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Reviews 207
historical environment. If there are scholars who believe that it is impossible to
write an “interesting biography of Ibn Khaldun” (p. 39), Fromherz has triumphantly
proved them wrong. Ibn Khaldun, Life and Times is not just interesting,
but also thorough and hugely informative. Fromherz is very prolific, and his future
work will no doubt continue to advance and enrich Islamic and Middle Eastern
Studies.
Mohammad Salama: San Francisco, mrsalama@sfsu.edu
Andreas Görke and Gregor Schoeler, Die ältesten Berichte über das Leben
Muhammads: Das Korpus ^Urwa ibn az-Zubair (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early
Islam, 24). Princeton 2008: Darwin Press, XII + 318 pp. ISBN 978-0-87850-172-4.
This is an important book that represents the culmination of more than a decade’s
worth of collaborative and independent work by these two authors on the early
history of the sira traditions. The roots of the project reach back at least as far
as Schoeler’s 1996 monograph Charakter und Authentie der muslimischen Überlieferung
über das Leben Mohammeds, which focused particularly on the traditions
of Mu1ammad’s prophetic call and the ^A#isha scandal, two traditions that
here again come into focus as part of a larger corpus of traditions that the authors
assign to the early traditionist ^Urwa b. al-Zubayr (d. 713). Indeed, in many ways
the book under review should be understood as an extension of this earlier work,
whose conclusions it seeks to amplify by identifying a number of other traditions
that the authors would assign to ^Urwa. Their larger goal in this is “to find a way
out of the present research ‘crisis’ concerning research on the life of Mu1ammad”
(p. 281). The “crisis” that Görke and Schoeler have in mind is the highly
problematic nature of the sources that we possess for understanding the life
of Mu1ammad and the earliest history of Islam. As is well known, the earliest
sources for the beginnings of Islam were very late in forming, being compiled over
a century after the events in question, and to make matters worse, these earliest
collections do not themselves survive but are known only as they have been reworked
by later authors of the ninth, tenth, and later centuries.
Görke and Schoeler aim to circumvent this problem by assigning accounts
of eight key events from Mu1ammad’s life to ^Urwa’s authorship, thereby securing
this foundational core of Mu1ammad’s biography to the end of the first Islamic
century. Accordingly, they maintain, we may take some confidence that
this skeleton of events accurately reports actual events from the beginnings of
Islam, a point that is regularly underscored, both in this work and in previous