u/Voltrim

This is another article by Ehsan Roohi. Here he attempts to do a historiographical reassessment of the Meccan raids that took place both preceding and succeeding the Battle of Badr and the raids that constituted the casus belli for the Battle.

Roohi's findings suggests that of the 6 caravan lootings occured in the ghazwas and sariyyas, according to al-Wāqidī, that occured 16 months after the hijra are extremely suspect as they are never present in Mūsā b. ʿUqba and Ibn Isḥāq’s reports. Furthermore, many of these expeditions that are without any looting in Ibn Isḥāq’s reports alterate to caravan raids in al-Wāqidī’s records. This, according to him, suggest that this alteration was a literary device that was deployed to apologetic ends, such as to vindicate the muhājirūn.

The caravan lootings recorded in al-Wāqidī’s maghāzī are flagrantly more numerous than those preserved by Ibn Isḥāq. Roohi suggests that this occured due to ninth-century historiography inclining towards the Medina state being strong from the outset, even though in reality Medina was very vulnerable. He brings traditions related to Ibn ʿAsākir to argue this fact stating:

>Regarding the nature of the first Medinan expeditions, we are then reduced to our earliest sources, which speak of Muḥammad “making for Quraysh.” If anything, the vague statement yurīdu/ghazā Quraysh might denote defensive and/or surveillance measures of the kind of which the foregoing Ibn ʿAsākir tradition makes reference. What argues in favor of the archaic status of this account is its concordance with the context. Unlike al-Wāqidī’s idealized depiction of the Muslims as fearless warriors who repeatedly menace the powerful Quraysh’s trade, Ibn ʿAsākir’s account connotes the Muslims’ being a fledgling and fragile community who are apprehensive of losing their very existence.

For the sarriya of Nakhla, Roohi suggets that this was the only likely caravan raid out of all the expeditions but raiding of the caravan itself was not predicated upon the command of the Prophet:

>It remains to discuss the only expedition in which the attack on a caravan sounds more likely to have occurred, the sariyya of Nakhla. [...] According to Ibn Isḥāq, Muḥammad orders ʿAbd Allāh that: “Lie in wait there (i.e., at Nakhla) for Quraysh and find out for us what they are doing”. [...] The similar propensity of transforming the expedition to a caravan raid is perceptible in al-Wāqidī’s reports. [...] The claim of the earliest sources (Ibn Isḥāq, in particular) that the Muslims disobeyed the Prophet by attacking the caravan, and that they were initially commissioned only for reconnaissance (apologetic though it may appear), tallies with what is argued above about the vulnerability of Medina against foreign aggression and about the patrolling character of the first expeditions as a whole.

He then states that this single spontaneous incursion does not show a policy on Muḥammad’s part to disrupt the Quraysh’s commerce in this period, nor was he in fact able to do so, unlike the “orthodox” image the later Islamic historiography strives to convey.

Roohi also questions the Abu Sufyan caravan raids, suggesting that that this raid is no less dubious than the proported raids in the previous expeditions. He suggets that this caravan raid is a complete fabrication, by referring to the incongruity between the Qurʾān narrative and the sīra narrative, and suggets that this incongruity is to absolve the mutakhallifūn from blame of not participating.

>There is more to the incongruity between the sīra and the Qurʾān. Q 8:5–6 is revealing in this respect and worth quoting here: “Just as thy Lord ordered thee out of thy house in truth, even though a party among the Believers disliked it, disputing with thee concerning the truth after it was made manifest, as if they were being driven to death while they see it.” These verses are the chastisement of the believers for their detesting the fighting with the enemy. The Muslims are said here to have been aware from the outset, when the Prophet left Medina (lit. his “house” (bayt)), that a military confrontation is due to be met and thus sought ways to avoid it. The sīra likewise refers to the unwillingness of the Muslims to join the Prophet, but not on account of their fear of fighting, rather, for their lack of interest in gaining booty (!). Put another way, the Muslims were disinclined to participate in the battle, according to the Qurʾān, as they believed there would be imminent fighting, but according to the sīra they were unwilling to join Muḥammad as they supposed there would be no fighting. While the Qurʾān expressly admonishes the mutakhallifūn, the sīra absolves them from the blame, labeling them the people “of resolve and discernment.” [...] There can be little doubt that the eighth- and ninth-century account of the sīra diverges from our contemporary source, the Qurʾān, in order to gloss over the culpability of the mutakhallifūn. And the integral element of this apologetic scenario is the motif of caravan raid that the sīra includes in its narrative.[...] Set in the wider context of justifying the mutakhallifūn, the episode of caravan looting in the story of Badr is, therefore, highly suspicious and can be jettisoned as fabricated.

