Finally finished this book.
The main thrust of the argument is that Muhammad was still alive 2 years after his supposed death, when the Arabs invaded Palestine. However, the proof provided thus far is vague and unconvincing. There are references to someone leading the Arabs, but it could very well have been Abu Bakr or any other Khalifah, not necessarily Mo himself........On the plus side, the introduction is a marvel of disinterested study and clearly displays that it is not simply an attack on muslim faith, but a considered and meticulous examination using the same sorts of criteria that Biblical scholars regularly use.
Yes that is a pretty fair summary. The book provides some evidence from both Islamic and non-Islamic sources that Muhammad was still alive during the invasion of Palestine, but it is conceivable that those sources simply made a mistake.
What is more convincing is the other part of the argument, that Muhammad was a doomsday prophet, who actually believed that the end of the world was to happen very soon, possibly within his own lifetime. The evidence from the Quran that Muhammad was pre-occupied with doomsday is prolific, however there is nothing within the Quran that specifically gives a date to when the end of the world will come, only that it will come "soon". But "soon" is very subjective. So again not a killer blow. Though there is more evidence within the Hadiths (see below).
What I found most interesting about the book was the author's skeptical approach to studying Muslim traditions and trying to determine what parts of the Quran and Hadiths are most likely to have originated from Muhammad himself. For example the author suggests that the rhyming style of the Quran was most likely added by later compilers when trying to fit all the different little bits of the Quran together, and the parts when the Quran seems to repeat itself is most likely the result of trying to compile various different versions of Muhammad's ramblings from different sources into a single source and scribes accidentally putting the same ramblings from Muhammad into different surahs.
Shoemaker shows that the content of the Quran was still in flux as late as the Ummayad era as evidenced by the Quranic inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (inscribed during the time of Abd Al-Malik) that are apparently different from the corresponding passages in today's Quran:
The relative instability of the Qur’anic text even at this late date is substantiated by the thousands of variant readings preserved by early Islamic authors or recorded on coinage. Yet perhaps the most prominent and inescapable such evidence appears in the inscriptions of the Dome of the Rock: these citations from the Qur’an diverge from the 'ne varietur textus receptus', which had allegedly been codified almost forty years prior under Uthman, at least according to the traditionally accepted account. If the Quranic text had been already established for nearly four decades by this time, it is difficult to explain how or why this variant text came to be in-scribed on one of Islam’s most sacred and prominent monuments. To the contrary, it would seem that even in the centers of power, the codification of the textus receptus had not yet been achieved…
Shoemaker argues that a good methodology to determine the authenticity of traditions in the Hadith is the use of what he calls ‘MATN’ analysis or the doctrine of embarrassment. Basically any hadith that contradicts key principles of the later established tradition or that paints Muhammad or the early community in an unfavorable light is likely to be very early or even authentic. Because traditions that are embarrassing or contradictory to established beliefs and practices are unlikely to have been invented in a setting where their content would have created dissonance.
With regards to content in the Hadiths that talk about the end of the world coming within Muhammad’s lifetime, it is rather improbable that later generations would have dreamed up such pronouncements and placed them in Muhammad’s mouth, when they were so plainly contradicted by the flow of history; to the contrary, the persistence of traditions ascribing to Muhammad a belief in the Hour’s imminent arrival, despite their manifest inaccuracy, attests to the prominence of this idea within earliest Islam, confirming the evidence from the Qur’an. (Basically the fact that these traditions that Muhammad believed that the end of the world was rapidly approaching have survived at all is testament to how important the belief must have been in early Islam because it became impossible to totally cover up and "unremember" these mistakes)
Two of the best examples of this that Shoemaker identifies are a hadith where Muhammad pointed to a young man and said “If this young man lives, the Hour will arrive before he reaches old age.” And an incident from Ibn Sa’d’s Tabaqat where he instructed the builders of the Mosque in Medina not to bother with constructing a proper roof because there was no time left
:
the builders were instructed not to bother with constructing a proper roof for the mosque, since the end was close at hand. Instead they were enjoined “to build the mosque in a provisional way, like the booth of Moses,” apparently a roof of thatch, because “God’s command” would soon arrive putting an end to life in general and, consequently, worship as well. The tradition’s omission from many standard collections is readily understandable, as Kister observes: “the Day of Judgment did not come in the days of the Prophet and there was no reason to quote a tradition which stated clearly that the Prophet believed that the s’na (the Hour) would happen in his own lifetime.” Moreover, it is extremely unlikely that believers in later generations would invent such a tradition and ascribe it to Muhammad, since it was so patently contradicted by the passing of time: the most probable explanation is that the tradition originated from Muhammad’s own eschatological teachings. (pg. 176)
So all in all a very interesting read.
Topic: New book on beginnings of Islam by Stephen J. Shoemaker