$45.49
Author: Shoemaker Stephen J.
Brand: University of Pennsylvania Press
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Pages: 416
Details: Review
[Shoemaker] develops [previous ideas] substantially, discusses them in the light of recent publications, and also offers highly instructive parallels with the situation in (and scholarship on) early Christianity. . . . [He] has done a very good job of highlighting the issues and giving them sophisticated and thorough discussion, and [The Death of a Prophet] is a worthwhile addition to the fast-expanding body of material on Islamic origins. ― Journal of the American Oriental Society
A work of utmost importance, and one that has profound implications for our understanding of how Islam began. ― Fred Donner, University of Chicago
Product Description
The oldest Islamic biography of Muhammad, written in the mid-eighth century, relates that the prophet died at Medina in 632, while earlier and more numerous Jewish, Christian, Samaritan, and even Islamic sources indicate that Muhammad survived to lead the conquest of Palestine, beginning in 634-35. Although this discrepancy has been known for several decades, Stephen J. Shoemaker here writes the first systematic study of the various traditions.
Using methods and perspectives borrowed from biblical studies, Shoemaker concludes that these reports of Muhammad’s leadership during the Palestinian invasion likely preserve an early Islamic tradition that was later revised to meet the needs of a changing Islamic self-identity. Muhammad and his followers appear to have expected the world to end in the immediate future, perhaps even in their own lifetimes, Shoemaker contends. When the eschatological Hour failed to arrive on schedule and continued to be deferred to an ever more distant point, the meaning of Muhammad’s message and the faith that he established needed to be fundamentally rethought by his early followers.
The larger purpose of The Death of a Prophet exceeds the mere possibility of adjusting the date of Muhammad’s death by a few years; far more important to Shoemaker are questions about the manner in which Islamic origins should be studied. The difference in the early sources affords an important opening through which to explore the nature of primitive Islam more broadly. Arguing for greater methodological unity between the study of Christian and Islamic origins, Shoemaker emphasizes the potential value of non-Islamic sources for reconstructing the history of formative Islam.
Book Description
Stephen J. Shoemaker investigates contradictory traditions about the end of Muhammad’s life in the Islamic and non-Islamic sources of the seventh and eighth centuries.
About the Author
Stephen J. Shoemaker is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon and author of Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The publication of Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s controversial study Hagarism in 1977 unquestionably marks a watershed in the study of religious culture in the early medieval Near East, even if its significance has occasionally been underestimated by other specialists in this field. In particular, this relatively slim volume highlighted the potential importance of non-Islamic literature for knowledge of religious (and secular) history in the seventh and eighth centuries, a so-called dark age for which sources are often sparse and spotty. Perhaps more importantly, however, this study proposed a radical new model for understanding both the formation of the Islamic tradition and the general religious landscape of the early medieval Near East. Together with the contemporary works of John Wansbrough, Hagarism articulated an innovative reinterpretation of formative Islam as a faith intimately intertwined with the religious traditions of Mediterranean late antiquity and in need of extensive study in the context of this religiously complex and intercultural milieu.
There are, it must be admitted, some considerable and undeniable flaws in Hagarism’s reinterpretation of
Release Date: 29-10-2015
Package Dimensions: 28x229x590
