Expeditions and battles
Scholars who want to portray the origins of Islam face a number of difficult decisions that come from the periphery. Should they tell the story as Islam's earliest existing accounts picture it?
My friend Ayman Ibrahim has been writing about Islam since 2010 and has already published or is presently working on more than a dozen books. Recently Oxford University Press accepted for publication Ibrahim’s manuscript provisionally titled Muhammad’s Expeditions: A critical reading in original Muslim sources.
Ibrahim grew up in Egypt and now works in the United States. The Arabic of the ‘original sources’ is not a problem for him. His book seeks to lay out what the earliest existing Muslim sources say about the expeditions of Muhammad. ‘Expeditions’ is Ayman’s translation of the Arabic term that the Muslim sources use for these accounts: maghāzī — meaning military campaigns, forays, raids, or attacks.
My last column mentioned a statement made by Jordan Peterson during the Q&A at the end of a 2017 lecture. Peterson said that one of the things that he ‘couldn’t wrap his head around’ in relation to Islam was that “Muhammad was a warlord.”
Was Peterson’s statement true? Did he intend it as a negative criticism of Islam? Would most Muslims, past and present, agree with that statement? Would the traditional Muslim accounts of Islamic origins agree? Ibrahim’s new book provides a clear, definitive answer to this latter question about the traditional Muslim accounts.
Ibrahim describes the four major early Muslim accounts to which we owe the main outline of the traditional story about Muhammad. (Interesting that there are four accounts, but that needs its own separate discussion.) Each of the four offers a narrative of famous battles and particular military raids during the period Muslims believe Muhammad ruled in Medina. One of the four, written by al-Wāqidī (747-823), is known by the title Kitāb al-maghāzī (“Book of the raids”) and uses the traditional chronology of the expeditions as an organizing principle. Interspersed between the raids are reports of battles, assassinations, and a massacre. An English translation of al-Wāqidī’s Kitāb al-maghāzī by Rizwi Faizer, The life of Muḥammad (2011), is readily available from Routledge.
Academic scholars have been familiar with these early Muslim narratives since a series of discoveries of their original manuscripts in Syria and India in the middle of the 19th century. Ibrahim traces the trail of subsequent Muslim accounts to show that there is no significant Muslim disagreement with the traditional story up to the second half of the 19th century, when several modernist Muslims in India sought to respond to western criticism of the violence reported in the Muslim sources.
The earliest Muslim accounts about Muhammad therefore portray him, without apology, as a warlord. In this sense Jordan Peterson’s 2017 statement was true. But from there it gets complicated. Are the earliest Muslim accounts historically reliable? How much do we actually know about Muhammad? Peterson was evidently not familiar with scholarly discussions of historicity, which Ibrahim helpfully reviews in one of the most valuable parts of his book.
Beyond this, however, from the political periphery of the subject: If Muslim accounts tell of actions that are now generally considered negative in the modern west, is it wrong to repeat those details? Is it kinder to characterize the early Muslim accounts as historically unreliable? Is it kinder to edit out the details now considered negative and to present instead only details now considered favorable?