Historicity of Muhammad

The earliest source of information for the life of Muhammad is the Qur'an, although this doesn't give much information.Encyclopaedia of Islam, Muhammad Next in importance are the historical works by writers of third and fourth century of the Muslim era (~900-1000 C.E.).William Montgomery Watt, Muhammad in Mecca, Oxford University Press, p.xi There are also few non-Muslim sources which are valuable for comparison with the statements in the first two sources.S. A. Nigosian(2004), p.7
==Information on Muhammad==
Attempts to distinguish between the historical elements and the unhistorical elements of many of the reports of Muhammad have not been very successful.Wim Raven, Introduction on a translation of Islamic texts into Dutch by Ibn Ishaq, Het leven van Muhammad (The life of Muhammad), ISBN 90-5460-056-X. A major source of difficulty in the quest for the historical Muhammad is the modern lack of knowledge about pre-Islamic Arabia. Harald Motzki states:
At present, the study of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim community, is obviously caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, it is not possible to write a historical biography of the Prophet without being accused of using the sources uncritically, while on the other hand, when using the sources critically, it is simply not possible to write such a biography 
==Sources for the historical Muhammad==
The main source on Muhammad's life are Muslim sources written in Arabic, which include the Qur'an and accounts of Muhammad's life written down by later Muslims, who say that they are recording oral tradition.
Some claim that there are also non-Muslim sources written in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Hebrew by the Jewish and Christian communities. If so, these non-Muslim sources are few, none of them date back to before 634 CE, and many of the interesting ones date to some decades later. One by a 7th-century Armenian scholar Sebeos, claims that Muhammad was a merchant and that his preaching revolved around the figure of Abraham. There are also confirmations of Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina in them. However, they also contain some essential differences: with chronology and to Muhammad's attitude towards the Jews and Palestine. All these claims of non-Muslim sources are disputed notably by Ibn Warraq.Why I Am Not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq 
The Qur'an itself has some, though very few, incidental allusions to Muhammad's life.S. A. Nigosian(2004), p.6 However,the Qur'an responds "constantly and often candidly to Muhammad's changing historical circumstances and contains a wealth of hidden data that are relevant to the task of the quest for the historical Muhammad." 
The earliest surviving biographies are the two recensions of Ibn Ishaq's (d. 768) "Life of the Apostle of God", by Ibn Hisham (d. 834) and Yunus b. Bukayr(d.814-815). According to Ibn Hisham, Ibn Ishaq wrote his biography some 120 to 130 years after Muhammad's death. Many, but not all, scholars accept the accuracy of these biographies, though their accuracy is unascertainable. After Ibn Ishaq, the most widely used biography of Muhammad is that of al-Waqidi's (d. 822) and then Ibn Sa'd's (d.844-5). Al-Waqidi is often criticized by Muslim writers who claim that the author is unreliable.
It should be noted that these biographies are hardly biographies in the modern sense. The writers did not wish to record the life of Muhammad, but rather to describe Muhammad's military expeditions and to preserve stories about Muhammad, his sayings and the traditional interpretations of verses of the Qur'an. The biographical dictionaries of Ali ibn al-Athir and Ibn Hajar provide much detail about the contemporaries of Muhammad but add little to our information about Muhammad himself.William Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, Oxford University Press, p.xii Lastly, there are the hadith collections, which include accounts of the verbal and physical traditions of Muhammad. These date from several generations after the death of Muhammad. Western academics view the hadith collections with caution as accurate historical sources.Lewis (1993), pp.33-34
==Historical authenticity of the Qur'an==
All or most of the Qur'an was written down by Muhammad's companions while he was alive, but it was primarily an orally related document. The written compilation of the whole Qur'an in its definite form as we have it now was not completed until many years after the death of Muhammad.William Montgomery Watt in The Cambridge History of Islam, p.32
The Qur'an is widely regarded by Muslims to be that which issued from Muhammad's mouth from AD 610-632. F.E. Peters states, "Few have failed to be convinced that what is in our copy of the Quran is, in fact, what Muhammad taught, and is expressed in his own words... To sum this up: the Quran is convincingly the words of Muhammad, perhaps even dictated by him after their recitation".F. E. Peters (1991) Peters argues that "The search for variants in the partial versions extant before the Caliph Uthman’s alleged recension in the 640s (what can be called the 'sources' behind our text) has not yielded any differences of great significance." In fact, the source of ambiguity in the quest for historical Muhammad in western academic circles is due to the uncertainty and the lack of knowledge about pre-Islamic Arabia.
