Sīrah

Al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya (

The most striking issue about the life of Muhammad and early Islamic history is that the source information emerged as the irregular products of the storytelling culture and the increasing progress of the details over the centuries. Lawrence Conrad examines the biography books written in the early post-oral period and sees that a time period of 85 years is exhibited in these works regarding the date of Muhammad's birth. Conrad defines this as "the fluidity (evolutionary process) is still continuing" in the story.^[1]

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Etymology

In the

Early works of sīrah consist of multiple historical reports, or akhbār, and each report is called a khabar.[4] Sometimes the word tradition or hadith is used instead.

Content

The sīrah literature includes a variety of heterogeneous materials, containing mainly narratives of military expeditions undertaken by

Starting from the 8th and 9th century, many scholars have devoted their efforts to both kinds of texts equally.[4] Some historians consider the sīrah and maghāzī literature to be a subset of Hadith.^[5]

Reception

During the early centuries of Islam, the sīrah literature was taken less seriously compared to the

For centuries, Muslim scholars have recognized the problem of authenticity of hadith. Thus they have developed sophisticated methods (see Hadith studies) of evaluating isnāds (chains of transmission). This was done in order to classify each hadith into "sound" (ṣaḥīḥ) for authentic reports, as opposed to "weak" (ḍaʿīf) for ones that are probably fabricated, in addition to other categories.^[7] Since many sīrah reports also contain isnād information and some of the sīrah compilers (akhbārīs) were themselves practicing jurists and hadīth transmitters (muḥaddiths), it was possible to apply the same methods of hadīth criticism to the sīrah reports.^[8] However, some sīrah reports were written using an imprecise form of isnād, or what modern historians call the "collective isnād" or "combined reports". The use of collective isnād meant that a report may be related on the authority of multiple persons without distinguishing the words of one person from another. This lack of precision led some hadith scholars to take any report that used a collective isnād to be lacking in authenticity.^[9]

According to Wim Raven, it is often noted that a coherent image of Muhammad cannot be formed from the literature of sīra, whose authenticity and factual value have been questioned on a number of different grounds.^[2] He lists the following arguments against the authenticity of sīra, followed here by counter arguments:

1. Hardly any sīrah work was compiled during the first century of Islam. However, Fred Donner points out that the earliest historical writings about the origins of Islam first emerged in AH 60–70, well within the first century of Hijra (see also List of biographies of Muhammad). Furthermore, the sources now extant, dating from the second, third, and fourth centuries AH, are mostly compilations of material derived from earlier sources.^[10][11]
2. The many discrepancies exhibited in different narrations found in sīrah works. Yet, despite the lack of a single orthodoxy in Islam, there is still a marked agreement on the most general features of the traditional origins story.^[12][11]
3. Later sources claiming to know more about the time of Muhammad than earlier ones. Scholar Patricia Crone found a pattern, where the farther a commentary was removed in time from the life of Muhammad and the events in the Quran, the more information it provided, despite the fact it depended on the earlier sources for its content. Crone attributed this phenomenon to storytellers' embellishment.

   If one storyteller should happen to mention a raid, the next storyteller would know the date of this raid, while the third would know everything that an audience might wish to hear about.^[13]

   In the case of Ibn Ishaq, there are no earlier sources we can consult to see if and how much embroidering was done by him and other earlier transmitters, but, Crone argues, "it is hard to avoid the conclusion that in the three generations between the Prophet and Ibn Ishaq" fictitious details were not also added.^[13][14][11]
4. Discrepancies compared to non-Muslim sources. But there are also similarities and agreements both in information specific to Muhammad,^[15] and concerning Muslim tradition at large.^[16][11]
5. Some parts or genres of sīra, namely those dealing with miracles, do not qualify as sources for scientific historiographical information about Muhammad, except for showing the beliefs and doctrines of his community.^[11]

Nevertheless, other content of sīra, like the Constitution of Medina, are generally considered to be authentic.^[2]

Early compilations of sīra

The following is a list of some of the early Hadith collectors who specialized in collecting and compiling sīrah and maghāzī reports:

• Umayyad caliphs, Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan and al-Walid I, involving questions about certain events that happened in the time of the Prophet. Since Abd al-Malik did not appreciate the maghāzī literature, these letters were not written in story form. He is not known to have written any books on the subject.^[6]
• Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī
  .
• Umayyad court and asked to write two books, one on genealogy
  and another on maghāzī. The first was canceled and the one about maghāzī is either not extant or has never been written.
• al-Zuhrī, wrote Kitāb al-Maghāzī, a notebook used to teach his students. The work was lost but a manuscript of Kitab al-maghazi was recently rediscovered.Some of his traditions have been preserved, although their attribution to him is disputed.^[6]
• Ibn Jarir al-Tabari
  .

• Biographical evaluation (ʿIlm al-rijāl)
• Hadith
• Historiography of early Islam
• List of biographies of Muhammad
• List of hadith collections
• Sunnah

Notes