In the preface to the first (German) edition of this book, we commented on the discussion that began in the 1970s about the authenticity and historical value of the early Islamic tradition. This discussion between “sanguine scholars” on the one hand and “sceptics” or “revisionists” on the other – to use the terminology still in use today – is still going on; however, the partisans of the “sceptics” have shrunk to a small group in the meantime.

As far as the Qurʾān is concerned, the assessment of the time of its creation, collection and further transmission has now radically changed, mainly due to the discovery and study of the oldest Qurʾānic copies known to date, especially a palimpsest from Ṣanʿāʾ (probably from the first half of the first century) and a codex from Paris and Saint Petersburg (probably from the third quarter of the 1st century). The scholarly investigation of these and other discoveries took place, on the one hand, within the framework of two large projects and, on the other hand, through research work by individuals.

The late Patricia Crone, “our field's most articulate skeptic”, who, like many other “sceptics”, long insisted on the hypothesis that the Qurʾān was not redacted until the reign of the Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685-705), revised her view under the impression of the results of the edition and examination of the palimpsest from Ṣanʿāʾ, whose text is most likely non-ʿUṯmānic. In the Preface to her Collected Studies (2016), she declared: “The Qurʾān existed by the time when tradition says it existed. There is no longer any good reason to doubt that ʿUthmān set up a commission that produced a Qurʾān.” Although Crone thus explicitly acknowledged the correctness of a core assertion of the Islamic tradition, she was no longer able to take the further step of recognising and using the Islamic tradition as a useful source of our knowledge of the life of Muḥammad and early Islam, in addition to the Qurʾān itself.

R. Hoyland has characterised “the crux” of Patricia Crone's and Michael Cook's ‘alternative’ theory of the origins of Islam, which they call “Judaeo-Hagarism”, briefly and aptly as follows: “Arab-Jewish involvement in the conquest of their birthright of the Holy Land, united by common descent from Abraham and motivated by Judaic messianism”. For this theory, or rather hypothesis, the two authors rely mainly (but not exclusively; see below) on an account in a chronicle attributed to the Armenian bishop Sebeos (written around 655), which centres on the calling of an Ishmaelite (Arab) merchant and preacher, Mahmet (=Muḥammad), who was familiar with the Jewish religion, especially with the story of Moses. According to the proponents of the Hagarism hypothesis, Muḥammad called the united Ishmaelites and Israelites to conquer “their” land, Palestine, which was under Byzantine rule at the time. In the campaign against the Greeks (Byzantines) that soon followed, not only Ishmaelites but also 12000 Israelites are said to have taken part; the Ishmaelites are said to have distributed the Israelites among their tribes to use them as guides into the land of Israel. – Since this account contains the earliest information about the Islamic prophet and his career, proponents of the Hagarism hypothesis consider this “external evidence” to be the more likely alternative to the early Islamic reports of the origins of Islam; in fact, these reports, in the form we have today, were redacted much later. Crone and Cook in Hagarism argue as follows: The terms hiǧra and muhāǧirūn originally referred not to an alleged emigration of Muḥammad from Mekka to Medina, but to an exodus from Arabia to Palestine; it is only later, by a geographical emendation, that Palestine lost its centrality as the religious focus of Islam in favour of Mekka. The conquest of Palestine was led by Muḥammad himself in 634, thus two years after the generally accepted date of his death.

Before reviewing the most important texts on which Hagarism is based, it should be said in all fairness that Crone and Cook have gradually abandoned constituent components of the hypothesis underlying their book. Cook is now apparently critical of his and his co-author's methodology and working methods at that time. However, he does seem to continue to regard the texts to be discussed here as possible supports for his original hypothesis.

Ad Die ältesten Berichte, 11

ʿUrwa's scholarly interest in the life of Muḥammad must also be seen in the context of the political aspirations of his family, the Zubayrids: In their “counter-discourse against the Umayyads”, they promoted the spread of the name (Muḥammad) and title (“the Messenger of God”) of the Prophet, who was their close relative (the Umayyads had no kinship with Muḥammad; they were also regarded as unpious). The commitment to Muḥammad's prophethood seems to have played a major role in the Zubayrid's efforts to articulate the legitimacy of ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Zubayr and his claim to the title “ruler of the faithful” (amīr al-muʾminīn). Under ʿAbd Allāh's caliphate, as is well known, the name of the Prophet, combined with the affirmation of his prophethood, appears on coins for the first time (“In the name of God, Muḥammad is the Messenger of God”). Such a revaluation of Muḥammad is not yet found in early Umayyad inscriptions. Only since the caliphate of the Umayyad ʿAbd al-Malik, who showed his interest in the life of the Prophet also through his questions in the letters to ʿUrwa, is Muḥammad's name together with his title found everywhere in official inscriptions; the most famous example is the Dome of the Rock. According to Robinson, and following him, Anthony, this is explained as follows: “the Marwanids seem to have learned a Zubayrid lesson – that …principal articles of belief should be proclaimed and disseminated publicly.

