Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad

(ca. 704–ca. 767)

   Ibn Ishaq was the grandson of a slave who was given his freedom upon converting to Islam. His father and two uncles were professional traditionists— preservers of the oral traditions that had been passed down concerning the life of Muhammad. Based originally in Medina, Ibn Ishaq himself became an expert on Muhammad, specifically on the prophet’s military career. Accused of too rationalist an approach in his study of Muhammad’s life, Ibn Ishaq left Medina in 733. He studied in Alexandria and eventually traveled to Baghdad, collecting all of the traditional stories he could find and compiling them into a single narrative, Sirat Rasul Allah (The biography of God’s prophet).Written about a century after the death of the prophet, Ibn Ishaq’s text was the earliest biography ofMuhammad.His original work is no longer extant, but the text was revised in the ninth century by one Ibn Hisham, and that version has survived, along with extensive quotations and allusions to Ibn Ishaq’s text in other historical works.

   Oral tales, memories, and legends about Muhammad’s life began to circulate immediately after the prophet’s death, and these were preserved (sometimes orally, sometimes in writing) by professional traditionists like Ibn Ishaq’s father and uncles. These scholars preserved not only the stories but also their sources, so that it was known which eyewitness had passed his or her version of the event down to which storyteller. In this way, the authority of the tales could be verified. When Ibn Ishaq collected these tales, he preserved their attributions as well, so that his text is filled with phrases like “Abdullah told me that . . .” Thus Ibn Ishaq felt free to at least imply his own doubts about certain stories that had been passed down: He begins one section with the disclaimer “It is alleged in popular stories (and only God knows the truth).”As such, the biography provides a helpful insight into how medieval narratives grew out of oral sources. But for the most part the biography is valuable particularly to Muslims, because it is the chief source for detailed information about the life of God’s messenger.

   Ibn Ishaq’s biography preserves a far more detailed picture of Muhammad than we have for the founders of any other major religious traditions. The text is a collage of short anecdotes, genealogy, poems, long lists of supporters or opponents of Muhammad, and more detailed narratives. It begins by tracing Muhammad’s descent from Adam through Abraham and his son Ishmael. Ibn Ishaq then relates the history of Arabia until the time of Muhammad. He then includes stories concerning the prophet’s birth, his visions in the desert, his preaching and building his community of believers, his exile to Medina and triumphant return to Mecca, and subsequent religious wars, concluding with Muhammad’s death and details of the burial of the prophet.

   In addition, Ibn Ishaq is careful to show Muhammad’s life in the context of the community of faith he established, so that other members of the community, such as Salman the Persian, the first non-Arab convert to Islam, are given prominent stories of their own within the larger arc of the prophet’s life-story.

   Little more is known of Ibn Ishaq’s life or the circumstances of his death (in Baghdad), but his legacy is the biography that is still the best authority we have for the life of one of the world’s most significant religious figures.

   Bibliography

   ■ Guillaume, Alfred, ed. and trans. The Life of Muhammad: Translation of Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah. 1955. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997.

   ■ Newby, Gordon Darnell. The Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Muhammad. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.