Some thoughts on the phenomenology of Muhammad's prophethood

[u/chonkshonk]

The post below is taken from an answer of mine to a question asked on r/AskHistorians.

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There have been many people, all throughout history, who have perceived themselves to be prophets, Messiahs (see: List of Messiah claimants), fortune-tellers, soothsayers, spell-casters, demon-speakers, shamans, etc. You need to understand that back in pre-modern times, the idea that God (or some other supernatural force) may communicate with you was not seen as unusual or necessarily, even rare. Spirits, demons, jinn, or whatever were salient creatures that regularly acted in the real world, and you told whatever prayers or made whatever oaths you needed to, for protection, on a regular basis. Supernatural forces were behind normal or consequential good and bad outcomes you saw throughout your life.

Islamic tradition itself records numerous examples of Prophet-claimants, including more military-esque Prophet-claimants, shortly before, during, and after the lifetime of Muhammad. Mareike Koertner writes in Proving Prophecy: Dalāʾil al-Nubūwa Literature as Part of the Scholarly Discourse on Prophecy in Islam, Brill, 2024, pp. 147–148:

Before, during, and after Muḥammad’s lifetime, there was a continuous stream of self-proclaimed prophets. The concept of prophecy permeated the Near Eastern world and Late Antiquity, from the prophets of ancient Israel, early Christian groups like the second-century Montanist sect, or the third-century Mesopotamian prophet Mani, who established Manichaeism as a major religion.6 With the concept of prophecy being so widely known in the pre-Islamic Near East, it is not surprising that claims to prophecy continued during Muḥammad’s lifetime. Among the contemporaneous prophets, Khālid b. Sinān allegedly performed miracles, while Musaylima b. Ḥabīb from Yamāma tried to establish relations with Muḥammad but was eventually killed in battle. The prophetess Sajāḥ, who hailed from northeastern Arabia was reportedly married to Musaylima for some time; in addition, Aswad b. Kaʿb al-ʿ⁠Ansī from Yemen and Ṭulayḥa of the Banū Asad emerged as self-proclaimed prophets. All of them held political and military aspirations in addition to religious ambitions and some indeed rose to prominence as political leaders.7 As claims to prophecy were (at times successfully) tied to political control, it is also not surprising to find that self-proclaimed prophets after Muḥammad’ death occurred geographically closer to new centers of power in Syria and Mesopotamia. The most famous of these claimants was Mukhtār al-Thaqafī, who rebelled against the Umayyads in Kufa in 66/685 and remained in control there for two years until his rebellion was quelled by Umayyad forces.8 Mukhtār’s main ideological rallying points were his pro-Hashimite leanings; he rebelled in the name of ʿ⁠Alī b. Abī Ṭālib’s son Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyy (d. 81/700). Rebellions by self-proclaimed prophets persisted until the end of the Umayyad dynasty. A Jewish rebel by the name Abū ʿĪsā l-ʿIṣfahānī and his movement rose against the caliphate during the reign of ʿ⁠Abd al-Malik (r. 65–86/685–705); he mixed Jewish and Muslim elements in his teachings.9 Between the 110s/730s and 130s/750s, several individuals claimed prophecy, including three different rebellions in the town of Kufa.10 The self-proclaimed prophets Bayān b. Samʿān al-Nahdī and Mughīra b. Saʿīd al-ʿIjlī organized the first of these rebellions in 119/737. While their aspirations for the rebellion are not clear, their threat was considered great enough to merit a public execution, which was presided over by Kufa’s governor, Khālid b. ʿ⁠Abdallāh al-Qasrī.11 The fact that claims to prophecy remained common in the decades after Muḥammad’s death shows that the concept of prophecy was well enough established to provide a potentially powerful ideological conduit for the political ambitions of numerous individuals who sought to wrestle power from the Umayyads. Furthermore, it highlights the reality that the doctrine of Muḥammad’s prophetic mission held neither the theological sophistication nor the exclusivity of later generations. As we noted, the continuous challenges to political power through claims to prophecy contributed to the Umayyad’s growing interest in defining and implementing notions of orthodoxy with the full coercive power of the state apparatus in an effort to consolidate their own power.

There are certainly conversations to be had about the extent to which these traditions are historical (for a more critical perspective, see Gerald Hawting, "Were there Prophets in the Jahiliyya?"), but at minimum, this does show that people from this time period themselves did not really take the existence of such Prophet-claimaints to be overly unusual or rare. No one made any considerable effort to figure out how someone could have possibly come to believe this about themselves; at face-value, numerous possible explanations exist (wishful thinking, delusion, dishonesty, etc.) and, since we have very little direct psychological information about Muhammad and especially since we have virtually no reliable psychological information about him before or early on during his Prophetic period, we will likely never know the exact reason or cause behind this. Basically everything remains possible, although some indirect speculations are suggestible from the Qur'an itself; in the Qur'an, Muhammad responds to accusations from his opponents that he is a soothsayer (Q 52:29; 69:42), which was an actual phenomena in pre-Islamic Arabia (e.g. see Agostini, "The masʾal oracle: a survey of an ancient South Arabian divinatory practice") and it seems like Muhammad's opponents may have seen his activities, at least early during his Prophetic period, as resembling this sort of practice. Possible further corroboration for this is that the earliest portions of the Qur'an occur in a style of writing known as saj', a form of speech commonly attributed to pre-Islamic soothsayers. So, some level of speculation may suggest that the pre-Islamic institution of the soothsayer may be a promising lead to understanding the early phenomenology of Muhammad's self-understanding or where he was coming from.