Religion of Peace

Islam Files, No. 4 — The Life Is Called the Best-Documented Biography on Earth. The Town at the Center of It Does Not Appear in the Pre-Islamic Record, and the First Full Life Survives from the Ninth Century.

In the standard narrative the Prophet is born in Mecca in 570, receives revelation there from 610, leaves in 622, and dies in 632. The Qur’an names “Makka” once, in 48:24. Everything else is “Masjid al-Haram,” which the later tradition glues to the Kaaba. The sira makes the town the first fifty-two years of the life and the hinge of Arabian trade.

Patricia Crone’s Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987) went looking for that town in the records that actually survive from before Islam: Assyrian, Roman, Persian, Himyarite, Nabataean, and the Greco-Roman geographers. Ptolemy’s second-century Geography lists a Macoraba; Crone argued the coordinates and the etymology do not land on Mecca. Procopius surveyed the west Arabian coast in the sixth century and did not mention the place. Najran, Taif, Yathrib, Khaybar, Tabuk — the other oases on the western plateau — show up in outside sources. Mecca does not. Francis Peters put the silence bluntly: there is no non-Arabic text that confirms even the town’s existence.

The first clear non-Muslim notice is the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle of 741, a century after the traditional death date. It records a conquest of Mecca and then locates the city “between Ur in Chaldea and Harran,” which is Mesopotamia, not the Hijaz. The map in the chronicle and the map in the gift shop do not agree.

The paper trail for the man is late in the same way. Ibn Ishaq, first compiler of a large biography, dies in 767. His book is lost. What exists is Ibn Hisham’s recension; Ibn Hisham dies in 833. Al-Waqidi dies in 823. The six Sunni hadith collections belong to men who died between 870 and 915. Al-Tabari dies in 923. None of them wrote in Mecca. Bukhari was from Bukhara. Tabari was from Tabaristan. The printed Ibn Hisham most students meet was assembled by the German philologist Wüstenfeld in 1858–1860 from manuscripts dated 1063 to 1589. The Leiden Tabari was assembled in Holland between 1879 and 1901.

Two to three centuries and one to two thousand miles from the events is not “best documented in history.” It is a literature. Literatures can be true, false, or mixed. They are not contemporaneous minutes. The concrete now poured around the Haram has closed the one trench that might have settled the geography. The slogan did not require the trench.

Filed from the primary texts and the public record:

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