Muhammad and the Empires of Faith by Sean Anthony

Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam
By Sean W. Anthony
University of California Press, 2020

Of the three main sources for the life of Muhammad and the birth and initial rise of the religious and cultural tidal wave he unleashed - the primary (the Qur’an and the Hadith), the historical (inscriptions, near-contemporary non-Islamic writings, etc.), and the long sirah-maghazi tradition, a vast miscellaneous collection of Muhammad-related sayings, histories, documents, and legends, often spliced into a splotchy and uneven mass that doesn’t date any closer to Muhammad’s own day than 150 or even 250 years later - Sean Anthony is entirely right to posit his new book, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith, on the assumption that the third, the sirah-maghazi literature, is the least regarded for its historical usefulness. The mass of  sirah-maghazi literature, passed down from teachers to students in a steady accumulation of often unattested details, has long been considered by scholars to be badly unreliable at the very least. 

Anthony, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University, organizes the fascinating riches of Muhammad and the Empires of Faith around a disarmingly simple question: “Can the modern historian really work with the sirah-maghazi literature - or is this corpus hopelessly mired in legend, an impenetrable veil that that [sic] must be cast aside because it obscures our view of the historical past?” 

His answer, given with eloquence and steep erudition in these pages, is a very firm yes. And in a variety of ways, he shows how this can be done - including, most intriguingly, analyzing the sirah-maghazi horizontally, as it were, in a kind of dialogue with other literature of its own period. The sheer number of times Anthony manages to make insightful commentary on the writings of the Venerable Bede in a book about Muhammad, for instance, is just one indication of the important thinking going on here. Anthony rightly refers to the late Patricia Crone as “our field’s most articulate skeptic” when it came to the usefulness of the sirah-maghazi tradition to historians seeking the hard bones of the past, but even she would have grappled with this book, filling its margins with many arguments but, I’d guess, few outright dismissals. 

“The sirah-maghazi tradition is problematic because it is such a noisy source,” Anthony writes, “its version of history tends to drown out the other sources or else demand that they be read within the framework it provides.” Muhammad and the Empires of Faith goes a considerable way toward the good goal of quieting and sorting out that noise. The book is a delight for the textually inquisitive. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.