The Sources for Muhammad's Biography
In that the Qur'an does not contain sufficient information regarding subjects
of Islamic rituals, jurisprudence, early history or even the biography (Sira)
of Muhammad, some early Muslim scholars began to collect and transmit
traditions to fill these deficits. Generally, an Islamic tradition (hadith) is
preceded by a chain of names (isnad), which is to represent the transmitters
of a hadith, originating with a witness and concluding with s^1 omeone
contemporary with the respective writer of the tradition. Very often, the
value attached to a certain tradition by Muslim scholars is relative to the
trustworthiness of those mentioned in the isnad of that hadith.^2
It appears that the first collections of Islamic historical traditions, known as
"maghazi" books, gave the reports of the raids and expeditions, which took
place during Muhammad's lifetime. There were at least nine e^3 arly maghazi
books, of which only parts of two seem to have survived to the^4 present.^5
The biography of Muhammad, composed by Muhammad b. Ishaq (d. 151
AH - c. 767 AD), is the earliest of which major portions are sti^6 ll available.
Although Ibn Ishaq's text as a whole appears to be lost, the ex^7 tensive
quotations of those who copied out his lectures, can be foun^8 d in the works
of later Islamic scholars. Of the sources used in this prese^9 nt book, the
traditions collected by Ibn Ishaq are quoted extensively in the Sira of Ibn
Hisham (d. 218 AH), the^10 Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir of Ibn Sa`d (d. 230
AH), the^11 Ta'rikh of Tabari (d. 310 AH), and a manuscript of a shaykh^12
al-Bazzaz (d. 400? AH). Another work, which may contain parts^13 of Ibn
Ishaq's traditions, is the Maghazi of al-Waqidi (d. 207 AH).^14
One of the features of Ibn Ishaq's work is that he was not very careful about
recording the isnads for his traditions. However, none of the^15 early Islamic
historians appear to have attached much importance to this science, which^16
first became rather developed in the 3rd Islamic century, when both the
historical and canonical collections of traditions began^17 to take their
present form. In his biography of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq, as other^18 early
Muslim historians also, quotes a fair number of poems, which were
generally said to have been composed by Muhammad's contemporaries
during or after major events. In the judgment of many Islamic^19 and