as these are often reliable for their relative sequencing of events, and the consistency displayed with regard to Muhammad’s involvement in the Near Eastern conquests is impressive to say the least. Some of these documents merely indicate Muhammad’s death sometime after the Near Eastern conquests had begun, while others are more descriptive in noting Muhammad’s actual leadership during the invasions. But when all of the sources are considered together, as they are here, their collective witness to Muhammad’s continued leadership of the early Islamic community during the assault on the Roman Near East is unmistakable. While many scholars have rejected or ignored the evidence of these sources, no one has disputed that they do in fact report this.
For the most part, these reports are free from polemic and apologetic interests, and even when these qualities are evident elsewhere in a given text, they do not affect the notice of Muhammad’s vitality and leadership of the military campaign in Palestine. None of these texts connects its report of Muhammad’s leadership during the Near Eastern conquests with any sort of “totalizing explanation” of Islam or an apologetic agenda. Although a few of the authors display marked ideological tendencies elsewhere in their writing, in no instance are these themes linked with their observations that the conquest of Palestine or the Roman Near East began during Muhammad’s lifetime. In every case, the notice of Muhammad’s survival and leadership during the Near Eastern campaigns is mentioned almost in passing, so unobtrusively that its dissonance with the received tradition could easily be overlooked, as indeed it generally has been. The neutral, matter-of-fact manner with which the various sources convey this information suggests that this was the chronology that the authors had collectively received (or perhaps in some cases experienced?) rather than something that they were trying to impose onto their narratives. There is then little cause to suspect that any or all of these writers have invented a report locating the Islamic conquest of the Near East within Muhammad’s lifespan to suit some broader ideological agenda: no evidence would suggest this, nor is there any obvious reason for them to have fabricated such information. Likewise, the possibility of a collective error by all eleven sources seems highly improbable, particularly in the case of the Letter of ʿUmar. While such an interpretation of course cannot be entirely excluded, it does not offer a very compelling explanation for the persistent and seemingly independent manifestations of this tradition linking Muhammad with the invasion of the Roman Near East.164
Several of these documents are of particularly high quality, including the first two and the final two especially. The Doctrina Iacobi, written within months of the invasion of Palestine it would seem, bears near contemporary witness to Muhammad’s presence among the invading “Saracens.” Although the text itself was composed in North Africa, its report concerning recent events in Palestine is said to rely on a document sent by a Jewish resident of Palestine, Abraham, who allegedly obtained his information about the Arabs and their prophet from eyewitnesses. In light of Abraham’s notice that Muhammad was preaching the imminent arrival of the messiah, one wonders if some of his informants were among those Jews who saw Muhammad’s religious movement as the fulfillment of their eschatological hopes. Such contemporary Jewish faith in Muhammad as a divinely appointed deliverer and herald of the messiah is clearly witnessed in the apocalyptic traditions ascribed to Rabbi Shimʿōn b. Yoḥai. Although these early traditions survive only in slightly more recent texts, their identification of Muhammad as one who conquers the land at God’s will is so anomalous with later Jewish attitudes toward Muhammad and Islam that, as numerous scholars have noted, this apocalyptic vision must have been composed very close to the events of the conquest itself. Similarly, the Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle, which very clearly relates Muhammad’s leadership during the invasion of Palestine, seems to preserve a particularly early account of the Islamic conquests, despite its survival only in a relatively late collection. Like the apocalypse of Rabbi Shimʿōn, the Continuatio’s strikingly positive attitude toward Muhammad and the invading Muslims, as well as its seemingly detailed and accurate knowledge of the conquests, suggests that its source for events of the mid-seventh century must have been composed in close proximity to the events themselves, perhaps on the basis of eyewitness accounts.
Finally, ʿUmar’s Letter to Leo provides important confirmation of this early tradition from the Islamic side. Although this epistolary polemic is one of the later texts that we have considered, it is for an Islamic source particularly early. By way of comparison, the oldest extant narrative of Islamic origins, Ibn Isḥāq’s biography of Muhammad, was composed only in the middle of the eighth century, and it is known only in two later recensions by ninth- and tenth-century authors. Moreover, as Hoyland notes, ʿUmar’s letter shows signs of having compiled earlier “exchanges,” and thus perhaps its tradition of Muhammad’s leadership during the invasion of the Near East is even older than this version of the letter itself, similarly predating Ibn Isḥāq’s biography. The apparent composition of ʿUmar’s letter in western Syria is especially important, inasmuch as the Medinan traditions of Muhammad’s pre-conquest death at Medina may have first spread into the Near East only at a later date largely through influence of Ibn Isḥāq’s biography, a work composed by this Medinan scholar in Baghdad at the caliph’s request. As a whole the canonical accounts of Islamic origins were composed under ʿAbbāsid rule almost entirely on the basis of Medinan and Iraqi authorities, and accordingly Syrian and (pro-)Umayyad traditions are very scarce in these eighth- and ninth-century collections.165 Yet by contrast, ʿUmar’s letter originates in the same geographic region as most of the sources considered in this chapter, that is, Syro-Palestine, the center of Umayyad rule. Quite possibly, this early Islamic apology preserves a common early memory of Muhammad’s role in the invasion of Syro-Palestine from this region and this era, shared by Muslim, Christian, Jew, and Samaritan alike. Of utmost importance is the independence of these four reports from one another, which makes their convergence regarding Muhammad’s leadership at the beginning of the Near Eastern conquests quite impressive to say the least. While it is of course possible that someone might have misunderstood Muhammad’s significance for the invading Muslims, it is extremely unlikely that these four documents and their sources would all have made the same mistake independently, particularly in the case of ʿUmar’s letter. Thus, in view of their high quality, these sources alone are compelling enough to warrant serious reconsideration of the traditional Islamic memory of Muhammad’s death.
The remaining seven reports all come from the Christian historical tradition, whose accounts no doubt depend on earlier oral and written traditions about the Islamic invasions. Nonetheless, several of these texts bear witness even more clearly to Muhammad’s leadership at the onset of the Near Eastern conquests. This agreement suggests that we are not misreading the earlier sources, or, at the least, we are interpreting their reports in the same way as the next generation of Near Eastern Christians and their historians. Like the previous four documents, these sources also represent the diverse religious communities of the early medieval Near East. Although one document, the short Syriac chronicle written in 775, was produced in an unknown context, the others were composed by authors from the Coptic, Maronite, East Syrian, and West Syrian communities, while