He then suggest that the Battle of Badr was defensive by quoting Q 9:13 and stating the apologetics of the sīra compilers regarding the Companions:

>Q 9:13 reminds the believers of the way in which the first battle with the Meccans began: “Will ye not fight people who violated their oaths, plotted to expel the Messenger, and attacked you first?” The context of the verse pertains well to the first days of Muḥammad’s Medinan career, for it mentions the expulsion (from Mecca) of the Messenger and his first war with the Meccans. As explicated by the commentators, the statement “attacked you first” (badaʾukum awwalu marra) corresponds to the Battle of Badr. [...] It seems tenable, thanks to our foregoing analysis of the Badr incident, that he would not have likewise fomented war with the Quraysh at Badr. The dread and anxiety of certain Companions to fight with the Meccan troop was probably a matter of extreme discomfort in the time when the sīra was being collected and complied. That is probably why the sīra tends to recall the Muslims as the instigator of war at Badr and before it.

Roohi also discovers a parallel between the sīra's story with accounts of the so-called sinful wars (ḥurūb al-fijār), a series of conflicts ranging from minor skirmishes to all-out wars waged in Arabia during the late sixth century. Through this, he suggests:

>The nature of the motif of caravan raid in the expeditions assessed thus far appears to be that of a literary topos, and this is particularly the case with the sīra’s account of the Battle of Badr, in which echoes of the tales of ḥurūb al-fijār abound.

Roohi also doubts the two expeditions that took place after the Battle of Badr by Zayd, namely al-Qarada and al-ʿĪṣ, suggesting that they are full of topoi:

>Notwithstanding the doubtful value of these reappearing elements, the problematic nature of the al-Qarada and al-ʿĪṣ accounts should not be relegated to the mere repetition in these stories of some individuals and commodities, for these narratives consist of nothing but topoi, as I hope to demonstrate.

Finally Roohi puts into question the alleged antagonistic actions of the Prophet’s formal and informal allies.

Link to the article: https://www.academia.edu/100165066/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammads_Disruptive_Measures_Against_the_Meccan_Trade_A_Historiographical_Reassessment

u/DrJavadTHashmi, apologies for tagging you again, but you argued here that the raids were likely historical. What do you think about Roohi's findings?

According to Ehsan Roohi, the assasination stories of the Prophet are often branded in modern scholarship as ideologically unbiased, politically “marginal,” and “completely free of any ten-dentiousness,” stories that “there would seem to be no reason for anyone to have tampered with for hagiographical or any other purposes.”

In this article, Ehsan Roohi questions this assertion, suggesting that the political assasination stories of the Prophet expressed in the sīra may be either fabricated, or largely filled with fictitious elements. In either case, these narratives are intended for apologetical, glorifying or polemical reasons.

He argues this by doing a literary analysis of all the assaination narratives and shows the extent to which literary topoi is present in the all the assaination narratives.

He concludes that:

>The assassination reports’ literary analysis, which reveals the literary commonplaces and the motivations behind their recurrence, has proved our narrative sources to be of little use for historical reconstruction.

However, he also states:

>Yet, it is not safe to generalize from this article’s negative observations and arrive at the conclusion that the Islamic sources are without “discernible historical truth,” for consulting the “unorthodox” traditions and non-sīra material appears to have occasionally provided the historians of formative Islam with a less tendentious counter-view to the sīra’s slanted portrayal.

Joshua Little concurs with his research as shown in this tweet:

>This is unnecessary IMO. The relevant hadiths are likely false: they’re just different remixes of a common stock of artificial narrative structures (tropes, formulae, etc.), each reflecting rival tribal and familial interests. Cf. this article.

Here is the tweet

Link to the article: https://www.academia.edu/56044561/Between_History_and_Ancestral_Lore_A_Literary_Approach_to_the_S%C4%ABras_Narratives_of_Political_Assassinations

u/juanricole and u/DrJavadTHashmi, what do you think?