The Death of a Prophet. Stephen J. Shoemaker

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 derive from al-Zuhrī’s teaching, at least in terms of their general content. While it certainly is not at all impossible that later transmissions of Ibn Isḥāq’s sīra have occasionally inserted al-Zuhrī’s name on the basis of his reputation as a great scholar,¹³ the probability that much of Ibn Isḥāq’s information depends on al-Zuhrī seems rather high. In some instances, traditions from al-Zuhrī are further ascribed to ʿUrwa ibn al-Zubayr, and while it is not inconceivable that certain reports about Muhammad took their origin from ʿUrwa’s teaching, this possibility has not been successfully demonstrated and remains highly speculative. It is doubtful that al-Zuhrī himself wrote either a history of early Islam or a biography of its prophet,¹⁴ but several of his students in addition to Ibn Isḥāq composed biographies of Muhammad on the basis of traditions related from al-Zuhrī, the most important of these disciples being Mūsā b. ʿUqba (d. 758) and Maʿmar b. Rāshid (d. 770). Often by correlating traditions independently ascribed to al-Zuhrī in these and other sources with similar reports from Ibn Isḥāq’s Maghāzī, it is possible to establish a measure of probability that al-Zuhrī may in fact have taught some of these traditions to his students.

      Unfortunately, however, like Ibn Isḥāq’s lost biography, neither Mūsā’s or Maʿmar’s Maghāzī survives, and we must rely primarily on the evidence of later writers for indirect knowledge of their contents, including especially al-Wāqidī (d. 823) and his disciple Ibn Saʿd (d. 845), as well as al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) and al-Balādhurī (d. 892). The only exception is perhaps a brief fragment purporting to transmit extracts from Mūsā’s Maghāzī, which relates nineteen short and disconnected traditions concerning the life of Muhammad. Nevertheless, the authenticity of this document has been disputed, and given the paucity of its contents, the bulk of Mūsā’s early biography must otherwise be derived indirectly from much later sources.¹⁵ Despite the lack of a similar artifact, the prospects of recovering traditions from Maʿmar’s Maghāzī are in fact much better than for Mūsā’s lost work. Al-Wāqidī’s Maghāzī from the close of the second Islamic century forms a particularly important witness to Maʿmar’s biography, which seems to have served as one of its primary sources. Although al-Wāqidī’s collection is somewhat marred by his occasionally irregular use of isnāds, as well as by the very strong possibility that he has made extensive—and often unacknowledged—use of Ibn Isḥāq’s Maghāzī, al-Wāqidī’s Maghāzī transmits considerable material from Maʿmar, at a chronological distance roughly equivalent to Ibn Hishām’s separation from Ibn Isḥāq.¹⁶ Unlike many earlier maghāzīs, however, al-Wāqidī’s work is true to its title, taking focus on the campaigns of Muhammad during the period from his flight to Medina until his death, an event mentioned only briefly in passing.¹⁷

      Al-Wāqidī is reported to have written several other works on Muhammad’s life, including a collection on the Death of the Prophet (Kitāb wafāt al-nabī), but none of these writings is extant.¹⁸ Presumably, many of the traditions from these lost works survive in the biography of Muhammad prepared by al-Wāqidī’s student Ibn Saʿd. In the modern edition of the latter’s Ṭabaqāt, the first two volumes comprise an extensive collection of traditions regarding the life of Muhammad, which seems to have been prepared by Ibn Saʿd himself (as opposed to his students). Although Ibn Saʿd has drawn from a number of authorities in compiling this biography, a large number of its traditions are given on al-Wāqidī’s (and Maʿmar’s) authority, many of which were likely taken from al-Wāqidī’s now lost sīra works. Ibn Saʿd’s collection is thus of particular importance since, as Horovitz notes, he is “the earliest author, after Ibn Isḥāq, from which a complete biography of the Prophet has come down to us.”¹⁹ In contrast to Ibn Isḥāq, however, Ibn Saʿd devoted considerable attention to the end of Muhammad’s life, allotting roughly the last quarter of his biography to traditions concerning his death and burial. Here al-Wāqidī again figures prominently, and while