Concubines:—*Safiyyah bint Huyyay, d. A.H. 36, *Railzeinah bint Zaid,*Mciriyah the Copt. d. A.H. 15 or 16, mother of Ibrahim. (Other names given by Ibn Sa'cl, vol. viii.) literary matter ascribed to the Prophet consists of (I) the Koran (q.v.) ; (2) certain contracts, letters and re scripts preserved by his biographers; (3) a number of sayings on a vast variety of topics, collected by traditionalists. The refer ences in the Koran to a form of literature called "Wisdom" (/iikmah) suggest that even in the Prophet's time attempts had been made to preserve some of the last; the general uncertainty of oral tradition and the length of time which elapsed before any critical treatment of it was attempted, and the variety of causes which led to the wilful fabrication of prophetic utterances, render the use to which No. 3 can be put very limited. It is very much to be regretted that the number of pieces justificatives (No. 2) quoted by the biographers is so small, and that for these oral tradition was preferred to a search for the actual documents, some of which may well have been in existence when the earliest biog raphies were written. Besides these contemporary documents many events were celebrated by poets, whose verses were ostensibly 'Dates are given A.H.
* is prefixed to names which figure on occasions that seem to be historical. Female names are in italics.
incorporated in the standard biography of Ibn Ishaq; but in the abridgment of that biography which we possess many of these are obelized as spurious; the divan (or collection of poems) attributed to Hassan b. Thabit, however, is ordinarily regarded as authentic. Though they rarely give detailed descriptions of events, their attestation is at times of value, e.g., for the story that the bodies of the slain at Badr were cast by the Prophet into a pit. Besides this, the narratives of eye-witnesses of important events, or of those who had actually taken part in them, were eagerly sought by the second generation, and some of these were committed to writing well before the end of the 1st century. The procedure whereby the original dates of the events (so far as they were remembered) were translated into the Muslim calen dar—for something of this sort must have been done—is un known, and is unlikely to have been scientific.
biography of Ibn Ishaq had circulated long before the two chief causes for the falsification of tradition had begun to have serious effects; these were the need for legal precedents, and the concept of saintliness, which gave rise to the classical works on the Evidences of Mohammed's Mission by Abu Nu'aim (d. A.D.
and Baihaqi (d. A.D. 1066) .
Lives of the Prophet (t indicates that the work is lost) : t'Urwah b. Zubair (d. 712-713) ; Musa b. `Ukbah (d. 758-759) ; 'Mohammed b. Ishaq (d. 768) ; Mohammed b. Hisham (d. 828-829), ed. Wiistenfeld (Gottingen, 1860) ; reprinted in Egypt by Zubair Pasha, a series of excerpts from the last ; Mohammed b. Omar al-Waqidi (d. 823), portion published by Kremer (Calcutta, 1855), abridged trans. of a fuller copy by Wellhausen, Muhammad in Medina (Berlin, 1882) ; Mohammed b. Sa'd (d. 844-845), an encyclopaedic work on the history of Mohammed and his followers, called Tabaqat, ed. Sachau and others (Berlin, 1904-12, incomplete) ; Mohammed b. Jarir al-Tabari (see TABARD . Other writers are enumerated in the Fihrist, cf. Sprenger's Leben Muhammads, Modern Authorities: The critical study of Mohammed begins in Europe with the publication by Th. Gagnier in 1723 of the Life by Abulfeda (q.v.). Presently there appeared an apologetic biography by Henri Cmte. de Boulainvilliers (2nd ed., Amsterdam, 1731), to which Gagnier replied in 1732 (La Vie de Mahomet, traduite, etc., ibid.). Then came the biography of G. Weil (Mohammed der Prophet, Stutt gart, 1843), without religious bias; the popular life by Washington Irving (London, 1849) is based on this. That by J. L. Merrick (The Life and Religion of Mohammed, Boston, 1850) rests on Shiite sources. The search for mss. in India conducted by A. Sprenger led to the dis covery of fresh material, which was utilized by Sprenger himself in his unfinished Life of Mohammed (Pt. I, Allahabad, 1851), and his more elaborate Das Leben and die Lehre des Mohammed (1861-65), and by Sir William Muir in his Life of Mahomet (London 1858-61), 4 vols.: afterwards abridged in one volume and reprinted. The biography by S. W. Koelle, Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1889), is pro-Christian, the pcpular work of Syed Ameer Ali, The Spirit of Islam (1896), an apology for Mohammedanism. The more notable later works include H. Grimme's Mohammed (Munster, 1892, and Munich, 1904) ; F. Buhl's Mohammeds Liv (Copenhagen, 1903—Dan ish ; since translated into German) ; A. N. Wollaston's Muhammad, His Life and Doctrines (1904); D. S. Margoliouth, Mohammed and the Rise of Islam (N.Y., 1905, etc.) ; Prince Caetani, Annali dell' Islam, i., ii. (Milan, 1905-07) ; and J. T. Andrae, Die Person Muhammeds in Lehre and Glauben seiner Gemeinde (Stockholm, 1917).
See further CALIPHATE, ab. init.; KORAN ; MOHAMMEDAN INSTITU TIONS ; MOHAMMEDAN LAW ; MOHAMMEDAN ART ; ISLAM ; MECCA.