Adrien de Jarmy
PhD candidate at Sorbonne Université, IDEO/IFAO Fellow 2019‒2020
Wednesday October 30ᵗʰ, 2019
Using a quantitative method, which includes traditions related to the Prophet and the Companions, and measures their distribution in ancient works of the Muslim tradition, Adrien de Jarmy tries to identify the political-religious thresholds and dynamics that mark the evolution of the representations of the Prophet. Moreover, in the Kitāb al-maġāzī, in the Muṣannaf of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī (d. 211/826) which includes 96% of the stories transmitted by Maʿmar b. Rāšid (m. 153/770), the Prophet is depicted above all as a warrior and does not occupy such a central place as he does in the Sīra of Ibn Hišām (m. 213/828), where he is omnipresent both as legislator and as a miracle worker. It would seem that after the ʿAbbāsid revolution in 132/750, political power needed to justify its link to the Prophet to both legitimize its ability to govern and to convince Jewish and Christians to convert to Islam by encouraging the emergence of an imperial historiography, which was not the priority of the Umayyads. It may also be that the Muṣannaf of ʿAbd al-Razzāq, written in Yemen, reflects peripheral concerns different from those prevailing in Baghdad, while at the same time informing us about the state of historiography at the end of the Umayyad period. Finally, it may be that some of these stories come from oral folk traditions (quṣṣāṣ) that have made their way into the biographical narratives that would eventually become canon.