Thoughts on Ibn Ishāq’s Sīrat Rasūl Allāh—the oldest biography of Muhammad

All references are to sections in A. Guillaume’s translation (Oxford edition). Before going any further, let me freely admit that Arabic is not one of my languages. I invite any learned Muslim or scholar of Ibn Ishāq’s Sīrat Rasūl Allāh to send me any corrections, including corrected references. Thank you.

A. Birth and childhood
There were 50 generations from Adam to Muḥammad—see Jesus’ genealogy in Luke chapter three (3). Then comes the genealogy of Ismā’īl. Note that in sūrah 37 the Qur‘an mentions Abraham’s (Ibrahim’s) son, who was led to the place of sacrifice, but he is not named—neither Isaac nor Ishmael (Ismail). My guess is that once the majority of Jews rejected the new religion, Muḥammad or his successors opted for a different (partly fictitious) genealogy.

3. Assorted teachings & practices

We continue our exploration of the 8th century Sīrat Rasul Allāh (literally, the Life of the Messenger of Allāh). Note: Muḥammad lived AD 570-632—in the Islamic calendar, 53 BH-11 AH (before / after Hijrah, or the migration from Mecca to Medina)

A. Monotheism
The Arabian Peninsula of the 7^th century was filled with polytheists (the majority), but there were also sizable numbers of Jews and Christians, along with handfuls of more or less monotheistic Zoroastrians and Sabians (Mandaeans).

Several pagan gods are explicitly named, like al-Lāt and Wudd. (See 52, 64, 116, etc.) Very popular in the Arabian Peninsula were the daughters of Allāh: al-‘Uzzā, al-Lāt, and Manāt. We also find that Allāh Akbar is the common exclamation in the Sīrat (90, and many other passages), not Allāhu Akbar. The meaning is “God is greater / the greatest.”

B. Worship, prayer, almsgiving, and elements of the pilgrimage, or hajj
The original duty of 50 prayers a day is lowered to five (271). (The prophet negotiates with God during his Night Vision, to the relief of Muslims worldwide!) The call to prayer by trumpet (as in Torah) is rejected in favor of using a clapper. “Allāh Akbar [3x—later changed to 4x]. “I bear witness that there is no God but Allāh. I bear witness that Muḥammad is the apostle of God. Come to prayer. Come to prayer. Come to divine service. Come to divine service. Allāh Akbar. Allāh Akbar. There is no God but Allāh” (347).

However, one should not think that anything goes. The prayer of a sitter has only half the value of the prayer of a stander (415). Moreover, it matters which direction one faces. There was a change of the direction of prayer, or qibla (381, 427). Initially Muḥammad prayed facing Syria [Jerusalem], lining it up with the Kaaba in Mecca (228). The Kaaba is the temple and mosque of Abraham the friend [of God] (55). Muḥammad’s practice was to kiss the black stone there (183, 789). There were pictures in the Kaaba, including some of Jesus and Mary. Muḥammad ordered all to be removed except those of Jesus and Mary (Azr. i.107).

“… The apostle entered Mecca on the day of the conquest and it contained 360 idols which Iblīs had strengthened with lead. The apostle was standing by them with a stick in his hand, saying, “The truth has come and falsehood has passed away; verily falsehood is sure to pass away” (821 [Azr. i.70] = Q sūrah 17.82).

Muḥammad conceded that Jesus healed the sick, raised the dead, and created birds from clay [this NT Apocryphal miracle is often mentioned in Islam]… (406). But only God creates life by the breath of his mouth (Gen 2:7).

About the gentleman on the right: a respected Arabian skeikh? (Or at least an uncanny resemblance?)

5. Warfare

Like the Hadith and the Qur‘an, violence features prominently in the Sīrat. Here are some examples.

