Sprenger and Muir
The first academic "Lives" of Muhammad asked fundamental questions about the historical value of the earliest Islamic sources
Muslims tell a well-known story about the origins of Islam and especially about the life and teachings of their messenger. Muslims take the story as fact and many non-Muslims, including academic scholars, accept the story as well. But what is the strength of the story’s claim to historicity?
Yes there are many recent stories on Islam that cry out for good writing these days, some even from the past week. But I need to unload at least one more column on a considerably older story from the contents of my default academic project this year, Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History (Brill). My topic here is 19th-century scholarly views on the historical reliability of the earliest written sources on Islamic origins.
I have completed and submitted drafts of entries about the writings on Islam of two 19th-century European scholars who worked in India, William Muir and Aloys Sprenger. Last month I highlighted some of the accomplishments of Sprenger during his years as a medical doctor in India, 1843-56.
Sprenger’s research in India culminated in a massive three-volume life of Islam’s messenger titled Das Leben und die Lehre des Moḥammad (1861-65) that he wrote and published after his return to Europe. Sprenger told the traditional Islamic story of Muhammad and his teachings as he had learned them from the earliest Muslim sources he could find — copies of some of which he had actually discovered in manuscript form in the dusty libraries of Lucknow and other Indian cities. In the book’s third volume he included a 180-page preface specifically about the existing global sources for the story he was presenting. At the time, Sprenger knew as much about the earliest Islamic sources — he wrote seemingly matter-of-factly in 1856 — as anyone on earth.
Relatively soon after the publication of the third volume of Das Leben, Muir wrote from India an extensive review of Sprenger’s preface on sources. In The Calcutta Review, Muir praised the book in general and was openly grateful for the work that Sprenger had done to discover and publicize copies of early Islamic sources. In his review, however, Muir disagreed with Sprenger over his estimate of the trustworthiness of those sources.
The main sources for Muhammad’s life and teachings are early Muslim narratives called Sīra (“way of life”) or Maghāzī (“military raids”) on the one hand, and traditional sayings known as ḥadīth on the other. After writing more than 1100 pages in volumes one and two about the story of Muhammad in Mecca, Sprenger curiously disclosed at the beginning of volume three that he was skeptical of the historical reliability of most of the Mecca story. He suggested that if anything in the early sources had a claim to historicity, it would be the reports of Raubzüge (military raids) during the Medina period. And in comparing the traditions with the narratives, he wrote, “According to my judgment, the sunna contains more truth than falsehood, the biographies more falsehood than truth” (p. civ).
Muir took issue with Sprenger's skepticism about the historical reliability of the narratives. Muir was ready to accept much in the narratives as fact; and when something seemed fanciful, to imagine an historical event behind it. He argued that it is possible when reading the Muslim stories of Islamic origins “to separate the grain of fact from the husk of overlying fiction.” Muir had written his own four-volume account based on the same narratives titled The Life of Mahomet (1857-61), and one might say he had a stake in the question.
Questions about the historicity of the earliest Islamic sources on Muhammad continue to be asked up to the present day. My mind was opened to these questions during PhD research by the article “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad” by F.E. Peters (1991). But readers can check updates in Sean Anthony’s introduction to his Muhammad and the Empires of Faith (2020) and especially in Stephen Shoemaker’s chapters on Memory Science in Creating the Qur’an (2022, open access).
Muir’s interest, however, went beyond the matter of historicity. He seemed to have hoped that an account of Muhammad based on the earliest available Islamic sources would facilitate a conversation between Muslims and non-Muslims about the behavior of Muhammad according to those sources. Sprenger, meanwhile, after discovering priceless manuscripts of those sources and transmitting their contents in German, seemed disinterested in, or perhaps indifferent to, the issues they raised.