The Life of Muhammad As Viewed by the Early Muslims
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STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND EARLY ISLAM 5 THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER THE LIFE OF MUHAMMAD AS VIEWED BY THE EARLY MUSLIMS A T e x t u a l A n a l y s i s STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND EARLY ISLAM 5 THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER THE LIFE OF MUHAMMAD AS VIEWED BY THE EARLY MUSLIMS A T e x t u a l A n a l y s i s U R I R U B IN THE DARWIN PRESS, INC. PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 1995 Copyright © 1995 by THE DARWIN PRESS, INC., Princeton, NJ 08543. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sys tem, or transmitted, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rubin, Uri, 1944-. The eye of the beholder : the life of Muhammad as viewed by the early Muslims : a textual analysis / Uri Rubin. p. cm. - (Studies in late antiquity and early Islam : 5) Includes bibliographical references (to p. ) and index. ISBN 0-87850-110-X : $27.50 1. Muhammad, Prophet, d. 632-Biography-History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. BP75.3.R83 1995 297’.63-dc20 94-49175 CIP The paper in this book is acid-free neutral pH stock and meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Printed in the United States of America C o n te n ts Preface ................................................................................................................. ix Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1 The Sources ..........................................................................................................5 Part I: Attestation 1. The Biblical Annunciation....................................................................... 21 2. The Arabian Annunciation....................................................................... 44 Part II: Preparation 3. Initiation: the Opening of Muhammad's Breast..................................... 59 4. Guidance: from Polytheism to Monotheism........................................... 76 Part III: Revelation 5. The Khadija-Waraqa Story ............................................................ 103 6. The Lapse of Revelation (Fatrat al-wahy) ....................................113 Part IV: Persecution 7. Declaration: the ‘Ashira Scene................................................................ 127 8. The Reaction of Abu Lahab .....................................................................139 9. The Reaction of Abu Talib ............................................................ 149 10. Isolation: the Satanic V erses................................................................ 156 Part V: Salvation 11. The ‘Aqaba M eetings ...................................................................169 Epilogue 12. The Chronology of Muhammad's L ife ............................................... 189 Conclusions 13. General Summary................................................................................. 217 14. Asbab al-nuzul..................................................................................... 226 15. The Evidence of the Isnads................................................................. 234 v iii Bibliography of Works Cited ...................................................................261 General Index ...................................................................................................271 \ Index of Quranic References......................................................................287 Index of Biblical References......................................................................289 P r e fa c e ALL PARTS o f THIS b o o k are published here for the first time. A preliminary version of Chapter 4 was read in the Sixth Colloquium “From Jahiliyya to Is lam”, held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1993. The first draft of Chapter 11 was part of a paper I read in the Colloquium on Hadith and Histori ography, held in Oxford in 1988. I have benefited much from the notes and comments of the participants in these two conferences. An excellent opportunity for reviewing and improving on various aspects of my findings was given to me during discussions with my students at Tel Aviv University over the past few years. Special thanks are due to Dr. Lawrence I. Conrad, Co-Director of the Late Antiquity and Early Islam project, for his painstaking editorial work on sev eral drafts of this book, as well as for his corrections of style, and invaluable suggestions concerning the book's final form and contents. I am particularly grateful to him for talking me into adding a summary (Chapter 13) which—to use his words—would serve “to focus and draw together all the various trends of thought and argument in the book.” * * * The very nature of the source materials, and what I have sought to derive from them, makes it inevitable that this book will be full of Arabic personal names and terms. While this will pose no difficulty for those conversant with early Is lamic studies, for students and colleagues in other fields it may prove daunting. This very common problem is of course an obstacle to communication across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and I have tried to take it into account here. As a further aid, persons and terms are briefly identified in the Index. The translation of Quranic verses throughout the book is my own, drawing oc casionally on Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (Oxford, 1964). The numbering of kitabs (“Books”) and babs (“Chapters”) in h a d ith compilations arranged by topics (musannaf) are given in parentheses after the indication of the volume and page; e.g. Bukhari, Sahih, IV, 225 (61:17). ix Introduction THIS BOOK is ABOUT TEXTS, and the texts are about Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. The texts—found in the earliest Islamic sources which have come down to us— are studied in this book for the sake of the stories recorded in them, not for the sake of the events described in these stories. The question “what really happened” in Muhammad's times is not the one asked in this book, which instead is concerned with the manner in which the texts tell the story of Muhammad's life, and is aimed to discover how the various evolving versions of this story tell us about the image of the Prophet as perceived by the believers among whom these texts were created and circulated. Many Islamicists who have already studied the story of Muhammad's life have focussed their attention not only on the story itself, but also and mainly on the historical events which this story is supposed to record; they have conducted their research on the story with a view to revealing what the Prophet was “really” like, and what his enterprise “actually” was. They have noticed the existence of tendentious elaborations and legendary inventions in the early Islamic biographies of the Prophet, but have always regarded them as a secondary element, distinct from what they have considered to be the “early” and most “authentic” and “human” presentation of Muhammad. They have believed that the “genuine” display of Muhammad could and should be distinguished from the “later” legendary and tendentious one. This conviction is evident to various degrees of intensity in the studies of many leading Islamicists. Already Ignaz Goldziher surveyed in some detail the legendary elements which found their way into the biographies of Muhammad.1 In his view, these elements were only produced after the popular veneration of saints had already developed during the first decades of Islam. Originally, the Prophet was per ceived as an ordinary human being; his legendary image was only established as a later development in contrast to the initial Islamic concepts. To use Goldzi- her's own words: “The power of ijma‘ here scored one of its biggest triumphs in the whole system of Islam, insofar as the belief of the people succeeded in penetrating into the canonical conception of the Prophet and, so to speak, forc ing it to make him into a fortune-teller, worker of miracles, and magician.”2 1 Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies (London, 1967-71), II, 255-62 (“Veneration of Saints in Islam”). 2Ibid., II, 261. 1 2 Introduction A similar approach was adopted by Josef Horovitz, who tried to establish the earliest possible date for the “beginning” of legendary elaborations in the bi ography of the Prophet. This implies that for him too, the legendary presenta tion is a secondary—albeit early—element in the traditions about the prophet Muhammad.3 Tor Andrae, in his Die Person Muhammeds in Lehre und Glauben seiner Gemeinde,4 surveys the views of later Islamic theologians and their treatment of the Prophet as a subject of veneration. He too treats the legendary image of Muhammad as a product of later development which deviated considerably from the earliest conception of the Prophet He believed he could distinguish between the legendary and the real Prophet, and in another book he tried to understand how Muhammad really thought and acted. The latter is entitled Mohammed, sein Leben und sein Glaube.5 Rudolf Sellheim has more recently published a thorough literary study of the early biography of the Prophet composed by Ibn Ishaq (d. AH 150).6 Here the discrimination between the real and fabricated is very clear-cut Sellheim is able to detect three major stages in the literary development