THE PREPARATION OF THE PROPHET is not confined to initiation through physical purification. It also consists of spiritual purification through religious guidance. This issue has already been encountered in some stories of his physical purification, and in the present chapter further traditions about his dogmatic guidance will be reviewed. In all of them this is an independent subject, not just an ingredient in another story. These traditions deal with the pre-prophetic period of the life of the Prophet, when he is presented as still adhering to the religion (dīn) of his own tribe. The traditions are aimed at showing how during this stage of his life, he was already led away from the local pagan practices which he used to observe.

Some aspects of these traditions have already been treated by various Islamicists. They have noticed in particular that Muḥammad is said to have been a pagan once, and have concluded that here an “historical” kernel has been pre- served. Tor Andræ, for example, concluded from these traditions that early Islam preserved the Quranic “human” image of the Prophet, which means that for Andræ these traditions are untouched by any tendentious elaboration. It seems, however, that all the available traditions in which allusion is made to Muḥammad's pre-prophetic paganism are in themselves “tendentious”. All of them tell the story of guidance, a theme preserving an early form of the concept of the Prophet's ‘i ṣma, i.e. his protection from sin and error. In themselves these stories bear nothing unique compared to other prophets who are said to have been guided to the right path. The Muslims spread them in accordance with their wish to provide Muḥammad with an appropriate sacred biography, like that of other prophets. The following observations will reveal, however, some problems within the inner Islamic context which denied most of these stories wide circulation. This was due to the fact that the outlook of Muḥammad's ‘iṣma, which established itself in the mainstream of Islamic thinking, was focussed not on the theme of guidance, but rather on that of total immunity to sin and error, lasting since the first moment of his existence and pre-existence till the Day of Resurrection.

I The universal theme of guidance was adapted in Muslim tradition to the local Arabian pre-Islamic surroundings in which the Meccan prophet spent his early years. In some of these traditions, religious guidance is administered to the Prophet through human agents.