Historicity of Muhammad - Sources For The Historical Muhammad

Sources For The Historical Muhammad

The main source on Muhammad's life are Muslim sources written in Arabic, which include the Qur'an and accounts of Muhammad's life written down by later Muslims, based on oral traditions. These sources are known as sīra and hadith.

There are also non-Muslim sources written in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Hebrew by the Jewish and Christian communities. These non-Muslim written sources go back to about 636 AD and many of the interesting ones date to within some decades later. One, attributed to a 7th century Armenian scholar Sebeos, states that Muhammad was a merchant and that his preaching revolved around the figure of Abraham. There are also confirmations of Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina in them. However, they also contain some essential differences with regard to Muslim sources and in particular about chronology and about Muhammad's attitude towards the Jews and Palestine.

The Qur'an itself has some, though very few, incidental allusions to Muhammad's life. However, the "Qur'an responds constantly and often candidly to Muhammad's changing historical circumstances and contains a wealth of hidden data that are relevant to the task of the quest for the historical Muhammad."

In the sīra literature, the most important extant biography are the two recensions of Ibn Ishaq's (d. 768), now known as Sīrat Rasūl Allah ("Biography/Life of the Messenger/Apostle of Allah"), which survive in the works of his editors, most notably Ibn Hisham (d. 834) and Yunus b. Bukayr (d.814-815), although not in its original form. According to Ibn Hisham, Ibn Ishaq wrote his biography some 120 to 130 years after Muhammad's death. Many, but not all, scholars accept the accuracy of these biographies, though their accuracy is unascertainable. After Ibn Ishaq, there are a number of shorter accounts (some of which are earlier than Ibn Ishaq) recorded in different forms (see List of earliest writers of sīra). Another biography of Muhammad is that of al-Waqidi's (d. 822) and then Ibn Sa'd's (d.844-5). Al-Waqidi is often criticized by early Muslim historians who state that the author is unreliable. These biographies are hardly biographies in the modern sense. The writers did not wish to record the life of Muhammad, but rather to describe Muhammad's military expeditions and to preserve stories about Muhammad, his sayings and the reasons of revelations and interpretations of verses in the Qur'an. In addition to sīra, the biographical dictionaries of Ali ibn al-Athir and Ibn Hajar provide much detail about the contemporaries of Muhammad but add little to our information about Muhammad himself.

Lastly, there are the hadith collections, which include traditional, hagiographic accounts of the verbal and physical traditions of Muhammad. These date two to three hundred years after the death of Muhammad. The main feature of hadith is that of Isnad (chains of transmission). The majority of Western academics view the hadith collections with caution as accurate historical sources. However, other Western historians have also defended hadith and the general authenticity of Isnad.