The Prophet’s Palestinian Campaign: Reconsidering the Date of Muhammad’s Death in View of Non-Islamic Sources

FAIN: FT-52838-04

Stephen James Shoemaker
University of Oregon (Eugene, OR 97403-5219)

This study investigates a matter of fundamental significance in the "quest for the historical Muhammad" and for understanding the formation of the Islamic tradition. It examines the divergent accounts of the end of Muhammad’s life reported by Islamic and non-Islamic sources written during the first 150 years of Islam: while Islamic sources report Muhammad’s death at Medina in 632, the Christian sources regularly describe Muhammad as surviving to lead the Islamic conquest of the Near East, beginning in 633-4. This project scrutinizes all of the pertinent sources and concludes that the non-Islamic accounts are trustworthy, while there is reason to suspect the historical reliability of the traditional Islamic accounts.

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The Death of a Prophet: Muhammad's Death and the Beginnings of Islam (Book)
Title: The Death of a Prophet: Muhammad's Death and the Beginnings of Islam
Author: Stephen J. Shoemaker
Abstract: The oldest Islamic biography of Muhammad, written in the mid-eighth century, relates that the prophet died at Medina in 632, while earlier and more numerous Jewish, Christian, Samaritan, and even Islamic sources indicate that Muhammad survived to lead the conquest of Palestine, beginning in 634-35. Although this discrepancy has been known for several decades, Stephen J. Shoemaker here writes the first systematic study of the various traditions. Using methods and perspectives borrowed from biblical studies, Shoemaker concludes that these reports of Muhammad's leadership during the Palestinian invasion likely preserve an early Islamic tradition that was later revised to meet the needs of a changing Islamic self-identity. Muhammad and his followers appear to have expected the world to end in the immediate future, perhaps even in their own lifetimes, Shoemaker contends. When the eschatological Hour failed to arrive on schedule and continued to be deferred to an ever more distant point, the meaning of Muhammad's message and the faith that he established needed to be fundamentally rethought by his early followers. The larger purpose of The Death of a Prophet exceeds the mere possibility of adjusting the date of Muhammad's death by a few years; far more important to Shoemaker are questions about the manner in which Islamic origins should be studied. The difference in the early sources affords an important opening through which to explore the nature of primitive Islam more broadly. Arguing for greater methodological unity between the study of Christian and Islamic origins, Shoemaker emphasizes the potential value of non-Islamic sources for reconstructing the history of formative Islam.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14933.html
Access Model: 978-0-8122-4356-7
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Type: Single author monograph

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