Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (15 page)

What's more, Ibn Ishaq's
Sirat Rasul Allah—Biography of the Messenger of Allah
—has not survived in its original form. It comes down to us today only in a later, abbreviated (although still quite lengthy) version compiled by another Islamic scholar, Ibn Hisham, who died in 834, sixty years after Ibn Ishaq, as well as in fragments quoted by other early Muslim writers, including the historian Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari (839–923).

The lateness of this material doesn't in itself mean that it is unreliable. Historians generally tend to favor earlier sources over later ones, but an early source is not always more trustworthy than a later one. A hurriedly written biography of a politician rushed into print within weeks of his death, for example, would not be likely to have greater value than a more considered account published several years later, after exhaustive research. But in light of the rampant forging
of material concerning Muhammad's words and deeds, and the way various factions in the eighth and ninth centuries used Muhammad's supposed statements and actions to support their positions, Muhammad's first biographers would have faced an extraordinary challenge in winnowing out authentic material from forgeries and fabrications.

Ibn Hisham, moreover, warns that his version is sanitized: He left out, he says, “things which it is disgraceful to discuss; matters which would distress certain people; and such reports as al-Bakkai [Ibn Ishaq's student, who edited his work] told me he could not accept as trustworthy.”
¹
Abdallah ibn Numayr, a collector of hadiths who died in 814, complained that although Ibn Ishaq's work contained much that was authentic, the authentic material was mixed with “worthless sayings” that Ishaq had obtained from “unknown people.”
²
The renowned hadith specialist Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855) did not regard Ibn Ishaq as a trustworthy source for Islamic law.
³
Since much of that corpus of law is derived from the example of what Muhammad said and did, embraced and avoided, that is extremely significant: Ibn Hanbal's delicacy in this matter implies that he considered the great bulk of what Ibn Ishaq reported about Muhammad to be unreliable. On another occasion, however, Ibn Hanbal clarified his view, explaining that while he did not believe Ibn Ishaq was trustworthy on matters of law, he saw Ibn Ishaq's work as reliable regarding material about Muhammad that was more purely biographical, such as accounts of battles. A less favorable view comes from another early Islamic jurist, Malik ibn Anas (d. 795), who called Ibn Ishaq “one of the antichrists.”
⁴
Others simply called him a liar.
⁵

Defending Ibn Ishaq

Ibn Ishaq had his defenders as well. The early Muslim writer who collected all these unfavorable statements about Ibn Ishaq, and many more as well, ultimately dismissed the criticisms and affirmed the trustworthiness of the biographer's work. And indeed, many of those
who objected to Ibn Ishaq's work did so because he had Shiite tendencies or affirmed the free will of mankind, which many Muslims considered to be a heresy. Some believed that he wrote too favorably of the Jewish tribes of Arabia.

None of this actually bears upon the veracity of what he reports, and many early Muslims affirmed that veracity. One eighth-century Muslim, Shuba, dubbed Ibn Ishaq the “amir of traditionalists” (that is, hadith specialists) because of his prodigious memory. A late-ninth-century writer, Abu Zura, said that Ibn Ishaq's work had been scrutinized for accuracy and had passed the test. The early ninth-century jurist ash-Shafii said that Ibn Ishaq was an indispensable source for the battles of the prophet, and even exclaimed that “knowledge will remain among men as long as Ibn Ishaq lives.”
⁶

These widely divergent views may be attributable to the fact that the picture of Muhammad that emerges from Ibn Ishaq's biography is not what one might expect from the founder of one of the world's great religions. The Muhammad of Ibn Ishaq is not a peaceful teacher of the love of God and the brotherhood of man but rather a warlord who fought numerous battles and ordered the assassination of his enemies. “The character attributed to Muhammad in the biography of Ibn Ishaq,” observes the twentieth-century historian David Margoliouth, “is exceedingly unfavorable. In order to gain his ends he recoils from no expedient, and he approves of similar unscrupulousness on the part of his adherents, when exercised in his interest.”
⁷

