Duties, roles and leaders

A role has a purpose; a figure has a context; a leader leaves an effect. For each record you read, ask which of these it shows, and what evidence the record gives. Keep your own judgement apart from what the record states.

Read two short passages in the record of what Islam asks of a believer. A Bedouin asked the Prophet about Islam. He told him of the five prayers in the day and night, and the man asked: "Is anything else upon me?" The Prophet said: "No, unless you volunteer" ². In another version the Ramadan fast is mentioned after the prayers ³, and when the man asked about zakat, the Prophet told him of the duties of Islam ⁴. In Gabriel's hadith, as Ibn Khuzayma gives it from Abu Hurayra (may God be pleased with him), a man asks the Prophet "What is Islam?" ⁵; the editor of al-Bukhari's Sahih explains that the man was Gabriel "in the form of a man" ⁶, and al-Bukhari says after the hadith: "He made all of that part of faith" ⁶. The two texts both define what is asked of a person: one by marking duty off from what is volunteered, the other by gathering the acts under faith.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam article on Muhammad, as the museum's record reports it, opens with the Muslim understanding: belief that he is the Messenger of God stands second only to belief in the oneness of God in the creed of the shahada, and the Qur'an and Islamic orthodoxy insist that he was fully human and had no supernatural powers of his own ⁷. It then separates two inquiries: for the believer, God chose Muhammad and was directly responsible for his success; for the historian, the evidence points to a man of remarkable leadership and a charismatic personality who drew strong leaders to him ⁷. The article calls the two views not necessarily incompatible, but different inquiries with different methods ⁷. The record follows its historical inquiry, labels its academic judgements as the article's own, and sets aside what the believer's inquiry holds ⁷.

For Muhammad, the article names the Qur'an as the most trustworthy source and also the hardest to use, since it answers his changing circumstances but was never meant as biography, and it says that the maghazi, sira, tafsir and hadith genres were not written to record his life as such, so each report has to be weighed by its purpose ^7 8. The most widely used sources date from the third and fourth centuries of the Islamic era; Ibn Ishaq's sira survives through Ibn Hisham's recension, and the article notes that Muslim writers often criticise al-Waqidi as unreliable ⁸. For Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan the record rests on Wikipedia articles and Wikidata. It says the English article attests him as a devout Muslim whose nonviolence was grounded in Islam, that the word Sunni appears in it only in the description of the family he was born into, and that, because family background is not the man's own attestation, the museum's data record leaves his school unknown ⁹.

The record says the English Wikipedia article attests Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan as a devout Muslim whose nonviolence was grounded in Islam, and that he recognised his struggle as a jihad in which only the enemy held swords ⁹; it adds that the word Sunni appears there only for his family ⁹. What further evidence would a historian want before saying that a leader's religion shaped the discipline of a movement, and why would the leader's own words not be enough?

• What Islam asks of a believer: Gabriel's hadith and the hadith of the Bedouin as Ibn Khuzayma gives them, and al-Bukhari's remark after them.
• Muhammad: the believer's and the historian's inquiries in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, its sources for his life, and al-Mubarakpuri's account.
• Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan: the founding of the Khudai Khidmatgar in 1929, and how the record handles the evidence of his faith.