Abstract
Reviewed by Fred M Donner , The University of Chicago, USA
Zayd relates, as the characterization on the book’s dust-jacket notes, “the little-known story of the prophet Muḥammad’s adopted son” (a helpful description that does not, however, figure as part of the book’s official title). Powers compiles, from an extensive array of Islamic sources dating from the 8th and later centuries, what must be an almost complete assemblage of the surviving lore relating to Zayd ibn Ḥāritha, known to Islamic tradition as the young man who became first the prophet Muḥ;ammad’s slave and then his adopted son. He also collects reports about Zayd’s son, Usāma b. Zayd, remembered mainly as leader of a campaign sent out by the prophet on the eve of his death. Powers handles this rich trove of material with consummate philological and literary skill, synthesizing from it a clear picture that reflects the Islamic tradition’s consensus view on these two important companions of the prophet.
Powers gathers this material in order to further the case argued in an earlier book, Muḥ;ammad is Not the Father of Any of Your Men: The Making of the Last Prophet (2009), that the reports of the prophet’s repudiation of Zayd as his adopted son, and the rejection of the institution of adoption in general, and most other reports about Zayd, and even the Qur’anic verses in sura 33 (Al-Aḥ;zāb) that relate to Zayd and adoption, are primarily products of a desire in the later community to prevent anyone from raising claims to legitimate leadership on grounds of being Muḥ;ammad’s descendant (in the male line at least). Regarding the Qur’anic verses, Powers suggests plausibly—there is, of course, no definitive proof—that they were not part of the original text, but are interpolations introduced during the redaction of the Qur’an made at the behest of the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705). The theological doctrine that Muḥ;ammad was the “seal of the prophets”—interpreted to mean the final prophet in a long series—also “required that the man who brought the office of prophecy to an end must be sonless” (111). Powers thus argues that for both political and theological reasons, later Muslims were driven to deny or reconfigure Zayd’s status as the prophet’s adopted son.
In addition to this basic point about the prohibition of adoption, and the roots of that prohibition in political and theological concerns in the community of Believers after Muḥ;ammad’s death, Powers argues forcefully that the narratives about Zayd and Usāma were modeled on stories about prophets found in the Hebrew Bible (or sometimes in later Jewish tradition). For example, he notes that Zayd’s beautiful wife Zaynab, like Uriah the Hittite’s beautiful wife Bathsheba, was the subject of the amorous attentions of a prophet (Muḥ;ammad or David, respectively), and that in both cases, the respective prophets were able to marry their newfound objects of desire when the husbands, Zayd and Uriah, ceased to be obstacles. Similarly, Powers argues that the reports in which the prophet Muḥ;ammad granted Usāma b. Zayd, who was very dear to him, special clothing on numerous occasions, are modeled on biblical stories involving the granting of special clothing that conferred esteemed (sometimes royal) status on the recipient, such as Pharaoh’s granting fine robes to Joseph, or Ahasuerus’s dressing Mordechai in royal garb.
The suggestion that narratives about the life of the prophet Muḥ;ammad, or about other events in early Islamic history, are inspired by biblical motifs or models is not, of course, new. It goes back at least to 1922, when P. Jensen published an article pointing out numerous parallels between the Sīra and the Bible (which elicited an almost instantaneous reply by J. Horovitz [1922]), and has been cogently advanced more recently by T. El-Hibri (2010) in relation to the stories about the rāshidun caliphs. To the extent that such parallels form the core of these sources, this of course moves these reports into the realm of purely literary fabrication, and undermines the notion that they provide evidence of actual events. On the other hand, we cannot simplistically assume that the early Islamic narrative sources consist entirely of literary motifs, borrowed or otherwise, simply because we sometimes find in them precise, objective information—such as the appointment of a particular governor to a particular city in a particular year—that turns out to be confirmed by documentary evidence, such as a coin issued in that governor’s name. Students of early Islamic history, and of early Islamic narratives, then, must work harder to understand more precisely how these sources were put together, and so to discern where the “seams” between literary confection and sound historical information may lie. This undertaking will doubtless require many years, maybe many generations, to complete.
