Did the Prophet Muḥammad keep court?

Did the Prophet Muḥammad keep court? If so, in what sense? If not, what did he do instead? These are interesting questions, but I can make no claim to have thought of them for myself. They were put to me by the organizers of the conference on court cultures in the Muslim World which was held, so appropriately, in Schloss Friedenstein at Gotha in July 2007. I found the questions intriguing enough to devote a summer of research to them, and I have every hope of returning to this project in the future, and of writing it up with full references to the sources. But here, as at the conference, I shall attempt to survey only a small part of the subject, namely the pattern of access to Muḥammad; and for the most part I will consider it only as it appears in a single standard source, Ibn Hishām’s Life of the Prophet. ¹ I will, however, end my discussion with some comments addressing the wider concerns of the conference.