Ibn Ishāq

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Depiction of Ibn Ishaq

Muhammad ibn Ishāq [ ɪbn ɪsˈħɑːq ] (محمد بن إسحاق بن يسار بن خيار, DMG Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq ibn Yasār ibn Chiyār , b. around 704 in Medina ; died 767 or 768 in Baghdad ) was a Muslim historian who for the first time compiled the hadiths and documents about the life of the Prophet Mohammed in a book with a well-thought-out structure and chapters. This book, which has not been preserved in the original but only in later reviews, adaptations and excerpts, is one of the most important sources for the early history of Islam and served as a model for all later biographical works on the Prophet . The best-known arrangement of his work is the Sīra of Ibn Hishām . It later replaced the original work. A full German translation of the Sīra is available online, see below.

Life

Ibn Ishaq was the grandson of Yasār, who was one of the first prisoners of ʿAyn at-Tamr in Iraq from 633 to 634 on a campaign by Chālid ibn al-Walīd , and was sent to Mecca, where he was sent to Qays ibn Machrama ibn al -Muṭṭalib ibn ʿAbd Manāf ibn Quṣayy was enslaved. Converted to Islam, Yasār was released, and as his Maulā , he received the nisba al-Muṭṭalibī. His three sons were all known as historical news spreaders.

Muhammad ibn Ishaq followed in the footsteps of his uncles and father, specializing in the collection of stories and legends about the life of the prophets, about the creation of the world and the stories of the Arab tribes in pre-Islamic times . Already the Umayyad scholar az-Zuhrī, who died in 741/42, is said to have praised him as the most important authority in the field of the Maghāzī , the reports on the Prophet's campaigns.

First Ibn Iṣḥāq worked in Medina. In 737 he went to Alexandria , where he studied the hadith . Around 749 he was again among scholars in his hometown Medina, where he met the traditionarian Sufyān b. ʿUyaina, who passed on traditions after him and valued his learning.

Shortly afterwards (749/750) he left Medina. According to Brockelmann, it was not the Abbasid takeover that prompted him to do so, but the hostility of public opinion in this city that accused him of being the author of legends and poems about the prophet Mohammed. Mālik ibn Anas should be mentioned among the Medinens , who is said to have suspected him of having Shiite inclinations and of advocating the doctrine of human free will .

Between 759 and 760 Ibn Ishāq stayed in the Jazira , then he went to the caliph al-Mansur (r. 754–775) in al-Hira , before he finally settled in Baghdad. On behalf of the caliph he put together a book. In a report in the history of Baghdad by al-Chaṭīb al-Baġdādī it is specified that this was intended for the crown prince, the later caliph al-Mahdi .

Content and structure of his work

The content of the work that Ibn Iṣḥāq compiled for al-Manṣūr is given differently. While the biographer Muhammad ibn Saʿd in the 9th century only mentions that Ibn Iṣḥāq wrote down the Maghāzī for al-Manṣūr , al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī mentions in the 11th century that the caliph gave him the order "to write a book from the creation of Adam to this day ". He and others give this work al-Kitāb al-kabīr ("The Great Book") as the title and write that it consisted of three parts:

  • the Kitāb al-Mubtadaʾ ("Book of the Beginning"), which dealt with the period from the creation of the world to the appearance of Muhammad,
  • the Kitāb al-Mabʿath ("Book of Dispatch ", namely of the Prophet), which dealt with the Meccan period of the Prophet, and
  • the Kitāb al-Maghāzī ("Book of Campaigns"), which treated the Medinan period and the campaigns of the Prophet.

Some authors mention that this compilation contained a fourth part, namely a Kitāb al-Chulafāʾ ("Book of the Caliphs"), which dealt with the caliphate up to al-Manṣūr. The contradiction between the information given by ibn Saʿd and al-Chaṭīb al-Baghdādī is usually resolved in modern research in such a way that it is assumed that the title Kitāb al-Maghāzī was also used for the collective work. Some modern Western authors also use the title Sīra for the compilation , but this is not attested in classical Arabic literature.

