The Death of a Prophet. Stephen J. Shoemaker
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and indeed, the absence of a known grave could seem to validate an Islamic claim to his resurrection. Admittedly, this source is problematic on a number of fronts, and its polemical character raises substantial questions regarding its reliability. Nonetheless, its suggestion that there was a time when Muhammad’s followers did not know the location of his grave is more than a little intriguing, and it certainly adds lateral support to the notion that Muhammad’s life may have ended in rather different circumstances than his traditional biographies remember it.
In summary then, from 634 onward, the various religious communities of the Near East repeatedly report a memory of Muhammad’s continued leadership of the Islamic community at the beginning of the Islamic conquests of the Near East. The consistency of this tradition and its persistence across confessional boundaries and over considerable distances are themselves quite persuasive. Moreover, there is no obvious reason for these authors to have fabricated this information, and the nature of the sources that transmit this information suggests that on this particular matter they are as reliable as one could reasonably expect of any historical source. To my knowledge, the earliest non-Islamic text to indicate that Muhammad died before the onset of the Near Eastern conquests is in fact Łewond’s Armenian chronicle from the end of the eighth century, although Łewond’s chronology of the conquest is itself highly erratic. Łewond locates the conquest of Syria and Palestine after Muhammad’s death, although a little too far thereafter: according to Łewond, the Muslims did not invade Palestine until after the death of Heraclius, that is, 641.176 This would place the invasion of Palestine well into ʿUmar’s reign, which cannot be right.
Perhaps a more successful effort to “correct” the Christian historical tradition so that it would agree with the emergent Islamic historical tradition can be seen in the Greek chronicle of Theophanes, written at the beginning of the ninth century.177 Although Theophanes is clear in signaling Muhammad’s decease before the onset of the Palestinian campaign, Theophanes, or perhaps more correctly one of his sources, has made use of Islamic traditions for knowledge of the chronology of Muhammad’s life, as Conrad has shown.178 Thus, this Christian witness to the traditional Islamic chronology does not in fact offer independent attestation of Muhammad’s death prior to the conquest but almost certainly reflects the author’s direct knowledge of the emergent Islamic historical tradition and its memory of Muhammad’s death in Medina in 632. Nevertheless, despite these “corrections,” Theophanes additionally relates that Muhammad’s life ended with his “slaughter” or “wounding” (σφαγή): could this anomaly perhaps suggest some vestige of an earlier tradition that Muhammad died in battle, possibly leading his followers in the conquest of the Holy Land?179 To be sure, such a proposal is highly speculative, but the further indication in this passage that Muhammad’s “slaughter” took place against a backdrop of Jewish messianic expectations would seem to comport with many of the early reports from the sources discussed above, as well other related traditions to be considered in Chapter 4. In any case, despite the eventual establishment of the canonical Islamic narratives of origins, the tradition of Muhammad’s leadership during the conquest of Palestine died a hard death, and it continued to figure prominently in the Syriac historical tradition, where it appears in both Michael’s Chronicle of the later twelfth century and the anonymous Chronicle of 1234, as we have already seen. Likewise, Thomas Artsruni’s Armenian History from the turn of the tenth century also places the conquest of Palestine within Muhammad’s lifetime.180 Perhaps the tradition continued even later.
On the whole then, when considered purely on its own merits, the tradition that Muhammad survived to lead the invasion of Palestine would appear to be both early and trustworthy. The only problem, however, is that the Islamic historical tradition invariably reports Muhammad’s death at Medina in 632, almost two full years before the Islamic armies first invaded Palestine and the rest of the Near East. Since these Islamic sources were essentially the only accounts of Islam’s earliest history consulted or even available prior to the last century, the traditional Islamic account of the end of Muhammad’s life has dominated Western historiography for centuries.181 Now, however, thanks to the considerable efforts of both Western and Near Eastern scholars over the past century and a half, the literary heritage of other religious communities from the medieval Near East is becoming better known, and their writings have disclosed new perspectives on the rise of Islam. While much that these sources report is of use only for understanding internal responses to Christian defeat and the transition to Muslim rule, some of the information preserved by these texts also has value for understanding the earliest history of Islam itself, and the tradition of Muhammad’s leadership at the beginning of the conquest of Palestine quite possibly stands among the latter. The high quality of the evidence demands that we take this witness seriously. But what are we to make of these two conflicting reports? To pursue this question further we must first and foremost consider both the nature and reliability of the sources responsible for transmitting the Islamic tradition of Muhammad’s death in Medina as we have just done for the non-Islamic sources, a task to which we now turn in the following chapter.
CHAPTER 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 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