Muhammad and The Jews — Page 20
with whom they had social and business relations, and killed him. 1 It seems to be a drastic order. Could the Apostle enforce it in the third year of the Hijrah? What was the occasion? And in spite of the language of the order which covered every Jew it seems lbn Sunaynah was the only unfortunate Jew who fell into Muslim hands. It is obvious that lbn Isl)iig gave this information without context; some important link is missing. For lbn IsJ:iiiq that link was not signi- ficant, and for us it is impossible to recover. Ibn Isl)iiq quotes a con- ciliatory letter which the Apostle wrote to the Jews of Khaybar 2 , but does not tell us who carried the letter, how the messenger trans- mitting the letter was treated, how the Jews reacted to it, whether they replied, and if they did what their reply was. That information is lost to us. One may agree with Lord Raglan's conclusion, which he has drawn after careful study, that "any fact about a person which is not placed on record within a hundred years of his death is lost. " 3 Add to this the fact that "every incident begins to fade as soon as it has occurred". 4 · Considerable critical work on the authenticity of the lf adith literature has been done by Goldziher5, Margoliouth, 6 Lammens 7 , Robson8 and Schacht9. Al-Sabil;ain, the first two collections of authoritative traditions known as "The Six Genuine Ones", the !iaf:iih of MuJ:iammad b. Ismii"il _, al-Bukhari (194/810-256 /8 70) and the $al;lh of Muslim b. al-J:Jajjaj (210/816-261/785), though slightly later, "represent for the first time in the literature a more rigorous criticism 1 Ibn Hisham, p. 553. 2 Ibid. , pp. 376-7. 3 Lord Raglan, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, lvlyth and Drama (New York, 1956), p. 13. 4 Ibid. , p. 14. 5 Ignaz Goldziher, lvlus/im Studies (The original was first published in 1890) trans. · by C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern (London, 1971), Vol. II. 6 D. S. Margoliouth, The Early Development of Mohammedanism (London, 1914). 7 Henri Lammens, Islam, Beliefs and Institutions, trans. by Sir E. D. Ross (London , 1929). 8 James Robson, " Tradition", 711e Muslim World, Vol. XLI, 1957, January, pp. 22-23, April, pp. 98-112 and July, pp. 166-180. 9 J. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford, 1959). A vast literature by Muslim scholars, especially of India and Pakistan, to rebut the. criticism of Western scholars, especially that of Schacht , has recently appeared in Urdu. Fuad Sezgin has also done some valuable work. Unfortunately most of these works have not been translated either into Arabic or English. 20 •.