The Biography of Muhammad

Nature and Authenticity

Gregor Schoeler, Uwe Vagelpohl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415567176
• eBook ISBN: 9781136959738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book considers the Arabic biographies of Prophet Muhammad, the earliest of which dates from two centuries after his life. These biographies, prized by Muslims, have been approached in the Western study of Islam from a range of positions. Some scholars reject them entirely, seeing in them products of the Muslim community's idealisation of its history, while others accept them at face value, reasoning that, if not exact versions of events, the events could not have differed too much from their descriptions.

The author revisits the debate and reconsiders several key incidents in the life of the Prophet. By compiling an extensive corpus of materials and comparing them closely, this book analyses the transmission and the contents of the accounts. It shows that by understanding clearly the interaction in early Islam between written and oral modes of transmission, and by the judicious sieving of the accounts, as well as the lines of transmission, we can sometimes reach back to that generation of Muslims who though not themselves witness to the events were younger contemporaries of those who were. Establishing a solid basis for the informed study of Muhammad's biography and adding to the ongoing debate, this book will appeal to scholars of early Islam, history and theology.

1
The main Medinese transmitters

Learning and teaching – the use of writing

The systematic study of early Islamic history (primarily the life of the Prophet, based on the collection of reports about it) began with the first generation of ‘successors’

in ‘his’ city, Medina.¹ It is true that, according to Muslim tradition, some of

contemporaries made notes of his sayings² and acts;³ one of them is reported to have written down an entire speech

.⁴ But reports about such occasional records, if they are to be believed, cannot be read as evidence for a truly systematic effort. Such an effort involved deliberately asking various people, especially surviving companions of the Prophet

, about his life and deeds and compiling these reports in some way.⁵ It was only begun by younger representatives of the first generation of successors

who had not themselves met

, around the last third of the first/seventh and the early part of the second/eighth centuries. Sons and grandsons of the earliest believers, ‘prevented by fate to take part in contemporary political life and estranged from the affairs of the wider world, turned to the study of a glorious past’.⁶

The reports they gathered from various informants and then passed on to inquiring fellow believers were called

(initially always in the singular), ‘narration’, ‘account’. This is in fact the original meaning of the word, which later came to be used in a more restricted sense.⁷

These activities, which were not limited to historical studies,⁸ soon developed into systematic teaching which usually took place in the mosque of Medina. There, the earliest scholars spread their ‘knowledge’ (

, often used in the same sense as

⁹) to contemporaries with a thirst for learning (‘students’) by w...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Classical Islam
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• Truth and historical tradition
• Introduction
• 1 The main Medinese transmitters
• 2 The text in the transmission process
• 3 The issue of authenticity
• Afterword 2009
• Appendix 1 The corpus
• Appendix 2 List of sigla
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index