writings for recovering the earliest Islamic traditions about Muhammad’s life and death tends to be found mainly in their convergences, when they collectively attest to a tradition that may be traced to an early authority, such as Ibn Isḥāq, Maʿmar, or perhaps even al-Zuhrī. Occasionally, however, some less well-attested reports may also be judged as early on the basis of their content, their “matn,” particularly when they run counter to the prevailing doctrinal and literary tendencies of the earliest sources: such dissimilarities suggest an early tradition that has been preserved against these ideological interests on account of its relative antiquity. By carefully sifting these earliest sources according to such principles, it is possible to identify a rather basic account of the end of Muhammad’s life as it was remembered by Medinan scholars of the mid-eighth century.
As will be seen, the resulting sketch of Muhammad’s death and burial is disappointingly meager, and despite the frequent illusion of detailed specificity, the earliest accounts disclose remarkably little about the historical circumstances of Muhammad’s departure from this life. Although repeated attention to concrete details can give these reports a feel of authenticity, their focus on minutia often comes at the expense of broader historical context. As much is in fact typical of the early Islamic historical tradition, whose fragmented, atomistic nature is one of its most characteristic features. By consequence, individual traditions, despite their occasionally remarkable attention to detail, are commonly transmitted without any connection to a broader historical narrative.28 This quality often leaves the sequence of events uncertain, and accordingly, as will be discussed further below, the chronology of the early Islamic historical tradition is widely recognized as one of its most artificial features. Likewise, the narrative detail that occasionally seems to bring these biographical vignettes to life is a common literary device, named by Roland Barthes “the reality effect.”29 With specific regard to the early traditions of Muhammad’s death, Leor Halevi observes that their attention to seemingly trivial details serves “to give the religious narrative a sense of verisimilitude, a certain tangibility that only such casual details could provide.”30 As interesting as such details are for what they reveal about the conceptual world of Muslim believers at the beginning of Islam’s second century, one must take care not to be seduced by these nuances into accepting the veracity of these reports. Rather than validating the accounts in which they occur, they are instead very likely a sign of their literary construction.
Later Biographical Sources: Isnāds, Forgery, and Isnād Criticism
There are, of course, in addition to these early collections, innumerable traditions about the life of Muhammad that survive in only later sources, a great many of which concern his death. One need only consider, for example, the sizable collection of death and burial traditions gathered by Ibn Saʿd in his Ṭabaqāt, the vast majority of which find no parallels in other early Islamic sources.31 More recent works, such as Ibn Kathīr’s Sīra, are even more extensive in their knowledge of Muhammad’s life and death: somewhat paradoxically, it would seem that as the distance from Muhammad’s lifetime increased, so too did the Islamic tradition’s knowledge of what he had said and done.32 Each of the biographical traditions in these collections of course bears an isnād vouching for its authenticity, and these chains of transmitters generally conclude with an early authority, such as al-Zuhrī or ʿUrwa, or even ʿĀʾisha or some other Companion of the Prophet, who is identified as the ultimate source of the report in question. In light of the attribution of these reports to such early authorities, one may perhaps wonder why they are not equally valued as witnesses to the life of Muhammad and the history of Islamic origins. Should not these traditions be taken for what they purport to be, namely, reports from the earliest authorities on the beginnings of Islam, including many who were themselves participants in these very events? While there is certainly no reason to exclude the possibility that some early traditions may survive in these later collections, and unquestionably some do, the endemic forgery of ḥadīth and isnāds in medieval Islam means that neither these traditions nor their alleged transmissions can be taken at face value.
Consequently, the countless traditions ascribed to al-Zuhrī and ʿUrwa (among others) by later sources most likely do not reflect actual transmissions so much as the reputation of these two scholars as the earliest and most important authorities on Muhammad and the rise of Islam. Traditions conveying what the community believed to be true about earliest Islam would have been attracted magnetically to their names by sheer virtue of their fame. One need not imagine some sort of conspiracy or even a willful falsification, as some have wrongly maintained, to explain such developments: members of the Islamic community would rather “naturally” have assumed that traditions about the Prophet held to be true must have originated with one of these two sagacious men. As Harris Birkeland comparably observes with regard to Ibn ʿAbbās, whose reputation as a great authority on tafsīr inspired later transmitters to attribute a “great ocean” of exegetical traditions to his authorship, “so it is even today, for instance in traditionalistic, rural communities in Norway. Every accepted religious opinion is attributed to Christ, Paul, or Luther.” He continues to note, perhaps even more tellingly, that “it would provoke great indignation if anybody should happen to express the opinion that Luther ever believed in pre-destination. Every believing peasant would deny that statement most decidedly.”33 Surely this is not the result of some widespread conspiracy to deceive. Accordingly, one would in fact expect to find that the chains of transmission in the sīra literature regularly ascribe much of their material to ʿUrwa and al-Zuhrī, and consistent attribution of traditions to these early authorities does not necessarily indicate the authenticity of these attributions. It is instead altogether likely that established patterns of authoritative transmission had become fixed according to traditional forms rather early on, and these patterns provided paradigms for the isnāds that were attached to later traditions. Insofar as the Islamic community believed such later traditions to be true, there was not so much a need to invent phony isnāds to justify their authenticity; rather, the “truth” of the traditions themselves would make their attribution to authoritative scholars such as ʿUrwa and al-Zuhrī mostly a foregone conclusion.34
In the face of such concerns, the methods of isnād criticism, especially as developed by Joseph Schacht, G. H. A. Juynboll, and, most recently, Harald Motzki, can often be somewhat helpful for assessing the probability of attributions to such early authorities. Through an extensive correlation of the different isnāds assigned to a particular tradition in later sources, one can occasionally identify a plausible date for the tradition, as well as the individual who was most likely responsible for initially placing it into circulation. The Islamic tradition itself of course has long-established methods of isnād criticism designed to assess the authenticity of the numerous ḥadīth ascribed to Muhammad, the vast majority of which have been regarded as spurious even in the Islamic faith. Yet modern scholarship on Islamic origins generally approaches these chains of transmitters with a great deal more skepticism than the Islamic tradition, and consequently it has developed its own methods for evaluating both the isnāds themselves and the various traditions, or matns, to which they are attached. There is certainly warrant for such suspicion, since forgery of ḥadīth and their isnāds was pandemic in early Islam: the ninth-century Islamic scholar of ḥadīth al-Bukhārī is said to have examined 600,000 traditions attributed to the Prophet by their isnāds, and of these he rejected over 593,000 as later forgeries.35 Matters are even worse in regard to the sīra traditions, which medieval Islamic scholars regarded as having even less historical reliability than the rest of the ḥadīth.36 With good cause, modern scholarship on Islamic origins has merely intensified the Islamic tradition’s own internal skepticism of prophetic traditions in its efforts to reconstruct the beginnings of Islam.
Ignác Goldziher and Schacht after him were among the first Western scholars to draw attention to the artificial and historically problematic nature of very many isnāds that the Islamic tradition viewed as credible, casting considerable doubt on the authenticity of the traditions that these isnāds claimed to validate.37 Schacht, however, developed a method of analysis that