It isn't so much Muhammad's wars that embarrass modern-day Muslims in the West—those they can attribute to their prophet's particular time and place, glossing over his status as a “good example” (Qur'an 33:21) for Muslims in all times and places. Harder to explain away are incidents such as the notorious “satanic verses” episode: Muhammad received a revelation naming three goddesses of the pagan Quraysh as daughters of Allah, worthy of veneration. But when the prophet of Islam realized that he had compromised his message of monotheism, he claimed that Satan had inspired those verses, and indeed that Satan interfered with the messages of all the prophets
(cf. Qur'an 22:52). Muhammad quickly canceled the offending passages. Ibn Ishaq tells the story of this incident, which most other early chroniclers of Muhammad's life omit from their accounts. Ibn Ishaq also recounts the horrific story of Kinana bin ar-Rabi, a Jewish leader at the oasis of Khaybar, which Muhammad raided and conquered. Thinking that Kinana knew where the Jews of Khaybar had hidden their treasure, the prophet gave this order to his men: “Torture him until you extract what he has.” The Muslims then built a fire on Kinana's chest, and when Kinana still wouldn't tell them where the treasure was, they beheaded him.
⁸

A modern-day Islamic apologist named Ehteshaam Gulam, a youthful writer at the website Answering Christian Claims, offers a typical Islamic objection to this story when he rejects it for its lack of a proper chain of transmitters
(isnad
): Ibn Ishaq doesn't name his source. Gulam also says that the story simply can't be true, because Muhammad would not have acted this way: “That a man should be tortured with burns on his chest by the sparks of a flint is too heinous a deed for a Prophet (Peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) who had earned for himself the title of
Rahma'lil Alamin
(Mercy for all the worlds).”
⁹
He suggests that Jews may have concocted the story and passed it along to a credulous Ibn Ishaq.

Ibn Ishaq's Reliability

So are these all “worthless sayings” that Ibn Ishaq received from “unknown people”? Possibly. Yet left unexplained in these criticisms is Ibn Ishaq's motive. If there were indeed Jews who were enemies of Islam (as they are for all generations, as designated by Qur'an 5:82) and were feeding Ibn Ishaq false information about Muhammad in order to discredit Islam, their motive is relatively clear, but Ibn Ishaq's isn't. Ibn Ishaq, says Margoliouth, paints “a disagreeable picture for the founder of a religion,” but it “cannot be pleaded that it is a picture drawn by an enemy.”
¹⁰
Even if the Muhammad of Ibn Ishaq's portrait
is more of a cutthroat than a holy man, his biographer's reverence for his protagonist is obvious and unstinting. Clearly Ibn Ishaq has no interest in portraying his prophet in an unfavorable light; Muhammad, after all, is Ibn Ishaq's moral compass, just as he is for so many Muslims today. Ibn Ishaq seems not to be troubled by the moral implications of the stories he tells or to believe that the incidents place Muhammad in a negative light. Such stories cannot be rejected as unhistorical simply because modern-day Muslims wish they weren't there.

Islamic sources mention earlier historians, but their works have not survived, and what has come down to us about them is uncertain. For example, the man generally acknowledged as the founding father of Islamic history, Urwa ibn Az-Zubair ibn al-Awwam, according to Islamic tradition was a cousin of Muhammad and nephew of Aisha who died in 712. Ibn Ishaq, Tabari, and another early Muslim historian, Ibn Sa‘d, attribute many traditions to him, but if he wrote anything at all, it has not come down to us.
¹¹

There is no way to evaluate the veracity of Ibn Ishaq's various accounts of Muhammad. Material that circulated orally for as many as 125 years, amid an environment in which forgery of such material was rampant, is extremely unlikely to have maintained any significant degree of historical reliability. What's more, as the Dutch scholar of Islam Johannes J. G. Jansen observes:

Nothing from the contents of Ibn Ishaq is confirmed by inscriptions or other archeological material. Testimonies from non-Muslim contemporaries do not exist. Greek, Armenian, Syriac and other sources about the beginnings of Islam are very difficult to date, but none of them is convincingly contemporary with the Prophet of Islam. Under such circumstances, no biography can be a scholarly work in the modern sense of that word, not even with the help of an omniscient Ibn Ishaq.
¹²