Patricia Crone and Michael Cook challenge the traditional account of how the Qur'an was compiled, writing that "there is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century." They also question the accuracy of some the Qur'an's historical accounts.Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, and Gerd R. Puin as quoted in It is generally acknowledged that the work of Crone and Cook was a fresh approach in its reconstruction of early Islamic history, but their alternative account of early Islam has been almost universally rejected.David Waines(1995), p. 273-274 Van Ess has dismissed it stating that "a refutation is perhaps unnecessary since the authors make no effort to prove it in detail...Where they are only giving a new interpretation of well-known facts, this is not decisive. But where the accepted facts are consciously put upside down, their approach is disastrous."van Ess, "The Making Of Islam", Times Literary Supplement, September 8, 1978, p. 998 R. B. Sergeant states: "Hagarism[the thesis of Crone and Cook]…is not only bitterly anti-Islamic in tone, but anti-Arabian. Its superficial fancies are so ridiculous that at first one wonders if it is just a ‘leg pull’, pure ’spoof’."Sergeant, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1981, p. 210
Gerd R. Puin's study of ancient Qur'an manuscripts led him to conclude that the Qur'an is a "cocktail of texts", some of which may have been existent a hundred years before Muhammad. Karl-Heinz Ohlig comes to the conclusion that the person of Muhammed was not central to early Islam at all, and that at this very early stage Islam was in fact an Arabic Christian sect, which had objections to the concept of the trinity, and that the later hadith and biographies are in large part legends, instrumental in severing Islam from its Christian roots and building a full-blown new religion.Karl-Heinz Ohlig, Der frühe Islam, 2007, ISBN 3-89930-090-4 John Wansbrough believes that the Qu’ran is a redaction in part of other sacred scriptures, in particular the Judaeo-Christian scriptures.Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (1978) by Wansbrough.http://www.derafsh-kaviyani.com/english/quran3.html (Discusses Wansbrough) Prof. Herbert Berg writes that "Despite John Wansbrough's very cautious and careful inclusion of qualifications such as "conjectural," and "tentative and emphatically provisional", his work is condemned by some. Some of negative reaction is undoubtedly due to its radicalness...Wansbrough's work has been embraced wholeheartedly by few and has been employed in a piecemeal fashion by many. Many praise his insights and methods, if not all of his conclusions."Herbert Berg(2000), p.83 
There is considerable academic debate over the real chronology of the chapters of the Qur'an.Carole Hillenbrand in The New Cambridge Medieval History, p.329 Carole Hillenbrand holds that there are several remaining tasks for the Orientalist Qur'anic scholars: Few Qur'anic scholars have worked on the epigraphy of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem whose foundation inscription dates to 72/692 and the antique Qur'an recently discovered in the Yemen, the Sana'a manuscripts. The Carbon-14 tests applied to this Qur'an date it to 645-690 AD with 95 percent accuracy.
==Historical authenticity of the hadith literature==
Early Muslim scholars were concerned that some hadiths may have been fabricated, and thus developed a whole science of criticism to distinguish between genuine sayings and those that were errors or frauds.
So modern historians agree that a chain of authorities may be equally easily forged and that rejection of some relators implies the victory of one thought over the others.Peters (1991), pp.291-315
Overall western academics view the hadith collections with caution. Bernard Lewis states that "the collection and scrutiny of Hadiths didn't take place until several generations" after Muhammad's death and that "during that period the opportunities and motives for falsification were almost unlimited." In addition to the problem of oral transmission for over a hundred years, there existed motives for deliberate distortion.
==See also==
* Historicity of Jesus
* Muhammad
* Origin and development of the Qur'an
* Quest for the Historical Muhammad
* Soviet Orientalist studies in Islam
==Notes==
==References==
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Category:Muhammad
Muhammad
fa:صحت تاریخی محمد