For the two parts of Ibn Isḥāq's work that dealt with the biography of the prophets , the orientalist Josef Horovitz wrote : “ Ibn Isḥāq sent the traditional material that had been handed down to him by his teachers and which he expanded with numerous statements he had collected himself a well-ordered representation of the life of the prophet. ”He understood how to place“ the history of the prophet and the new faith in the history of divine revelation since the beginning of the world ”. According to Schoeler, the parts of the biography of the prophet were arranged chronologically and given chapter headings.

However, none of the above-mentioned parts of the anthology has survived in the original; rather, their content and form can only be deduced from traditional works by later authors.

The Kitāb al-Mubtadaʾ is known only from quotations and paraphrased excerpts in works such as World History and the Koran Commentary by at-Tabarī . In his book The making of the last Prophet, GD Newby attempted to reconstruct the Kitāb al-Mubtadaʾ with the help of such quotations . Accordingly, the story of Abraham was treated in this book in a particularly detailed and artful way.

Those parts of his work that deal with the biography of the prophet are also known through reviews ( riwāyāt ) of his students and later adaptations. They are covered in more detail in the following section.

Reviews and adaptations of his biography of the prophet

Review of Yūnus ibn Bukair

The Kitāb al-maġāzī is available on 300 manuscript pages (incomplete) in the review of his student Yunus ibn Bukair (d. 815) and was published by M. Hamidullah in 1976. The work begins with the genealogy of Muhammad and ends with the Islamic legend of Muhammad's Ascension . The German orientalist Johann Fück first pointed out the existence of this work review .

Characteristic of this work review are the numerous additions by Yunus ibn Bukair based on other sources that Ibn Ishāq himself did not use. Thus Ibn Bukair created an independent work, which Ibn ʿAsākir in his biographical city history of Damascus and Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalānī in his commentary on al-Buchārī under the title: Ziyadat al-maghaziزيادات المغازي / ziyādāt al-maġāzī  / Quoting 'additions (to the book) of the campaigns' several times.

Review based on Muḥammad ibn Salama

A short fragment of another review based on Muḥammad ibn Salama († 807) has been published by M. Hamidullah as an appendix to his above-mentioned edition; It is only a few pages long and contains an episode about the Dhu Amarr campaign, which is not preserved in the relevant traditions of the campaigns of Muhammad.

Adaptation of Ibn Hisham

In the second generation after Ibn Ishāq, ʿAbdalmalik ibn Hishām (d. 834 ) revised his work under the title Sirat Muhammad Rasulillah (“Biography of Muhammad the Messenger of God”). Ibn Hisham added numerous comments to the text, but also made cuts and omitted some poems. This arrangement superseded Ibn Ishāq's original version after a few centuries, so that it was no longer accessible as an independent book in the 13th century.

Ibn Sayyid an-Nās

Another adaptation of the work, which became famous in the early 14th century, was written by Ibn Sayyid an-Nās (born 1273; died 1334 in Cairo ) under the title: Uyun al-athar fi funun al-maghazi wa-sh-shama 'il wa-s-siyar  /عيون الأثر في فنون المغازي والشمائل والسير / ʿUyūn al-aṯar fī funūn al-maġāzī wa-š-šamāʾil wa-s-siyar  / 'The best news in the field of campaigns, the (good) qualities (of the Prophet) and (his) way of life'. In addition to Ibn Ishaq, he also quotes other authorities in maghazi literature from the 8th century, whose works are no longer available today. This work in two volumes has been printed several times in the Orient (most recently in Beirut 1974).