The Battle of Badr (289)

• Names of Muslim participants, fallen Muslims, etc… (485). Names of fallen polytheists, then names of polytheist prisoners of war, then poetry celebrating the bravery and victories of the believers. This is the pattern in the sections of the Sīrat dealing with battles and raids.
• “At Badr He gave them into the power of His apostle / and an angry army that did violently. / They smote them with their trusty swords… Now they are in hell” (518).
• “When battle was joined I dealt him a blow / That drew blood—his arteries murmured aloud: / That is what I did on the day of Badr” (536).
• From my personal notes: “This feels like a celebration of warfare” (520). Many parts of the Sīrat remind me of Homer’s Iliad—esp. the graphic violence and the celebration of warfare

The Battle of Uhud (555)

• “… That one man should accept Islam is dearer to me than the killing of a thousand unbelievers” (566).
• Muḥammad’s incisor was broken and his face scored during battle of Uhud (566). (Some claim that Muḥammad lost four teeth at the Battle of Uhud, after he was struck with a battle axe. Two were supposedly lost, one preserved at Topkapı, another retained by Mehmed II. I have seen the relics of Muḥammad at Topkapı, and an interest in relics is highly consistent with the image of Muḥammad’s followers as recorded in the Hadith.)
• A healing miracle: someone’s “eye was so injured that it lay exposed upon his cheek. ‘āsim told me that the apostle restored its place with his hand and it became his best and keenest eye afterwards” (574).
• When the prophet was older—and heavier—and wearing a double coat of mail, he needed assistance climbing a mountain (576).
• Muḥammad tells one of his followers to say “God is most high and most glorious. We are not equal. Our dead are in paradise; your dead are in hell” (582).
• “The apostle’s eyes filled with tears and he wept and said, ‘But there are no weeping women for Hamza.” [Then the women were ordered to weep for the apostle’s departed uncle.”] (586).
• When raised on day of resurrection warrior wounds will still be bleeding and there will be a smell of musk (586).
• When the apostle rejoined his family he handed his sword to his daughter Fātima, saying, “Wash the blood from this, daughter, for by God it has served me well today” (588).
• Summary statement: “The day of Uhud was a day of trial, calamity, and heart-searching on which God tested the believers and put the hypocrites on trial, those who professed faith with their tongue and his unbelief in their hearts, and a day in which God honored with martyrdom those whom he willed” (592).
• Names of martyred at Uhud, polytheists killed etc.
• “You brought Kināna in your folly (to fight) the apostle, / For God’s army was (bound to) disgrace them. / You brought them to death’s cisterns in broad daylight. / Hell was their meeting-place, killing what they met with. / You collected them, black slaves, men of no descent, / O leaders of infidels whom their insolent ones deceived” (613).
• “We thrust our swords between your shoulders / Where they drank blood again and again. / We made liquid to run from your arses / Like the ordure of camels that have eaten ‘asal” (617).
• “We conquered at Badr by piety,/ Obeying God and believing the apostles” (617).

The Battle of the Trench

• “They left the slain of Aus with hyenas hard at them and / Hungry vultures lighting on them” (630). Cp: “You will get such blows at our hands / That the hyenas will rejoice at the lumps of meat” (624).
• “Among us the apostle, a star… / A brilliant light excelling the stars. / True in his speech, just his behavior. / He who answers his call will escape perdition, / Brave in attack, purposeful, resolute” (633).
• Abū Sufyān used to say, “I have never seen a man who was so loved as Muḥammad companions loved him” (640).

Medina

• The three holiest cities in Islam are Mecca (Makkah), Medina (formerly Yathrib), and Jerusalem (Al-Quds).
• In Medina Muḥammad has trenches dug for mass graves. He has hundreds decapitated hundreds and pushed in (689).
• Note the interesting juxtaposition: “The apostle was a very sea of generosity to us.” And then, the next sentence: “The apostle had ordered that every adult… should be killed” (692).

Against the Byzantines (the Eastern Roman Empire, which outlasted the West by 1000 years)

• The prophet comes across 100,000 soldiers marching with the Roman emperor Heraclius (792). (The Eastern Roman Empire’s language was Greek—see next entry.)
• “Welcome Paradise so near / Sweet and cool to drink its cheer / Greeks will soon have much to fear / Infidels, of descent unclear / When we meet their necks I’ll shear (794).

Assorted

• One fifth of the war booty is allotted to Muḥammad (425).
• “When the apostle ordered him to be killed, ‘Uqba said, ‘But who will look after my children, O Muḥammad?’ ‘Hell,’ he said.” (458).

