| Part ofa series on |
| Muhammad |
|---|
 |
Career |
Views |
 Part ofa series onIslam Islamic prophets |
|---|
Listed by Islamic name and Biblical name.
|
 Islam portal |
Al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya (Arabic:السيرة النبوية), commonly shortened toSīrah and translated asprophetic biography, are the traditional biographies of theIslamic prophetMuhammad written byMuslim historians, from which, in addition to theQurʾān andḥadīth literature, most historical information about his life and theearly history of Islam is derived.
In theArabic language the wordsīrah orsīrat (Arabic:سيرة) comes from the verbsāra, which means "to travel" or "to be on a journey". A person's sīrah is that person's journey through life, orbiography, encompassing their birth, events in their life, manners and characteristics, and their death. In modern usage it may also refer to a person'sresume. It is sometimes written as "seerah", "sirah" or "sirat", all meaning "life" or "journey". In Islamic literature, the plural form,siyar, could also refer to the rules of war and dealing with non-Muslims.[1]
The sīrah literature includes a variety of heterogeneous materials, containing mainly narratives of military expeditions undertaken byMuhammad and hiscompanions. These stories are intended as historical accounts and are used for veneration. The sīrah also includes a number of written documents, such as political treaties (e.g.,Treaty of Hudaybiyyah orConstitution of Medina), military enlistments, assignments of officials, letters to foreign rulers, and so forth. It also records some of the speeches and sermons made by Muhammad, like his speech at theFarewell Pilgrimage. Some of the sīrah accounts include verses of poetry commemorating certain events and battles.[1]
At later periods, certain type of stories included in sīrah developed into their own separate genres. One genre is concerned with stories of prophetic miracles, calledaʿlām al-nubuwa (literally, "proofs of prophethood"—the first word is sometimes substituted foramārāt ordalāʾil). Another genre, calledfaḍāʾil wa mathālib — tales that show the merits and faults of individualcompanions, enemies, and other notable contemporaries of Muhammad.[1] Some works of sīrah also positioned the story of Muhammad as part of a narrative that includes stories ofearlier prophets,Persian Kings,pre-Islamic Arab tribes, and theRashidun.[1]
Parts of sīrah were inspired by, or elaborate upon, events mentioned in theQur'an. These parts were often used by writers oftafsir andasbab al-nuzul to provide background information for events mentioned in certainayat.[1]
The phrasesīrat rasūl allāh, oras-sīra al-nabawiyya, refers to the study of the life of Muhammad. The term sīrah was first linked to the biography of Muhammad byIbn Shihab al-Zuhri (d. 124/741–2), and later popularized by the work ofIbn Hisham (d. 833). In the first two centuries ofIslamic history,sīrah was more commonly known asmaghāzī (literally, 'stories of military expeditions'), which is now considered to be only a subset ofsīra[1]—one that concerns the military campaigns of Muhammad.[2]
Early works of sīrah consist of multiple historical reports, orakhbār, and each report is called akhabar.[3] Sometimes the wordtradition orhadith is used instead.
In terms of structure, ahadith and a historical report (khabar) are very similar; they both containisnads (chains of transmission). The main difference between a hadith and a khabar is that a hadith is not concerned with an event as such, and normally does not specify a time or place. Rather the purpose of hadith is to record a religious doctrine as an authoritative source ofIslamic law. By contrast, while a khabar may carry some legal or theological implications, its main aim is to convey information about a certain event.[3]
Starting from the 8th and 9th century, many scholars have devoted their efforts to both kinds of texts equally.[3] Some historians consider the sīrah andmaghāzī literature to be a subset of Hadith.[4]
The main feature of the information that formed the basis of early historiography in Islam was that this information emerged as the irregular products ofstorytellers (qāṣṣ, pl.quṣṣāṣ) without details. While the narratives were initially in the form of a kind of heroic epics called magāzī, details were added later, edited and transformed into sirah compilations.[5][6] InUmayyad times, storytellers used to tell stories of Muhammad andearlier prophets in private gatherings andmosques, given they obtained permission from the authorities. Many of these storytellers are now unknown. After the Umayyad period, their reputation deteriorated because of their inclination to exaggerate and fantasize, and for relying on theIsra'iliyat. Thus they were banned from preaching at mosques.[7] In later periods, however, works of sīrah became more prominent.
