Spoerl / The Levantine Review Volume 2 Number 1 (Spring 2013)
Ishaq, who died in Baghdad roughly in 767 CE (or 151 AH). Ibn Ishaq’s sira is passed down to us in an abridged and annotated recension by a later scholar, Ibn Hisham (d. c. 833 CE), although it is possible to undo some of Ibn Hisham’s abridgement since other historians such as al-Tabari quote large portions of the earlier unabridged version in their writings.[1] Ibn Ishaq’s biography forms the basis of virtually all later biographies of Muhammad in the Islamic tradition.[2] It is, in F. E. Peters’ words, “the classical and canonical biography of Muhammad.”[3] There is a wide variety of opinion among scholars of early Islam as to whether Ibn Ishaq’s sira is reliable.[4] I will abstain altogether from taking a position in this debate and focus entirely on the contents of the book, since its impact on the Islamic tradition is indisputable even if its historical accuracy is not.[5]
- ↑ Alfred Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah (Oxford and Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. xxx-xxxi.
- ↑ Francis Peters observes, “all the earliest surviving versions of Muhammad’s life rely heavily on Ibn Ishaq’s original Sira.” F. E. Peters, “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 23 (1991), p. 304.
- ↑ F.E. Peters, Muhammad and the Origins of Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 49.
- ↑ See, for example, F. E. Peters, “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 23 (1991), pp. 291-315, reprinted in F.E. Peters, Muhammad and the Origins of Islam, pp. 257-268, and Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 50-56 and 242-244. For a more trusting view of Ibn Ishaq’s reliability, see W. Montgomery Watt, “The Reliability of Ibn Ishaq’s Sources,” in Watt, Early Islam: Collected Articles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), pp. 13-23. A very skeptical view of Ibn Ishaq is that of Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Muslim World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). A highly accessible summary of the scholarship in this area is Robert Spencer, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2012).
- ↑ In the words of M. J. Kister: “The narratives of the Sirah have to be carefully and meticulously sifted in order to get at the kernel of historically valid information, which is in fact meager and scanty. But the value of this information for the scrutiny of the social, political, moral, and literary ideas of the Muslim community cannot be overestimated; during the centuries, since Muslim society came into existence, the revered personality of the Prophet served as an ideal to be followed and emulated.” M. J. Kister, “The Sirah Literature,” in ed. A. F. L. Beeston et al., Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period (The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 352-367.
