The merchant

One service Sean Anthony is providing is to question the motif of Muhammad The Merchant as motif. I must admit overall, I am finding this chapter - the last in the first Part - hard to understand.

That Qutham al-Qurâshî married a merchantess, Khadija, and that he did trade on behalf of the now-family business is well attested in all the traditions, Muslim and Christian. That his tribe Quraysh dealt in trade is, also, a commonplace. And then there's sura 25 which posits prophets in the marketplace (buying groceries).

Anthony notes all this, to contrast with Islamic piety: which insisted that our man was, rather, a shepherd. As Sulayman Bashear noted in Arabs and Others (not the Bashear text in the bibliography), the Arab elite under the Umayyads came to shun trade as something for Jews to do - not for Muslims and, ultimately, not for proper Arabs. The trade motif is ineptus for Islam. Shall we believe this lectio difficilior?

Hol' up, as they say. There's a parallel anti-piety on the kâfir side - and a parallel snobbery against Trade. A backstory to Star Control was that the Androsynth turned against humanity after a prophet rose up among the humans attacking the Androsynth. The humans' prophet was a used-car salesman. Here in reality(?) the Midianites and Ishmaelites shared a reputation as traders, in between oppressing Israel. So maybe Muhammad The Merchant was a gentile (Christian) trope, a racial canard. Where the Hadith denies that its prophet was a trader, it is this to which they are reacting.

Then there's Fück's mab'ath genre, which painted Muhammad as ascendescent prophet. Despite its pious pretensions mab'ath aims for entertainment, the precise analogue to the Christian "infancy gospel" genre which, of course, we never read at Mass. Shahab Ahmed is in the bibliography. "S. Ahmed" is not in the footnotes, not until p. 114. For the trade motif, Anthony is looking at maghâzî / sîra, the Expeditions literature, I guess because that's what Anthony knows best. (Anthony will later propose a schema to subsume mab'ath into sîra but, I don't buy it.) We do find in Islamic tradition some admissions that Muhammad engaged in trade. The mab'ath doesn't care (as much) to make the Prophet holy - because holiness is, let's face it: boring. I get the nagging feeling that Anthony hasn't read Ahmed closely enough.

Anthony weighs up what he got and concludes that, yeah: merchant. This, despite his chaotic argumentation. And he's made his readers wonder, anew, if any truth could ever be had from our sources. He also admits the whole discussion is banal. If not a full turnover 'tis at least a lengthy fumble, that didn't advance the ball.

I wasn't writing this chapter. I probably wouldn't have bothered writing a chapter like it. If somebody had forced me to write such a chapter I would, instead, interrogate such sources as claimed that Qutham was anything else but a man of his tribe doing his tribe's work. Those contrary, pious sources consistently liken the Prophet to prophets like Moses (and Samuel). These are the sources which have Muhammad (pbuh) chasing sheep.

Those sources align with sura 28. I do not think that they are early sources.

I think Qutham was a merchant - or at least took on that role when his merchant people demanded it of him. He also acted as an archer when his people were mustering for the Fajr battle. And of course he would have had to wrangle a camel or a horse from time to time; maybe even, yes, a sheep. But if you had been a Roman conducting a reconnaissance of the Palaestina Salutaris in AH -1 / AG 932, you would have jotted this man's occupation as "trader". Because that is what his tribe did. What else ya gonna do in the desert?

As for Anthony, I'd say that he blew a lot of time chasing less a sheep than a rabbit - and yeah, I do know what that is like. Meanwhile he also had a book short a few pages, another frustration I know well. Footnote 8 promises an "Anthony forthcoming". It may be a rewrite of this chapter. Our author may be better advised to give the topic a rest.