Sīrah

thumb|upright=0.8|An early manuscript of [[Ibn Hisham's ]]

Al-Sīra 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 (qāṣṣ, pl. quṣṣāṣ)—they were quite prestigious then—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. 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. 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." 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 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. 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

upright=1.2|thumb|Non-Islamic testimonies about Muhammad's life describe him as the leader of the [[Saracens, believed to be descendants of Ishmael.]]

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.

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. and concerning Muslim tradition at large. 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, 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. 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.

Nevertheless, other content of sīra, like the Constitution of Medina, are generally considered to be authentic,

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.<!-- Empty reference While some hadith may genuinely originate from firsthand observation of Muhammad (particularly personal traits that were not of theological interest, like his fondness for tharid and sweets), Western scholars suggest that it is extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to determine which hadith accurately reflect the historical Muhammad.

Muhammad ibn Ishaq (d. 767 or 761), another student of al-Zuhrī, who collected oral traditions that formed the basis of an important biography of Muhammad. His traditions survived through a number of sources, most notably Ibn Hisham and Ibn Jarir al-Tabari.

Statistics

The sīrah literature is important: in the Urdu language alone, a scholar from Pakistan 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 in Arabic is even more important.

Terminology

Evolution of content

Reliability

Statistics

See also

Notes

References

Bibliography

Further reading