The Lives of Muhammad PDF
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The Lives of Muhammad Kecia Ali HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Jacket art: Miniature Portrait of Dara Shikoh, c 1640 (gouache on paper mounted on album leaf), Indian School (17th century)/Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA/gift of Stephen Hamilton/The Bridgeman Art Library Jacket design: Jill Breitbarth The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Ali, Kecia. The lives of Muhammad / Kecia Ali. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-05060-0 (alk. paper) 1. Muhammad, Prophet, –632—Biography—History and criticism. I. Title. BP75.3.A454 2014 297.6'3092—dc23 2014009174 This book is dedicated to my children Saadia and Tariq, and to the memory of their sister Shaira (1996–2012). The standard biographies of Muhammad recount that seven of his eight children died during his lifetime. None of the miracles traditional sources ascribe to him impresses me more than his having survived such loss. Contents Chronology Introduction 1 The Historical Muhammad 2 A True Prophet 3 Eminent Muslims 4 The Wife of Muhammad 5 Mother of the Faithful 6 An Enlightened Man Conclusion Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index Chronology Conventional dating (approximate) of key events in Muhammad’s biography: 570 Muhammad’s birth 580s Journey to Syria with his uncle Abu Talib 595 Marriage to Khadija 610 Qur’anic revelation begins 615 Some followers seek refuge in Abyssinia 619 Deaths of Khadija and Abu Talib 621 Night Journey and Ascension 622 Migration to Medina 624 Battle of Badr 625 Battle of Uhud 627 Siege of Medina and retaliation against the Banu Qurayza 630 Conquest of Mecca 632 Muhammad’s death Introduction For a man who lived fourteen hundred years ago, Muhammad has been in the news a lot lately. From the 2005–2006 Danish cartoon debacle to the 2012 uproar over the Innocence of Muslims viral video, media coverage has often explained Muslim outrage by referencing long-standing prohibitions on the depiction of the Prophet and sensitivity to any insult directed at him. By the time this book appears there may have been another flash-in-the-pan incident, with these same tired explanations proffered alongside a portrait of irrational and fanatical Muslim rage, contrasted with a rational, pluralist, democratic West. Rather than plunge into these recent controversies, which reinforce an unpersuasive clash of civilizations rhetoric, this book approaches Muhammad as he has been portrayed over the centuries. It is a book not about the life of Muhammad but about the ways in which his life has been told. Biographies of the foundational figures of world religions are inherently controversial. The faithful prefer one biography, those outside the fold offer competing accounts, and experts often insist on other versions based on prevailing scholarly views. Muhammad, alternately revered and reviled, has been the subject of hundreds if not thousands of biographies since his death in the seventh century. Far from being uniform or unchanging, both non-Muslim and Muslim views of Muhammad have been diverse, multifaceted, and subject to dramatic changes over the centuries. This is widely known. Less well known is that since the nineteenth century they have become increasingly interdependent. In the twenty-first century, it makes no sense to speak of Muslim views of Muhammad in opposition to Western or Christian views. Instead, the images of Muhammad that contemporary Muslims hold fervently and defend passionately arose in tandem and in tension with western European and North American intellectuals’ accounts of his life. At the same time, Muslim sensibilities and beliefs have affected the way many non-Muslim authors write his life. This book focuses on these interconnections, the circuitous routes that ideas about Muhammad have taken as they have circulated, and how these ideas have been shaped by shifting attitudes about human achievement, the nature and place of religion, and marriage and sexuality. Interaction itself is nothing new. Muslims have always adopted and adapted material from their environments. Civilizational boundaries have always been porous, and were certainly so during the first two centuries of Islam’s existence when the first accounts of Muhammad were written. The rapid evolution of his biography during the seventh and eighth centuries—shifting from biblical to Arabian motifs, merging the human and the heroic, engaging in contentious negotiations over identity and legacy—has its counterpart in the last two hundred years. Syriac Christian polemics against Islam 1 motivated early refinements in Muhammad’s biography. Colonial-era missionizing by western European Christians had a similar effect. There is a striking parallel between the major and disruptive transformations wrought by the advent of Islam in late antiquity and the coming of European colonialism to Muslim-majority societies in Asia and Africa. Specialized scholars are working hard to discover what sort of biography of Muhammad and knowledge of Islam one can retrieve from its first two centuries. The Lives of Muhammad describes an equally massive set of shifts in the last two centuries. Just as boundaries between traditions have always been fluid, so traditions have always been internally heterogeneous. The nature of prophecy, the status of miracles, and—in a more mundane vein—the roles of those close to Muhammad are perennial issues in Muslim thought. These are not just matters of disagreement between insiders and outsiders, but litmus tests that raise the question of who is to be considered an insider and what is to count as tradition. In the modern era, European and American accounts and ideas are pressed into service for intra-Muslim debates. Understanding the multiple, sometimes contradictory, accounts of Muhammad’s life requires close attention to the ways in which writers read and draw on their predecessors and antagonists: differing from them, depending on them, appropriating and repurposing their materials—at times narrowly imitative, in other moments strikingly innovative, in what Virginia Burrus, a historian of early Christianity, has called 2 “writerly acts of textual recycling.” A book like this requires authorial choices if it is not to run, as medieval Muslim histories typically did, to dozens of volumes. Some decisions are large, such as what to omit. I have chosen, among other things, Persian poetry, the Danish cartoons—in fact, any and all visual depictions—and 3 whole swathes of the globe, including sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Others are smaller, such as how to render foreign words and names, including that of the prophet. Earlier English- language authors generally preferred the French-inflected Mahomet but also wrote Machomed, Mohamed, Mohammad, Muhammed, and other variants, with little regard for consistency. Muhammad is now the usual English spelling, and I use it throughout except in quotations. Where I translate from modern French texts, in which Mahomet is standard, I use Muhammad to avoid accidentally imparting an archaic flavor. (One Indian biographer replaced Mahomet with Muhammad 4 when quoting an earlier British work, “since the word Mahomet is derogatory.”) Texts also spell the names of people close to Muhammad in myriad ways. In quoting sources, I keep original spellings unless doing so seems likely to confuse readers. Otherwise, I use simplified versions of recurring names (for example, Khadija, Ali, Aisha, Abu Bakr). I usually skip the honorifics and blessings Muslim authors invoke at every mention of Muhammad and other prophets, and Muhammad’s wives, close relatives, and associates. One becomes inured to these formulae when reading Arabic or devotional texts, but they distract those unaccustomed. Yet since their presence, especially in texts in European languages, tells about the intended audience for a work, I include them when it seems relevant. I mostly dispense with diacritics in the body of the book, though quotes, notes, and bibliography retain full transliteration. I draw primarily from English, Arabic, and French sources, occasionally dipping into works in other languages. I rely on published translations when appropriate; other translations are mine. (Where the nuances of the original language seem particularly relevant, I excerpt the key portion in the endnotes.) I do not read Persian, Turkish, or Urdu (or Dutch, Danish, or Latin) and am thus, like many before me, at the mercy of translators when I consult texts composed in those languages. Translations themselves have been of major importance in the production and dissemination of knowledge and ideas about Muhammad, reshaping works in revealing ways. I discuss such changes, too, as one more way in which Muhammad’s Lives proliferate, entering new spaces, reaching new audiences, and contributing to the voluminous literature about a man variously known as the Messenger of God, the Arabian impostor, an arch-heretic, an antichrist, a false prophet, the founder of Islam, Mahound, God’s beloved, a hero, a Great Man, and—in the modern era—simply Muhammad.
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