Death of prophet muhammad pdf

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 formative 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 commonly thought. Although a first reading of this opening chapter might convince 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 Near1 S. Shoemaker’s first book is entitled Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford University Press, Oxford-New-York, 2002). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2�16 | doi 10.1163/19585705-12341344 318 Revue des Livres / Book Reviews 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 unquestionable 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 translating 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 discussed 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 Revue des Livres / Book Reviews 319 one hand more a reflection of the way Muslims imagined their Prophet’s life over a century after his death rather than an historical account, and on the other that the way he is pictured bears the “influence of prophetic models from the biblical tradition” (p. 114). Shoemaker indicates that Muḥammad’s life as depicted in the Sīra is directly based on that of Moses (he refers to U. Rubin’s The Eye of the Beholder). One could also add that some episodes of his life are modeled on Isaiah’s narration in the Old Testament. For example, the story of Muḥammad’s first revelation which starts by “[The angel] Gabriel came to me and said: ‘Proclaim!’ (iqrāʾ). I answered: ‘What shall I proclaim?’ (mā aqraʾ)” is clearly based on Isaiah 40, 6: “The voice said: ‘Proclaim!’ (qerā). And he said: ‘What shall I proclaim?’ (māh ēqerā)”. Notwithstanding these remarks, the author undertakes the task of examining the way in which this text as well as others (al-Zuhrī’s accounts cited in ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s Muṣannaf, in Ibn Saʿd’s Ṭabaqāt, etc.) portray Muḥammad’s death. Although what follows is of great interest, especially concerning variant traditions regarding the Prophet’s age and year of death (varying from 60 years old to 65) which are put in parallel with epigraphic material (pp. 114-5), it is regrettable that Shoemaker has entirely dismissed the whole Shia corpus of ḥadīṯ. By only focusing on the Sunni texts, the author is perpetuating an unfortunate shortcoming of Western Islamic studies, which from its genesis has had a strong tendency to either dismiss Shia material as being the production of ‘heretics’ or altogether ignore them. This is regrettable as some very ancient Shia sources such as the Kitāb Sulaym b. Qays—otherwise known as the Kitāb al-Saqīfa—which was partly written during the first decades of the 2nd/8th century, offers some extremely early, different and interesting insights into the death of Muḥammad. Indeed, its second chapter is entirely devoted to that very subject and therein we learn for example that there was a plot to prevent the Prophet from writing his last will and that he was ultimately poisoned.4 The third chapter is to my sense the most accomplished and insightful of the book. It tackles the too-often neglected although critical issue of the place and importance of imminent eschatology in early Islam and by doing so reopens an old and unjustly forgotten file dating back to the beginnings of Western studies of Islam initiated by scholars such as Paul Casanova or Snouck Hurgronje5 4 See Amir-Moezzi, Le Coran silencieux, pp 27-61 (and specifically p. 39 footnote 43). On the subject of Muḥammad’s death as seen through both Sunni and Shia sources, see Hela Ouardi, Les derniers jours de Muhammad (Albin Michel, Paris, 2016). 5 Paul Casanova has published his Mohammed et la fin du monde. Étude critique sur l’islam primitif in 1911 (Paul Geuthner, Paris) ; Snouk Hurgronje, his Mohammedanism; lectures on its Studia Islamica 111 (2016) 297-323 320 Revue des Livres / Book Reviews (pp. 120-4); Shoemaker opposes this first small group of Islamic scholars to a large number of T. Nöldeke’s followers who ignored the eschatological dimension of the Qurʾān to focus on Muḥammad as a social reformer for example. In order to do so, Shoemaker turns to the Qurʾān—a book containing, in part, Muḥammad’s primitive teachings—in a refreshing way: by using the methods of Biblical criticism which for instance imply trying to find the Sitz im Leben of its various pericopes to determine to which period they go back to (pp. 136-8). The author rightly abandons the traditional dichotomy of considering surahs to be either Meccan or Medinan and instead states that the eschatological passages are surely ancient and reflect a primitive stage in Muḥammad’s movement (p. 160). He then suggests an interesting quadripartite chronology to account for the evolution of the Qurʾānic eschatological discourse which I briefly summarize hereafter: 1. 2. 3. 