Knowing About the Prophet

By Arshad Alam, New Age Islam 31 January 2023 The Sira And Hadis Literature Have Shown To Be Fabricated, So How Do We Know About The Early Islamic Community Main Points: 1. The extant Sira and Hadis were written down much after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. 2. Yet most of what we know about him and the early Islamic community comes through this literature as the Quran does not tell us much. 3. Scholars have shown this post-Quranic material to be contradictory and at times plain fabrications. 4. How then do we then reconstruct the historicity of the early Islamic community, including the career of Prophet Muhammad? ------- The traditional Islamic narrative about Prophet Muhammad tells us in minute details about his birth, youth, his prophethood, his marriages and wars and his ultimate death in 632 AD. But the sources for much of this information are Islamic literature itself. They do not cite or rely upon a single source which is outside of the Muslim tradition. They do not even pose the obvious methodological question whether there is any reference being made to an Arabian prophet in Christian, Jewish or other sources. In other words, they refer to only Muslim sources and that too uncritically, as if they represent the kernel truth. Today, we know that the arrival of an Arabian Prophet was noticed by non-Muslim sources and they referred to it much earlier than some Islamic commentators. Information about the Prophet is found in Sira (biographical) and Hadis literature, which were written much after the death of the prophet. One of the earliest such biographies was written by Ibn Ishaq roughly between 761-767, which is more than hundred years after the death of the Prophet. What is troubling is that no copy of this Sira exists and we know about it only through the another Sira by one of his students, Ibn Hisham, who probably wrote it in the early 9th century. What is more, Ibn Hisham informs us that he excluded those parts of the original work, which might be offensive to the readers. Thus, we cannot be sure about the actual contents of the first biography of the Prophet. Roughly three to four generations would have passed when these presumably oral information about the Prophet would have been complied in the book known as the Sira. But we know that after the passage of such a long time, we can never be certain about the authenticity of received information. The second source of information about the life of Prophet comes from the Hadis literature which was compiled even later. Sahih al Bukhari and Sahih Muslim were compiled around 850s which is more than 200 years after the death of the prophet. What is intriguing is that all these writers lived outside the Hejaz, the birth place of Islam. They came from cities in present day Iraq and Uzbekistan, much removed from Mecca and Medina. It will be quite fanciful to believe that whatever they have written about the life of the Prophet is true. This is reflected in quite many contradictory narrations about the Prophet which are contained in these Hadis collections. Consider the length of the Prophet’s stay at Mecca, a crucial point if one is interested in early Islamic history. Bukhari tells us that he stayed in Mecca for 10 years (SB 7:72:787) but another narration in the same collection puts it at 13 years (SB 5:58:242). Imam Muslim however, says that the prophet stayed in Mecca for 15 years (SM 30:5809). Similarly, this literature is not even sure of the age at which the Prophet died; marking it variously as 60, 63 and even 65. The key point here is not to argue which of these is true but since they contradict each other, they all cannot be true, although it is possible that they all can be wrong. The important point is that we should realize that our insistence on using this material as sources of history is nothing but fallacious. The compilers themselves were aware of the fictitious nature of many such oral narrations and they themselves pruned away many thousands from their texts. Still many fanciful and contradictory accounts of the Prophet’s life remain within these collections, such as the ones cited above. Moreover, the purpose of these Hadis collections was not really to establish historical accuracy but to clarify legal and ritual matters. There was much internal debate about the authenticity of these reports and some of these texts like the Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim would only get canonical status much later in the 11th century. Academic scholarship on early Islam has always recognized the problem of historical reconstruction from traditional Islamic literature. Decades earlier, Ignaz Goldhizer and Joseph Schacht had pointed out the unreliability of Hadis narrations for purposes of historical writing. Wael B. Hallaq similarly stated that “we have good reasons to believe that Prophetic reports were fabricated at a later stage in Islamic history and that they were gradually projected back to the Prophet”. F. E. Peters in his book Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians argues that “the great bulk of the Hadis, sound or otherwise, appear to be forgeries and there is no reliable of determining which, if any, might be authentic historical reports from or about Muhammad”. Even some Muslim scholars have been confounded by this problem. Abdullah Saeed, in his Reading the Quran in the Twenty First Century clearly writes that “there are significant problems in relying on the use of Hadis and other traditions when attempting to understand certain aspects of the Prophet’s life or to understand what was happening in the earliest Muslim communities. Given the level of fabrication of Hadis that occurred in the first and second centuries of Islam, and the difficulties associated with the biographical material collated by Muslims in relation to the Prophet, the question of authenticity of such material remains an important question in contemporary Islamic scholarship”. Under these circumstances, how sure can we be about the received knowledge about the Prophet? Can we reliably know about the historical Muhammad? Questions such as these led scholars like Patricia Crone and Michael Cook to argue in their book Hagarism that the traditional Islamic literature should be rejected in toto as it has become so layered that nothing of value about early Islam can be discerned from it. But it is primarily through such literature that Muhammad has been reconstructed in fine detail. Thankfully, there is now some consensus in the academia that the Quran became stable much early in Islamic history. Even revisionist historians like Crone and Cook later accepted that “…we can reasonably be sure that the Quran is a collection of utterances that he (Prophet Muhammad) made in the belief that they had been revealed to him by God. The book may not preserve all the messages he claimed to have received, and he is not responsible for the arrangement in which we have them. They were collected after his death-how long after is controversial. But that he uttered all or most of them is difficult to doubt”. Fred Donner, the author of Muhammad and the Believers: The Origins of Islam concurs: “we seem…. to be dealing with a Quran that is the product of the earliest stages in the life of the community in western Arabia. The fact that the Quran text dates to the earliest phase of the movement inaugurated by Muhammad means that the historian can use it”. However, questions regarding the historical reconstruction of the Prophet and early Islamic history will remain. In terms of the personhood of Muhammad and the early Islamic community, the Quran has very little to say. What we know of his activities and those of his early companions have all come to us through the Sira and Hadis collections. What can only be termed as an inverted reasoning, the traditional Islamic method seeks to fill the gap in the Quran by seeking explanations from the Sira and Hadis, which were composed much later! Does this mean that the possibility of retrieving the historical Prophet Muhammad and his early Islamic community has been lost forever? ------ A regular contributor to NewAgeIslam.com, Arshad Alam is a writer and researcher on Islam and Muslims in South Asia. URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-personalities/prophet-sira-hadees-islamic-traditional/d/128995 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism