by Dan Burmawi
There is a industry of Western scholarship dedicated to the problem of what we can historically recover about Muhammad of Mecca. The revisionist historians, from John Wansbrough in the 1970s through Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s Hagarism and into the more recent popular scholarship of Tom Holland, have mounted increasingly sophisticated arguments that the biographical tradition surrounding Muhammad was constructed decades or centuries after the events it purports to record, that the historical core of the Islamic founding narrative is irrecoverable beneath layers of pious invention, and that the sources through which we know Muhammad, the sira literature, the hadith collections, the maghazi accounts of his military campaigns, were compiled generations after his reported death.
Whether Muhammad existed in the precise biographical form that the tradition describes is a question for historians. Whether the Muhammad who has shaped the horizon of Islamic civilization for fourteen centuries is real is not a question at all. He is overwhelmingly, undeniably, consequentially real, more real, in the sense that matters for understanding human behavior and civilizational development, than most figures whose historical existence is beyond scholarly dispute.
He exists in the collective consciousness of a civilization of nearly two billion people with a specificity, an intimacy, and a comprehensive authority that no other founding figure of any tradition has achieved.
The tradition knows what he ate and how he slept. It knows which hand he preferred for which activities. It knows how he walked, how he smiled, how he treated his wives, how he handled the execution of his enemies, how he responded to mockery, how he negotiated with those he was in the process of defeating, how he organized the distribution of war spoils, how he prayed, how he expressed affection and how he expressed rage. This is not hagiography in the Western sense. It is a comprehensive behavioral template for human existence, preserved with the explicit theological purpose of making imitation possible and obligatory.
The companions who surrounded Muhammad absorbed this model at first hand, sat with him, fought beside him, watched him make decisions, heard his judgments, received his commands, and then carried what they had absorbed into the world with a momentum that is almost impossible to account for on purely material grounds.
Within a century of his death, the culture he founded had conquered the Arabian peninsula, destroyed the Persian Sassanid Empire, stripped the Byzantine Empire of its richest provinces, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Iberia, pushed into Central Asia, and reached the borders of the Indian subcontinent.