Before going on with Muhammad’s life story, let’s look at one of the basic problems. At the time of Muhammad’s life, Arabia was not a society that wrote much down.
Paper is what makes writing easy; Arabia had parchment like the rest of the Near East and Europe, but while parchment can be reasonably available, its expense restricts use to important documents: charters, wills, decrees. It was very unusual to write notes about someone’s life during the parchment age. Charlemagne’s courtier Einhard wrote his biography, but then Charlemagne was the most powerful king Europe had seen since the Roman Caesars. We occasionally see a monk who uses some parchment to make his own meditations or notes, but it’s rare, and monasteries were places that majored in parchment procurement. South-Central Arabia, not so much.
Furthermore, the Arabic language of Mecca was just starting to be written down. As we’ll see, Muhammad’s close followers realized the importance of writing down his revelations. They certainly believed that his life was also very important. But they lived in an oral society where it was assumed that everyone would remember the stories he had been told. In oral societies, there are sometimes people whose role in the tribe is simply to remember everything. Forgetting wasn’t something they foresaw.
But Muhammad’s influence expanded more rapidly than anyone could plan for, and then they were too busy creating and maintaining an empire. Muslim records suggest that the third Caliph, who had known Muhammad, urged people to write things down but his reign was short. It wasn’t until two hundred years had passed since the Prophet’s death that scholars made a determined effort to collect on paper the oral anecdotes of his life that were floating around. The men who had known Muhammad had been scattered far and wide by the conquest effort, so their descendants might be found anywhere from Morocco to Afghanistan. They had to be tracked down and asked to narrate what their elders had told them to remember.
An anecdote of the Prophet is called a hadith. This just means a story or a saying, pretty much like our word “anecdote.” An anecdote is a short capsule of narrative information, maybe without a plot or storyline, and maybe without a clear lesson or point. The power of an anecdote is that it happened.
Lacking objective data, the main way to tell if a hadith was true or false was to evaluate the person who told it. After 200 years, that’s not just one person, either. Every hadith comes with a chain of transmission, called its isnad. The isnad tells you what type of claim is being made, and how many narrators were involved in passing it on. Were the transmitters generally thought to be honest men? There is a whole science of determining whether a hadith can be trusted. Every link in the chain had to be investigated.
And what about the collector, who had interviewed the last link in the chain? If a few hadiths in his collection have been deemed “fabricated,” then his collecting discernment is cast into doubt. The Shi’a care most about chains of transmission related to the line of Imams descending genetically from Muhammad, and they don’t give much credit to al-Bukhari, who collected most of the Sunn’i favorite hadiths.
Hadiths were also evaluated by whether they agreed with other hadiths. An outlier hadith that claimed Muhammad said something unusual would have a heavier burden of proof in terms of isnad quality. Some hadiths were recounted by multiple chains of transmission, so they were presumed to be true. When two hadiths disagreed head on, someone had to determine whether they were both correct in different contexts, or if one of them should be discarded. Discarded hadiths are considered fabrications or forgeries.
The whole thing reminds me of the current dilemma we have on the internet when we see a wise quotation ascribed to Aristotle, Winnie the Pooh, or Mark Twain. There’s little at stake here, so in that sense it isn’t comparable. But we face similar questions: is the friend who posted it typically careful about checking things, or not? Does the statement sound like something Aristotle would have said? Winnie the Pooh and Aristotle are known only through a defined set of works, but with Mark Twain, the set is less defined. What if the quote was generated from a private letter held in a museum, not typically shown in books? What if someone’s grandfather had met him and claimed Twain said this to him? How can we tell for sure which quotes are fabricated when the set is undefined? Imagine that a current political party had reason to tell us that Mark Twain said something: in a way, the stakes just went up. Does this agenda make the quote more or less likely?
Let’s take a random example of how to evaluate a hadith, leaning on the database “Isnad.io” for facts. One hadith (Vol. 4, Book 56, #710) in al-Bukhari’s collection says that when two teams were competing archery, the Prophet stopped to watch, but the team he wasn’t standing with refused to compete since now his presence was with the other team. Muhammad told them to go on shooting, because he was really “with” everyone. Is that a reliable hadith? First, its isnad has four narrators: “Masdad bin Masrhad narrates from Yahya bin Said bin Farroukh al-Qatan narrating from Yazid bin Abi Ubaid narrating from Salma ibn al-Akwa.” The original teller was a personal disciple of Muhammad, and although I don’t know anything about the other three names, they were all well-known teachers of Islam with many pupils, no sketchy outliers. The hadith itself appears two more times, with only minor variations; both of these also trace back to Salma ibn al-Akwa, so it confirms that the intermediate tellers didn’t alter it much (therefore they are trustworthy). How does it agree with other stories? It shows Muhammad being fair-minded and interested in archery, which means it agrees with them. So my guess is that it’s considered a reliable hadith.
BUT:
One of the most important things to know about Islam is that the various branches and “schools of law” differ greatly in how they evaluate the hadiths. If a hadith shows Muhammad speaking to a point of law, but it’s considered a fabrication, then the Islamic judges won’t regard it as relevant. Perhaps, back in 1023 two judges disagreed over some hadith, and ever since, their law students have passed on their differing opinions, generation after generation. Depending on what the hadith relates to, the judge from one stream might uphold your claim to an inheritance, while the other denies it. One might invalidate an adoption, the other uphold it.
Take a cursory look at the many collections of hadiths, and you’ll see how complicated this can be. The lists from the Sunn’i, Shi’ite, and Ibadi (African) branches include few overlapping collections. Just being from al-Bukhari might be enough to discredit the archery story for the Shi’ites and Ibadis.
This is the long way of saying that it’s not always clear what we know about Muhammad’s life. There’s a consensus story, and some facts emerge through the Quran itself, and some facts can be checked with outside events. But much of what we think we know comes from pooling these hadiths, written long after the fact. In at least one small but important case, another type of record conflicts with an important hadith. Which one should be taken as definitive? Sometimes these points define Shi’ite or Sunn’i viewpoints, and other times they follow other divisions. I intend to present the narrative formed by consensus, without taking any stands. When I’m aware that there are two narratives, I’ll tell both, as with the case of Khadijah’s previous marriages.
For further detailed information about hadiths, British scholar Jonathan A. C. Brown wrote an accessible book, Hadiths: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World.