The Death of a Prophet
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The oldest Islamic biography of Muhammad, written in the mid-eighth century, relates that the prophet died at Medina in 632, while earlier and more numerous Jewish, Christian, Samaritan, and even Islamic sources indicate that Muhammad survived to lead the conquest of Palestine, beginning in 634-35. Although this discrepancy has been known for several decades, Stephen J. Shoemaker here writes the first systematic study of the various traditions. Using methods and perspectives borrowed from biblical studies, Shoemaker concludes that these reports of Muhammad's leadership during the Palestinian invasion likely preserve an early Islamic tradition that was later revised to meet the needs of a changing Islamic self-identity. Muhammad and his followers appear to have expected the world to end in the immediate future, perhaps even in their own lifetimes, Shoemaker contends. When the eschatological Hour failed to arrive on schedule and continued to be deferred to an ever more distant point, the meaning of Muhammad's message and the faith that he established needed to be fundamentally rethought by his early followers. The larger purpose of The Death of a Prophet exceeds the mere possibility of adjusting the date of Muhammad's death by a few years; far more important to Shoemaker are questions about the manner in which Islamic origins should be studied. The difference in the early sources affords an important opening through which to explore the nature of primitive Islam more broadly. Arguing for greater methodological unity between the study of Christian and Islamic origins, Shoemaker emphasizes the potential value of non-Islamic sources for reconstructing the history of formative Islam.
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The Death of a Prophet
Series Editors Daniel Boyarin, Virginia Burrus, Derek Krueger
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The same division of the conquest into two stages is also preserved in the Hispanic Chronicle of 754, although this chronicle adopts a considerably different attitude toward Islam, and consequently, its preservation of the Spanish Eastern Source differs in some significant details. In comparison with the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle, the Hispanic Chronicle is rather polemical, occasionally adding derogatory comments and, more frequently, omitting material from the Spanish Eastern Source that portrays Islam too favorably, as can be seen especially by comparing the citations that follow with those above. This chronicle is also considerably longer than the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle, since it includes extensive material on the Visigoths and focuses much more squarely on the Iberian Peninsula, while drawing on the Spanish Eastern Source to set events in Spain within a more global context. Moreover, the Hispanic Chronicle continues its record of eastern events until approximately 750, prompting the suggestion that perhaps the Spanish Eastern Source originally continued to this point, and the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle has for some reason truncated its source in 741.85 Yet it is not at all clear why the author of the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle would have done this, and so it is just as likely that the Hispanic Chronicle has somehow supplemented the Spanish Eastern Source with additional information from another source.
In its basic outline, the Hispanic Chronicle’s account of the rise of Islam and the Islamic conquests of the Near East largely repeats that of the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle, but it clearly has edited the Spanish Eastern Source to reflect much more negatively on Islam.
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