Admittedly, Hoyland’s caution that one must be careful about assuming that modern ideas of tension or contradiction within the Islamic tradition coincide with those of early Muslims is an important point. Such concerns certainly warrant constant and careful consideration, but they need not paralyze historical analysis: reconstruction of the past always involves viewing its events through the lens of the present, no matter which methods or criteria the historian applies.25 No (post)modern historian can escape the limitations of her social and intellectual context, and as salubrious as Hoyland’s warning is to historians in general, it seems there is no alternative “view from nowhere” that does not bring contemporary concerns and perspectives to the analysis of the past. If we are to abandon the toolkit of modern historical study simply because of its own historical contingencies, then we presumably must resign ourselves either to a radical historical agnosticism or to the indigenous critique of the Islamic tradition itself. Moreover, the application of this criterion of historical analysis is not simply a matter of judging a tradition “either false or authentic,” as Hoyland somewhat incorrectly draws the dichotomy in his critique, but instead this method affords principles for identifying a probability that certain material is unlikely to have originated in specific historical circumstances. In the case of traditions that are strongly divergent from the beliefs and practices of second- and third-century Islam or its canonical memory of origins, one must admit that these are less likely to have been invented by the later community than traditions undergirding the classical Islam of the ʿAbbāsid era. While Hoyland’s implicit critique of modern historiography’s claim to divide truth from fiction is welcome, his rejection of this method of analysis for its failure to yield such objective results is not fully persuasive.
On the basis of these methodological principles, the present study will argue that the witness of certain non-Islamic sources that Muhammad survived to lead the invasion of Palestine preserves what is quite possibly a genuine early Islamic tradition, despite the fact that several recent articles would suggest otherwise. For instance, Hoyland, who generally advocates the value of non-Islamic sources for reconstructing early Islamic history, has somewhat surprisingly taken the opposing view. In his study of Muhammad’s life as reported in Christian writings, Hoyland initially notes the clear witness of these sources to Muhammad’s sustained vitality but then rather strangely concludes that these sources are collectively mistaken in their notice of a later date for Muhammad’s death. Without much explanation at all, he declares the accuracy of the traditional Islamic sources on this matter, despite the fact that his own criteria could seem to favor the reliability of the Christian sources in this case.26 To my knowledge the only other study to address the relationship between the various Christian accounts of the Arab conquests and the Islamic biographies of Muhammad specifically and in any detail is an article entitled “La ‘Sira’ du Prophète Mahomet et les conquêtes des arabes dans le Proche-Orient d’après les sources syriaques,” an article published in the proceedings from a conference on the life of Muhammad some thirty years ago. Unfortunately, its author, Bertold Spuler, not only disregards some of the most important sources, but he rather astonishingly asserts the fundamental harmony of all the sources and completely overlooks their differences concerning Muhammad’s involvement in the Palestinian campaign.27 Finally, we may add to this a report in the popular media that Crone and Cook have allegedly “backed away from” their earlier views concerning the date of Muhammad’s death as expressed in Hagarism, although I have not yet found any evidence of such a retraction in print.28 In fact, to the contrary, Cook has maintained the significance of the non-Islamic sources on this point, writing in the same year as the article in question that “non-Muslim sources written in the following decades [after 632] give only very scrappy information and are subject to problems of their own. One point of interest is that they suggest that Muhammad was still alive when the Muslim expansion outside Arabia began.”29 Even more recently, Crone has similarly written that these sources “convey the impression that he was actually leading the invasions. Mohammad’s death is normally placed in 632, but the possibility that it should be placed two or three years later cannot be completely excluded.”30
In light of the rather negative assessment that this report of Muhammad’s vitality during the Palestinian invasion has received in recent publications, it seems necessary to revisit the question of Muhammad’s death, not so much with the goal of determining when he really died, but with an eye toward whether these non-Islamic sources may in fact preserve an early tradition that was subsequently revised as Islam’s self-image and self-understanding were transformed. This book seeks to determine if Muhammad’s leadership during the invasion of Palestine is something that might have comported with the beliefs of the earliest Muslims, insofar as they can be known, and, likewise, if are there reasons to suspect that there might have been cause to re-remember the end of his life differently at a later point. The larger purpose of this investigation thus lies not in the possibility of adjusting the date of Muhammad’s death by a few years. Instead, this difference in the early sources affords an important opening through which to explore the nature of primitive Islam more broadly. Likewise, this study aims to demonstrate the potential value of non-Islamic sources for reconstructing the history of formative Islam, when these sources are used in a methodologically critical manner and in conjunction with, rather than isolation from, Islamic sources. While others have already made similar demonstrations, including Lawrence Conrad and Hoyland in particular,31 in view of the generally negative reception of Hagarism and its approach within Islamic studies as a whole, it would appear that this point bears repeating.
A related goal of the study is to work toward narrowing the divide that exists between the study of religion and culture in Mediterranean late antiquity and the investigation of Islamic origins, an objective that it shares with much recent scholarship on late antiquity and early Islam.32 In both its methods and its conclusions, this monograph presents a case for interpreting the beginnings of Islam more within the context of the broader late ancient world, rather than according to the more traditional view of Islam’s formation in the relative isolation of the Ḥijāz. By interpreting the rise of Islam in continuity with, rather than separation from, the world of Mediterranean late antiquity, we are sure to gain new perspectives on both.33 Moreover, this study aims to demonstrate the value of studying Islamic origins using the same methods and perspectives that have long been utilized in the investigation of early Christianity and early Judaism. The hermeneutics of suspicion have profoundly affected the modern study of formative Christianity and Judaism, but this skeptical approach has yet to significantly affect the comparatively more sanguine attitudes often displayed by scholars of early Islam. Accordingly this book is aimed not only at scholars of early Islam but also at scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity. It is hoped that by attempting to bridge the disciplines of Christian and Islamic origins methodologically this study might generate further comparative discussion among experts in both fields.
This investigation thus will adopt the more skeptical approach to the sources that is characteristic of the historical-critical study of early Christianity and the historical figure of Jesus. It expects of early Islamic traditions that they meet the same rigorous criteria that scholars of formative Christianity have applied in judging the historicity of traditions contained in early Christian literature. Although this study will treat traditional narratives of Islamic origins with a great deal of suspicion, this will not exceed the skepticism that scholars of religious history bring to bear on similar narratives of Christian origins. It is very important to stress this methodological consistency, particularly in light of the fact that the sīra traditions and their historicity have lately become a sensitive issue in contemporary Islam. While the medieval Islamic tradition was itself rather circumspect regarding the historical authenticity of these traditions, in more recent years, largely in response to the historical-critical study of these traditions in the