Ad Die ältesten Berichte, 41, point 14, and 75

On 75, lines 23f. it should read: “The letter [of ʿUrwa] mentions the meeting of al- ʿAqaba, which does not occur at all in the reports relying on al-Zuhrī ← ʿUrwa.”

This is the letter of ʿUrwa to the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik about the hiǧra and its prehistory, preserved by al-Ṭabarī (in the transmission of Hišām b. ʿUrwa ← ʿUrwa). It speaks of one ʿAqaba meeting, not of two, as the later tradition (Ibn Isḥāq) and, following it, most modern Muḥammad biographies have it. The text in question reads: “Then there came to the Messenger of God from Medina 70 chiefs, leaders of those who had embraced Islam. They met him [according to the agreement] at the pilgrimage. They paid homage to him at al-ʿAqaba and gave him their commitment: “We belong to you and you belong to us …” etc.

Overview of the Transmission

These two successive and related events are represented in the ʿUrwa corpus by several traditions according to Hišām b. ʿUrwa ← ʿUrwa (← ʿĀʾiša), which contain the main incidents of both events and are available in several versions (ʿAbd Allāh b. Numayr, Ḥammād b. Salama, ʿAbda b. Sulaymān, Ibn Abī Zāʾida). Part of these traditions form a coherent (albeit relatively short) narrative.

Ibn Isḥāq, in his K. al-Maġāzī, lists Yazīd b. Rūmān (← ʿUrwa) as one of his informants in the collective isnād, under which he places his longer account of the Battle of the Trench and the Banū Qurayẓa. In the Sīra (Ibn Hišām's adaptation of Ibn Isḥāq's book), the tradition material traced back to Yazīd ← ʿUrwa cannot be identified, but some traditions belonging here can be determined by comparison with the other Ibn Isḥāq transmission. These traditions are, on the one hand, a version of the story of the spy Nuʿaym b. Masʿūd, and, on the other, exegetical traditions that refer to certain verses of sūra 33. (The verses 9-27 of sūra 33 are related to the Battle of the Trench by the commentators.)

At least as important a source for our knowledge of the two events as the transmission according to Hišām b. ʿUrwa ← ʿUrwa is the much more detailed transmission according to al-Zuhrī. Longer or shorter parts of it are also preserved in several versions (Maʿmar, Ibn Isḥāq, ʿUqayl, Mūsā b. ʿUqba). Al-Zuhrī's reports largely correspond to those of Hišām ← ʿUrwa. However, for most of his traditions, al-Zuhrī does not give any sources at all; and not once does he name ʿUrwa. Ibn Isḥāq, too, names only al-Zuhrī in the above-mentioned collective isnād (in the Sīra) as well as in the text itself, where he explicitly refers to al-Zuhrī for individual traditions, but in no case does he name any of al-Zuhrī's informants.

The Hišām b. ʿUrwa Recension

In the following, the important traditions according to Hišām ← ʿUrwa (← ʿĀʾiša) concerning the events will be discussed first. Most significant is a longer, welldocumented tradition that has survived in its entirety and in parts and contains the central incidents of both events. At its centre is the person of Saʿd b. Muʿāḏ, who, mortally wounded in the Battle of the Trench, passed the terrible death sentence on the Banū Qurayẓa.

Overview of the Transmission

The story of the slander against ʿĀʾiša (ḥadīṯ al-ifk) is attested in the ʿUrwa corpus by two long recensions that go back directly to ʿUrwa (←ʿĀʾiša): the -Zuhrī and the Hišām b. ʿUrwa recension. Two other recensions depend indirectly (i.e., via al-Zuhrī) on ʿUrwa (←ʿĀʾiša): the Ibn Isḥāq- and the -Wāqidī-recensions. Unlike Hišām b. ʿUrwa, however, al-Zuhrī and – relying on him – Ibn Isḥāq do not transmit the scandal story according to ʿUrwa alone, but give other sources in addition to ʿUrwa; in their recensions, the reports of the various informants are conflated. This makes it difficult to determine the exact share of the respective informant. However, a comparison with the Hišām version makes it possible to identify those elements that can certainly be traced back to ʿUrwa.

The recensions according to al-Zuhrī and Hišām b. ʿUrwa exist in several versions that are independent of each other. In both ʿUrwa recensions, ʿĀʾiša is named as the original reporter and informant, thus also by Hišām b. ʿUrwa, who as a rule does not trace back the isnād beyond his father, ʿUrwa.

According to the ʿUrwa transmission, the story must have taken place before the Battle of the Trench, since Saʿd b. Muʿāḏ, who was mortally wounded in that battle, was still alive during the affair. It was only al-Zuhrī, and not yet ʿUrwa, who linked the event with the raid against the Banū l-Muṣṭaliq, in a short separate tradition transmitted by al-Nuʿmān b. Rāšid on the authority of al-Zuhrī. The isnād of this tradition stops with the latter, thus does not go back to ʿUrwa. While al-Zuhrī does not bring this synchronism in his long narrative of the ʿĀʾiša scandal, Ibn Isḥāq included it in his detailed account. It later became generally accepted.431 We can dispense with a treatment of Ibn Isḥāq's and al-Wāqidī's recensions, since these depend mainly on the -Zuhrī recension.

The -Zuhrī-Recension

Al-Zuhrī gives not only one informant, ʿUrwa, for his report on the scandal, but three others in addition: Saʿīd b. al-Musayyab, ʿAlqama b. Waqqāṣ and ʿUbayd Allāh b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUtba b. Masʿūd, all of whom refer to ʿĀʾiša. We will return to this. The following summary is based on the version according to ʿAbd al-Razzāq ← Maʿmar ← al-Zuhrī.433 However, the plot of the story is identical in all the complete versions that have come down to us on the authority of al-Zuhrī (see below).

Overview of the Transmission

The events of (or immediately preceding) Badr are attested in the ʿUrwa corpus by two long transmissions: The first is a letter from ʿUrwa to the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik, which is recorded in al-Ṭabarī's Taʾrīḫ (pieces from it also in his Tafsīr). The letter has the same isnād as all the other letters of ʿUrwa cited by al-Ṭabarī, i.e., it is traced back to ʿUrwa's son Hišām via Abān al-ʿAṭṭār (Hišām recension). He reports the events that took place immediately before the battle up to its beginning. A text without isnād that corresponds to the letter, in part verbatim or almost verbatim, is also found in Mūsā b. ʿUqba's account of the events of Badr. The other long transmission consists of traditions that Ibn Isḥāq traces back to ʿUrwa in his biography of the Prophet, relying on Yazīd b. Rūmān, a client of the family of a son of ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr. Ibn Isḥāq prefaces his long account of Badr with a collective isnād; one of the five chains of tradition that make up this collective isnād is Yazīd b. Rūmān ← ʿUrwa. For most of his account, Ibn Isḥāq claims to have combined the texts of the Yazīd ← ʿUrwa tradition with the texts of other informants about the event; but in three cases he says that he relies on Yazīd ← ʿUrwa alone for the tradition that follows. For two other traditions he cites two isnāds each, one of which is the Yazīd ← ʿUrwa chain. Among the shorter traditions concerning Badr, several traditions according to Hišām b. ʿUrwa ← ʿUrwa are worth mentioning. Some of them, e.g., the account of the Prophet's address to the fallen Meccans at the pit of Badr, are well attested, i.e., they exist in different versions (according to Abū Usāma, ʿAbda b. Sulaymān, Yūnus b. Bukayr, Wakīʿ).

Compared with Hišām b. ʿUrwa's traditions on Badr, those according to al- Zuhrī ← ʿUrwa are much fewer in number and importance. The most important -Zuhrī tradition, which is admittedly not certain to go back to ʿUrwa, exists in several versions (Maʿmar ← al-Zuhrī, Yūnus ← al-Zuhrī, Layṯ ← ʿUqayl ← al-Zuhrī). It is a compilation of various “statistical” details and data on the Battle of Badr. Corresponding traditions on the authority of al-Zuhrī (← ʿUrwa) (?) are also available for the Battle of Uḥud and the Battle of the Trench.

