The ongoing decay of the Sîra

On the question did Muhammad exist I should sum up this blog's commentary on the official biography. This comes from the Muhammadan mab'ath / maghazî, often packaged together as "Sîra". Ehsan Roohi presents his take at the start of "Between History and Ancestral Lore" just now posted to Academia.edu; although I see the history of this scholarship a bit differently.

Maybe because we each cite different sources. I should confess here that I'm often that sort of "REF?!" weenie that Richard Hanania hates. But I see Hanania's point that in a 48 page essay, why should it bog itself down with every comment ever tangentially relevant to the topic. So please do consider whatever I bring here to be brought here in a friendly spirit. When I get annoyed by scholarship blithely ignoring relevant data I generally tell you; Roohi has not annoyed me so far.

John Wansbrough in the late 1970s presents a towering figure, and any summary of the Sîra's critical project must mention him. The project did not begin with him (more, below), and the man assuredly had overreached. But he bequeathed to the project the same tools as used in Biblical and classical scholarship; he gave the project its Design-Patterns, as we coders call them. One such tool is the topos, or trope: if the event is made up of clichéd material shared among similar events, and the core of it seems designed to explain something itself nebulous (like a Qurân passage), then the whole event dissolves into so much literary vapour.

After the Prophet's death, we have the example of the "Pact of 'Umar", probably a construct of the 'Umarid line including the man raised to the caliphate in the late 90s AH / 710s AD. This guideline for kitâbî law vied with legal compendia for that purpose as compiled by, for an important instance, Ibn Jurayj. 'Abd al-Razzâq's copyists brought this latter together with Ma'mar's maghâzî as appendices to 'Abd al-Razzâq's musannaf of sunna. The Pact won out, not because it was more authentic, but because it was more useful; along with its counter-tradition in the ur-Ashtinameh.

Within the mab'ath, the scholars we have chosen - Goerke, Schoeler, and Motzki foremost - tend to date the Sîra's narratives of Jewish (alternately, "mushrik") doctrinal opposition to Islam to the first century AH. Modern scholarship finds its basal sources in, so far, Muhammad Ibn Abi Muhammad and now Abu Mijlaz; in House of War I proposed the Zubayrids as important as well. These cast rhetorical devices from the Quran into narrative, or narratio as Wansbrough would put it.

Also to be found in this context is that weird event of the Satanic Verses. What we likely have with this one are late first-century storytellers expounding on the Quran to explain verses whose context they no longer owned, nor wanted to own.

Within the maghazî, we see an overlap in the scholars. The accounts of the raids (literally what ghazwa means; it's even become a Latinate loanword: razzia) are also dated to the first century. In these cases, I do not find where these events are tropes at base. These may actually have happened.

Also in maghazî is a subgenre where the Prophet confronts opponents at home. Since those Muslims (in the maghazî chronology) were on a war-footing these events are likewise violent. These stories, inasmuch as the Prophet is the archetype for the Believer, are what inspire state violence against religious minorities. These selfsame stories get mined by those outside Islam in opposition to that religion as a whole: The Truth About Muhammad being one modern example.

Since even before Wansbrough, not all scholars nor even Muslims have always accepted these sordid tales. Following 1973, when the Arab-Israeli conflict was hotter (and the Muslims' consensus was nominally on the Arab side), Israel made hay of the open Judenhass of the Muslim establishment, especially in Saudi. One particularly vicious maghazî-set episode, increasingly cited by extremists, involved the ethnic-cleansing of the Banu Qurayza tribe. Some Muslims had the integrity to feel embarrassment. Some of these have excused Banu Qurayza or waved it away, even if they should know better. But in 1976 one Walid Najib Arafat (best Arafat) set to refute it. Even some Orientalists have applied the brakes for that one.

Roohi last year questioned the Ibn Ashraf episode; this was family lore done to protect Muslims of Jewish descent, by casting those ancestral Jews as the Prophet's sicarii. With "Between History and Ancestral Lore" he expands his net: all those supposed assassinations come to us from family lore.

Roohi's work may well end up republished as a full book. (THAT book can cite Arafat and whoever else.) I look forward to buying it; I hope its publisher sets the price at a level accessible to a wider audience.