6. Violence and Compulsion

We have just considered the wars and warfare of the Sīrat. Now we move on to a complementary subject: compulsion. Why? Because Muslims typically claim that there is "no compulsion” in Islam, a phrase in Q 2.256. We’ll begin by examining a few passages on violence, mutilation, and revenge. I will also hazard a guess about Muḥammad’s hypersensitivity to criticism—something that still affects Muslims (and non-Muslims) 1400 years later.

Violence

• The first instance of violence in Islam: “When the apostle’s companions prayed they went to the glens so that their people could not see them praying… a band of polytheists came upon them… and rudely interrupted them… they came to blows, and… Sa‘d smote a polytheist with the jawbone of a camel and wounded him. This was the first blood to be shed in Islam” (166).
• “When battle was joined I dealt him a blow / That drew blood—his arteries murmured aloud: / That is what I did on the day of Badr” (536).
• “When you thrust with a spear you made great wounds / From which came hot foaming blood” (560). This reads like the Iliad—intense violence and gore.
• Muḥammad has a man tortured to extract information, then a fire is kindled on his chest until nearly dead. Then vengefully beheaded him (764, [ṭ 1582]). [Some Muslims reject this, as unworthy of Muḥammad, given that he pardons the woman who tried to poison him. Yet such a degree of cruelty is very much in harmony with the Muḥammad we come to know in the Hadith of Bukhari.]
• Most of the poems in the Sīrat seem to glorify war. I did find one exception: “If you abandon war it will go far from you / When you stir it up you raise an evil thing / ’Tis a monster devouring everything near and far / It severs kinship and destroys people / It cuts the flesh from the hump and the back… / Beware of war! / Do not let it cling to you / A stagnant pool has a bitter draught / War—it first seems fine to men / But afterwards they plainly recognize an old hag / It scorches unsparingly the weak / And aims death-blows at the great (179).
• Overall, the spirit of the militant expansion of Islam is captured in this pithy sentence: “Fight everyone in the way of God and kill those who disbelieve in God” (991)

Mutilation

• “The apostle sent Kurz b. Jābir, who went in pursuit… and brought them to the apostle… He cut off their hands and feet and gouged out their eyes” (999).
• On the death of one of his uncles, Muḥammad proclaimed: “If God gives me victory over Quraysh in the future I will mutilate 30 of their men.” When the Muslims saw the apostle’s grief and anger against those who had thus treated his uncle, they said, “By God, if God gives us victory over them in the future we will mutilate them as no Arab has ever mutilated anyone” (584).
• Sometimes the apostle does forbid mutilation (463).

Hot temper

• We often read about the prophet’s intense anger (400).
• The apostle was so angry that his face became almost black (546).
• “The apostle of God prepared for war / When he is wronged his face becomes black with anger / With a great army foaming like the sea” (806).

Revenge

• A Muslim warrior is crucified, and curses his enemies from the cross (641).
• “The believers must avenge the blood of one another shed in the way of God” (342).
• Violence is allowed if wronged: “I have allowed them to fight only because they have been unjustly treated…” (314).
• Note: in the OT, such practices (the “avenger of blood”) are strictly regulated, but not required or idealized.

Thin skin

• Despite the toughness, Muḥammad seems to have been remarkably thin-skinned—or paranoid, or tyrannical in prohibiting dissent.
• When the Quraysh became insolent towards God and rejected His gracious purpose, accused the prophet of lying, and ill-treated and exiled those who served Him and proclaimed His unity, believed in His prophet, and held fast to His religion, He gave permission to His apostle to fight and to protect himself against those who wronged them and treated them badly” (313). How different to Matt 5:43-48; 10:13-14.
• He orders the execution of two girls who sang satirical songs about him (819).
• Some of Muḥammad’s followers cannot bear rejection or mockery: “[We] called them to Islam, but they received it not / And they treated it as a joke. / They ceased not so until I volunteered to attack them” (419). Touchy!
• Execution of poet who had mocked Muḥammad (995). And of another (996).
• One Muslim expresses similar indignation: “There is no people whom I want to fight more than those who insulted your apostle, called him a liar, and drove him out” (679). After all, “There is painful punishment for those who vex God’s apostle” (925).
• It is often protested that there is no compulsion in Islam (377)—see Q 2.256.

“No Compulsion”—really?

It’s frequently claimed that in Islam there is “no compulsion” There is indeed a sentence in the Qur’an that reads “Let there be no compulsion in religion, for the truth stands out clearly from falsehood” (2.256).

