Muhammad's Body

Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage

Michael Muhammad Knight

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469658926
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Muhammad's Body introduces questions of embodiment and materiality to the study of the Prophet Muhammad. Analyzing classical Muslim literary representations of Muhammad's body as they emerge in Sunni hadith and sira from the eighth through the eleventh centuries CE, Michael Muhammad Knight argues that early Muslims' theories and imaginings about Muhammad's body contributed in significant ways to the construction of prophetic masculinity and authority. Knight approaches hadith and sira as important religiocultural and literary phenomena in their own right. In rich detail, he lays out the variety of ways that early believers imagined Muhammad's relationship to beneficent energy—baraka—and to its boundaries, effects, and limits. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory about the body, Knight shows how changing representations of the Prophet's body helped to legitimatize certain types of people or individuals as religious authorities, while marginalizing or delegitimizing others. For some Sunni Muslims, Knight concludes, claims of religious authority today remain connected to ideas about Muhammad's body.

CHAPTER ONE

Reading the Prophetic Body

Genealogy, Physiognomy, and Witness

Before asking what Muhammad’s body can do, this chapter asks how that body came into the world and became observably special to the bodies with which it would interact. I first consider the forces that come together to make this body possible. What kinds of bodies precede Muhammad and contribute to the making and organizing of his parts? What claims become confirmed in the naming of his ancestors? When these bodies forge connections and produce a new body that’s physically appropriate for the reception of the Qurʾan, what observable symptoms can reveal the condition of such a form—and how does the body enact meaningful change upon those who see it?

The first mode through which Muhammad links to other bodies reflects a rather conventional detail of what it means to be human: simply put, Muhammad had parents. His body came from bodies that in turn connected him to the bodies from which they came, and so on, connecting him biologically to a chain of distant prophetic ancestors such as Abraham and his son Ishmael. In Muhammad’s most immediate context, his birth automatically located him within organizations of bodies, namely families, clans, and tribes. In turn, Muhammad’s body, producing descendants through his daughter Fatima, also enabled future chains of bodies that could authorize themselves via their biological credentials from him. In numerous contexts throughout Muslim-majority societies—ranging from the Imamate to numerous ruling dynasties to Sufi orders to scholars and even beggars on the street—claiming sayyid or sharif status as a descendent of Muhammad staked a claim to certain privileges of respect, consideration, and power.¹ Descent from Muhammad is meaningful because he was the best of God’s creation, but Muhammad did not materialize from nothing; his special status becomes established in part through narratives about the family tree that produced him. His body, to borrow from a 1990s advertising slogan, was “made from the best stuff on earth”; Muhammad was better because his body came from better ingredients.

How does this body prove itself? Descriptions of Muhammad’s appearance, attributed to its eyewitnesses, circulate as mundane checklists of ostensibly neutral data such as the amount of hair on his torso and the manner of his stride. When it comes to the prophetic body, however, there are no neutral facts. The transmission networks that disseminated reports of his body’s details inhabited a world in which facts of the body were regarded as keys to understanding facts of the soul. Even without a singular, shared ur-logic or unified theory of bodies that informed all hadith transmitters, people talked about Muhammad’s body because his body contained readable signs: his body could tell stories.

This chapter begins our discussions of Muhammad’s body by first investigating its origins and appearance: Where did this body come from, what did it look like, and how do the sources’ answers to these questions express particular assumptions about bodies? After examining the processes through which Muhammad’s body appeared in the world and the ways this special body became manifested as such to its observers, I consider the eyes and hands that could access this body and the ways that such encounters can transform the witness.

Prophetic Genealogies

The Qurʾan’s historical setting of late Mediterranean antiquity places it in potential encounter with diverse theories of human reproduction, including both a “one-seed” model, in which a fetus develops exclusively from the father’s sperm, and a “two-seed” model, in which both parents contribute materially to the formation of their child. Kathryn Kueny has argued that the Qurʾan and hadith corpus favor a Hippocratic two-seed model, and that the two-seed model was embraced by most medieval Muslim physicians and jurists.² The Qurʾan’s precise construction of each parent’s role is not immediately self-evident. Though one reference describes the semen (nutfa) that produces a fetus in the womb as “mixed,” suggesting a two-seed model, the text of the Qurʾan also presents human reproduction as derived singularly from a man’s deposit in the womb, which God then molds through various stages.³

