Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

“AND MUHAMMAD IS HIS MESSENGER” t 53
are preserved in the Quran. These circumstances came to be called
by Muslim exegetes and lawyers the “occasions of revelation,”
and they were another powerful incentive for assembling the
known facts of Muhammad’s life in the form of a biography. Not
unexpectedly, then, the preserved biographies of the Prophet do
note the historic occasion when this or that revelation was “sent
down.”
Hagiography and History
We have before us, then, a life, or rather a number of relatively
early lives of Muhammad. As time passed those lives not only multiplied
but, as happened with the lives of Jesus, they also expanded
to include more and more material as both piety and theology
added their own glosses to what had once been substantially recollection.
It is easy enough for the historian to dismiss these later,
overblown treatments of the life of the Prophet as hagiography of
the type that surrounds many Christian saints. More pertinent is to
ask how much of the traditional and standard Life—as it will be
referred to here—the one composed by Ibn Ishaq (d. 767) and
known to us chiefly in the edition of Ibn Hisham (d. 833), is made
of the same stuff of piety and legend. Muslims, in any event, accept
it is history, just as they accept the larger, more generously enhanced
stories and tales of the Prophet that followed as a proper
matter for contemplation and imitation.
As in some of the Gospels, and even in the Quran’s own account
of Jesus’ infancy and adolescence (19:29–35), Muhammad’s birth
and early years are marked by epiphanies or recognition scenes in
which he is recognized, against all expectation, as the future
Prophet of God. In Jesus’ case, the acknowledgment is chiefly by
his fellow Jews, but according to the Life of Muhammad, it was
Jews and Christians, those earlier recipients of God’s truth, who
recognized this last of God’s prophets. Muhammad had in fact
been predicted in their own Scriptures (61:6). The similarity of this
and other motifs found in Ibn Ishaq’s Life to those in the Jesus
story may not be entirely fortuitous. The standard Life of Muham-