These changing circumstances can persuasively explain the existence of an early tradition of Muhammad’s leadership during his followers’ invasion of Palestine as well as its eventual replacement. One would expect that a religious movement driven by an urgent eschatology focused on Jerusalem, which earliest Islam appears to have been, would have originally wanted to remember its founding prophet as leading the faithful into the Promised Land to meet the Final Judgment. Even if Muhammad never actually made it to the Holy Land, one can well imagine that his early followers would have come to remember their early history as such. Yet once the focus of Islamic devotion turned to Mecca and Medina, a new memory of Muhammad’s quietus would be required, one that joined the fulfillment of his career to the newly consecrated landscape of the Ḥijāz: just such an account one finds in the canonical Islamic narratives of Muhammad’s death.
The similarity of this hypothesis to the solution proposed by the authors of Hagarism certainly should not be missed. As the eschatological hopes of the early Believers went unfulfilled, Jerusalem and the Holy Land lost much of their significance, eventually to be replaced by the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. Consequently, Crone and Cook conclude that “the Prophet was disengaged from the original Palestinian venture by a chronological revision whereby he died two years before the invasion began.”48 While certain other facets of Hagarism’s reconstruction of Islamic origins may now seem somewhat dubious, such as its proposal concerning an early Islamic messianism, the identification of earliest Islam as an eschatological movement focused on Jerusalem and the Holy Land remains persuasive and has been validated by much subsequent research. As this study argues, the reports indicating Muhammad’s leadership during the Near Eastern conquests first identified by Hagarism most likely reflect an early Islamic tradition that was eventually abandoned: the information is attested by a wide range of high-quality sources, and the tradition’s early acceptance as well as its eventual rejection both comport with certain major changes in the development of primitive Islam.
Finally, while some scholars of Islam might protest that such an approach merely perpetuates the sins of earlier Orientalist scholarship, I would argue that such accusations are neither very helpful nor warranted. To be sure, the manner in which we choose to represent other cultures, and particularly those cultures that have been victims of Western colonization and aggression, demands serious and constant reflection.49 Out of such concerns, many scholars from both the Islamic world and the West have proposed that the academic study of Islam must accordingly respect Islamic truth claims regarding Islam’s most authoritative traditions, the Qurʾān and the Sunna, and refrain from subjecting them to historical criticism. To do otherwise, some would maintain, is to commit what essentially amounts to an act of intellectual colonialism.50 Although I deeply sympathize with the concerns that give rise to this position, it simply does not present an adequate solution in my view, at least not from the vantage of the academic discipline of religious studies.51 Insofar as the approach taken in this study merely applies methods and perspectives of analysis to formative Islam that have now for well over a century been utilized in the study of Jewish and Christian origins, one must recognize just how “othering” it is to insist that Islam—and it alone—should be shielded from similar study. One thereby runs the risk of presenting the Islamic tradition in comparison as something fragile and pristine, whose unique perspective is somehow harmed by the application of modern criticism. Thus, while the broader political context identified by Edward Said as well as many others certainly cannot be simply ignored, I would argue that it is at the same time essential, for both intellectual and pedagogical reasons, to conduct investigations into the earliest history of Islam, as Chase Robinson recommends, “committed to the idea that the history made by Muslims is comparable to that made by non-Muslims.”52
CHAPTER 1
“A Prophet Has Appeared, Coming with the Saracens”
Muhammad’s Leadership during the Conquest of Palestine According to Seventh- and Eighth-Century Sources
At least eleven sources from the seventh and eighth centuries indicate in varied fashion that Muhammad was still alive at the time of the Palestinian conquest, leading his followers into the Holy Land some two to three years after he is supposed to have died in Medina according to traditional Islamic accounts. As will be seen, not all of these witnesses attest to Muhammad’s leadership with the same detail: some are quite specific in describing his involvement in the campaign itself, while others merely note his continued leadership of the “Saracens” at this time. When taken collectively, however, their witness to a tradition that Muhammad was alive at the time of the Near Eastern conquests and continuing to lead his followers seems unmistakable. The unanimity of these sources, as well as the failure of any source to contradict this tradition prior to the emergence of the first Islamic biographies of Muhammad beginning in the mid-eighth century, speaks highly in their favor. In fact, no source outside the Islamic tradition “accurately” reports Muhammad’s death in Medina before the invasion of Palestine until the early ninth-century Chronicle of Theophanes, a text that shows evidence of direct influence from the early Islamic historical tradition on this point as well as others.
It would appear that this tradition of Muhammad’s continued vitality and leadership during the campaign in Palestine circulated widely in the seventh- and eighth-century Near East. Although the majority of the relevant sources are of Christian origin, collectively they reflect the religious diversity of the early medieval Near East, including witnesses from each of the major Christian communities as well as a Jewish, a Samaritan, and even an Islamic witness to this discordant tradition. This confessional diversity is particularly significant, insofar as it demonstrates the relative independence of these accounts and the diffusion of this information across both geographic distance and sectarian boundaries. Indeed, the multiple independent attestation of this tradition in a variety of different sources demands that we take seriously the possibility that these eleven sources bear witness to a very early tradition about Muhammad. Presumably, it was a tradition coming from the early Muslims themselves, since it seems highly improbable that all of these sources would have so consistently stumbled into the exact same error concerning the end of Muhammad’s life. If this deviant report arose simply through misunderstanding, one would accordingly expect that at least some sources would have managed to understand these events “correctly.” At the very least, this evidence seems to indicate that a tradition of Muhammad’s death at Medina before the invasion of Palestine had not yet become clearly established prior to the beginnings of the second Islamic century.
It should again be made clear from the outset, however, that the existence of this tradition invites much more than an opportunity simply to extend the longevity of Muhammad by a mere two or three years, and the discrepancy of the source materials on this point instead calls for some sort of explanation. Why are there very different memories concerning Muhammad’s relation to the expansion of his religious movement outside of Arabia and his followers’ invasion of Roman territory in Syro-Palestine? Admittedly, one cannot entirely exclude the possibility that the difference is simply the result of a collective misunderstanding, but as this chapter will argue, the nature of the sources in question renders this solution improbable. The fact that no source, Islamic or non-Islamic, from the first Islamic century locates Muhammad’s death before the Near Eastern invasions indicates that it is not simply a matter of having guessed incorrectly. Possibly the esteem expressed for Muhammad by members of this new religious movement may have led each of these non-Islamic writers to the false assumption that he remained in charge for a few years longer than had actually been the case. Such a scenario is certainly not inconceivable, but it would imply that a profound and prolonged ignorance regarding the basic “facts” about Islam’s founding prophet remained pervasive in the various non-Islamic religious communities of the seventh and early eighth centuries. Indeed, if the earliest Muslims had clearly recalled from the start that Muhammad died two years before their invasion of Syria and Palestine, it is hard to imagine that not a single one of