Cut to the heart of the matter

There exist a few secular works on Muhammad's last years, like Stephen Shoemaker's The Death of a Prophet. What Shoemaker hadn't noted was Islamic sources relating Muhammad's end as being ignoble, to poison. David Woods gives us that summary from Islamic sources (albeit still skipping Sulaym) - and relates the (Sunni) accounts to sura 69.

I've had a decade-long fascination with sura 69. Like other suwar it cites earlier content. But I cannot find Q 69 citing later content - as Q 68 and 70 cite. On the other hand I rarely find those later suwar citing sura 69 (suwar 18, then 13 and 76; later, 81); it even gets omitted in some masahif. My "Blasting the Caliph" project has taken on a number of revisions in an attempt to clarify the argument, but... there's little argument as can be clarified.

Perhaps the reason the qurrâ kept sura 69 at a distance is that sura 69 posed a problem to them. The tradition that a Jew[ess] poisoned Muhammad (and his buddy Bishr) is as old as the Sira itself. And it's always associated with the Prophet's main chest vein; usually considered the aorta (and not jugular). Q. 69:46 refers to the slicing of al-watîn, a rhyming term which the mufassirs also considered the aorta.

Admittedly it's poetry all the way down, when dealing with Islamic literature. When I hear Muhammad lament, at the end, that he is suffering from a meal he'd eaten at Khaybar; this reads like regret for annexing Khaybar's property. An allusion to sura 69, to Woods, suggests further he'd lost the wahy there too. The Imam Malik and others always disliked that Ibn Ishaq was using Jewish sources. The Jewish sources might have taught that Muhammad was a Jewish-approved prophet until he did what he'd done at Khaybar.

Against that, some Muslims these days suspect that the Khaybar atrocities were overblown. But Muslims were different under the Umayyads. Such Muslims seem to have spread Khaybar stories, like John of Nikiu told Cyril stories. Earlier in Iraq, when Christians were out and about over there, Jews told the Toledot Yeshu'. If earlier Jews might spread their counter-stories against Jesus, later ones could certainly do similar against Muhammad.

UPDATE 12/12: Hasan Bitmez. I don't wanna be like this, I don't wanna hurt no feelings.