The imagined and the historical Muhammad.

• Author: Hagen, Gottfrier

I

Since John Wansbrough, Albrecht Noth, and Uri Rubin introduced the 'literary turn" to the study of the origins and rise of Islam, scholars of the field have found themselves facing a shibboleth of sorts: Has the recognition of the literary character of the source material precluded the possibility of reaching factual truth, or is the dismissal of the Islamic source material unwarranted extremism? How is it possible to extract positive knowledge from the mass of legendary material? Is there a sound methodology to deal with the material, and where does it lead? No matter how individual scholars go about it. these questions require a response before any findings can be assessed appropriately. In the course of modern studies on the beginnings of Islam, different answers have been given, with different reasoning. Fred Donner has summarized the development of approaches as a sequence from a descriptive, positivist attitude represented by the optimism of nineteenth-century Orientalists through the source-criticism of Wellhausen and the tradition-critical work of Goldziher and Schacht to the "skeptical approach." Under this last rubric Donner lists John Wansbrough's work informed by the textual analysis of biblical studies, and that of Crone and Cook, who drew the radical conclusion of these textual studies and abandoned hope of extracting historical information from Islamic sources altogether. (1) Ever since, any serious historical study in this field has to clarify its stance regarding the authenticity and source value of the early Muslim tradition, Qur'an, slra, hadith. and historiography.

II

The necessity of reflection on methodological challenges is not always acknowledged, however. Numerous popular and pious accounts of the life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam continue to offer more or (mostly) less critical rewritings of the central narrative source, Ibn Ishaq. In In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Lessons from the Life of Muhammad, Tariq Ramadan claims to narrate the life of the Prophet in an "academically rigorous" manner, "in regard to classical Islamic sources." (2) There is no bibliography in this volume, but a quick glance at the endnotes reveals that he did not consult any source other than the Qur'an. Ibn Ishaq, and the classical hadith collections. The purpose of the book, however, is not historical, but didactic and paraenetic: "Because Muhammad's life expressed the manifested and experienced essence of Islam's message, getting to know the Prophet is a privileged means of acceding to the spiritual universe of Islam." Interestingly, he also emphasizes that this life story is "devoid of any human tragic dimension" (p. 7). Taking the Qur'anic statement about the purely human character of Muhammad as a starting point, Ramadan attaches all kinds of lessons on values, strictly in line with the requirements of modern life, to the narrative of the Prophet. While insisting on the reality of the Night Journey, he skirts the discussion about its physical character, suggesting instead that the moral lessons to be derived from it are more important (p. 73). Thus, Ramadan's Muhammad can be taken as a prime example of how the mainstream of the Islamic tradition is actualized under the premises of modernity. While his results from the interpretation of individual episodes may differ, his method is not substantially different from that of other Islamic scholars who mine the life of the Prophet for lessons to be learned by modern Muslims. Another scholar, who like Tariq Ramadan has often been hailed in the media as an example of "liberal" Islam, a problematic label on several counts, is Fethullah Gulen, who has also produced a book of lessons to be learned from the life of the Prophet, although he has abandoned the narrative structure in favor of a more thematic approach. (3) Both works indicate to what degree the connection between historical and religious truth claims remains intact among Muslim scholars. As long as religious truth has to be substantiated by historical evidence, any challenge to the source amounts to an undermining of religion itself for the pious, while for the historian piety becomes an obstacle to objective research. Few scholars have drawn the consequences, either by deliberately restricting themselves to the narrative and relying on its own mythical power, like Martin Lings, or by dismissing the material world with which the historian is concerned as irrelevant altogether, like Seyyed Hossein Nasr. (4)