A key question, of course, is whether such proposed cases of intertextuality are really that, or only appear to be. I do not doubt that many of the biblical parallels that Powers finds in the Zayd–Usama corpus are likely ones, but it is worth pointing out that the parallels are often not exact. In the case of Zayd, for example, it is true that the narratives depict Muḥ;ammad as being smitten by sight of his adopted son Zayd’s wife Zaynab, just as the Bible depicts David as being smitten by sight of his soldier Uriah’s wife Bathsheba. But the dissimilarities are almost as striking: David seduces Bathsheba, that is, commits adultery, and then sends her husband Uriah to his death in a hopeless battle in order to get rid of him, whereas Muḥ;ammad resists the temptation to seduce Zaynab until Zayd has divorced her (which he had already wanted to do). Is this, then, an intentional effort to model Muḥ;ammad’s actions on those of David? Or is it merely the recurrence of a common theme—a man’s temptation to become sexually involved with a woman who is already married and so not “legally” available—that is found throughout human history and is ubiquitous in works of drama, from the ancient Greek myth of Ares and Aphrodite to countless episodes in today’s soap operas? In making the case for intentional modeling of one narrative on an earlier archetype, the devil is in the details, and if the details are too different, one has to wonder whether we are really dealing with intentional modeling, or merely with a general similarity reflecting a theme common in human life and folklore. In such cases, it might be helpful to consider a narrative arc under consideration in the light of a compendium such as Stith Thompson’s classic Motif-index of Folk Literature (1955–1958).
It is also problematic when a practice or event is said to parallel not one particular figure, but many. So, for example, the notion that the prophet gave special garments to Usāma, or allowed him to ride behind him, may have symbolic importance, but when it is adduced as a parallel to three separate figures (87), we are entitled to ask whether this is a case of intentional modeling on these figures, or whether we are dealing, again, with a widespread trope in human life. Similarly, one is puzzled by Powers’s observation (96) that “Zayd is a hybrid figure whose persona is modeled on that of at least six different biblical characters: Joseph, Dammesek Eliezer, Solomon, Ishmael, Uriah the Hittite, and Isaac.” This seems to reduce the modeling to a very general theme—but what is the common theme uniting all these figures?
Another issue arises from Powers’s analysis. If these narratives about Zayd and Usāma were in fact essentially fabrications shaped by preexisting tales about biblical figures, why were these two men favored with this kind of parallel construction? The point of these narratives, with their biblical overtones, seems to be that they elevated Zayd’s and Usāma’s status and enhanced their claim to some kind of legitimacy. But this contradicts Powers’s other thesis, that adoption was prohibited in order to prevent Zayd or Usāma from being the figures to which later claims to political or religious legitimation might be attached. How, then, are we to explain this conundrum? Powers may provide a clue in his statement (104) that these biblically based narratives about Zayd and Usāma were “pushed from the center to the margins” of Muslim tradition about Muḥ;ammad. He thus implies, but does not state explicitly, that these Zayd–Usāma stories modeled on biblical prototypes constituted an early stage or layer in Muslim tradition—one that antedated the decision to forbid adoption but that was well enough established so that these reports could not be effectively eliminated, but only neglected in the later narratives about the life of the prophet that eventually became mainstream, such as the Sira of Ibn Ishāq in its recension by Ibn Hishām. This would mean that these narratives must have been composed during the 7th century, since Powers has proposed that the Qur’an verses forbidding adoption were inserted during the redaction undertaken at the behest of ‘Abd al-Malik, and thus before his death in 705 CE. It would be helpful if Powers had discussed this possibility openly, which I believe is the only way to explain the apparent contradiction between the prohibition of adoption and the biblically modeled narratives about Zayd and Usāma.
Powers has given us a short but fascinating and carefully argued study that raises a number of momentous questions about early Islamic tradition. He offers some bold hypotheses, with which one may agree or disagree, but always handles the evidence carefully and provides clear reasoning for his deductions. Zayd is thus in many ways a model work that students of Islamic tradition need to read and reflect upon, and it should be the starting point for much further fruitful discussion.