Ibn Ishaq on Trial: “A Dajjal Among Dajjals,” a Lost Book, and an Editor’s Omissions

A Book Everyone Quotes, Whose Original No One Has Seen

Open almost any biography of the Prophet of Islam — classical or modern, Arabic or English — and follow its references backward. Again and again the trail ends at a single name: Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn Yasar of Medina (d. 150/151 AH, c. 767 CE), author of Sirat Rasul Allah, the earliest extensive biography of the Prophet. The battles, the treaties, the list of the participants at Badr, the letters to kings — an enormous share of what later generations narrate about the Prophet's life passes through this one book.

Yet three facts sit beside that book in the classical sources themselves. The most famous jurist of Ibn Ishaq's own city, Malik ibn Anas, is reported to have called him "a dajjal among dajjals." The book Ibn Ishaq actually wrote no longer exists in its original form. And the editor through whose recension it survives, Ibn Hisham, states in his own preface that he omitted, among other things, "things which it is disgraceful to discuss."