See also

Ibn Hisham

literature

Text output
Translations
Studies
  • Johann Fück : Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq . Frankfurt a. M. 1925
  • Josef Horovitz : The Earliest Biographies of the Prophet and their Authors. In: Islamic Culture. 2 (1928) pp. 169-180.
  • Maher Jarrar : The biography of the prophets in Islamic Spain. A contribution to the tradition and editorial history. European university publications. Series 3. Frankfurt 1989, ISBN 3-631-42087-0 .
  • JMB Jones: Art. "Ibn Isḥāq" in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition. Brill, suffering. Vol. 3, pp. 810b-811b.
  • Harald Motzki (Ed.): The Biographies of Muhammad. The issue of the sources. Brill, Leiden 2000, ISBN 90-04-11513-7 .
  • Miklos Muranyi : Ibn Isḥāq's Kitāb al-Maġāzī in the Riwāya of Yūnus b. Bukair. In: Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam. 14: 214-275 (1991).
  • Uri Rubin (Ed.): The Life of Muhammad. Ashgate Variorum, Aldershot 1998 (The Formation of the Classical Islamic World, Volume 4), ISBN 0-86078-703-6 .
  • Gregor Schoeler : Character and authenticity of the Muslim tradition about the life of Muhammad. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1996. p. 37ff; 124ff. ISBN 3-11-014862-5 .
  • Fuat Sezgin : History of Arabic Literature. Volume 1: Qur'an Studies, Hadith, History, Fiqh, Dogmatics, Mysticism. Until about 430 H. Brill, Leiden 1967, pp. 288-290; Pp. 297–299 (with further references)

Web links

Commons : Ibn Ishaq  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition. Brill, suffering. Vol. 1, p. 788
  2. ↑ Fuat Sezgin (1967), pp. 289-290
  3. ↑ See Jones 810b
  4. ↑ See Jones 810b
  5. ↑ Fuat Sezgin (1967), p. 288
  6. ↑ al-Mizzī : Tahḏīb al-kamāl fī asmāʾ ar-riǧāl , vol. 24, p. 410; 418; 426
  7. ↑ Brockelmann, C .: Enzyklopaedie des Islam , Vol. 1, p. 414.
  8. ^ The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition. Brill, suffering. Vol. 4, p. 368: Kadariyya
  9. ↑ See Jones 811a and Schoeler 43
  10. ↑ See Schoeler 42
  11. ↑ See Schoeler 42f.
  12. ↑ See Schoeler 42. Ibn an-Nadim cites a Kitāb al-ḫulafāʾ and a Kitāb as-sīra wal-mubtadaʾ wal-maġāzī in his Fihrist of Ibn Isḥāq , without mentioning that these were summarized in a larger work.
  13. ↑ See Schoeler 43.
  14. ↑ See e.g. B. Newby 2.
  15. ↑ Josef Horovitz (1928), p. 181.
  16. ↑ Gregor Schoeler (1996), p. 41 after J. Fück (1925), p. 37
  17. ↑ See Schoeler 40
  18. ↑ See Newby 65.
  19. ↑ Gregor Schoeler (1996), pp. 48-51.
  20. ^ Alfred Guillaume : New Light on the Life of Muhammad. Journal of Semitic Studies. Monograph No. 1. Manchester University Press (1960); Muranyi (1991), passim .
  21. ↑ Muḥammad b. Isḥāq. Literary historical studies . Frankfurt am Main 1925. p. 34. Note 8; Miklos Muranyi (1991), p. 214; 216.
  22. ↑ Muranyi (1991), passim ; Gregor Schoeler (1996), pp. 50-51.
  23. ↑ Muranyi (1991), 248-249, note 80; Gregor Schoeler (1996), pp. 127-128.
  24. ^ Carl Brockelmann: History of the Arabic literature . Brill, Leiden 1949. Vol. 2. p. 85; The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition. Brill, suffering. Vol. 3, p. 932
personal data
SURNAME Ibn Ishāq
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ishaq, Muhammad ibn; Ishaq; Ishâk, Muhammed Ibn; Ishāk, Muhammed Ibn
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Arab historian and biographer of the Prophet Mohammed
DATE OF BIRTH at 704
PLACE OF BIRTH Medina
DATE OF DEATH 767 or 768
Place of death Baghdad