The Biography of Muhammad: The Issue of the Sources.

• Author: Afsaruddin, Asma
• Position: Reviews of Books

The Biography of Muhammad: The Issue of the Sources. Edited by HARALD MOTZKI. Islamic History and Civilization, Studies and Texts, vol. 32. Leiden: BRILL, 2000. Pp. xvi + 330.

This volume of ten essays is the result of a colloquium held at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, in October, 1997, in order to discuss the problem of using the primary Arabic sources at our disposal to reconstruct the life of the prophet of Islam. The editor, Harald Motzki, describes the central dilemma as currently perceived by many modern scholars of Islam: "on the one hand, it is not possible to write a historical biography of the Prophet without being accused of using the sources uncritically, while on the other hand, when using the sources critically, it is simply not possible to write such a biography" (p. xiv). However, as the various essays in this volume show, the issue need not be so glaringly black and white. Critical re-reading of the sources allows us to reassess this situation more optimistically, especially since the project of reconstructing "the historical reality which the sources reflect is an issue which has been scarcely studied in depth and is indeed far from being settied" (p. xvi).

The book is divided into two sections; the first section entitled "The Development of the Stra Tradition," is led off by Uri Rubin's essay "The Life of Muhammad and the Islamic Self-Image." Rubin focuses here on the different versions of a single event from the Prophet's Madman period to trace its "textual history," particularly in terms of what these versions may have to say about the "self-image of the Muslims of the first Islamic century" (p. 3). The event, well known from the stra literature, occurred in 6/627-28 when Muhammad and his Companions were prevented from performing the pilgrimage by the pagan Makkans and were forced to halt at a place called al-Hudaybiyya. The depictions of the consultation scene that ensued between the Prophet and his Companions as to the proper course of action to adopt is rightly read by Rubin as pointing inter alia to the merits ([fada.sup.[contains]]il) of both the Companions and the process of consultation (mashura) for resolving intractable problems. But I think Rubin is off t rack when he reads another version of the Hudaybiyya event as encoding a nationalist discourse. In this version, Miqdad b. al-Aswad assures Muhammad that, unlike the children of Israel, they would not abandon their prophet if they had to go to battle; in this context, Miqdad alludes to Surat al-[Ma.sup.[subset]]ida 5:24, which is understood to refer to the biblical story of spies (Numbers 13- 14). Rubin reads Miqdad's statement as a contraposition of the "bad Israelites" to the "good Arabs," a reading along nationalist or ethnic lines that is anachronistic. The contraposition is more appropriately understood as drawn between those Jews who have done wrong in the past by refusing to come to the aid of their prophet and those Muslims in the present (from the narrator's point of view) who can lay claim to greater righteousness by obeying their prophet. This understanding is reinforced by looking at other versions of the Hudaybiyya event. Ibn Hisham's version of this event (1) mentions that when the Prophet invited th e Arabs and the Bedouin to march with him to Hudaybiyya, some of them demurred. In [Shi.sup.[subset]]iliterature, this noncompliance...