Muhammad, His Prophetic Claims, and His Aorta
The perplexing presence of hadiths that seems to declare Muhammad to be a false prophet
All that we know, or think we know, about the life of Muhmmad come from sources that were committed to paper generations after his death. Chief among these are the biographies of Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Hisham and the vast corpus of hadiths (or traditions). Dating from 200-300 years after Muhammad’s death the, the hadiths supposedly describe his life in obsessive detail.
The very fact that the further we go from Muhammad’s lifetime, the more information there seems to be, should obviously set some alarm bells flashing. However, what I want to focus on for the moment is the astounding fact that some of those who wrote down the traditions bucked the trend of presenting Muhammad as some kind of superman, by actively undermining his prophetic claims. Could this have been the work of a disgruntled convert to Islam among those who worked to write down the traditions?
As it happens, to understand the story we must go back to the actions of one of the first apostates from Islam.
According to Muhammad’s biography he was deserted by his scribe, Ibn Abi Sarh. At issue was the charge that Muhammad allowed Abi Sarh to make changes to the Qur'an causing him to become disillusioned about how easily the supposedly eternal word of Allah could be changed. These events could obviously cause serious damage to Muhammad's reputation. As a means of damage control Allah sent down another one of his many ‘convenient revelations’: "And if the messenger were to invent any sayings in Our name. We should certainly seize him by his right hand, And We should certainly then cut off the artery of his heart (aorta)" (Qur'an 69:44-46)
So, the Qur'an here makes a rather stark, and utterly unique, claim: If Muhammad dies through the cutting of his aorta, he is a false prophet.
So, how did Muhammad die according to the most venerable Islamic hadiths? The widely accepted details of Muhammad's death are very well known. He was given poisoned meat by a Jewish woman as revenge for his actions against her people at the Battle of Khaibar. Interestingly, she placed the poison in the meat as a test of his prophethood, stating “If he was a prophet he will be informed of what I have done.”
What is even more interesting, in the context of Qur'an 69:44-46, is that there are several strong traditions, that are in the most revered collections, that state that Muhammad died through the cutting of his aorta: "The Prophet in his ailment in which he died, used to say, “O Aishah! I still feel the pain caused by the food I ate at Khaibar, and at this time, I feel as if my aorta is being cut from that poison.” (Sahih Bukhari 5:59:713); and: "He then said about the pain of which he died: I continued to feel pain from the morsel which I had eaten at Khaibar. This is the time when it has cut off my aorta." (Sunan Abu Dawud 4498)
The mind boggles at how these hadiths, which all but declares Muhammad to be a false prophet, made it into the two of most respected collections of ‘sound’ hadiths. Be that as it may, their presence just illustrates once again why every single aspect of the ‘accepted’ biography of Muhammad should be up for debate.
For much more about the serious questions that can be asked about the early history of Islam, please see my book ‘The Mecca Mystery – Probing the Black Hole at the Heart of Muslim History’
Kind regards,
Peter
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