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Theme Changer

 Topic: Sira

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  • Sira
     OP - October 05, 2014, 05:24 PM
    Quote
    More recent works by Wansbrough and Uri Rubin have similarly demonstrated in rather different ways that the representation of Muhammad in the sīra traditions is essentially a reflection of Islam and its concerns during the eighth and ninth centuries, having little to do with the historical figure of Muhammad.121

    Patricia Crone reaches the same conclusion in the opening pages of her Slaves on Horses, where she offers the following pithy, if devastating, assessment of the sīra traditions as historical sources:

    Thanks to its success, the Sīra of Ibn Isḥāq is practically our only source for the life of Muhammad preserved within the Islamic tradition.

    The work is late: written not by a grandchild, but a great grandchild of the Prophet’s generation, it gives us the view for
    which classical Islam had settled. And written by a member of the “ulama” the scholars who had by then emerged as the classical bearers of the Islamic tradition, the picture which it offers is also one sided: how the Umayyad caliphs remembered their Prophet we shall never know.

    That it is unhistorical is only what one would expect, but it has an extraordinary capacity to resist internal criticism, a feature unparalleled in either the Skandhaka [the life of the Buddha] or the Gospels, but characteristic of the entire Islamic tradition,
    and most pronounced in the Koran: one can take the picture presented or one can leave it, but one cannot work with it.122


    Shoemaker p100
    All my great grandparents were dead before I was born......

    Is it not realised Islam is built on nothing?
    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • Sira
     Reply #1 - October 05, 2014, 10:09 PM
    It's funny, I was just finishing up Ehrman's "How Jesus Became God" this morning, and I came across a passage that illustrates the critical gulf between scholarship on Islam v. scholarship on Christianity.  Here's the quote from Ehrman:

    "But Justin [the martyr] was writing 120 years after the 'earliest' Christians and cannot, of course, be used to show what the followers of Jesus were saying in the years just after Jesus's death, more than a century earlier."

    In modern scholarship on any other religion, you would spit our your coffee in laughter at the idea that somebody writing something down 250 years after the fact was a reliable source as to what happened 300 years or so before; without specific written texts, the claim would be useless as a matter of basic historical methodology.  Even 120 years, as Ehrman says, would be nonsense.  Until recently, however, such a claim was taken seriously in Islamic studies, and still is by many people, despite the devastating demonstrations made by Lammens/Wansbrough/Crone et al.  It's mind-boggling.
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