Historicity of Muhammad
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Career Views and Perspectives
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The historicity of Muhammad is the subject of the study of Muhammad as a historical figure and critical examination of sources upon which traditional accounts (the Quran, sīrah, hadith especially) are based. Other historical sources that can be investigated include sealed documents, orders, treaty texts, archaeological findings and internal and external correspondence of neighboring states or communities, as well as the discovery of Muhammad's genetic makeup and kinship through his personal belongings and physical remains (hair, beard, etc.) that are among his alleged legacies.
Prophetic biography, known as sīra, along with attributed records of the words, actions, and the silent approval of Muhammad, known as hadith, survive in the historical works of writers from the second and third centuries of the Muslim era (c. 700−1000 CE),[1][2] and give a great deal of information on Muhammad, but the reliability of this information is very much debated in academic circles (hadith studies) due to the gap (oral tradition) between the recorded dates of Muhammad's life and the dates when these events begin to appear in written sources.[3] Islamic tradition traces the lineage of the Islamic prophet Muhammad back to the Adnani branch of the Arabs, through the Hashim family and the Quraysh tribe.[a][6][7][8] And, Muhammad is believed to be descended from Ishmael, the son of Abraham, through the Hashim tribe who are considered prophets in Islam, a biblical figure; however, neither Abraham nor Ishmael's existence has been independently corroborated by historians. Modern historians don't take the Family tree as a fact.[9] In the pre-Islamic (and early Islamic) period,[10] genealogical trees were a product of the oral tradition of the Days of the Arabs, shaped according to social needs and the interests of the listeners.[11] Contemporary historiography unveiled the lack of inner coherence of this genealogical system and demonstrated that it finds insufficient matching evidence; the distinction between Qahtanites and Adnanites is believed to be a product of the Umayyad Age, when the war of factions (al-niza al-hizbi) was raging in the young Islamic Empire.[12]
The general Islamic view is that the Quran has been preserved from the beginning by both writing and memorization, and its testimony is considered beyond doubt. The earliest Muslim source of information for the life of Muhammad, the Quran, gives very little personal information and its historicity is debated.[13][14]
Despite any difficulties with the biographical sources, scholars generally see valuable historical information about Muhammad therein and suggest that what is needed are methods to distinguish the likely information from the unlikely.[15] In practice it has proven difficult determining which parts of the early accounts of Muhammad's life are valuable to modern scholars.[16] However, the majority of classical scholars believe Muhammad existed as a historical figure.[17]
Geography
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There are a relatively small number of contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous non-Muslim sources which attest to the existence of Muhammad and are valuable both in themselves and for comparison with Muslim sources.[14] As in the case of Mecca, these sources cannot be said to support the traditional Islamic narrative; where there is a lack of pre-Islamic sources that mention it as a pilgrimage center in historical sources before 741 here the author places the region in "midway between Ur and Harran" rather than the Hejaz- and lacks pre-Islamic archaeological data.[20][b]
Modern scholarship on Mecca
[edit]Little is known about the early history of Mecca due to a lack of clear sources. The city lies in the hinterland of the middle part of western Arabia of which there are sparse textual or archaeological sources available.[22] This lack of knowledge is in contrast to both the northern and southern areas of western Arabia, specifically the Syro-Palestinian frontier and Yemen, where historians have various sources available such as physical remains of shrines, inscriptions, observations by Greco-Roman authors, and information collected by church historians. The area of Hejaz that surrounds Mecca was characterized by its remote, rocky, and inhospitable nature, supporting only meagre settled populations in scattered oases and occasional stretches of fertile land. The Red Sea coast offered no easily accessible ports and the oasis dwellers and the Bedouins of the region were illiterate.[22]
Possible earlier mentions are not unambiguous. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus writes about Arabia in the 1st century BCE in his work Bibliotheca historica, describing a holy shrine: "And a temple has been set up there, which is very holy and exceedingly revered by all Arabians".[23] Claims have been made this could be a reference to the Ka'bah in Mecca.[24] However, the geographic location Diodorus describes is located in northwest Arabia, around the area of Leuke Kome, within the former Nabataean Kingdom and the Roman province of Arabia Petraea.[25][26]
Ptolemy lists the names of 50 cities in Arabia, one going by the name of Macoraba. There has been speculation since 1646 that this could be a reference to Mecca. Historically, there has been a general consensus in scholarship that Macoraba mentioned by Ptolemy in the 2nd century CE is indeed Mecca, but more recently, this has been questioned.[27][28] Bowersock favors the identity of the former, with his theory being that "Macoraba" is the word "Makkah" followed by the aggrandizing Aramaic adjective rabb (great). The Roman 4th-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus also enumerated many cities of Western Arabia, most of which can be identified. According to Bowersock, he did mention Mecca as "Geapolis" or "Hierapolis", the latter one meaning "holy city" potentially referring to the sanctuary of the Kaaba.[29]
Procopius' 6th century statement that the Ma'add tribe possessed the coast of western Arabia between the Ghassanids and the Himyarites of the south supports the Arabic sources tradition that associates Quraysh as a branch of the Ma'add and Muhammad as a direct descendant of Ma'add ibn Adnan.[30][31]
Islamic sources
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The main Islamic source on Muhammad's life are the Quran and accounts of Muhammad's life based on oral traditions known as sīra and hadith.
