317 Stephen J. Shoemaker Before Going Into the Details of The

Revue des Livres/Book Reviews 317

Stephen J. Shoemaker The Death of a Prophet. The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam, University of Pennsylvania Press, Pennsylvanie, 2012.

Before going into the details of the monograph under review, it is useful to say that its author, Stephen Shoemaker, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon, is not a specialist of Islamic studies but one of the history of ancient Christianity in general and of early traditions of the Virgin Mary in particular.1 This is a relevant piece of information since Shoemaker uses a strong critical methodology inherited from Biblical criticism which is very rarely used in the field of Islamic studies. It is then important to underline the fact that from the very start, The Death of a Prophet explicitly follows the trail of another study: Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s famous 1977 Hagarism which for the first time set out to shed light on the beginnings of Islam through the use of contemporary non-Muslim sources. Although Hagarism was indeed offering a fresh view into the forma- tive period of Islam, one of its main shortcomings, as has been noted many times (p. 1), is that Crone and Cook weren’t critical enough of the non-Muslim sources that they were using. This is where Shoemaker picks up as he wishes to reopen his predecessors’ investigation by individually analyzing and evaluating the three sources used in Hagarism which speak of Prophet Muḥammad—who is traditionally said to have died in 632 Ad—as being alive during the conquest of Palestine in 634 Ad. To these early documents, the author adds eight other ancient sources. The Death of a Prophet’s first chapter thus aims at critically examining all of these, especially by relying on Robert G. Hoyland’s Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (New-Jersey, 1997) which translates and comments most of them. Shoemaker insists on the fact that these documents are independent one from another, which means that they do not have a common source. The author wants to demonstrate that several texts which are older than the Muslim Tradition (i.e. the Sīra and ḥadīṯ) and do not form part of a “sacred history” preserve an early memory of the Prophet being alive later than what is com- monly thought. Although a first reading of this opening chapter might con- vince one that there did exist an early tradition of Muḥammad dying in 634 Ad which was later erased from canonical sources, a closer examination will certainly bring more doubts and confusion. Half of the documents reviewed do not explicitly speak of the Prophet partaking in the conquest of the Near-

1 S. Shoemaker’s first book is entitled Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford University Press, Oxford-New-York, 2002).

East. For instance, the first document, the Doctrina Iacobi (634 Ad), only states that “A prophet has appeared, coming with the Saracens . . .”, while the Khuzistan Chronicle (ca. 660) has the following line: “And their [i.e. the sons of Ishmael] leader was Muḥammad [. . .] They also went to the land of the Byzantines . . .”. Moreover, the four most ancient sources—all going back to the 7th century Ad—are extremely laconic and obscure on this subject. It then seems to me that these texts do not qualify as being conclusive in demonstrating that it was Muḥammad in person, who led the conquest of the Near-East, or even that he was still alive at that time. It is one thing to state that the Arabs—whose leader was Muḥammad—marched on to Palestine, and it is another to write that Muḥammad was there himself. However, the unquestion- able importance of some of these very early documents as well as some others resides elsewhere, namely in the eschatological way they portray the new movement led by Muḥammad. Thus, the first source speaks of the Saracens’ prophet who “is preaching the arrival of the anointed one who is to come, the Messiah” and the second one portrays Muḥammad “as the fulfillment of Jewish messianic hopes” (p. 28). To this, one could add a passage of John bar Penkaye’s Rēš Mellē (ca. 686-7 Ad) which is briefly mentioned by Shoemaker (p. 211), and which speaks of Muḥammad as being the “sons of Hagar’s” (bnay Hagar) or Hagarenes’ “guide” (mhadyōnō).2 It is worth mentioning that instead of trans- lating this Syriac word as merely a “guide”, one can wonder if what we have here is not a calque of the Arabic word mahdī as meaning the “eschatological Savior” who is expected to come at the end of time.3 If this were the case, then we could have a very ancient attestation that Muḥammad was considered by some to be this very Savior during his lifetime. The second chapter focuses on the problematic of using Muslim traditional sources—which are all posterior to the first century of the Hijra—to shed light on the life of Muḥammad. Although this topic is not new and has been dis- cussed more or less extensively in previous studies, Shoemaker is successful in exposing in a clear manner an otherwise complex Western scholarly debate over the authenticity of ḥadīṯ material and their isnād-s (pp. 80-90). Shoemaker then insists on the fact that Ibn Hišām’s (d. 218/833) Sīra, for instance, is on the

2 Alphonse Mingana, Sources Syriaques—Volume I (Otto Harrassowitz, Leipzig, 1908), p. 146 (Syriac text); Hoyland, Seeing Islam, p. 197 and id., “The Earliest Christian Writings on Muḥammad: An Appraisal”, in Harald Motzkie ed., The Biography of Muḥammad. The Issue of the Sources (Brill, Leiden-Boston-Köln, 2000), p. 284. 3 In Twelver Shia Islam, al-Mahdī is the surname given to the twelfth and last Imam, Muḥammad b. Ḥasan al- ʿAskarī, who is believed to have gone into a Major Occultation around 329/941 and will only come back at the end of time.

Studia Islamica 111 (2016) 297-323