Yet is this really true? Based on the chronology of the Hadith, surah 9 is one of the final surahs in the Qur’an. Here we read Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day, nor comply with what Allah and His Messenger [Muhammad] have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth from among those who were given the scripture, until they pay the tax, willingly submitting, fully humbled (9.29). In surah 9 we also find the famous “Verse of the Sword”: … Kill the polytheists wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them on every way (9.5).

• God sent Muḥammad with this religion and he strove for it until men accepted it voluntarily or by force” (Sīrat 986). No compulsion? No forced conversions?
• Muḥammad said, “Woe to you, Abū Sufyān, isn’t it time that you recognize that I am God’s apostle?” He answered, “As to that I still have some doubt.” I said to him, “Submit and testify that there is no God but Allāh and that Muḥammad is the apostle of God before you lose your head” (Sīrat 813).
• A poet wrote “If you are not sincere in worship, and embrace Islam / Then shame will come on you speedily in this life / And in hell you will wear a garment of molten pitch for ever!” (Sīrat 468).
• Furthermore, Islam has a death penalty for apostasy. (In some Islamic schools of jurisprudence, a woman may receive a lesser penalty, such as life in prison).

Based on the evidence within the Qur’an, the Hadith, the Sīrat, Shari’a Law, and common practice in parts of the world where Shari’a is enforced or jihad is carried out, the claim that there is no compulsion is manifestly false! Many Muslims realize this, and are pained by this fact, even if they are reluctant to admit it publicly.

For more on Jihad, listen to Islam B.

7. Miscellaneous Matters

Part 7 of our study of the Sīrat contains a number of things I thought were interesting, but which didn’t easily fit into the nine other categories.

• A Damascus Road experience, but without the repentance—check it out! (473)
• An event parallel to 2 Kings 6:15-17 (474).
• The exact opposite of Judges 6-7—improving the Muslims’ odds against the enemy (484).
• The day of our death is pre-determined (597).
• Opinion circulated that one person on the way to conversion, who died before officially becoming a Muslim, was nevertheless a Muslim in God’s sight (285).
• Some Muslims fed for 20 days on a washed-up whale (991).
• Muḥammad tells his followers how to tie their turbans (991). Also, “…My Lord has ordered me to let my beard grow long and to cut my moustache” (Ṭ 1573).
• Legislating on hermaphrodites and inheritance, “follow the trail of urination” (78).
• The Satanic verses—of which Muḥammad later repents (239).
• Sinking sun (poetry) “sinks from view / In a pool of mud and fetid slime” (Ṭ 906).
• Muḥammad changes the greeting from “Good morning” to “Salām” (472-473).
• Muḥammad puts stock in auguries, though not in flights of birds (593).
• In one of Gabriel’s several appearances, the angel comes to Muḥammad in an embroidered turban, riding a mule covered in brocade (684).
• Privies should not be in private houses (the foreigners’ unclean custom). Good Muslims go out to the open spaces (733).
• Muḥammad was temporarily bewitched—that is, under a spell (352).
• He claims, “I am the most Arab of you all” (106).
• The Quraysh, who largely rejected his message, called Muḥammad Mudhammam (reprobate), whereas Muḥammad means “laudable” (234).
• The Roman Byzantine emperor Heraclius admits that Muḥammad is the prophet (Ṭ 1566).
• Muḥammad gives eight she-camels as compensation to a man whose sandal toe had hit Muḥammad’s shank (on camelback) (Ṭ 1683).
• “… Umm Ayyūb and I used to touch the spot where his hand had rested and eat from that in the hope of gaining a blessing” (338).
• “The Munahhemana (God bless and preserve him!) in Syriac is Muḥammad; in Greek he is the paraclete” (150). But parakletos, Greek for advocate, is the Holy Spirit (John 14:16-17, 26; 15:26; 16:7), not Muḥammad. Muslims tried to force these passages to “prophesy” Muḥammad. This simply will not work! In John we read that the paraclete was to come in Jesus’ name, and would remind his followers of Christ’s words. But this is not at all what Muḥammad did. Instead, he borrowed selectively from Judaism and Christianity and placed himself at the center of the world he was creating, essentially ignoring Jesus’ message of peace.
• Last, here is a poem composed against one of Muḥammad’s uncles and his wife (who rejected Islam):

Abū Lahab and his hands, God blast!
His wealth and gains useless at last,
He shall roast in the flames, held fast,
With his wife, the bearer of the wood, aghast,
On her neck a rope of palm-fiber cast (232).

