Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

52 t CHAPTER THREE
that purport to go back to the recollection of his contemporaries;
we also have an enormous mass of free-floating, discrete reports
that are thought to contain his sayings on a wide variety of topics
from prayer to table etiquette. The reasons for this proliferation
of information are not too surprising. Throughout the Quran, Muhammad
is made to insist that he is merely a man (18:10)—his
critics expected something more considerable of a divine messenger
(6:37) and were understandably surprised when he turned out
to be someone they knew from the market—but for his followers
he was indeed the best of men since he had been chosen to deliver
God’s message of salvation. But more importantly, Muhammad
was in his own person the most perfect embodiment of that message:
he was the Muslim paradigm, as the Quran itself announces
(33:21). That fact alone would explain the growing Muslim interest
in the Prophet’s life, but there is more. People remembered, of
course, some of the things this remarkable man had said and done
during his lifetime, and those recollections were handed down
from one generation to the next. Eventually the reports of these
recollections became a determining precedent in Islamic law (see
chapter 7), and so it became important for some to verify the many
statements in circulation that purported to describe what soon was
called generally “the customary behavior (sunna) of the Prophet.”
An important branch of Islamic historiography was born.
Other motives urged the Muslim to become a historian in the
matter of Muhammad. The Quran is, in many instances, an
opaque document. It has almost nothing direct to say of either
Muhammad or Mecca, for example, or indeed of contemporary
events generally, and its teachings are most often delivered without
discernible context. Only very rarely are we told what particular
circumstances provoked or the reason behind this or that prescription
or prohibition, and so the believer is often hard-pressed to
understand the practical application of that same divine command.
Context is immeasurably important in moral matters, as is
clear from the Gospels, and the Quran provides little or none with
its prescriptions. Muslims turned for that context to the life of
Muhammad, for there, if anywhere, were the settings for the revelations
that issued from his mouth over twenty-two years and that