4. The Qurʾān’s oldest verses discuss an imminent End of the world, insinuating that it should have happened during Muḥammad’s lifetime such as in Q 21, 1; in Q 16, 1 or in Q 18, 31-44—the latter two passages finding close parallels in Mark 1, 15 and Luke 12, 13-21 respectively6—, speaking of astronomical signs to come or having already happened which are portents of the End, and answering those who do not believe in the Hour (see Q 37, 170-9 for instance). The Qurʾān then slightly changes its discourse by refusing to give a definite answer as to when exactly the Hour will come, stating that only God knows its time (see Q 7, 187 and Q 31, 34 for example), which is once again close to a passage of the New Testament like Mathew 24, 36 in which it is said that only God knows when the Kingdom will come. In order to justify that the End has not yet come, later additions were made to the final version of the Qurʾān stating that there is a considerable difference between terrestrial and celestial time (see Q 22, 47), a technique also used in the Christian tradition. Finally, Shoemaker suggests seeing another set of additions to the Qurʾān which consists of the a posteriori introduction of the words laʿalla and ʿasā an into the ‘canonical’ text. When added to the beginning of a verse which would primitively have declared that “the Hour is nigh” in accordance to its earliest imminent eschatology, it introduces a doubt, origin, its religious and political growth and its prime state in 1916 (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York / London). 6 For a recent closer look at some interesting parallels between the Qurʾān (as well as its eschatology) and the New Testament (in Aramaic), see Emran Iqbal El-Badawi, The Qurʾān and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions (Routledge, London and New York, 2014). Studia Islamica 111 (2016) 297-323 Revue des Livres / Book Reviews 321 deviating the certainty of imminence towards a supposition: “perhaps the Hour is nigh” (Q 33, 63). It is certainly a very compelling way to consider the development of the Qurʾānic discourse on eschatology going from a primitive stage during Muḥammad lifetime when his movement was “driven if not even defined by imminent eschatological belief” (p. 188) to a time during the edition of the Qurʾān (most certainly under ʿAbd al-Malik’s reign, as Shoemaker notes) when, because of the Prophet’s death occurring before the coming of the Hour, changes were made to what will become the Qurʾānic text ne varietur. The implications of this have great importance on both the transformation of an eschatological religious movement which does not see the End and has to rethink the nature of its movement after the death of its Prophet, and on the history of the Qurʾānic text. Assuredly, both need to be seriously dealt with. However promising these remarks on the textual evolutions may be, they do fail to explain why for example the n°1 category of verses were left as such in the Qurʾān and were unaffected either by redactions or by n°4 type insertions. The fourth and final chapter wishes to investigate just what the nature of Muḥammad’s primitive religious movement was. Shoemaker does that in two parts. The first consists of focusing on its Jewish components as related by early non-Muslim sources (such as Sebeos’ Chronicle or The Secrets of Rabbi Shimʿōn b. Yoḥai which speaks of Muḥammad’s community of Believers or muʾminūn in Arabic as “a type of Jewish messianic movement”) and Muslim ones (the ‘Constitution of Medina’ which includes Jewish groups into Muḥammad’s eschatological community), and then of reviewing its Christian aspects. The author accomplishes the latter task by noticing that the Qurʾān generally speaks of Christians in a very positive manner although it does also contain some resolutely anti-Trinitarian passages, which he considers to be later additions dating back to the Marwanide era. Shoemaker also comes back to some 7th century Ad Christian sources to point out that they do not show traces of polemic discourse aimed at these ‘Hagarenes’, that they speak of them in a positive manner and that they even mention that people who wished to join the Believers’ movement could keep their faith. All of these elements lead the author to describe Muḥammad’s primitive movement as “non confessional” (or alternatively “inter-confessional”, p. 203), “nonsectarian” (p. 199) and “ecumenical” (p. 205). These qualifiers and the ideas behind them, partly inherited from Fred Donner’s writings and especially his Muhammad and the Believers7 which Shoemaker cites very frequently, are 7 Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers. At the Origins of Islam (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2010). Studia Islamica 111 (2016) 297-323 322 Revue des Livres / Book Reviews problematic. Among other reasons which cannot