Musaylima

Musaylima is the best attested of the several people who claimed prophetic revelation in Arabia in the years around 630, and he is also the one about whom almost nothing independent survives. His people, the Banu Hanifa, held the oases of al-Yamama in the centre of the peninsula, a productive agricultural district rather than a marginal one, and they were numerous enough to field an army that very nearly held.

The sources are the problem. Everything that reaches us about his teaching comes through Muslim historians and commentators writing from a century to three centuries later, in a tradition for which he is the type of the false prophet. His name is transmitted in a diminutive form, and Muslim scholars themselves recorded that his own people used the fuller name Maslama. Passages presented as his revelations are quoted in a manner designed to make them ridiculous beside the Quran, and no manuscript, inscription or non-Muslim notice offers a control.

This does not make him a fiction. The campaign against him is among the best documented events of the period, and the losses among Quran reciters at Aqraba are given in the tradition as the reason the collection of the Quran was undertaken at all. What cannot be recovered from the surviving record is the content of what he actually preached, and an honest account has to say so rather than repeat the parody.

When Muhammad died in 632 several Arabian groupings withdrew from the arrangement they had made with Medina. Muslim historiography calls the campaigns that followed the ridda, the apostasy, a term that assumes the arrangement had been a conversion rather than a treaty. Modern historians point out that some of the groups involved may have understood themselves to be ending a political agreement with a man who was now dead, not leaving a religion, and that the two readings are not always separable in the sources.

The Banu Hanifa were the hardest of them to break. Abu Bakr sent Khalid ibn al-Walid, and the decisive engagement was fought at Aqraba, in a walled garden that the sources afterwards called the garden of death. The Hanifa lost and Musaylima was killed in the fighting. The tradition gives the fatal blow to Wahshi ibn Harb, the same man who had killed Hamza at Uhud years earlier while fighting on the other side, a detail whose neatness invites caution.

The consequence that mattered ran in the opposite direction from the battle. Casualties among the men who carried the Quran in memory were heavy enough, the sources say, for Umar to press Abu Bakr to have the text written down and gathered before more of it was lost. On that account the collection of the Quran as a single written object begins with the campaign that ended Musaylima.