The first (German) edition of this book was published in 2008 by The Darwin Press in Princeton, New Jersey, as No. 24 of the prestigious series “Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam” (SLAEI). Since the work was written in German and published in the United States, it somewhat “fell between chair and bench”: Not being written in English, it did not find wide circulation in English-speaking countries; and in Germanspeaking countries, and not only there, it was often difficult to obtain. Moreover, there was no effective advertising on the part of the publisher. We are therefore very pleased that the book can now be published in a second edition by Gerlach Press as part of the reprint of the entire SLAEI series.

The most important revision of this new edition is the addition of the 11th and 12th chapters. The 11th chapter “The earliest non-Muslim writings on Muḥammad” is intended to address the criticism raised by one critic, namely that the book did not live up to its title (“The earliest reports on the life of Muḥammad”) which in the opinion of this critic was not fulfilled. It should be noted that a small inaccuracy remains: of all the six non-Muslim sources discussed, only one gives an actual account of Muḥammad's life, while the others just mention his name, allude to, or briefly report on, his emergence as a prophet, his character, his conquests, and the like. The 12th chapter “Hagarism revisited” contains a refutation of the Hagarism hypothesis. This refutation is based on the new revised editions and improved translations of the non- Muslim sources presented and dealt with in the previous chapter. The 13th chapter comprises comments on and responses to criticisms that were raised in reviews of the book. Longer additions, corrections and further discussions form the 14th chapter.

The newly added parts were written by Gregor Schoeler.

In terms of content, the text of the first edition has been mostly unchanged in this new edition. Obvious errors have been corrected, minor deletions and additions, such as references to recently discovered sources and new literature, have been made.

Quotations from the Koran are based on the translation of The Study Quran, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. The scholarly transcription follows to the rules of the Journal Arabica.

Overview of the Transmission Hišām b. ʿUrwa transmitted several accounts of individual events from the battlefield on the authority of his father. Some of these traditions are very well attested; they exist in versions from several disciples of Hišām. These reports are often typical family traditions in which close relatives of ʿUrwa play an important role: namely his father al-Zubayr and his grandmother Ṣafiyya.

Al-Zuhrī transmits only a few short reports about Uḥud on the authority of ʿUrwa. A long account of the events is traced back to ʿUrwa only in one place in ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s Muṣannaf, but not in ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s Tafsīr: there the chain stops at al-Zuhrī and is not extended to ʿUrwa.

Only for one, admittedly particularly striking tradition, the story of the accidental killing, by Muslims, of the Muslim al-Yamān (the father of the military leader Ḥuḏayfa (who later became famous), do both main transmitters ofʿUrwa, al-Zuhrī and Hišām b. ʿUrwa, refer to ʿUrwa. This tradition is well evidenced for both Hišām (versions on the authority of Abū Usāma, Yaḥyā b. Abī Zakariyyāʾ, ʿAlī b. Mushir, Salama b. Raǧāʾ) as well as for al-Zuhrī (versions relying on Mūsā b. ʿUqba, ʿUqayl and Yūnus b. Yazīd).

The Report on al-Yamān’s Death

The -Zuhrī Recension

Al-Bayhaqī334 and Ibn ʿAsākir present the story of al-Yamān’s death in three different traditions on the authority of al-Zuhrī ← ʿUrwa. Al-Bayhaqī quotes the tradition relying on Mūsā b. ʿUqba ← al-Zuhrī:

Ibn ʿAsākir quotes two other versions of this tradition, a slightly longer one relying on ʿUqayl ← al-Zuhrī and a slightly shorter one with slightly different wording relying on Yūnus b. Yazīd ← al-Zuhrī.

Non-Muslim Sources as Provocation of Islamic Studies

In 1977, three books appeared, all in England, that shook classical Islamic studies to its foundations: John Wansbrough's Quranic Studies, Patricia Crones and Michael Cook's Hagarism, and John Burton's The Collection of the Qurʾan. What all three authors have in common is that they consider the traditional accounts of early Islam and its culture, which had previously served Islamic studies for the most part as the most important basis for its critical research, to be untrustworthy or reject them altogether. This condemnation refers to the legal and historical traditions (aḥādīṯ and aḫbār), especially those concerning the life of Muḥammad (siyar, maġāzī) (Crone and Cook), as well as to the traditional accounts of the origin (collection, editing and dissemination) of the Qurʾānic text (Wansbrough, Burton, Crone and Cook). The reason for rejecting this material in all cases is mainly the fact that it is not based on contemporary accounts, but was only given the form it has today many generations later. The “sceptics” or “revisionists” base their theories and claims mostly on “external evidence” (coins, inscriptions), but especially also on non-Muslim historical sources that are supposedly older and more trustworthy than the Muslim ones and supposedly contradict them.

