| Reports relating supernatural events - or miracles - in the life of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 11/632) have been traditionally either ignored by those modern scholars attempting to determine the historicity of the source material or have been studied piecemeal in an attempt to determine their origins by those scholars who see them as secondary additions. The current study will examine both the sira/ta'rikh, the story of Muh&dotbelow;ammad's life as told within larger works of universal history, and tafsir, exegetical, works of two medieval Muslim scholars, al-T&dotbelow;abari (d. 310/923) and Ibn Kathir (d. 773/1373), to attempt to determine how the reports of the supernatural fit into the story of Muh&dotbelow;ammad's life as a whole. The result is that there is both a supernatural and mundane archetype for the life of Muh&dotbelow;ammad, and that they appear to mirror each other almost perfectly. Whereas the story begins with God performing all the miracles for Muh&dotbelow;ammad's benefit, by the time of his death in Medina, Muh&dotbelow;ammad has completed his mastery over the forces of the supernatural, even to the point where it appears that God performs miracles directly in response to Muh&dotbelow;ammad's prayers. Thus, as Muh&dotbelow;ammad gained more control over the movement he founded, he gained an equal amount of control over the forces of the supernatural. Both al-T&dotbelow;abari and Ibn Kathir include reports that contain the supernatural archetype, but also include reports that diverge from it in important ways. While there is not one, overall theory to explain why each author made the changes he did to the supernatural archetype of Muh&dotbelow;ammad's life, the examples in the following chapters indicate that the role of the supernatural versus the mundane, the politicization of the archetype, and authorial opinion were important to each scholar and help to support the argument that the miracle stories are integral to the life of Muh&dotbelow;ammad as a whole, and deserve to be studied as such. |
