The Life of Muhammad: Al-Waqidi's Kitab al-Maghazi.

• Author: Lecker, Michael
• Position: Book review

The Life of Muhammad: Al-Wagidi's Kitab al-Maghazi. Edited by RIZWI FAIZER. Routledge Studies in Classical Islam. Abingdon. UK: ROUTLEDGE, 2010. Pp. xx + 580. [pounds sterling]110.

Al-Waqidi's Kitab al-Maghazi or "The Book of the Battles of the Prophet Muhammad" is a major resource for the study of Muhammad's life and time. It is now presented to the English reader in a handsome garb as part of the Routledge Studies in Classical Islam series.

The title The Life of Muhammad is somewhat misleading because much of what was going on in Mecca and Medina during Muhammad's time was not of interest to the medieval scholars who concerned themselves with Muhammad's biography and had their own limitations, viewpoints, and agendas. Al-Waqidi and his colleagues were restrained by self-censorship and apologetic, and had to take into account the politics of their time. Al-Waqidi officiated as judge in Baghdad--under Harun al-Rashid, under al-Ma'mun, or under both. His predecessor Ibn Ishaq also had close links with the 'Abbasid regime, although he is not known to have held a government office. As a result, for central aspects of Muhammad's life we must have recourse to other types of literature, such as the histories of Mecca and Medina and the dictionaries dedicated to Muhammad's Companions.

Rizwi Faizer's task in the book under review was formidable because the text is often problematic. In the introduction to his 1966 edition of the Maghazi (1, p. v) Marsden Jones noted that "the text itself proved to be so full of errors as to make the task of edition very much more complicated and laborious than was at first anticipated." Many difficult passages still remain, even though Arabic philology now benefits from a variety of online tools such as http://baheth.info, which includes several classical dictionaries, and http://ejtaal.net/m/aa, where one can search Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, as well as some others. At http://shamela.ws/index.php/main, one can download free of charge a large collection of classical Arabic texts. We owe these tools to the generosity of individuals and organizations whose contribution to science is invaluable.

Faizer's Ph.D. dissertation was entitled "ibn Ishaq and al-Waqidi Revisited: A Case Study of Muhammad and the Jews in Biographical Literature" (McGill University, 1995), and, indeed, a large part of the book under discussion deals with Muhammad's war with the Jews. A total of 91 pages out of 548, or one-sixth of...