In the modern era, there has not been a shortage of the hagiographical accounts of the life of Muhammad that projected distinctly contemporary ideals onto his persona. (5) One strand in this tradition is the depiction of Muhammad as a military leader, which probably began with Ahmet Refik [Altinay]'s treatise, written when he was an instructor in the Ottoman military academy, and continued with M. Hamidullah's compilation, first published in 1937. (6) The secularizing tendency inherent in these works, which dispenses with the religious and spiritual dimension of Muhammad's life, logically culminates in this history being taken up by non-Muslims. (7) Richard A. Gabriel is a retired U.S. military officer and a prolific military historian, who has also published Genghis Khan's Greatest General, Great Battles of Antiquity, and The Military History of Ancient Israel. Published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2007, Muhammad: Islam's First Great General is entirely derivative in its source base, drawing primarily on standard modern biographies by Watt and Rodinson, in addition to Muhammad Hamidullah's earlier attempt to write Muhammad's life from the viewpoint of military history. It is intended to show that "Muhammad was more than a great field general and tactician, He was a military theorist, organizational reformer, strategic thinker, operational level combat commander, political and military leader, heroic soldier, revolutionary, and inventor of the theory of insurgency and history's first successful practitioner" (p. xix). What follows, however, is an entirely conventional, if not trivial, account of the major battles during the Prophet's lifetime. As a tribute to more sensationalist interests, it does not spare grueling details as reported in the classical sources, such as the death of Hamza and the revenge wrought by Hind bt. 'Utba on his corpse--certainly not a central topic of military history. Yet to draw parallels between Muhammad, as a leader of an insurgency, and the North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap (p. xxiii) also invites, in a book published in 2007, parallels to be drawn between the rise of Islam and the insurgency in Iraq, thus opening the door to all kinds of historically problematic and politically volatile conclusions about a jihadi insurgent essence of Islam.

It is not the political or religious agenda per se, however, that makes these biographies of Muhammad so problematic from a historical point of view. At a more serious academic level--especially in the U.S.--demand for introductory texts on the life of Muhammad continues unabated, due presumably to a persistent belief that Islam can most easily be understood through its origins. The textbooks for general undergraduate classes and an interested broader non-Muslim audience equally tend to be based on secondary literature and to ignore the profound problems of divergent sources and their disputable historicity. Irving Zeitlin is a professor emeritus of sociology; he has no access to sources in Arabic, and no chance of original research. His The Historical Muhammad attempts to elucidate aspects of that history by using sociological theories, including Ibn Khaldun, in conjunction with current primary research in the field. He opens his series of discussions of scholarship with a paraphrase of Donner's summary cited above, and thus seems to indicate his awareness of the foundational problem of sources and source criticism. Alas, he does not draw the consequences: subsequent chapters are more or less obviously centered around the set of seminal essays republished by Uri Rubin, (8) while countless equally critical studies in English, not to mention other languages, are ignored; in his discussion Zeitlin indiscriminately juxtaposes William Muir's arguments with those of Crone and Cook without realizing their methodological incompatibility. Unaware of the complexities of the Islamic tradition, and of its conflictual origins, and informed by sociology's search for clearly distinguishable social groups, Zeitlin reproduces a simplistic picture of late antique Arabian society. Seeking an explanation for what to him is the emergence of a religio-political mass movement, he finds that out of the four basic conditions, widespread discontent, ideology, charismatic leadership, and organizational strategy and tactics (p. 154), practically none was operative in Mecca, but all of them were in Medina. This is hardly a new insight, and it is marred by the absence of any analysis of the message of the "movement," the Qur'an. There is nothing to gain from Zeitlin's book for the specialist, while it is likely to cause confusion among non-specialists as it reverts the discussion back to the state that the work of Buhl, Watt, and Rodinson, to name but a few, had overcome. It is not insignificant that the title The Historical Muhammad appears on a book cover with a miniature from the life of the Prophet taken from one of the most legendary and ahistorical accounts in Islamic literatures, framed by a manipulated text in Arabic characters (in fact, Ottoman Turkish) that the designer obviously did not expect anybody to understand. (9)

All these works start out from, and perpetuate, the illusion that there is actually a significant body of firmly established factual information about the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the origins of Islam, despite the warning of Maxime Rodinson: "'A biography of Mohammed limited only to...