The reaction that the publication of these books triggered will not be discussed here, enough has been said about that. However, the discussion about whether the Muslim tradition is at all useful for the knowledge of what really happened, and whether the external, especially the non-Muslim sources, do not constitute a better path to this goal, is by no means finished. Even today, “revisionists” claim that the consonantal skeleton (rasm) of the Qurʾānic text only took on its final form around 700 after a lengthy process of stabilisation – some 50 years later than the Muslim tradition reports. However, the “revisionists” can no longer invoke Patricia Crone, “our field's most articulate skeptic” for their hypotheses; she has, in the Preface to her Collected Studies (2016), relying on and convinced by the research on a Palimpsest found in Ṣanʿāʾ fom the first century A.H., abandoned her earlier view.

In today's world, a scholar, or someone who wants to be one, can become famous by promoting and spreading a provocative thesis. It does not matter whether this thesis is serious or not. There are plenty of examples from various disciplines.

In Islamic studies, a provocative thesis of this kind might be that there was no prophet named Muḥammad. Anyone who is aggressive enough in promoting this view can be sure that some newspapers will print his article and thus make it accessible to a wide audience. It is convenient for the disseminator of such a thesis that he does not need to master the most important source language of Islamic studies, Arabic, in order to produce it. His native language and English are fully sufficient as “source” languages for this purpose; he can find everything necessary in secondary literature in these languages.

Works and articles that question the value of the Muslim sources on Muḥammad and early Islam, in part or in their entirety, exist in sufficient numbers, and have done so for more than 100 years.

The fact is that there are no contemporary Muslim sources about the people and events of the early Islamic era. Apart from the Qurʾān, the existing sources with a specifically Islamic reference were all written between 150 and 250 years after the events – at least in the form in which they have come down to us today. This has been known for a long time, however, and as early as the beginning of the last century, a methodological discussion arose in Islamic Studies in which there were “believers” – today one would say “sanguine scholars” – and “sceptics”. Even in this discussion, the best experts in the field at the time, Theodor Nöldeke and Carl Heinrich Becker, fully aware of the problematic character of the early Islamic tradition, rejected extreme scepticism towards the sources, and with good reasons.

The renewed round of discussions on the authenticity and historical value of the early Islamic tradition, which began in Britain towards the end of the 1970s, continues to this day. In recent times, the methodological discussion on the side of the “sceptics”, as Josef van Ess has aptly remarked, has taken on an increasingly parasitic character (loc. cit., p. 391).

The Corpus of the Sīra Traditions According to ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr

In the preceding chapters, the corpus of the sīra traditions of ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr was examined on the basis of the reports traced back to him on eight events from the life of Muḥammad to determine the extent to which the material actually goes back to ʿUrwa. In the following, the most important results of this investigation will be summarised and further conclusions drawn.

The reports presented here that can be traced back to ʿUrwa do not represent the entirety of what ʿUrwa collected about the life of the Prophet and passed on in letters to the Umayyād caliphs and in study circles. In the reports presented here, however, all the longer traditions traced back to ʿUrwa that we were able to identify have been taken into account, with the exception of the traditions attributed to Abū l-Aswad ← ʿUrwa, of which only individual traditions were used for the study as examples. Shorter reports traced back to ʿUrwa exist on numerous other events from Muḥammad's life, but their complete investigation would have gone beyond the scope of this book. From the excerpt examined, important insights can already be gained into the character and transmission of ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr's sīra material.

In the following, the focus will first be on the isnāds with which the reports of ʿUrwa are cited in later sources. Whereas in the previous chapters the isnāds of a single tradition were examined in each case, the aim here is to present an overview of the transmission routes which play a role in ʿUrwa's traditions and discuss how reliable the individual isnāds are.

Following this, a summary will be presented of the contents of the traditions which have been proven on the basis of this study to go back to ʿUrwa with certainty or with a high degree of probability. This core of the traditions that can be traced back to ʿUrwa will then be examined with regard to its nature and form. Finally, a reconstruction will be done of how the beginnings of the sīra developed from the reports of ʿUrwa to the works of, for example, Mūsā b. ʿUqba, Ibn Isḥāq, Maʿmar b. Rāšid and al-Wāqidī.