Historical Embroidery

Later biographers were even more knowing, often embroidering on Ibn Ishaq's accounts. Historian Patricia Crone adduces one particularly egregious example. According to Ibn Ishaq's account, the raid of Kharrar appears to have been a nonevent in Muhammad's life: “Meanwhile the Messenger of God had sent Sa‘d b. Abi Waqqas on campaign with eight men from among the Muhajirun. He went as far as Kharrar in the Hijaz, then he returned without having had a clash with the enemy.”
¹³

Two generations later, al-Waqidi (d. 822), in his
Book of History and Campaigns
, a chronicle of the battles of Muhammad, embellishes this spare account:

Then the Messenger of God (may God bless him and give him peace) appointed Sa‘d b. Abi Waqqas to the command against Kharrar—Kharrar being part of Juhfa near Khumm—in Dhu'l-Qa'da, eighteen months after the
hijra
of the Messenger (may God bless him and give him peace). Abu Bakr b. Ismail b. Muhammad said on the authority of his father on the authority of Amir b. Sa‘d on the authority of his father [sc. Sa‘d b. Abi Waqqas]: the Messenger of God (may God bless him and give him peace) said, “O Sa‘d, go to Kharrar, for a caravan belonging to Quraysh will pass through it.” So I went out with twenty or twenty-one men, on foot. We would hide during the day and travel at night until we arrived there on the morning of the fifth day. We found that the caravan had passed through the day before. The Messenger had enjoined upon us not to go beyond Kharrar. Had we not done so, I would have tried to catch up with it.
¹⁴

Al-Waqidi knows so much more about this expedition than did Ibn Ishaq—and, as Crone notes, “he knows all this on the impeccable authority of the leader of the expedition himself”! But how is it that these details eluded Ibn Ishaq and yet made their way to
al-Waqidi some fifty years later? Though it is possible that al-Waqidi had access to oral traditions that had been passed on from people close to Muhammad but had escaped Ibn Ishaq's notice, it is more likely that these details were legendary elaborations developed for the purposes of dramatic storytelling.
¹⁵

Legendary Elaboration

The scholar of Islam Gregor Schoeler contends that the traditional Islamic material about Muhammad's life and work is substantially reliable. He points out that although the work of Urwa ibn Az-Zubair, Muhammad's first biographer, is lost, Ibn Ishaq and other early Muslim writers quote it extensively. Because Urwa died in 712 and collected the bulk of his stories about Muhammad from the 660s to the 690s, he had ample occasion to gather reliable information. Urwa, says Schoeler, “still had the opportunity to consult eye witnesses and contemporaries of many of the events in question—irrespective of whether he mentions his informant in the
isnad
or not. For this reason, it is much more likely that he asked his aunt Aisha about many events she had witnessed…. In addition, he was able to collect firsthand reports on numerous incidents occurring (slightly) before, during and after the
hijra
, e.g. the
hijra
itself (including the ‘first
hijra
’ to Abyssinia and the circumstances and events leading to the
hijra
proper), the Battle of the Trench and al-Hudaibiya.”
¹⁶

These are all important events in Muhammad's life: The Hijra is the Muslims' move from Mecca to Medina in 622, when Muhammad became for the first time a military and political leader as well as a spiritual one. Before that, some Muslims had fled to Abyssinia to escape persecution from the Quraysh of Mecca. The Battle of the Trench, in 627, was the siege of Medina by the pagan Arabs of Mecca—a siege the Muslims eventually broke, with momentous consequences for all concerned. The Treaty of Hudaibiya was the truce Muhammad reached with the Quraysh around the year 628;
it permitted Muslims to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. This treaty set the standard in Islamic law for all treaties between Muslims and non-Muslims. If Urwa was really able to gather and transmit reliable information about all this from his aunt Aisha and others eyewitnesses of the events in question, then the biography of Muhammad in the standard Islamic accounts is essentially trustworthy.

Schoeler's claim, however, falters in light of the comparison above between Ibn Ishaq's and al-Waqidi's accounts of the nonevent at Kharrar. If that material could be subject to so much legendary elaboration within a few decades, what was to prevent those who passed on Urwa's material from altering it substantially, whether they did so in light of other material they had received from different sources, or in the service of some political calculation, or out of a pious interest in exaggerating Muhammad's virtues, or a combination of such motives? In fact, this process of legendary elaboration was already taking place when Ibn Ishaq compiled his account.