The Death of a Prophet. Stephen J. Shoemaker
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Ibn Abī Shayba joins these three collectors in ascribing to al-Zuhrī the traditions that ʿAlī, al-ʿAbbās, al-Faḍl, and Ṣāliḥ (that is, Shuqrān) participated in Muhammad’s burial.109 ʿAbd al-Razzāq and Ibn Abī Shayba further relate here the installation of a brick monument to mark the location of Muhammad’s grave. Nevertheless, in both instances the report is given on Maʿmar’s authority, and thus the attribution to al-Zuhrī is somewhat questionable.110 Muhammad’s statement that “no prophet dies but he is buried where he died,” reported by Abū Bakr, and the ensuing decision to bury him beneath his bed are ascribed by ʿAbd al-Razzāq, Ibn Abī Shayba, and al-Balādhurī not to al-Zuhrī but to one of Ibn Isḥāq’s contemporaries, Ibn Jurayj (d. 767).111 ʿAbd al-Razzāq likewise joins Ibn Isḥāq in assigning the tradition of Muhammad’s burial in the middle of the night between Tuesday and Wednesday to another contemporary traditionist, ʿAbdallāh b. Abī Bakr (d. 753).112
One has the sense then that with perhaps the exception of Muhammad’s burial in three garments, Ibn Isḥāq (and possibly Maʿmar as well) is collecting these funeral traditions for the first time, and on the whole, his account of Muhammad’s burial consists of what appear to be “idealized memories of Muḥammad” aimed at normalizing Islamic funeral practices and distinguishing them from the practices of their non-Islamic neighbors.113 Moreover, both these burial traditions and the traditions of Muhammad’s illness and death are heavily overlaid by the political and sectarian struggles of early Islam that ensued immediately after Muhammad’s death. As both Madelung and Halevi observe, the cast of characters and their various roles in Muhammad’s death and burial are designed to bolster the claims of one party or the other in the contest for authority within the earliest community.114 Muhammad’s sickbed provided, as Juynboll remarks, a frequent topos for the expression of these and other interests.115 Thus, many of the details from these accounts should be viewed as governed by such ideological concerns, rather than reflecting actual historical events.
Yet these observations aside, Ibn Isḥāq transmits a mosaic of traditions from al-Zuhrī that seem to envision Muhammad’s death within an urban context, where his wives live in separate dwellings and the faithful gather regularly in a central mosque for prayers. In contrast to the implied witness of the non-Islamic sources, Muhammad does not appear to have been out on campaign when he suddenly became ill and died; rather his death is situated within a thoroughly domestic setting, where Muhammad is surrounded by the constant care and attention of his friends and family. While this backdrop certainly bears a credible resemblance to the Medina of Islamic tradition, the city itself is never named in the death and burial traditions ascribed to al-Zuhrī. Is it then possible that the later tradition has supplied this location and its urban ambiance as the setting for Muhammad’s departure from this world, transferring these events from an original context somewhere outside the Ḥijāz? Could it be that the early Muslims had re-remembered the circumstances of Muhammad’s passing so dramatically just under a century after the event itself? There are in fact reasons to suspect a possible relocation of Muhammad’s death to Medina, but their consideration must be deferred until a later chapter. The remainder of this chapter will instead examine the historical reliability of the sīra tradition more broadly, focusing especially in the issue of its chronology. As it turns out, the chronology of Muhammad’s life is one of the most artificial and unreliable features of these early biographies, a point that is widely conceded by modern scholarship and even, to a certain extent, by the Islamic tradition itself. Moreover, modern scholarship has identified a variety of literary tendencies that have markedly shaped Muhammad’s traditional biography, and some of these may have influenced the early Islamic memory of his death, determining certain aspects of both its timing and location. Finally, we will consider certain passages from Ibn Isḥāq’s Maghāzī that seem to link Muhammad with a military campaign in Palestine during the final years of his life. These textual anomalies may possibly reveal traces of an older Islamic tradition concerning the end of Muhammad’s life that would comport with the witness of the non-Islamic sources.
Sīra Chronology and Its Reliability
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