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Historical Attestation of Muhammad: Difference between revisions
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Historical Attestation of Muhammad (view source)
Revision as of 03:58, 19 November 2025
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==Introduction== | ==Introduction== | ||
===Historical Critical Method=== | ===Historical Critical Method=== | ||
Professor Nicolai Sinai (2017) writes the 'historical-critical method' (all of ancient sources) essentially involves firstly suspending pre-conceived notions about it/them, before carrying out an investigation of the text without these to arrive at a conclusion. And secondly, interpreting its meaning as something that could plausibly have been thought or said in its original historical context. While these assumptions can be debated, they are foundational to contemporary historical scholarship. Thus, historical-critical interpretation significantly differs from traditional religious exegesis by postponing judgments about the truth or relevance of scripture and avoiding supernatural explanations. | |||
{{Quote|Sinai, Nicolai. Qur'an: A Historical-Critical Introduction (The New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys) (p. 14-16). Edinburgh University Press. Kindle Edition.|At this point, the reader may legitimately demand to know what, exactly, I understand by approaching the Qur’an from a historical-critical perspective, and why this may at all be a worthwhile endeavour.<sup>3</sup> I shall take the two components of the hyphenated adjective ‘historical-critical’ in reverse order. To interpret a literary document critically means to suspend inherited presuppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and to assess their adequacy in the light of a close reading of that text itself as well as other relevant sources...<br> ...Moving on to the second constituent of the adjective ‘historical-critical’, we may say that to read a text historically is to require the meanings ascribed to it to have been humanly ‘thinkable’ or ‘sayable’ within the text’s original historical environment, as far as the latter can be retrospectively reconstructed. At least for the mainstream of historical-critical scholarship, the notion of possibility underlying the words ‘thinkable’ and ‘sayable’ is informed by the principle of historical analogy – the assumption that past periods of history were constrained by the same natural laws as the present age, that the moral and intellectual abilities of human agents in the past were not radically different from ours, and that the behaviour of past agents, like that of contemporary ones, is at least partly explicable by recourse to certain social and economic factors.<sup>7</sup>... ...The foregoing entails that historical-critical interpretation departs in major respects from traditional Biblical or Qur’anic exegesis: it delays any assessment of scripture’s truth and relevance until after the act of interpretation has been carried out, and it sidesteps appeals to genuine foresight and miracles.<sup>8</sup>}} | |||
===Traditionalist Historians=== | ===Traditionalist Historians=== | ||
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One fundamental problem pointed out with accurately dating the contents of the Qur'an is that the verses, even by traditional Muslim accounts, were not collected and put together into a single book during the lifetime of Muhammad. They were put together at least a decade after his death through a process of gathering and recording verses that had been etched upon scraps of papyrus, bone, and wood along with interviewing members of the early community who had committed parts of the Qur'an to memory. | One fundamental problem pointed out with accurately dating the contents of the Qur'an is that the verses, even by traditional Muslim accounts, were not collected and put together into a single book during the lifetime of Muhammad. They were put together at least a decade after his death through a process of gathering and recording verses that had been etched upon scraps of papyrus, bone, and wood along with interviewing members of the early community who had committed parts of the Qur'an to memory. | ||
If this narrative of the Qur'an's formation is true then it raises | If this narrative of the Qur'an's formation is true then it raises questions about how accurate was the collection of the book, and if the current version of the [[Corruption of the Qur'an|Qur'an reliably Muhammad's]]? It is possible that parts of the originally recited Qur'an were not included in the book or entire passages were included that came from an author other than Muhammad. There were countless [[Legends|legends]] and stories circulating at this time in the Middle East, many, many of which show up in the Qur'an. Combined with relative paucity of eye witness attestation of Muhammad's contemporaries these facts suggest that our knowledge of the original contents of the Quran may be suspect. | ||
===Earliest Manuscripts=== | ===Earliest Manuscripts=== | ||
==Sira Literature== | ==Sira Literature== | ||
{{Main|Sirat_Rasul_Allah}} | |||
===Ibn Ishaq=== | ===Ibn Ishaq=== | ||
Read [https://archive.org/details/TheLifeOfMohammedGuillaume/page/n1/mode/2up Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah] - The Life of Muhammad, Translated by A. Guillaume for free on internetarchive by clicking on the link | |||
===Ibn Hisham=== | ===Ibn Hisham=== | ||
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===Historical Methods=== | ===Historical Methods=== | ||
{{Main|Quranism#Criticism_of_hadiths}} | |||
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==References== | ==References== | ||
{{reflist}} | {{reflist}} | ||
[[Category:Islamic History]] | |||
[[Category:Muhammad]] | |||
[[Category:Criticism of Islam]] | |||
[[Category:Hadith]] | |||
[[Category:Salaf al-Salih (Pious Predecessors)]] | |||
[[Category:Sacred history]] | |||