Sīrah

Al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya (Arabic: السيرة النبوية), commonly shortened to Sīrah and translated as prophetic biography, are the traditional biographies of the Islamic prophet Muhammad written by Muslim historians, from which, in addition to the Qurʾān and ḥadīth literature, most historical information about his life and the early history of Islam is derived.

The main feature of the information that formed the basis of early historiography in Islam was that this information emerged as the irregular products of storytellers (qāṣṣ, pl. quṣṣāṣ) -they were quite prestigious then- without details. At the same time the study of the earliest periods in Islamic history is made difficult by a lack of sources. 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. From the very beginning, the process of creating the image of the Prophet 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 wasn't like that in the beginning.

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, 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."

In the Arabic language the word sīrah or sīrat (Arabic: سيرة) 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.

The phrase sīrat rasūl allāh, or as-sīra al-nabawiyya, 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 (d. 124/741–2), and later popularized by the work of Ibn Hisham (d. 833). In the first two centuries of Islamic history, sīrah was more commonly known as maghāzī (literally, 'stories of military expeditions'), which is now considered to be only a subset of sīra—one that concerns the military campaigns of Muhammad.

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

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: