Oral Tradition and Scribal Conventions in the Documents Attributed to the Prophet Muhammad.

Abstract

This dissertation is on the citations in early Islamic sources of documents said to have been written or dictated by the Prophet Muhammad (~570-632 CE). These documents include contracts, grants of land, and diplomatic and personal letters. While documentary evidence from the period of the Prophet’s lifetime and the rise of Islam is scarce, the transmission of these documents can serve as an entry into a discussion of kitāba (writing) as a cultural practice and the representation of written artifacts in early Islam. I examine these documents as objects functioning within the contexts of textual transmission, the chancery and epistolary conventions of the late antique Mediterranean world, and orality and literacy. Keeping in mind that the discourse surrounding the Prophetical documents was not only a spoken but a material and social one, I ask the following questions. How did these documents and their transmission fit into the culturally current practices of storing and preserving information in verbal modes? How can we describe the physical characteristics as well as the symbolic and other non-linguistic functions of these written texts? In which ways did they interact with the idea of Prophetical relics and Prophetical ḥadīth (reports of sayings and deeds)?

This study of the documents attributed to the Prophet Muhammad shows that techniques of redaction, including preference for or laxity concerning verbatim reproduction, cannot be definitively divided between those belonging to oral and to written methods. An intense overlap and interchange exist between both oral and written mediums in our earliest surviving written sources for Islamic tradition. In addition, attesting to the sharing of traditions, the variation in the redactions of the Prophetical documents, their formulaic content and layout, and the scribal practices influencing their transmission are not unique to early Islam but find direct parallels in written practices of other (primarily Semitic) languages from the late antique world.