34 DESTINY DISRUPTED
significant events. He was the first of his line to write the whole story
down, but most of his book has been lost. Before it disappeared, however,
other writers quoted from it, referred to it, included excerpts from it in
their own works, wrote synopses of it, or paraphrased its stories. (Recently,
in fact, some academics have been trying to reconstruct Ibn Ishaq's work
from the fragments of it found in other works.)
One historian who used Ibn Ishaq as his major source was Ibn Jarir al-
Tabari, who died about three hundred years after the Hijra. He wrote the
thirty-nine-volume History of the Prophets and Kings that begins with
Adam and ends in the year 292 AH (915 CE). His work has survived into
the present day, and most of the anecdotes and details we read about Mo-
hammed and his successors come to us through him. It is he who tells us
what color hair these men had, what their favorite food was, and how
many camels they owned. He includes their key speeches and conversa-
tions as direct quotations. His history is not exactly a readable narrative,
however, because each story is nested in a mind-numbing list of names, the
isnad, or "chain of transmission": "X reports that Y told him that he heard
from Z that ... and finally the anecdote." After each anecdote comes a dif-
ferent version of the same anecdote, nested in a different isnad: "A reports
that he heard from B that C said that D recounts that ... [anecdote]."
Tabari doesn't say which version is true; he just puts them out there for you
the reader to decide. Over the centuries, writers have compiled their own
versions of the most compelling anecdotes, some of which make their way
into popular and oral accounts and eventually turn into the Islamic version
of"Bible stories," told to kids like me at home by our elders and in gram-
mar school by our religion teachers.
Overall, these stories chronicle a tumultuous human drama that un-
folded in the first twenty-nine years after the Prophet's death, a story of
larger-than-life characters wrestling with epic issues, a story filled with
episodes that evoke wonder and heartbreak. It's quite possible to take sides
in retelling these stories, for there are sides to take, and it's quite possible
to speculate about motives and make judgments about people's decisions.
On the other hand, these anecdotes have acquired allegorical status:
different judgments and interpretations support different doctrines and
represent various theological positions. We cannot know the hard facts of
this story in a journalistic way because no untouched eyewitness account