Acknowledgements
| 4 | Muhammad, 91. |
Introduction
| 5 | The precise title of Ibn Isḥāq’s work is not certain, though the most likely candidate is Kitāb al-Maghāzī. Ibn Hishām’s redaction is usually referred to as al-Sīrah al-nabawiyyah (Eng. The Prophetic Life-Story), but this title has little to do with Ibn Isḥāq’s original work. See Horovitz, Earliest Biographies, 80 and n. 93 thereto and Schoeler, Biography, 28–29. |
| 6 | This is not to say, however, that the earliest testimonies are bereft of historical insight; see Hoyland, “The Earliest Christian Writings on Muḥammad,” and Anthony, “Muḥammad, the Keys to Paradise, and the Doctrina Iacobi.” |
| 7 | In the West, scholarship on the historical Muḥammad is inevitably considerably indebted to the tradition of historical Jesus scholarship, a tradition that is now over two centuries old. However, it must be said that historians of early Islam are rarely fluent in the most up-to-date scholarship on the historical Jesus. In the massive literature on the challenges and aims of writing the biography of the historical Jesus, E. P. Sanders’ The Historical Figure of Jesus remains a classic. |
| 8 | Hoyland, “Writing the Biography of the Prophet Muhammad.” |
| 9 | See Chabbi, “La biographie impossible de Mahomet.” In the most recent decade anglophone scholarship has all but abandoned writing traditional, historical biographies in favor of monographs proposing radical new views of Islamic origins. The two most noteworthy monographs on this score are Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, and Powers, Muḥammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men. Germanophone and francophone scholars, on the other hand, have been considerably more active in writing more traditional, historical biographies during the last decade; e.g., see Tilman Nagel’s massive Mohammed: Leben und Legende and Allahs Liebling, and Hichem Djaït’s three-volume history La vie de Muḥammad (originally written in Arabic). Although the full impact of the scholarly reception of Djaït’s work has yet to be seen, a positive evaluation of Djaït’s project can be found in Nicolai Sinai, “Hisham Djait.” By contrast, the response to Nagel’s biography has been rather tepid; e.g., see Hagan, “The Imagined and Historical Muḥammad,” and Schoeler's Biography, 11–13 and “Grundsätzliches zu Tilman Nagels Monographie.” |
| 10 | Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 35–63; Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike, 235–75; Hamdan, “The Second Maṣāḥif Project”; Comerro, La constitution du muṣḥaf de ʿUthmān; Sadeghi and Goudarzi, “Ṣanʿāʾ 1 and the Origins of the Qurʾān.” |
| 11 | An excellent and fluent introduction to hadith as well as the formation of its canon can be found in Brown, Ḥadīth; however, Brown’s treatment of the earliest phases of hadith transmission and collection is a tad tendentious. For an important corrective, see Reinhart, “Juynbolliana,” 436 ff. |
| 12 | Cf. Görke, “The Relationship between Maghāzī and Ḥadīth.” |
| 13 | The reader may find it surprising that the word jihad (Ar. al-jihād) appears only once in the text; see 13.3. |
| 14 | Cf. the list of maghāzī titles gathered in Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 1:887b–888a. |
| 15 | Ibn ʿAsākir, Dimashq, 59:393. |
| 16 | These works include two collections of prophetic traditions, al-Jāmiʿ and Ṣaḥīfat Hammām ibn Munabbih, and ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s exegesis of the Qurʾan, al-Tafsīr; see EI3, “ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī” (H. Motzki). |
| 17 | Boekhoff-van der Voort (“The Kitāb al-maghāzī,” 29–30) recently tabulated the percentage of the materials ʿAbd al-Razzāq derived solely from Maʿmar in the Kitāb al-Maghāzī as 93.9 percent; however, her tabulation is somewhat misleading, as she counts ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s annotations and glosses of Maʿmar’s traditions, which rarely go beyond a sentence or two, as equal to Maʿmar’s fully realized narrations, which stretch on for pages. In fact, all of the narratives derive from Maʿmar except for a short narrative about Abū Bakr (24.3) and two longish narrations that ʿAbd al-Razzāq adds to the end of Maʿmar’s account of the marriage of Fāṭimah (31.2–31.3). |
| 18 | Donner, Narratives, 255–70; Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 15–17, 92–93. |
| 19 | Brown, Ḥadīth, 4 f. |
| 20 | Donner, Narratives, 280 ff. |
| 21 | See al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār, Muwaffaqayyāt, 332–35. |
| 22 |
Cf. Horovitz, Earliest Biographies, 6–11 and esp. n. 30 thereto. The account of Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik
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