Sīrah

[1] The sīrah literature includes a variety of heterogeneous materials, containing mainly narratives of military expeditions undertaken by Muhammad and his companions.

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.

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] In Umayyad times, storytellers used to tell stories of Muhammad and earlier prophets in private gatherings and mosques, given they obtained permission from the authorities.

"[10] Another striking example is the Qurayza massacre, which is attributed to Muhammad by various chains of attribution in sources considered authentic; The brutality of the event led researchers skeptics of traditional sources such as İhsan Eliaçık and Mustafa 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 at Masada was adapted to Muhammad.

[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.

[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.

[16] More recently, western historical criticism and debate concerning sīrah have elicited a defensive attitude from some Muslims who wrote apologetic literature defending its content.

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.

[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] 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 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.