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 on the basis of traditional Islamic sources.7 The late formation of the earliest accounts of Islamic origins thus raises significant questions concerning their reliability as historical sources, particularly when they are studied in isolation from other non-Islamic witnesses. Excepting only the decidedly “ahistorical” witness of the Qurʾān, there are essentially no Islamic accounts describing the formation of Islam that can be convincingly dated prior to the turn of the second Islamic century, a circumstance greatly limiting historical-critical investigation of the beginnings of Islam.8
The manifold shortcomings of the early Islamic historical tradition, particularly with respect to the period of origins, invite the strong possibility that the beginnings of Islam differed significantly from their representation in the earliest biographies of Muhammad. Not only were the narratives first composed at only an arresting distance from the events that they describe, but modern scholarship on the traditional biographies of Muhammad has repeatedly found them to be unreliable sources. These writings present a highly idealized image of Muhammad and the early community suited to the beliefs and practices of Islam at the beginning of its second century and conformed to a number of literary and theological tendencies. Most importantly, however, the chronology of these narratives has long been recognized as one of the most artificial and unreliable aspects of Muhammad’s canonical biographies, allowing for the real possibility that the sources considered in the previous chapter may indeed preserve an earlier tradition regarding the final years of Muhammad’s life. The traditions of Muhammad’s death contained in the oldest biographies are rather minimal, and in their earliest state they seem to have lacked any specific geographic or chronological context: these elements would appear to have been added only with the composition of the first written biographies around the middle of the eighth century. Consequently, these relatively recent documents cannot exclude the possibility that Muslims of an earlier age may indeed have remembered their prophet as leading his followers as they left Arabia and first entered into the land that had been promised to Abraham and his descendants. To the contrary, their failings as historical sources almost require that we look elsewhere to supplement our knowledge about the beginnings of Islam.
The Earliest Islamic Sources for the Life of Muhammad
The single most important early biography of Muhammad remains the Maghāzī, or Campaigns, of the Prophet by Ibn Isḥāq (d. 767), an account of Islamic origins compiled around the middle of eighth century, approximately 120 years after Muhammad’s death.9 Unfortunately, however, Ibn Isḥāq’s biography does not itself survive: it is known only through later recensions, the most important of which are the Sīra, or Life, of the Prophet by Ibn Hishām (d. 833), composed at the beginning of the ninth century, and al-Ṭabarī’s History from the turn of the tenth century. The mediated nature of Ibn Isḥāq’s traditions must constantly be born in mind, particularly inasmuch as Ibn Hishām does not always reproduce Ibn Isḥāq’s biography faithfully but has “abridged and vigorously edited” his source.10 Nevertheless, through comparison of Ibn Hishām’s transmission with that of al-Ṭabarī and others, it is frequently possible to recover significant amounts of Ibn Isḥāq’s lost biography of Muhammad: when the sources coincide, it is highly likely that the material in question derives from Ibn Isḥāq’s vanished Life. Of the various other early Islamic scholars who were reportedly engaged in the production and transmission of the sīra and maghāzī traditions (the two terms being largely interchangeable in this period), we generally know little more than their names. It would appear that only a handful of these early authorities actually produced written accounts, and with the exception of Ibn Isḥāq’s biography, as mediated primarily by Ibn Hishām’s later redaction, these early documents are witnessed by only a couple of fragments. A papyrus, for instance, has been discovered that relates traditions ascribed to Wahb b. Munabbih (d. 728), and while it remains uncertain whether these traditions actually derive from Wahb, there is no question that this document witnesses to early traditions, inasmuch as the artifact itself is contemporary with Ibn Hishām.11 Unfortunately for present purposes, however, this fragment relates no information concerning the end of Muhammad’s life.12
Working backward from the later recensions of Ibn Isḥāq’s biography, one finds Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 742) frequently identified as one of Ibn Isḥāq’s primary sources. Al-Zuhrī was a renowned Medinan authority on the life of Muhammad from the generation immediately prior to Ibn Isḥāq, and on the whole it seems likely that many of the traditions related by Ibn Isḥāq ultimately
