Muḥammad's call revisited : a critical approach to Muslim tradition

Abstract

This thesis is an examination of Muslim traditions concerning Muhammad's call to prophethood. Although Muhammad's initial prophetic call is one of the most crucial events in the history of Islamic religious tradition, Muslim records of the event are too inconsistent to be reconciled. At the expense of sound source criticism, some influential modern Islamicists, like Tor Andrae and W. M. Watt, have tried to reconstruct Muhammad's call from inconsistent hadiths. Drawing on the works of four Muslim traditionists, i.e. Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sa'd, al-Bukhari and al-Tabari this thesis points out that, other than the fact that Muhammad must have gone through a fundamental religious experience, Muslim traditions do not permit a reconstruction of the historical event of Muhammad's call; they do provide, however, evidence of the complex ways in which Muslims understood the event, suited to their religio-theological interpretation of the Qur'anic allusions to the modes of Muhammad's religious experiences.