Al-sīrah al-nabawiyya (), commonly shortened to sīrah and translated as prophetic biography, are the traditional biographies of the Islamic prophet Muhammad written over centuries by Muslim historians, from which, in addition to the Quran and hadith literature, most historical information about his life and the early history of Islam is derived.
Early historiographic information in Islam emerged as the irregular products of storytellers (qass, pl. qussas)—they were quite prestigious thenThey do not seem, however, to have been more prone to fabrications than other scholars of the early period. This deduction stems from the over-whelmingly positive reputation of the quṣṣāṣ in the early period.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004335523_008—without details.Most Islamic history was transmitted orally until after the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate. While the narratives were initially in the form of a kind of heroic epics called maghazi,The earliest sources we have on the life of Muḥammad are the maghāzī, but they are far from being a consistent literary genre because they encompass a mix of different types of texts: lists of martyrs, poetry, Qurʾānic explanations, anecdotes resembling those found in the Bible, and of course accounts of military expeditions.https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004466739_005 details were added later, edited and transformed into sirah compilations. The stories were written in the form of "founding conquest stories" based on nostalgia for the golden age then. Humphrey, quoted by Antoine Borrut, explains that the stories related to this period were created according to a pact-betrayal-redemption principle.Borrut A., "From Arabia to the Empire - conquest and caliphal construction in early Islam", in The Historians' Quran , vol. 1 , 2019, pp. 249-289 Western historians describe the purpose of these early biographies as largely to convey a message—of a hagiographic nature—rather than to strictly and accurately record history. 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."Conrad (June 1987). "Abraham and Muhammad: Some Observations Apropos of Chronology and Literary topoi in the Early Arabic Historical Tradition". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 50 (2): 239. doi:10.1017/S0041977X00049016 At the same time the study of the earliest periods in Islamic history is made difficult by a lack of sources.
From the very beginning, the process of creating the image of Muhammad as a warrior hero supported by divine help is seen as fitting the ideal hero typology and current needs during the military collapses experienced by the Umayyads. Muhammad's position gradually rose from his military stature to that of the sole and central figure in narratives who received divine assistance, in parallel with the rise in the value of the hadiths attributed to Muhammad in Islamic lawmaking although it was not like that in the beginning.
Terminology In the first two centuries of Islamic history, was more commonly known as (literally, 'stories of military expeditions'), which is now considered to be only a subset of —one that concerns the military campaigns of Muhammad. The phrase , or , refers to the study of the life of Muhammad. The term sīrah was first linked to the biography of Muhammad by Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri ( 124/741–2), and later popularized by the work of Ibn Hisham ( 833).
In the Arabic language the word sīrah or sīrat () comes from the verb sāra, which means "to travel" or "to be on a journey". A person's sīrah is that person's journey through life, or biography, encompassing their birth, events in their life, manners and characteristics, and their death. In modern usage it may also refer to a person's resume. 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.
Early works of sīrah consist of multiple historical reports called . Sometimes the word tradition or hadith is used instead. In terms of structure, a hadith and a khabar are very similar; they both contain isnads (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 of Islamic law. By contrast, while a khabar may carry some legal or theological implications, its main aim is to convey information about a certain event. Some historians consider the sīrah and maghāzī literature to be a subset of Hadith.
Evolution of content The sīrah literature includes a variety of heterogeneous materials, containing mainly narratives of military expeditions undertaken by Muhammad and his companions. 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 or Constitution 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 the Farewell Pilgrimage. Some of the sīrah accounts include verses of poetry commemorating certain events and battles.
Parts of sīrah were inspired by, or elaborate upon, events mentioned in the Quran. These parts were often used by writers of Tafsir and asbab al-nuzul to provide background information for events mentioned in certain ayat.
At a 2 to 3 hundred years later periods, certain type of stories included in sīrah developed into their own separate genres. One genre is concerned with stories of prophetic miracles, called aʿlām al-nubuwa (literally, "proofs of prophethood"—the first word is sometimes substituted for amārāt or dalāʾil). Another genre, called faḍāʾil wa mathālib—tales that show the merits and faults of individual companions, enemies, and other notable contemporaries of Muhammad. Some works of sīrah also positioned the story of Muhammad as part of a narrative that includes stories of earlier prophets, Persian Kings, pre-Islamic Arab tribes, and the Rashidun.
It can also be considered that the changes in the content of the Sira followed a course parallel to the replacement of the Sunnah (which initially meant only tradition), which was a valid argument for legitimacy in Islamic society, with the Sunnah of Muhammad and the Hadith of Muhammad which were considered more valuable, and the divine revelation of Muhammad becoming the most important source of Islamic lawsmaking.
Reliability
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. 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. 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.
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. He lists the following arguments against the authenticity of sīra, followed here by counter arguments:
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 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.Raven, W., “Sīra”, in: Brill Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, v.9 p.662 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. 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. 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. Discrepancies compared to non-Muslim sources. But there are also similarities and agreements both in information specific to Muhammad, and concerning Muslim tradition at large. 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.
Islamic tradition traces the lineage of the Islamic prophet Muhammad back to the Adnani branch of the Arabs, through the Hashim family and the Quraysh tribe. And, Muhammad is believed to be descended from Ishmael, the son of Abraham, through the Hashim tribe who are considered prophets in Islam, a biblical figure; however, neither Abraham nor Ishmael's existence has been independently corroborated by historians. Modern historians don't take the Family tree as a fact. In the pre-Islamic (and early Islamic) period,Although the ayyām circulated earlier as scattered oral and written materials, the formation of the genre as a distinct textual corpus is attributed primarily to the Basran grammarian and lexicographer Abū ʿUbayda Maʿmar b. al-Muthannā (110–209/728–824). genealogical trees were a product of the oral tradition of the Days of the Arabs, shaped according to social needs and the interests of the listeners.Among Bedouin and semi-Bedouin communities, the ayyām (Days) were transmitted as forms of oral tribal history, comparable to other tribal oral historiographical traditions. This mode of transmission rendered the narratives plastic and flexible, allowing them to be reshaped according to present social expectations and the interaction between performer and audience. Contemporary historiography unveiled the lack of inner coherence of this genealogical system and demonstrated that it finds insufficient matching evidence; the distinction between Qahtanites and Adnanites is believed to be a product of the Umayyad Age, when the war of factions (al-niza al-hizbi) was raging in the young Islamic Empire.