8. The People of the Book: Jews & Christians

There were many Christians and Jews in the Arabian Peninsula during Muḥammad’s day, and he recognized them as “People of the Book.” For example, he referred to the Torah, the Gospel. Sometimes he seems to tolerate them, at others to resent them. Following are my observations, with references to their locations in the Sīrat.

Jews

• How Judaism came to be in the Arabian Peninsula (17).
• Perception of Jews: “a treacherous, lying, and evil people” (54).
• The first 500 verses of sūra 2 [the longest chapter in the Q] were given by Allāh in response to the “Jewish rabbis and the hypocrites of Aus and Khazraj” (363).
• Old Testament
  • The Torah predicts the coming of Muḥammad (367—also Ṭ. 1567).
  • Muḥammad was a prophet like Moses (231). See Deut 18.
  • Comparison to Moses, again (899).
  • People complain about a lack of water… Muḥammad prays, and God sends a cloud and ample water. Water from the rock—like Exod 17 (904).
• Some were turned into apes for their sin (369).
• Some Jews claimed hell wasn't infinite (e.g., only a day), whereas in Islam it’s forever (371). Note: prominent Muslim scholar Shabir Ally rejects the Islamic doctrine of eternal torment.
• Speaking to Jews: “You know that I am a prophet who has been sent—you will find that in your scriptures and God’s covenant with you” (545).
• A Jew reads Syriac (124). This was the common language of eastern Jews and Christians.
• “Some of the Jews change words from their contexts and say: We hear and disobey…” (390).
• There is no hint of the common modern Islamic claim that that OT scriptures were corrupted (388). (Nor does the Q teach this.)
• Jews had sinned and broken the covenant (397).
• “Say, ‘O Scripture folk, you have no standing until you observe the Torah and the Gospel and what has been sent down to you from our Lord” (397). These are “Unbelieving people.”
• The apostle said, “I am the first to revive the order of God and His book and to practice it” (395).

Christians

• On the origin of Christianity in Najrān, a city in southwestern Arabia (21).
• Christian disputes: “They were Christians according to the Byzantine rite, though they differed among themselves in some points, saying He is God; and He is the Son of God; and He is the third person of the Trinity, which is the doctrine of Christianity…” (403).
• Moses was given the scripture, and Jesus the Son of Mary clear proofs: “raising the dead and forming the likeness of birds from clay and then breathing into them so that they became birds by God’s permission… healing the sick… confuting them from the Torah and the Gospel which God had created for Him” (373). The thoughtful Bible reader must ask, Who creates by breathing his breath into the inanimate? God.
• Heterodox Christians (380).
• Zachariah becomes Mary’s guardian after her parents died (407).
• The child in the womb of ‘Imrān’s wife was vowed to the Lord as a consecrated offering (406). Muslims claim that the word "Imran" in the Q refers to one of two people: Imran the father of Moses and Aaron and Imran the father of Miriam (Miriam = the Virgin Mary, the mother of Prophet Jesus). But a simpler explanation: Muḥammad is confusing the two Miriams (as in Sura 19).

Jews & Christians

• Judaism is dreary, Christianity is miserable—according to an old poet (349).
• “O you who believe, take not Jews and Christians as friends… Whoever of you takes them as friends is one of them” (546).
• “Then He mentioned the two people of scripture with their evil and their lies against Him until the words ‘Many of the rabbis and the monks devour men’s wealth wickedly and turn men from the way of God. Those who hoard up gold and silver and do not spend it in the way of God, announce to them a painful punishment’” (923).
• At his death Muḥammad had disposed “that two religions should not be allowed to remain in the peninsula of the Arabs” (776, 779). Umar then exiled the Jews and Christians from Arabia (xlv).
• At this time, many Arabs apostatized and Jews and Christians rose up (Ṭ 1834).
• A high tax was imposed on Jews or Christians [and Zoroastrians] when they opted not to become Muslims. This normally took the form a golden dinar or the equivalent in clothes, due annually.

9. Sīrat vs. the Gospels