be extensively discussed here, thinking of this movement of Believers as “ecumenical” is problematic because it would de facto imply that it is a monolithic and centralized one, which is by no means a given fact, and because the Qurʾān with all its polemics (mainly against Jews) hardly qualifies as an ecumenical text.8 Furthermore, Shoemaker’s dichotomy (Jews/Christians) unfortunately dismisses other possible components of the early movement and notably the presence of Judeo-Christians. The second part makes a more convincing case in showing that Jerusalem, the apocalyptic city par excellence, was the prime focus of the young Believers’ movement, not as part of the expansion of Islam (an obvious anachronism) but to deliver it from the hands of the Byzantines and to await the Last Judgment there. Shoemaker once more turns to Sebeos to show that the Holy Land’s liberation was thought to be at the center of Muḥammad’s message, before looking into the Qurʾān from which Jerusalem is conspicuously absent (pp. 217-19). Because of that simple fact, the author’s arguments are weaker here and although seeing Q 2, 114 as a reference to the ruins of Jerusalem’s Temple is tempting, it does not constitute solid evidence. I would have a tendency to view Jerusalem’s absence from the Qurʾān—a city of obvious purport in Early Islam (pp. 221-34)—as an inversely telling sign of its primal importance (as a comparison, none of Muḥammad’s contemporaries—family, friends or foes— are cited in the Qurʾān with the exception of a certain Zayd whose importance is very slim, not to say inexistent in later Islam). Shoemaker concludes by stating that the sacred geography’s transfer from Jerusalem to Mecca and Medina, which possibly happened during ʿAbd alMalik’s caliphate, are revealing of a desire to show an original and independent religious identity: “The Hour’s prolonged deferral transformed the apocalyptic faith of the early Believers into a monotheist sect that transposed the sacred history of its Jewish and Christian antecedents onto the new landscape of the Ḥijāz” (p. 251). Regrettably, in his demonstration on the centrality of Jerusalem in the early Believers movement’s ideology, and although he does mention the Dome of the Rock (and puts it in relation with the Jerusalem Temple) (pp. 233-6), the author not once refers to his own brilliant article “Christmas in the Qurʾān: The Qurʾānic Account of Jesus’ Nativity and Palestinian Local Tradition” ( Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 28 (2003), pp. 11-39). This is perhaps 8 For a critic of considering Muḥammad’s early movement as “ecumenical” see Patricia Crone, “Among the Believers”, Tablet (2010), accessed at http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-newsand-politics/42023/among-the-believers on May 26th 2016. Studia Islamica 111 (2016) 297-323 Revue des Livres / Book Reviews 323 because this article convincingly discusses the fact that the Dome of the Rock’s architectural model was the 5th century Ad Kathisma Church located halfway between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and not the Jerusalem Temple. Stephen Shoemaker’s The Death of a Prophet is a highly recommendable read for both novices who will find a refreshing overview of Western debates regarding the beginnings of Islam as well as many interesting leads to further investigate, and for more advanced scholars of Islam who can only benefit from the stimulating debates offered by the author’s hypotheses and methodology. Despite some of its shortcomings mentioned in the course of this review, Shoemaker’s study is successful in presenting a believable canvas for how the Believer’s movement centered around the belief in one God and in the imminent End of time became an institutionalized imperial religion several decades after Prophet Muḥammad’s death and what the implications of this are. Among the most fascinating and promising of them is the question of the Qurʾān’s formation. An eschatological movement like that of the Believers’ who were waiting to see the Final Judgment in a very near future would have had no time and no need in forming a lasting fixed book. It is only when the End didn’t come during Muḥammad’s lifetime and that the movement’s nature consequently had to be rethought that a sacred Book was compiled. The nature and raison d’être of its components should then be thoroughly reconsidered in light of the historical context of their emergence (dismissing the Meccan/Medinan bipartition to adopt a more critical division which allows to speak not only of pericopes due to Muḥammad but also of pre- and post-Muḥammad), and to do so by using and developing the methodology put forward in the third chapter (not only determining the Sitz im Leben of these texts but also their Sitz im Buch for instance). Paul Neuenkirchen Studia Islamica 111 (2016) 297-323