Did Muhammad Write by Hand? A Live Debate in Eleventh-Century Andalusia

Midway through a public reading of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, in the seat of the 11th-century Andalusian seaside kingdom of Dénia, a prophetic tradition was read aloud that stated that Muḥammad once handwrote a peace agreement with his opponents outside of Mecca. For many listeners, the only possible way to maintain Muhammad’s miraculous status as an unlettered Prophet would have required the commentator, Abū al-Walīd al-Bājī (d.1081), to look beyond the apparent meaning of the text to what was implied: Muḥammad ordered someone to write the agreement by hand. Despite the availability of textual resources outside of the Ṣaḥīḥ that would have supported such a reading, Bājī nevertheless chose to rely on the apparent meaning of the variant, suggesting that Muḥammad physically wrote the pact himself. A local controversy ensued, forcing the emir of Dénia to appeal to scholarly authorities in Sicily, North Africa and the Near East to help quell the popular outrage over Bājī’s reading and commentary.

Placing textual narratives of this episode in the context of 10th  and 11th-century Muslim scholarship on the Ṣaḥīḥ in Andalusia, this paper explores broader themes of how live and written commentaries of prophetic traditions came to serve as public and politicized forums in which commonly held Islamic legal and theological commitments could be taught, upheld, debated and sometimes subverted. This paper further documents how the growth in the study and criticism of the provenance of prophetic traditions not only bolstered one’s authority in the newly competitive arena of Andalusian traditionists, it also brought new and sometimes unwelcome expectations for the way readers ought to interpret its normative content.