During the early centuries of Islam, the sīrah literature was taken less seriously compared to thehadiths.[1]Today, although the orthodox Islamic approach frequently uses sirah material in itssermons,Qur'anism and the academic community (including those called hadith or khabar and whose chain of transmission are labeled as sound by their authors) approach this material with suspicion. WhileYaşar Nuri Öztürk notes that the hadiths, which have now reached millions, were initially limited to a few hundred, Mehmet Özdemir (prof.dr.) draws attention to the almost non-existent number ofmiracles (dalāʾil al-nubuwwa) in the first records and the hundreds of additions made in later periods.[8]
Lawrence Conrad Lawrence Conrad examines the early sirah books and sees that the dates of Muhammad's birth span a period of up to 85 years. Conrad defines this as "the fluidity (evolutionary process) continued even in the written period."[10]Another striking example is theQurayza massacre, which is attributed to Muhammad by various chains of attribution in sources considered authentic; The brutality of the event led researchersskeptics of traditional sources such asİhsan Eliaçık andMustafa İslamoğlu to think that the story of 960 Jews who destroyed themselves by refusing to surrender to the Romans in the clashes between Jews and Romans believed to have taken place atMasada was adapted to Muhammad. İhsan Eliaçık states that 3-5 Jews who were considered guilty may have been killed as a result of this incident.[11][12] Regarding the Qurayza massacre,Sami Aldeeb states that the incident is included in the Jewish holy texts, but according to these sources, Jews killed non-Jews.[13]
Many Western scholars suspect that there was widespread fabrication of hadith (either entirely or by the misattribution of the views of early Muslim religious and legal thinkers to Muhammad) in the early centuries of Islam to support certain theological and legal positions.[14] In addition to fabrication, it is possible for the meaning of a hadith to have greatly drifted from its original telling through the different interpretations and biases of its varying transmitters, even if the chain of transmission is authentic.[15][16] While some hadith may genuinely originate from firsthand observation of Muhammad (particularly personal traits that were not of theological interest, like his fondness fortharid and sweets), Western scholars suggest that it is extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to determine which hadith accurately reflect the historical Muhammad.[16]
More recently,western historical criticism and debate concerning sīrah have elicited a defensive attitude from some Muslims who wroteapologetic literature defending its content.[1] Some researchers, such as Volker Popp, have gone further and argued that names such as Muhammad andAli were not names but titles.[17]
For centuries, Muslim scholars have recognized the problem of authenticity of hadith. Thus they have developed sophisticated methods (seeHadith studies) of evaluatingisnāds (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 toother categories.[18] 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.[19] 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.[20]
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.[1] He lists the following arguments against the authenticity of sīra, followed here by counter arguments:
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.[6][24][22]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.[6]
Nevertheless, other content of sīra, like theConstitution of Medina, are generally considered to be authentic.[1]
The following is a list of some of the early Hadith collectors who specialized in collecting and compiling sīrah and maghāzī reports:
The sīrah literature is important: in theUrdu language alone, a scholar fromPakistan in 2024 produced a bibliography of more than 10,000 titles, counting multivolume works as a single book and without integrating articles, short essays and unpublished manuscripts, with the researcher also precising that the literature inArabic is even more important.[27]
:0 was invoked but never defined (see thehelp page).ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dūrī,Historical Writing, p.36: "Ahmad ibn Hanbal rejected the hadiths reported by Ibn Ishaq precisely on the grounds of their use of the collective isnād: "I see him relating a single hadith on the authority of a group of people, without distinguishing the words of one from those of another"" (Tanbih 9-43) But Ibn Hanbal did accept Ibn Ishaq's authority for the maghazi.
Islam topics | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
