the pious fictions of early Christian literature would be wrongly condemned as frauds or deceptions: to the contrary, they undoubtedly were efforts to proclaim the truth, as seen by the authors and their communities, with perfect clarity.43 One would only expect that similar impulses and developments are to be found in the nascent Islamic tradition, and as I will argue, the early Islamic traditions of the end of Muhammad’s life (much like the Christian Nativity traditions) appear to have adapted the arc of his biography to fit the needs of early Islamic identity and salvation history nearly a century after his death. Consequently, our knowledge of exactly when Muhammad died is not nearly as certain as much previous scholarship has assumed, and it seems we must accordingly adjust our historical estimate for the end of his life to sometime more approximately within the period 632–35 CE.
The first chapter of this study examines the various sources from the seventh and eighth centuries that attest to Muhammad’s survival and leadership at the time of the initial assault on the Roman Near East, circa 634–65. Although later sources, particularly from the Christian tradition, continue to repeat this tradition, this chapter focuses on witnesses from the first century and a half after Muhammad’s death. Sources from this period hold special value as potential bearers of early traditions that may subsequently have been displaced once the canonical narratives of Islamic origins came to be established during the later eighth century.44 At that time, Ibn Isḥāq’s officially sanctioned biography of Muhammad, as well as the teachings of other contemporary Medinan traditionists, began to be widely known. From this point onward, the life of Muhammad as remembered by Muslims and non-Muslims alike was largely governed by the contents of these canonical biographies. Early evidence of their influence outside of the Islamic tradition can be seen already in the early ninth-century Chronicle of Theophanes, which, owing to direct influence from Islamic sources, is the first non-Islamic source to “correctly” relate Muhammad’s decease prior to the invasion of Palestine. The fact that later Christian sources, and in particular the Western Christian accounts of Muhammad’s death surveyed by Etan Kohlberg, should largely adhere to the traditional Islamic chronology is merely testimony to the ascendency and authority of these canonical biographies within the Islamic tradition of the second and later centuries.45
Eleven different sources from this period, including even one from the Islamic tradition itself, indicate Muhammad’s continued survival at the beginnings of Near Eastern conquests. Each of these documents is first evaluated individually to assess the quality of its testimony. Then, the chapter considers the collective value of these reports, reaching the conclusion that they convincingly bear witness to an early tradition that Muhammad was still alive and leading the Islamic community as his followers invaded Roman Syria and Palestine. This tradition, it would appear, reached each of the various religious communities of the early Islamic empire by the beginning of the second century AH, and it is not contradicted by the more traditional chronology of Muhammad’s decease until after the composition of Ibn Isḥāq’s influential biography of Muhammad around 750 CE. As such, this divergent tradition regarding the end of Muhammad’s life merits serious historical consideration.
The following chapter turns to the traditional Islamic account of Muhammad’s death and burial, focusing especially on Ibn Isḥāq’s biography, the earliest surviving Islamic narrative of Muhammad’s life and the beginnings of Islam. Here the details of Muhammad’s sudden illness, his demise, and his interment as recorded in this collection are first described and then compared with other early biographical sources, in order to determine which traditions might possibly derive from earlier authorities. The results of this endeavor, however, prove rather meager, and most of the material concerning Muhammad’s death and burial in Ibn Isḥāq’s biography cannot be assigned to any earlier figure. While a limited number of traditions can be attributed to Ibn Isḥāq’s teacher, al-Zuhrī (d. 742 ce), these reveal only Muhammad’s sudden illness and death in an urban context, surrounded by his wives and in the vicinity of a place of prayer where his followers regularly gathered to worship. The location of Muhammad’s death and burial in Medina and the chronology of these events relative to the Near Eastern conquests, however, cannot be ascribed with any assurance to al-Zuhrī. Ibn Isḥāq’s biography remains the earliest witness to these traditions, and while one certainly cannot entirely exclude the possibility that he had received this information from al-Zuhrī or some other early authority, there is no evidence for this hypothesis.
This chapter continues to consider the issue of chronology within the early biographies of Muhammad more generally, observing that modern scholarship judges the traditional chronology of Muhammad’s life to be among the most artificial and unreliable elements of these narratives, apparently devised by his biographers only near the end of the first Islamic century. Moreover, a handful of sources from the early Islamic tradition indicate either a period of seven or thirteen years for Muhammad’s Medinan period (instead of ten years) or a date for the hijra of 624/25 (instead of 621/22): these variants reveal a significant pattern consistent with the possible revision of an earlier tradition of Muhammad’s death in order to place these events prior to the invasion of Palestine. Finally, Chapter 2 examines several anomalous reports from Ibn Isḥāq’s biography that could suggest traces of an older tradition associating Muhammad with the assault on Palestine. On the whole, these features of Muhammad’s earliest biographies invite a possibility that the traditional memory of Muhammad’s death in the Ḥijāz prior to the invasion of the Near East is a relatively recent development.
Nevertheless such significant revisions to the ending of Muhammad’s life in early Islamic memory would seem to require some sort of substantial catalyst. Several broad literary tendencies of the early biographical traditions could seem to favor these changes, including particularly the strong influence of certain biblical typologies on the structure of the narrative. Nevertheless, while these tendencies may have contributed to such a reconfiguration of Muhammad’s biography, they do not in themselves seem sufficient to have generated this change. The second half of this monograph accordingly identifies evidence of significant ideological shifts in early Islamic eschatology, confessional identity, and sacred geography that profoundly transformed the nature of Muhammad’s original religious movement. These dramatic changes not only provide a context that can account for the existence of an early tradition associating Muhammad with the invasion of Palestine, but they also present circumstances that would explain a need to sever his connection with the Near Eastern conquest and instead to memorialize the death of Islam’s founding prophet in the Ḥijāz.
Chapter 3 argues that Muhammad was an eschatological prophet who together with his earliest followers expected to witness the imminent end of the world in the divine judgment of the Hour, seemingly within his own lifetime. Much twentieth-century scholarship, particularly in English, has sought to minimize this aspect of earliest Islam, identifying Muhammad instead as a social-reforming prophet of ethical monotheism. But the evidence of the Qurʾān and certain early apocalyptic (or more precisely, eschatological) ḥadīth clearly show that Muhammad and the early members of his religious movement believed that they would soon see the end of history.46 Moreover, it seems rather likely that the eschatological fervor shared by Muhammad and his earliest followers was a driving force behind the Islamic conquest of the Near East: their anticipation of the Hour was, it would appear, closely linked with the restoration of Abraham’s descendants to the Promised Land. Yet when Muhammad died before the eschaton’s arrival and the Hour continued to be delayed, the early Muslims had to radically reorient their religious vision. The Hour was thus increasingly deferred into the distant future, and in less than a century Islam swiftly transformed itself from a religion expecting the end of the world to a religion that aimed to rule the world. In the course of such a profound transition, one would imagine that more than just the eschatological timetable was revised, and as the fourth chapter demonstrates, there were related changes in the nature of the early Islamic community’s confessional boundaries and the location of its sacred geography.
The final chapter looks first at the seemingly nonsectarian nature of the early Islamic community.47
