661. While these events do rather strangely intrude at the center of Muhammad’s life story here, one cannot exclude the possibility that the author has “cut to the chase” by introducing what his audience would otherwise have known to be the final outcome of Muhammad’s militant message. Yet by the same token, the Istoria does not otherwise clearly separate Muhammad from the conquests, and in light of the early tradition placing them within his lifetime, it seems very possible that we have here another relatively early witness to this rival tradition.171
As the Istoria continues to relate Muhammad’s death, it explains that when he sensed that death had come upon him (immediately after his “sin” with Zayd’s wife), he predicted that he would be resurrected three days after his death by the angel Gabriel. Following his death, Muhammad’s followers maintained a vigil, guarding his body and awaiting its resurrection. When three days later this did not transpire, Muhammad’s body began to stink, and his followers convinced themselves that their presence was preventing the angel’s appearance. So they left the body alone, “and immediately instead of angels, dogs followed the stench and devoured his flank”; his disappointed followers then buried what was left of the body.172 The Syriac versions of the Baḥīrā legend, a medieval Christian counter-narrative of Islamic origins, share a similar story, according to which Muhammad declared himself the Paraclete. By consequence, it seems, his followers expected that three days after his death “he would go up to heaven, to Christ, who sent him.”173 When he died, they brought his body to a large house and sealed it inside. Three days later, they returned only to find that they could not even enter the house on account of the stench of Muhammad’s rotting corpse. Barbara Roggema, the text’s most recent editor, dates this particular tradition tentatively to the eighth or ninth century, largely on the basis of its similarities to the Istoria de Mahomet, while Krisztina Szilágyi suggests a similar dating on the basis of the Baḥīrā legend’s literary history.174 It certainly seems possible, as Roggema suggests, that a Christian polemical tradition ascribing failed predictions of a bodily resurrection to Muhammad arose quite early, and that this episode from the Baḥīrā legend thus bears witness to an early anecdote about the end of Muhammad’s life. As much would certainly seem to be suggested by an early Islamic tradition, discussed in the following chapters, that when ʿUmar initially refused to allow Muhammad’s burial after his death, seemingly in hopes of his resurrection, al-ʿAbbās intervened to insist on his burial, noting that Muhammad’s corpse had begun to stink.
Unfortunately, however, the Syriac Baḥīrā legend affords no indication of the timing of Muhammad’s death in relation to either the Near Eastern conquests or any other major events from the history of early Islam. Nevertheless, the most striking feature of this alternative account of Muhammad’s demise is its indication, in the East Syrian recension at least, that Muhammad’s followers do not know anything about his grave, including, one would presume its location.175 This feature would seem to suggest a particularly early date for this tradition, sometime before the tradition of Muhammad’s death and burial in Medina had become well established. More to the point, particularly for present purposes, is that this brief polemical account seems to recall a time when Muhammad’s followers were perhaps uncertain as to the location of his grave. It is difficult to imagine a Christian polemicist fabricating such Islamic ignorance concerning the site of Muhammad’s death, particularly if the tradition of his death in Medina had been well established from early on. It is certainly not obvious, for instance, how this would serve the tendencies of this polemic: there is no reason why the location of the house where Muhammad failed to resurrect would need to remain a mystery, 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
