Review of "The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam" by Stephen J. Shoemaker

In The Death of a Prophet, Stephen Shoemaker has forged a comprehensive and novel perspective on approaching the study of Islam’s origins, and in particular attempts to align it with the methodological approaches used within contemporary studies of early Christianity. He employs the hermeneutics developed in centuries of critical study of the Greek New Testament, such as Formgeschichte, Literarkritik, and the criterion of embarrassment. Thus he attempts to bridge the gap between the two fields and harmonize various understandings of Islam’s beginning. In particular, he addresses the historiographical problems surrounding the death of the Prophet Muḥammad and the themes of eschatology, confessional identity, and sacred geography within the early Islamic community.

Chapter 1, “‘A Prophet has Appeared, Coming with the Saracens’: Muhammad’s Leadership during the Conquest of Palestine According to Seventh- and Eight-century Sources” addresses eleven early sources (ten from non-Muslims, one from within the Islamic tradition itself) attesting that Muḥammad died not quietly in Medina amongst his companions (as in unanimously agreed upon in early Islamic tradition), but two years later in 634 while leading an assault on Palestine. The combined testimony of these sources, he believes, should lead the modern historian to doubt the veracity of the traditional accounts. The eleven sources and their language of composition are as follows:

1. Doctrina Iacobi nuper Baptizati (634 AD); Greek 
2. The Apocalypse of Rabbi Shimʻon b. Yoḥai (635-45?); Hebrew
3. The Khuzistan Chronicle (ca. 660 AD); Syriac
4. Jacob of Edessa, Chronological Charts (691/92 AD); Syriac
5. The Life of Patriarch Benjamin (before 717 AD); Coptic, translated into Arabic
6. The Spanish Eastern Source (ca. 741 AD); Latin, originally Greek
7. The Syriac Common Source: The Chronicle of Theophilus of Edessa (ca. 750 AD)
8. The Short Syriac Chronicle of 775 (ca. 775 AD)
9. The Zuqnin Chronicle (ca. 775 AD); Syriac
10. A Report from the Continuation of Abū al-Fatḥ’s Samaritan Chronicle (7^th century); Aramaic
11. ʻUmar II’s Letter to Emperor Leo III (8^th Century AD); Arabic

Shoemaker asserts that this final source—the only one from within the Islamic tradition itself—was composed in Syria under the ʼUmayyads and preserves an earlier tradition which was later supplanted by the ‘official’ history of Muḥammad’s pre-conquest death as penned by Ibn Isḥāq in Medina. Much of the non-Muslim sources thus may have preserved these earlier traditions before the account was essentially ‘re-written’ and the Medinian tradition became canonical.

In the second chapter, “The End of Muhammad’s Life in Early Islamic Memory: The Witness of the Sīra Tradition,” Shoemaker attempts to then demonstrate the inherent unreliability of the early sīra and maghāzī literature (that is, biographies of Muḥammad, particularly the most well-known sīra written by Ibn Isḥāq), specifically concerning their rather meager presentation of Muḥammad’s death. He undertakes this primarily through employing isnād and hadīth criticism to indicate their late date of composition and overly literary tendencies. In this regard he follows the analysis and conclusions of Joseph Schacht, whom he defends against the critiques of Michael Cook and Harald Motzki concerning the widespread “endemic forgery” of isnāds in the medieval period. Thus, he argues that Ibn Isḥaq’s chronology of the prophet’s death, as well as the tradition identified with al-Zuhrī, cannot be dated before the beginning of the second century AH ('after the Hijra'). The author subsequently turns to what he terms “vestiges” of a Muḥmmad-led campaign to Palestine, reflected within the otherwise heavily-edited and artificial biographies presented in the sīra literature.

Chapter Three is entitled “The Beginnings of Islam and the End of Days: Muhammad as Eschatological Prophet,” and sets out to demonstrate that Muḥammad originally preached the imminent approach of the eschaton. He begins with a assessment of modern approaches to the study of Muḥammad and his religious mission. Thus he critiques studies that either accept the traditional Islamic account at face value (Noldeke, Watt, Bell) and/or attempt to remake the prophet into a sort of modern social reformer (Peters, Armstrong, Ramadan, Safi, to name a few), and seeks to demonstrate the weaknesses of their approaches vis-à-vis the efforts of other scholars (Andrae, Casanova, Donner) who have contended that Muḥammad’s foremost function was as an eschatological prophet. The first group failed to utilize any methods of the hermeneutics of suspicion or subject the sources to critical analysis, whereas the second group were concerned most of all with presenting Muḥammad as someone palatable to 20^th/21^st century notions of social justice--thus divorcing the prophet from his 7^th century Near Eastern context. Even if a reader were to disagree with Shoemaker’s rejection of these studies or his general conclusions, the chapter in and of itself provides an excellent introduction and summary of the state of the field. The author then turns to demonstrating the inherent concern with the impending eschaton as witnessed by the Qurʼānic text, and details how this may have been altered over time before the compilation of the textus receptus. Specifically, the continual delay of the End of Days—which Muḥammad had claimed was imminent—forced the early Islamic community to rethink or downplay its original apocalyptic character. Nevertheless Shoemaker contends that many ayas of the Qurʼān have preserved Muḥammad’s eschatological imperative: (16:1, 79; 21:1; 40:18; 43:61; 47:20; 53:57; 70:5-7). He also points to various Arabic words used in the Qurʼān to describe this incoming reckoning: ʼatā (‘it came’ in the perfect tense), qarīban (close or near), al-ʼaziqa (imminent), and la-wāqiʻ (about to fall). Muḥammad’s failure to plan for a successor, coupled with the artificiality of later accounts recounting his death, further lead Shoemaker to conclude that neither the original community nor Muḥammad himself had expected him to die before the eschaton; therefore the later traditions had to account for these early discrepancies. Reimagining their origins, however, was not an attempt to deliberately deceive but a sincere undertaking of the pious attempting correlate these traditions within their later theological and dogmatic frameworks. This later consensus therefore supplanted any earlier traditions because they were more suited to the needs of the community as it imagined itself in the 8^th century.

