Barakat Ahmad

Barakat Ahmad (died 1988) was a scholar and Indian diplomat. He had a doctorate in Arab history from the American University of Beirut and a doctorate in literature from the University of Tehran. Ahmad was also the First Secretary of the Indian High Commission in Australia, High Commissioner to the West Indies, and an adviser to the Indian delegation to the United Nations. He also served as rapporteur to the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid and was a fellow of the Indian Council of Historical Research. Ahmad died in 1988 as a result of bladder cancer.

Hypothesis regarding Muhammad and the Jews of Medina

Ahmad says that to the best of his knowledge, he is the first Muslim scholar to deal with the Jews of Yathrib in the spirit of independent study and research. In Muhammad and the Jews: A Re-examination, he questions the validity of the accepted accounts of Muhammad's expulsion of Banu Qaynuqa and execution of Banu Qurayza.

The earliest surviving biography of Muhammad are recension of Ibn Ishaq's (d. 768) "Life of the Apostle of God". Ahmad argues that Muslim historians and Orientalists have failed to take into account that Ibn Ishaq's book, written some 120 to 130 years after Muhammad's death during the Abbasid Caliphate, was strongly influenced by the environment in which it was written. Ahmad accepts Ibn Ishaq as a sincere historian, but states that "a historian is very much part of his time. He cannot isolate himself from the climate of opinion in which he breathes" and argues that "Ibn Ishaq's view regarding Muhammad's relation with the Jews were strongly influenced by his own reaction to Jewish life under the Abbasids".