Historicity of the Quran
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Islamic narrative
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According to traditional Islamic scholarship, all of the Quran was written down by Muhammad's companions while he was alive (during CE 610–632[32]), but it was primarily an orally related document. Following the death of Muhammad the Quran ceased to be revealed, and companions who had memorized the Quran began to die off (particularly after the Battle of Yamama in 633).[33] Worried that parts of the Quran might be irretrievably lost, senior companion Umar urged Caliph Abu Bakr to order the collection of the pieces of the Quran which had hitherto been scattered among "palm-leaf stalks, thin white stones, ... [and] men who knew it by heart, ..."[34] and put them together.[33][35] Under Caliph Uthman, a committee of five copied the scraps into a single volume, "monitoring the text as they went", resolving disagreements about verses, tracking down a lost verse.[36] This muṣḥaf – that became known as the "Uthmanic codex" – was finished around 650 CE,[37][38] whereupon Uthman issued an order for all other existing personal and individual copies and dialects of the Quran (known as Ahruf) to be burnt.[39][40]
Modern scholarship on the Quran
[edit]As to the historicity of the Quran itself, some scholars also disagree. Some argue "the Quran is convincingly the words of Muhammad" (F.E. Peters),[41] with the parchment of an early copy of Quran – the Birmingham manuscript, whose text differs only slightly to modern versions – being dated to roughly around the lifetime of Muhammad.[42] Some Western scholars,[43] however, question the accuracy of some of the Quran's historical accounts and whether the holy book existed in any form before the last decade of the seventh century (Patricia Crone and Michael Cook);[44] and/or argue it is a "cocktail of texts", some of which may have been existent a hundred years before Muhammad, that evolved (Gerd R. Puin),[44][45][46] or was redacted (J. Wansbrough),[47][48] to form the Quran. A group of researchers explores the irregularities and repetitions in the Quranic text in a way that refutes the traditional claim that it was preserved by memorization alongside writing. According to them, an oral period shaped the Quran as a text and order, and the repetitions and irregularities mentioned were remnants of this period.[49]
It is also possible that the content of the Quran itself may provide data regarding the date and probably nearby geography of writing of the text. Sources based on some archaeological data give the construction date of Masjid al-Haram, an architectural work mentioned 16 times in the Quran, as 78 AH[50] an additional finding that sheds light on the evolutionary history of the Quranic texts mentioned,[51] which is known to continue even during the time of Hajjaj,[52][53] in a similar situation that can be seen with al-Aksa, though different suggestions have been put forward to explain.[c] These structures, -expected to be somewhere near Muhammad-[d] which were placed in cities like Mecca and Jerusalem, which are thousands of kilometers apart today, with interpretations based on narrations and miracles, were only a night walk away according to the outward and literal meaning of the verse.Surah Al-Isra 17:1
Muhammad in the Quran
[edit]The Quran primarily addresses a single "Messenger of God," Muhammad. Unlike the hundreds of references in the Quran to the stories of prophets such as Moses and Jesus, the Quran provides very little information about Muhammad himself,[60][61] his companions,[62] or his contemporaries. The individuals to whom the expressions used in Quranic polemics belong and the contexts in which they were used are merely notes made in commentaries written in later centuries. An exception is his slave/adopted son Zayd, whose name is mentioned in the verses (Al-Aḥzāb;37) in the context of his -divorced- wife being taken into Muhammad's marriages.
Probably the clearest biographical account of Muhammad in the Quran is the brief mention of his followers' settlement in Yathrib after their expulsion by the Quraysh, and of military encounters such as the Muslim victory at Badr.[62]
Modern scholars differ in their assessment of the Quran as a historical source about Muhammad's life. According to the Encyclopedia of Islam, the "Qur'an responds constantly and often candidly to Muhammad's changing historical circumstances and contains a wealth of hidden data that are relevant to the task of the quest for the historical Muhammad."[13] In contrast, Solomon A. Nigosian writes that the Quran tells us very little about the life of Muhammad.[14] Unlike the Bible's narratives of the life of Moses or Jesus, Michael Cook notes that
while the Koran tells many stories after its fashion, that of Muhammad is not among them. There are references to events in his life, but they are only references, not narratives. In addition, the book is not given to mentioning names in the context of its own time. Muhammad himself is named four times, and a couple of his contemporaries once each ... and for this reason it is almost impossible to relate the scripture to his life without going outside it.[63]
Traditions
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