The fourth chapter, “From Believers to Muslims, from Jerusalem to the Ḥijāz: Confessional Identity and Sacred Geography in Early Islam,” will—for those familiar with the field—immediately evoke the recent monograph Muhammad and the Believers and its preceding article “From Believers to Muslims” by Fred Donner. Indeed much of the chapter is dedicated to supporting Donner’s thesis, namely that the original ‘Proto-Islamic’ community centered upon Muḥammad was an ecumenical and nonsectarian community of ‘Believers’ (muʼminūn), affiliated and unified under a broad banner of Abrahamic monotheism. Thus, the Believers movement was initially open to Christians and Jews, and it was not until several decades after the death of Muḥammad that the community undertook a radical reorientation in self-definition and confessional identity—leading ultimately to its formation as a distinctive and sectarian religion: Islam. The second half of the chapter turns from confessional identity to the question of sacred geography. Here Shoemaker argues that the liberation of the Biblical Holy Land (particularly Jerusalem) from the Byzantines was at the heart of Muḥammad’s eschatological message—thus explaining the tradition that Jerusalem was the original qibla (direction of prayer) of the Muslim community. This initial concentration on Jerusalem was then quieted by later writers, who undertook a ‘whole-sale transfer’ of Biblical traditions to the Ḥijāz region in Arabia. Therefore Abraham and other Biblical prophets were brought to Arabia in the reformulation of Islam’s own genesis narrative, and Muḥammad’s life and mission were made more explicitly centered on Arabia. In Shoemaker’s own words, the “inter-confessional, eschatological faith focused in Jerusalem transformed into an imperial religion defined by Muḥammad and his Arabian identity” by Ḥijāzī-centric traditions and authors.

Besides some minor issues in transliterating Arabic words (muʼminūn is sometimes transliterated with an ʻayn instead of a hamza) the book is otherwise free of any major editorial errors or faults. The most original contribution of Shoemaker’s monograph is certainly its first chapter and the sources discussed therein, the relevance of which are strengthened through his analyses in the subsequent chapters. The accounts of Muḥammad’s premature death are considerably more credible once Shoemaker has demonstrated the artificiality of the traditional Islamic chapters and then provided satisfactory reasons for why the later tradition would feel compelled to ‘re-remember’ their own genesis; i.e., providing reasons for ‘embarrassment’ such as Muḥammad’s initial eschatological message, the inter-confessional character of his earliest community, and the initial primacy of Jerusalam vis-à-vis the Ḥijāz. Although there are some moments during the middle chapters when the reader may forget the relevance of the first chapter, or perhaps wonder how the author would ultimately weave together the divergent strands, the conclusion successfully brings together his various observations and conclusions into a coherent vision of Islamic origins. Some of his arguments show some degree of circularity, such as supporting his contention that Jerusalem pre-dated Mecca as the focal point of Islamic sacred geography through arguing that the Faḍāʼil al-Quds literature was developed early because they represent these early opinions of Jerusalem. This claim is also the most difficult to sell to the reader because of the utter lack of any explicit reference to Jerusalem in the Qurʼān itself. Nonetheless evidence supporting his claim is not found wanting, and Shoemaker has certainly utilized a vast body of primary and secondary literature in support of his thesis.

Shoemaker also rather successfully attempts to undermine common assumptions that we as historians know more about Islamic origins than Christian origins. In fact, he says, it is quite the opposite. For example, it took Christianity three and a half well-documented centuries to transform from a small, local Jewish sect into an imperial religion; whereas the transition within Islam was drastically more rapid and provided historians with a comparatively meager amount of documentary sources. He also recalls a comparison made by Patricia Crone in comparing the reconstruction Islam’s origins to Christian origins: the earliest biography of Muḥammad (d. 10 AH/ 632 AD) is the sīra of Ibn Isḥāq (d. ~159 AH/ 767 AD), which only survives in the recension of Ibn Hishām (d. 218 AH/ 833 AD), so a comparative situation with Christianity would be trying to analyze the life of Jesus of Nazareth (d. ~30 AD) through the writings of Clement of Alexandria (d. 215 AD) in a redaction made by Origen (d. 254 AD). In this analogy, the biography of Muḥammad equates more to the ‘Apocryphal’ Acts of the Apostles than the Canonical Gospels in terms of historical reliability. His perspective will hopefully spur more scholars to continue undertaking a critical analysis of our sources using the tried-and-true hermeneutics developed in the studies of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.   


There are some times when it seems that the author prefers skeptical and revisionist theories simply for the sake of skepticism and revisionism. Nevertheless he does make some forceful arguments for the adoption of these theories over the traditional approaches hitherto employed by historians. Ultimately, whereas The Death of a Prophet may not be completely conclusive for all readers, it is nonetheless undeniably compelling.


Best,
Andrew