The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (36 page)

[The quot. in
text begins
“God was well pleased with the faithful”—
which begins
before 48:20. Is it okay to cite
from within the passage, and not from beginning (which is ca.
48:18)? Or
should the tag line be “God
was well
pleased” and the cite 48:18–20?]

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the Masada option:
In the year 73, a Jewish splinter group known as “the zealots” held out against Roman siege on this fortified hilltop overlooking the Dead Sea. According to the contemporary historian Flavius Josephus in The Wars of the Jews, the siege ended when all 960 men, women, and children killed themselves rather than surrender.

Page 000
“God was well pleased”:
Quran 48:18.
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“He has held back the hands”:
Quran 48:20.
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“continuation of politics by other means”:
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael

Muhammad’s life is extraordinarily well documented. In fact if anything, it is over-documented. The biographer’s challenge is to assess this mass of information, much of which is only newly available in translation, and to differentiate between history—what actually happened—and the volume of reverential legend that has inevitably accrued over the centuries. This book is thus based on the original eighth- and ninth-century histories, detailed here under “Primary Sources,” but it also calls on the perspective and context provided by recent academic research in Middle East history and literature, comparative religion, and social studies, listed under “Secondary Sources.”

The early Islamic historians ibn-Ishaq and al-Tabari are outstanding for the breadth and depth of their work, which makes extensive use of both oral history and earlier written sources that have since been lost. The result is not at all the dry history one might expect of classical historical texts. Their work often has the vivid immediacy of reporting, alive with the language and feel of the time.

Western readers used to a progressive chronological structure and a firm authorial point of view, however, may be somewhat disconcerted by their method. For example, the same event or conversation is often told from several points of view. The stylistic effect is almost postmodern, with the narrative thread weaving back and forth in time, and each account adding to the ones preceding it, though from a slightly different angle.

Where versions conflict, both historians ostensibly reserve judgment in the interest of inclusiveness, but indicate their point of view by the amount of space they give differing versions, and by the use of sentences such as “As to which of these is correct, only God knows for sure.”

As al-Tabari wrote in the introduction to his monumental history: “In everything which I mention herein, I rely only on established [written] reports, which I identify, and on [oral] accounts, which I ascribe by name to their transmitters . . . Knowledge is only obtained by the statements of reporters and transmitters, not by rational deduction or by intuitive inference. If we have mentioned in this book any report about certain men of the past which the reader finds objectionable . . . know that this has not come about on our account, but on account of one of those who has transmitted it to us, and that we have presented it only in the way in which it was presented to us.” in 767. His work was expanded and annotated in the ninth century in Egypt by ibn-Hisham, whose annotated version of ibn-Ishaq’s original Sira i s a v a i l a b l e i n a n e i g h t - h u n d r e d - p a g e E n g l i s h t r a n s l a tion by Alfred Guillaume: The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955).

A bu-Jafar al-Tabari’s Tarikh al-Rusul wa-al-Muluk, “History of the Prophets and Kings,” covers the rise of Islam and the history of the Islamic world through to the early tenth century in immense and intimate detail. The volumes on Muhammad’s life draw heavily on ibn-Ishaq’s work but also incorporate the writings of other early historians whose work has not survived. Al-Tabari was born in 838, and died in Baghdad in 923. His Tarikh has been translated into English in a magnificent project overseen by general editor Ehsan Yar-Shater and published in thirty-nine annotated volumes as The History of al-Tabari. Quotes and dialogue used in this book are from the following volumes:

The History of Al-Tabari , Volume V: The Sasanids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen. Translated by C. E. Bosworth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.
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———, Volume VII: The Foundation of the Community. Translated by W. Montgomery Watt and M. V. McDonald. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.
———, Volume VIII: The Victory of Islam. Translated by Michael Fishbein. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
———, Volume IX: The Last Years of the Prophet. Translated by Ismail K. Poonawala. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
———, Volume X: The Conquest of Arabia. Translated by Fred M. Donner. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.
———, Volume XV: The Crisis of the Early Caliphate. Translated by R. Stephen Humphreys. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
———, Volume XVIII: Between Civil Wars: The Caliphate of Mu’awiyah. Translated by Michael C. Morony. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

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