Muhammad’s failed resurrection legend explains early Islam’s fragility
Evidence
After Muhammad’s death, everyone wished to abandon his Law. He himself had said that on the third day his body would be borne up to heaven. When they realized that this was a lie and saw his corpse rotting, he was buried and the greater part [of his followers] abandoned [Islam]. ‘Alî, the son of Abû Tâlib, one of Muhammad’s ten associates, took over the kingdom at Muhammad’s death. He coolly predicted and hotly admonished the people to believe, and said that they had not properly understood Muhammad’s words. “Muhammad,” he said, “did not say that he would be resurrected before his burial or while men watched. He said rather, that after the burial of his body the angels would, with no one knowing, bear him up to heaven. Therefore, when they did not immediately bury him, he began to decompose, so that they might bury him immediately.” By means of this argument [‘Alî] kept the people for a while in their original error. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 809
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- SHARE: This interpolation story — ‘Ali saving the faith by reinterpreting a failed resurrection — is exactly the kind of thing a friend deep into early Islamic historiography would enjoy.
Related
- Medieval polemicists portrayed Islam as surviving only through deliberate fraud (similarity 0.84)
- Christian polemicists explained Islam’s worldly success via Muhammad’s failed-prophet legend (similarity 0.82)
- Medieval polemicists cast Muhammad as a failed Antichrist to explain Islam’s spread (similarity 0.79)
- Polemics charged Muhammad with leading Muslim sages to deny bodily resurrection (similarity 0.79)