So it was, during the ninth and tenth Christian centuries, that episodes from the life of Muhammad came to be woven imperishably into the fabric of Muslim life. The age of the Prophet and his companions was not forgotten. Those who laboured, generation after generation, to preserve its memory never doubted the full, revolutionary implications of their undertaking. It was not enough to provide the vast mass of the faithful with codes and standards of behaviour; the appetites of the rich, and of the powerful, and of the well-fed, those whose flaunting of the dictates of social justice had so provoked the anger of the Prophet in the first place, had to be tamed as well. “No man is a believer who fills his stomach while his neighbour goes hungry.”27 Here, and in the multitude of hadiths like it, were maxims calculated to unsettle anyone who had grown fat on the pickings of empire. Indeed, to an elite rotten with oppression and greed, Muhammad’s indignation at the inequities of human society, preserved in the record of his sayings, was bound to appear chilling in the extreme. No wonder, then, that the scholars of the Caliphate, justly suspicious of the ambitions and appetites of their rulers, should have toiled to authenticate the hadiths. The Muslim people could be left in no doubt about their veracity—no matter how challenging they might be. Here, for the jurists and the biographers, the historians and the religious scholars of Islam, was yet another prodigious task. The links that bound their own world to the time of the Prophet had to be certified as proven—and to the satisfaction of all.
The stakes, then, could hardly have been higher. Establish the hadiths as genuine, and the present would be grappled impregnably to the past. Naturally, it was essential that the struts and supports deployed for this purpose—the “isnads,” as they were termed in Arabic—be strong enough to hold firm across the centuries. Only an unbroken succession of authorities, each traceable to the next across the generations, culminating in a personal report of the Prophet himself, could be fit for purpose. Fortunately, there was no shortage of such chains of transmission. The links of the isnads held true. Five hundred years on from the death of Muhammad, and it seemed to many Muslim scholars that there was barely an aspect of human life that had not, thanks to all their titanic efforts, been safely secured and fettered to some salutary hadith. There was now not the slightest risk that the faithful might lose sight of the Prophet’s example. Just the opposite: the moorings that bound past to present could hardly have been rendered any the more secure. The isnads, like a tracery of filaments forged across time, seemed as infinite as they were unbreakable. Far from receding out of view, Muhammad’s life had been preserved in an almost pointillist depth of detail.
Nor, of course, was that the limit of the legacy left by the Prophet to the faithful. No matter all the many wonders and prodigies increasingly attributed to him by his biographers, the Muslim people knew, deep down in their hearts, that there had been only the one transcendent miracle. “We have made the Book to descend upon you, a clear explanation for all things.”28 So God had assured Muhammad. The “Book” was, of course, the sum of all the many revelations granted to the Prophet over the course of his life; and these, written down by his followers, had then, after his death, been assembled to form a single “recitation”—a “qur’an.” Quite how and by whom this great project of memorialisation had been undertaken would subsequently be much debated; but it gradually came to be accepted that the man responsible had been Uthman, the third of the Caliphs. As a result, the word of God, which had first been gasped out by the Prophet all those years before in the cave outside Mecca, was preserved in written form, to the eternal benefit of mankind: “a mercy and a remembrance to those who have faith.”29 To the Muslim people, this “recitation” was a prize beyond compare. Not a word of it, not a letter, but it was touched with the fire of God. Undimmed, undimmable, the Qur’an offered to all those who dwelt on earth something infinitely precious: nothing less than a glimpse of the radiance of heaven.
A prize such as this, it seemed to many, could only ever have existed uncreated, beyond the dimensions of time and space: for to imagine that God might somehow be distinct from His word was, of course, to commit the mortal offence of shirk. Quite how this insight was to be reconciled with the undoubted fact that Muhammad had received his revelations over a period of several years was a question requiring much delicate and ingenious investigation: not surprisingly, many centuries would pass before the problem was finally resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Deep waters—and only a Muslim whose entire life had borne witness to his piety, wisdom and learning could presume so much as to dip his toe into the infinitude of such an ocean. If the writing of a commentary on the Qur’an—“tafsir,” as it was known—ranked as the most praiseworthy activity known to scholarship, then so also was it easily the most hedged about by danger. No Muslim, but he knew that “torment upon torment” awaited those who “obstructed the path to God.”30 Peril awaited the unwary student of the Qur’an at every step. The consequences of error might be fatal indeed.
And yet the challenge, over the centuries, did succeed in being met—and gloriously so. A whole ornate scaffolding of commentary, rising in ever more spreading detail, came to be constructed around the luminous core that was the Qur’an itself. One particularly notable achievement was the identification of the process by which the Prophet, step by step, had received the word of God: no simple matter, to be sure. The divine purpose, after all, had been to send a message to humanity—not to scatter clues around for the benefit of Muhammad’s biographers. As a result, allusions to the life of the Prophet within the holy text were so opaque as to verge on the impenetrable. Muhammad himself, for instance, was mentioned by name a bare four times.31 The places associated with him received only fleeting and ambiguous reference. Not even the most dramatic episodes in his career—his confrontation with the Quraysh, his flight to Medina, his purification of the Ka’ba—received direct corroboration. Far from providing a roadmap of the Prophet’s life, the Qur’an was so dense, so allusive, so elliptical, as to require almost a roadmap itself. Fortunately for the Muslim people, however, it was precisely such a roadmap that the tafsirs were able to provide. Armed with these, the faithful could trace what would otherwise have been untraceable: the precise stages by which the Qur’an had been received by Muhammad. Only by reading the holy text with a commentary was it possible, for instance, to distinguish between the various revelations given in Mecca, and those given in Medina; to identify the precise verses that had followed the Battle of Badr; to recognise allusions to the Prophet’s concealment in a cave during the course of the hijra, or to his villainous uncle, or to the domestic arrangements of his wives. Authentication, as with all the other fruits of Muslim scholarship, was provided by unimpeachable witnesses. Isnads stretched back resplendent to the moment of each original recitation. Proofs bristled everywhere. Immortal and uncreated the Qur’an may have been; but it had also been firmly tethered to the bedrock of the human past. God had spoken to Muhammad—and Muhammad had belonged to the world. Islam was to be regarded both as eternal, and as born of a specific moment in time, a specific place, a specific prophet.