Ibn Ishaq

Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Yasar, or simply Ibn Ishaq (Arabic: ابن إسحاق, meaning "the son of Isaac") (died 761) (Robinson 2003, p. xv) was an Arab Muslim historian. He collected oral traditions that formed the basis of first biography of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. This biography is usually called Sirat Rasul Allah (Life of Allah's Messenger).

Life

According to Guillaume (pp. xiii-xiv), Ibn Ishaq was born circa AH 85, or roughly 704 CE, in Medina. He was the grandson of a man, Yasar, who had been captured in one of Khalid ibn al-Walid's campaigns and taken to Medina as a slave. Yasar converted to Islam and was freed. Yasar's son Ishaq was a traditionist, who collected and recounted tales of the past. Muhammad ibn Ishaq was thus carrying on the work of his father.

At the age of thirty, he traveled to the Islamic province of Egypt to attend lectures given by the traditionist Yazid ibn Abu Habib. He later fell out with his fellow traditionists in Medina and traveled eastwards, towards the what is now Iraq. There, the new Abbasid dynasty, having overthrown the Umayyad caliphs, was establishing a new capital at Baghdad. Ibn Ishaq moved to the capital and likely found patrons in the new regime. (Robinson 2003, p. 27) He died in Baghdad in 761.

Work

Ibn Ishaq wrote several works, none of which survive. His collection of traditions about the life of Muhammad survives mainly in two sources:

• an edited copy, or recension, of his work by his student al-Bakka'i, as further edited by Abd al-Malik ibn Hisham. Al-Bakka'i's work has perished and only Ibn Hisham's has survived, in copies. (Donner 1998, p. 132)

• an edited copy, or recension, prepared by his student Salama ibn-Fadl al-Ansari. This also has perished, and survives only in the copious extracts to be found in the volumimous historian al-Tabari. (Donner 1998, p. 132)

• fragments of several other recensions. Guillaume lists them on p. xxx of his preface, but regards most of them as so fragmentary as to be of little worth.

According to Donner, the material in Ibn Hisham and al-Tabari is "virtually the same". (Donner 1998, p. 132) However, there is some material to be found in al-Tabari that was not preserved by Ibn Hisham. The notorious tradition of the Satanic Verses, in which Muhammad is said to have added his own words to the text of the Qur'an as dictated by an angel and been rebuked, is found only in al-Tabari.

The English-language edition of Ibn Ishaq currently used by non-Arabic speakers is the 1955 version by Alfred Guillaume. Guillaume combined Ibn Hisham and those materials in al-Tabari cited as Ibn Ishaq's whenever they differed or added to Ibn Hisham, believing that in so doing he was restoring a lost work. The extracts from al-Tabari are clearly marked, although sometimes it is difficult to distinguish them from the main text (only a capital "T" is used).

References

• Donner, Fred -- Narratives of Islamic Origins, The Darwin Press, 1998
• Guillaume, A. --The Life of Muhammad, Oxford University Press, 1955, reprinted in 2003. ISBN 0-19-636033-1
• Robinson, Chase -- Islamic Historiography, Cambridge University Press, 2003, ISBN 0521588138
• Wansbrough, John --Quranic Studies, , 1977, as reprinted in 2004, ISBN 0197135889
• Wansbrough, John -- The Sectarian Milieu, , 1978, as reprinted in 2005, ISBN 019713596X