In a well-circulated and canonical tradition regarding ritual purity laws, Muhammad tells Umm Salama (or Aʾisha, depending on the version) that women have nocturnal emissions like men, and cites as evidence the fact that children can resemble their mothers.⁴ In a more detailed version attributed to Anas (often as Anas narrating an exchange between Muhammad and Anas’s mother, Umm Sulaym), the Prophet explains that men’s “water” is white and thick, while women’s water is yellow and thin, and the child will resemble whichever parent’s water dominates.⁵ In shorter versions, Muhammad simply gives his prescriptive ruling on ritual ablutions and does not approach the topic of heredity. Such versions appear throughout the Six Books as well as the Muwatta of Malik ibn Anas, who had rejected the Hippocratic position and held that only fathers contribute materially to their offspring’s form.⁶ Kueny also notes that the popular embrace of a two-seed model did not result in egalitarian views of reproduction, and that patriarchal assumptions about heredity still flourished in Muslim medical and juristic literatures.⁷ Though both father and mother were recognized as material contributors to the fetal body, Muslim thinkers such as Avicenna also followed Aristotle in attributing the soul entirely to the father’s semen.⁸

The Qurʾan does not give a “family tree” for Muhammad; it does not name Muhammad’s parents or grandparents, clan, or tribal lineage. The Qurʾan does mention a construct called Quraysh, which historical tradition has identified as Muhammad’s tribe, though the text itself does not self-evidently designate Quraysh as a tribe. As Daniel Martin Vorisco points out, “The term Quraysh is itself problematic[,] … a nickname” rather than a conventional tribal name (that is, the name of a founding ancestor), and it is not clear when Quraysh came to be understood as a tribal unit.⁹ When examining the Qurʾan for the significance of Muhammad’s ancestry, I read largely for silences.

Vorisco observes, “Even if the genealogy of the Prophet is assumed to be largely a myth, the important point is how and why genealogists constructed it”; prophetic genealogy operates as an authorizing discourse, establishing Muhammad’s biological line to Abraham and Ishmael and producing a context for his prophethood.¹⁰ The Sira invests powerful meanings in Muhammad’s ancestry, starting the prophetic biography with an extensive patrilineal genealogy that traces all the way back to Adam, and devotes special attention to the descendants of Ishmael.¹¹ Later discussing the marriage of Muhammad’s parents, Ibn Ishaq also documents the patrilineal descent of Muhammad’s mother, establishing that his parents share a patrilineal grandfather in Abdu’ Manaf, and traces her matrilineal descent to demonstrate a further connection with the same line.¹² These are the bodies through which Muhammad’s body was produced, legitimizing Muhammad as a physical descendent of Abraham.

Hadith traditions would amplify Muhammad’s genealogical elitism. Ibn Saʾd reports Muhammad stating that when God intends to appoint a prophet, he identifies the best tribe and then appoints its best man.¹³ In a tradition appearing in the Tabaqat, Ibn Abi Shayba’s Musannaf, and Ibn Hanbal’s Musnad, Muhammad explains that he has descended from the best son of every best son, asserting that from the sons of Abraham, God chose Ishmael; from the sons of Ishmael, God chose Kinana; from the sons of Kinana, God chose the tribe of Quraysh, and from the Quraysh, God chose the clan of Banu Hashim. From the Banu Hashim, God chose Muhammad.¹⁴ Another tradition presents Muhammad explaining that he came from the best family, from the best tribe, from the best group; in one variant, he issues this statement in response to unnamed critics’ slights upon his ancestry.¹⁵ Ibn Abi Shayba reports this tradition from a pro-ʿAlid narrator, Muhammad ibn Fudayl. Both Ibn Abi Shayba and Ibn Hanbal trace the transmission to pro-ʿAlid narrator Yazid ibn Abi Ziyad, who attributes the narration to ʿAbd Allah ibn al-Harith ibn Nawful (who happens to be the Prophet’s first cousin once removed, tracing his patrilineal descent to al-Harith ibn ʿAbd al-Muttalib, son of Muhammad’s grandfather). Varying chains in turn locate the original source for ʿAbd Allah’s narration either as Muhammad’s uncle ʿAbbas or ʿAbd al-Muttalib ibn Rabi’a, grandson of al-Harith ibn ʿAbd al-Muttalib and thereby ʿAbd Allah’s first cousin once removed.¹⁶ Narrations of Muhammad’s genealogical privilege serve a double authorization: while locating Muhammad atop a biological pyramid, they also privilege their reporters who share his roots.

Ibn Saʾd preserves three variations of the tradition in which Muhammad describes himself as the chosen individual from a chosen clan, from a chosen tribe, and so on, which departs from the above “chosen” tradition in describing God’s selection with the verb akhtara rather than astafa. The akhtara versions additionally include Arabs as one of the chosen categories. Two of these trace the report to Muhammad al-Baqir, the fifth Shiʾi Imam (and Muhammad’s great-great-grandson). In an extended version, presented in the isnad as a transmission from al-Baqir to his son, the sixth Imam, Jaʾfar as-Sadiq, the Prophet expands God’s process of choosing at both ends: “God divided the earth into two halves and made me from the best of them. Then he divided the half into thirds and I was from the best third. Then he preferred the Arabs from humanity. Then he preferred Quraysh from the Arabs. Then he preferred Bani Hashim from Quraysh. Then he preferred Bani ʿAbd al-Muttalib from Bani Hashim. Then he preferred me from Bani ʿAbd al-Muttalib.”¹⁷

