This paper explores the usages of four concepts – sunna, sīra, āthār, and nasab – mainly in early Ibāḍī epistles, but also in other types of Ibāḍī literature, to examine how early Ibāḍīs understood the legacy of the Prophet Muḥammad, and their relation to that legacy. It argues that before the sixth/twelfth century a notion of communal pedigree occupied pride of place in early Ibāḍī conceptualizations of legality and legitimacy. Thus, Ibāḍī sunna was “communal sunna”. The accumulated weight of Ibāḍī tradition – what is known as āthār in Ibāḍī literature – operated authoritatively as a counterpart to sunna; and the Ibāḍī siyar tradition did not focus on the Prophet exclusively, but rather described the scholarly community as an imagined whole. Moreover, Ibāḍīs explicitly articulated their communal pedigree in “teacher lines” (called nasab al-dīn or nasab al-islām) in Omani literature, and through the structure of their ṭabaqāt/siyar works in North Africa. Appreciating the importance of this communal pedigree, and the nexus of concepts through which it was articulated, helps us to understand the relative lack of emphasis placed on collecting and documenting ḥadīth (Ibāḍīs employ ḥadīth, but they did not use isnāds, nor did they appear to have a ḥadīth collection until the sixth/twelfth century), as well as the general absence of Prophetic biography among them (which also does not appear until the sixth/twelfth century).

This paper will examine the narrative of Salmān al-Fārisī/”the Persian” and his conversion to Islam, as recounted in the eighth-century Sīra of Ibn Isḥāq, as a lens into the laudatory interpretation of Christian monasticism by early Muslims. This account of Salmān al-Fārisī (d. 656 CE), an original Companion (ṣaḥābī) of the Prophet Muḥammad, vividly describes his rejection of his Zoroastrian heritage, his initial embrace of Christianity, and his departure from his homeland of Isfahan in search of a deeper understanding of the Christian faith. This quest leads the young Persian on a great arc across the Near East into Iraq, Asia Minor, and Syria, during which he studies under various Christian monks and serves as their acolyte. Upon each master’s death, Salmān is directed toward another mystical authority, on a passage that parallels the “monastic sojourns” of late antique Christian literature. At the conclusion of the narrative a monk sends Salmān to seek out a “new Prophet who has arisen among the Arabs.” The monks, therefore, appear to be interpreted as “proto-Muslims,” as links in a chain leading to enlightenment, regardless of their confessional distinction. This narrative could then suggest that pietistic concerns, shared between these communities, superseded specific doctrinal boundaries in the highly fluid and malleable religious culture of the late antique and early Islamic Near East.

The relationship between the traditional biographical material on Muḥammad (maghāzī- or sīra-material) and the narrations of his words and deeds (ḥadīth-material) has long been debated in Islamic studies. While some scholars have argued that the biographical material is fundamentally ḥadīth material arranged chronologically, others have argued the opposite: that ḥadīth material originally consists of narrative reports about the life of Muḥammad which were later deprived of their historical context to produce normative texts. This article argues that both views are untenable and that maghāzī and ḥadīth emerged as separate fields; each influenced the other but they preserved their distinctive features. While traditions that originated and were shaped in one field were sometimes transferred to the other, the transfer of traditions from one field to the other apparently did not as a rule involve any deliberate changes to the text.