The inclusion of ʿAbd al-Muttalib’s progeny among the privileged categories grants an increased share in Muhammad’s prestige to his paternal cousins ʿAli and Ibn ʿAbbas. The tradition also appears in the canonical collections of Tirmidhi and Muslim with a shortened version, leaving out ʿAbd al-Muttalib.¹⁸

The high esteem with which the sources treat Muhammad’s ancestors reads in tension with another theme of the prophetic biography and early Muslim historiography: depictions of pre-Islamic Arabia as lost in depraved ignorance (jahiliyya). A number of traditions address the problem. Muhammad declares, “I came from marriage; I do not come from fornication. From the time of Adam, the fornication of jahiliyya never touched me.” Versions of the tradition appear with chains that include the Prophet’s descendants, the fifth and sixth Imams, as transmitters. Ibn Saʾd also includes a shorter version (“I came from marriage, not fornication”) attributed to Aʾisha.¹⁹ Insofar as Muhammad’s moral integrity relates to the integrity of his lineage, he remains protected in every generation that precedes him.

Muhammad apparently existed within these bodies prior to his own formation. Rubin’s discussions of Qurʾan exegesis reveal openings in the text for consideration of Muhammad as preexisting his conception as “part of the spermatic substance of his ancestors.”²⁰ Rubin observes early Muslim sources imagining Muhammad as an “integral prophetic entity” that existed throughout the generations, leading to this entity’s “visible manifestation on earth, through the corporeal Muhammad.”²¹ Citing pre-Islamic poetry, Rubin points out that this “notion of a primordial spermatic substance wandering through pure forefathers” expressed ideas about bodies that were already established in Muhammad’s setting.²²

Though Muhammad’s preexistence does not find explicit articulation in the sira/maghazi sources, Ibn Ishaq’s Sira provides an account in which Muhammad’s father, ʿAbd Allah, becomes marked by a shining light on his forehead (described in one account as “a blaze like the blaze of a horse”). A woman (whose own genealogy is provided in the Sira, establishing her as a legitimate candidate) offers herself to ʿAbd Allah, but he declines, marries Amina, and consummates their marriage. When ʿAbd Allah sees the woman again, he asks her why she does not repeat her earlier offer, to which she answers that the light had vanished. The woman adds that she had heard from her Christian brother Waraqa that a prophet would soon appear. ʿAbd Allah apparently lost the blazing light with the ejection of his prophetic semen; the light next manifests from Amina after she becomes pregnant.²³

In the Musnad and Tabaqat, Abu Hurayra reports Muhammad stating, “I was sent from the best generations of Bani Adam, generation after generation, until I was sent from the generation that I am in.”²⁴ Ibn Saʾd presents a tradition in which Ibn ʿAbbas explains the statement of the Qurʾan “And your movement among those who prostrate”²⁵ as signifying that Muhammad had passed through generations of his pious forefathers. According to Ibn ʿAbbas, this verse amounts to God telling Muhammad, “From prophet to prophet, and from prophet to prophet, until I brought you out as a prophet.”²⁶ A popular tradition identifies Muhammad as a prophet prior to the formation of Adam; an interlocutor asks Muhammad about the beginning of his prophethood, to which Muhammad answers, “When Adam was between spirit and body.”²⁷ Slight variations in wording produce meaningful differences for the prophetic ontology; some versions represent the inquirer asking Muhammad how long he had been a prophet (matta kunta nabiyan?), while others depict the inquirer asking when Muhammad was appointed (juʾilta) or written (kutibta) as a prophet. In the latter reading, Muhammad was only a prophet prior to Adam in the sense that God had decreed his prophethood in advance, as with all things. A Kufan transmission attributed to ʿAmir al-Shaʾbi reports an unnamed man asking Muhammad, “When did you become a prophet?” (mata astunbiʾta?) to which Muhammad gives an extended answer: “When Adam was between spirit and body, the moment when the covenant was taken from me.”²⁸

Even if Muhammad came from a pure lineage, tension between his genealogical excellence and the jahiliyya of his historical setting persists in the question of his parents’ fates. As the biographical tradition reports that Muhammad’s father died before his birth, and Muhammad’s mother died w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction: What Can a Prophetic Body Do?
• 1. Reading the Prophetic Body: Genealogy, Physiognomy, and Witness
• 2. Muhammad’s Heart: The Modified Body
• 3. Bottling Muhammad: Corporeal Traces
• 4. The Sex of Revelation: Prophethood and Gendered Bodies
• 5. Secreting Baraka: Muhammad’s Body After Muhammad
• Conclusions: The Nabi without Organs (NwO)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks