Explore the vast range of titles available.

Sīrah (the life and biography of Prophet Muhammad) has been the point of focus and writing since the Prophet passed away. Approaches to sīrah have evolved in the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds over the centuries. This has had a significant impact on how the Prophet and even Islam are viewed in the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. While Muslim scholars have focused on details of the exact biography, what and why a particular incident occurred in his life, his leadership, reverence of his teachings and other aspects of his life as a role model as well as lessons that can be derived from his life to emulate in daily life, non-Muslim authors have approached sīrah quite differently. Some are extremely critical to the point of ridicule and slander, while others approach it in a more authentic and genuine manner. The sources to which they have access, namely Arabic sources, play a critical role in the way sīrah is approached. Similarly, interactions with Muslims, scientific developments and globalisation have had significant impacts on the way sīrah is perceived, particularly in modern times. This article provides a chronological and systematic review and analysis of the major sīrah works written by Muslims and non-Muslims since the 7th century. It traces the evolvement of sīrah literature in Muslim and non-Muslim scholarship by documenting the reasons and fundamental factors affecting various approaches to sīrah across the centuries.

This study aims to analyze the life of the Prophet Muhammad through a Freudian analysis. Although Sigmund Freud’s study of Islam is considered inaccurate in portraying Islam as a simplified repetition of Judaism, his psychoanalytic approach is useful to study the historical development of the Prophet’s life and his early community. By closely reading Ibn Ishaq’s Sīrat Rasūl Allāh (The Biography of the Prophet) and related library sources, this study sheds a new light on the changes and transformations of Muhammad’s personality and responses to historical events. This approach differs from previous scholarship that relied more on chronological narration and transmission or spiritual-philosophical reflections. Through Freudian psychoanalysis that he employed in Moses and Monotheism, this study analyzes the development of Muhammad’s characters, approaches, and reactions to historical occurrences as recorded in Ibn Ishaq’s biography of the Prophet Muhammad. This study demonstrates that the driving force of the Prophet’s responses to historical realities is not the feeling of guilt as Freud suggests, but a traumatic experience that leads to a series of changing characters and reactions to different sociological, religious, and psychological contexts. This finding not only challenges the relevance of the Freudian approach in the study of Islam but also revisits traditional narratives of the Prophet Muhammad.

In his Lovers of God: Sufism and the Politics of Islam in Medieval India, Raziuddin Aquil studied the role of Sufis in preaching Islam in medieval South Asia. He saw the preaching of Islam in South Asia as a gradual process. Many Sufi orders preached Islam in South Asia from medieval times. Among these Sufi orders, the Chishtī order caught the attention of many scholars of Islamics. Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence also penned a highly acclaimed work Sufi Martyrs of Love: Chishti Sufism in South Asia and Beyond. While Aquil detailed various practices of the Chishtī order and Chishtī saints' role in various socio-political events that took place in the Delhi Sultanate, Ernst and Lawrence elaborated on the origin, development, practices, and concepts of the Chishtī order. Unlike Aquil, Ernst and Lawrence continued describing the history of the Chishtī order up to the twenty-first century. The purpose of this review essay is to compare and assess these two works with the help of primary and secondary sources.

This article examines the emergence of new representations of Byzantium in early Arabic literature, with a focus on the Sīra, the biography of the Prophet Muḥammad. This historical investigation leads to a dual conclusions that the Arab perception of Byzantium not only forged an “imaginary Byzantium” but also marked the emergence of Arab self-consciousness. This process significantly influenced the Arab historical and cultural narratives, framing them within the context of the Arabic identity that emerged in late antiquity. Nevertheless, this relationship between the early Islamic community and Byzantium does little to confirm accurate knowledge about Byzantium, rendering the emerging representations as not truly reflective of “reality”, but rather presenting us with an “imaginary Byzantium”. This applies whether related to events in the 1st/7th century or the transition from oral to written texts during the 2nd/8th and 3rd/9th centuries. Furthermore, these representations reveal more about the creators of this imaginary than the other itself, shedding light on the motives of early Muslim writers who used the Sīra as a vehicle for these imaginaries. Ultimately, the article identifies, through the textual analysis and historical contextualization of Sīra, two narrative layers therein that are related to the imaginary Byzantium. The first layer reflected a pervasive fear of Byzantium, while the second layer represented an attitude of challenge and rivalry.

Determining hadith authenticity is vitally important in the Islamic religion because hadiths record the sayings and actions of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and they are the second source of Islamic teachings following the Quran. When authenticating a hadith, the reliability of the hadith narrators is a big factor that hadith scholars consider. However, many narrators share similar names, and the narrators’ full names are not usually included in the narration chains of hadiths. Thus, first, ambiguous narrators need to be identified. Then, their reliability level can be determined. There are no available datasets that could help address this problem of identifying narrators. Here, we present a new dataset that contains narration chains (sanads) with identified narrators. The AR-Sanad 280K dataset has around 280K artificial sanads and could be used to identify 18,298 narrators. After creating the AR-Sanad 280K dataset, we address the narrator disambiguation in several experimental setups. The hadith narrator disambiguation is modeled as a multiclass classification problem with 18,298 class labels. We test different representations and models in our experiments. The best results were achieved by finetuning BERT-Based deep learning model (AraBERT). We obtained a 92.9 Micro F1 score and 30.2 sanad error rate (SER) on the validation set of our artificial sanads AR-Sanad 280K dataset. Furthermore, we extracted a real test set from the sanads of the famous six books in Islamic hadith. We evaluated the best model on the real test data, and we achieved 83.5 Micro F1 score and 60.6 sanad error rate.

This paper attempts to address the question why German critical and polemical sīrah-writings garnered little reaction at the time they were written in the 1970s, and only began to receive greater interest at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What has changed since the 1970s? In answering such question, a brief and selected overview of German contributions to the literature on the life of the Prophet is presented. This will be traced from the early German biographers, critics, and sceptics, and deniers and revisionists who have gained quite some ground in the backdrop of a new political culture evolving in the wake of growing Islamophobia and populism. The conclusions will set out some of the issues that may be important for further sīrah-studies both in the light of questions pertaining to the historiography of religion in general and sīrah-writing in particular.

This paper explores the usages of four concepts – sunna, sīra, āthār, and nasab – mainly in early Ibāḍī epistles, but also in other types of Ibāḍī literature, to examine how early Ibāḍīs understood the legacy of the Prophet Muḥammad, and their relation to that legacy. It argues that before the sixth/twelfth century a notion of communal pedigree occupied pride of place in early Ibāḍī conceptualizations of legality and legitimacy. Thus, Ibāḍī sunna was “communal sunna”. The accumulated weight of Ibāḍī tradition – what is known as āthār in Ibāḍī literature – operated authoritatively as a counterpart to sunna; and the Ibāḍī siyar tradition did not focus on the Prophet exclusively, but rather described the scholarly community as an imagined whole. Moreover, Ibāḍīs explicitly articulated their communal pedigree in “teacher lines” (called nasab al-dīn or nasab al-islām) in Omani literature, and through the structure of their ṭabaqāt/siyar works in North Africa. Appreciating the importance of this communal pedigree, and the nexus of concepts through which it was articulated, helps us to understand the relative lack of emphasis placed on collecting and documenting ḥadīth (Ibāḍīs employ ḥadīth, but they did not use isnāds, nor did they appear to have a ḥadīth collection until the sixth/twelfth century), as well as the general absence of Prophetic biography among them (which also does not appear until the sixth/twelfth century).

This study examines a covenant of the Prophet, namely, a treaty, patent of protection or charter of privileges, that was copied by Fāris al-Shidyāq at some time before the middle of the nineteenth century. It provides a biographical sketch of the copyist. It reproduces the Arabic original as found in Majmū‘ fawā’id along with an English translation. This is followed by a commentary on the covenant and a series of conclusions, namely, that the “Shidyāq Covenant” from 1857 is a copy of the “Rylands Covenant,” which appears to be an Ottoman-issued document dating from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. This “Shidyāq/Rylands Covenant” could represent the missing link between the “Covenant of the Prophet Muḥammad with the Christians of Najrān,” found in the Chronicle of Seert, and the “Covenant of the Prophet Muḥammad with the Christians of the World,” namely, the Testamentum et Pactiones made famous by Gabriel Sionita in 1630. The significance of this study resides in the fact that it shares a previously unpublished and unstudied covenant of the Prophet Muḥammad, in both Arabic and English, with the scholarly community, while exploring the problems posed by transmission. The more covenants that are rediscovered, the better we will understand their origin, diffusion, and relationship, allowing us to better assess their authenticity. What is more, if these documents are accepted by Muslims as authentic, either in word or in spirit, they can help counter and prevent radicalization, promote moderation, and help protect minorities.

Early Muslims conquest of both empires of Eastern Romans and Persians brought lots of slaves, wealth and sources in the form of materials, and knowledge in Arabia, which initiated cultural diffusion in Arabia and Muslims became familiar with the Greek and Romans tradition of historical knowledge. Muslim historians amalgamated the external and internal world views of knowledge into a new paradigm and developed new forms of historical work such as the geographical histories and universal histories. Muslim historians described the formation of Roman Empire and development of Constantinople and its relations with Arabs and Islamic empire. Muslim sources narrated the wars of Arab Muslims towards Constantinople under the religio-political paradigm. Muslims historiographical work explained less about the Arab Muslims siege and attack on Constantinople but emphasized the reasons which forced them to fight against the Romans. For example, Tabari described seasonal raids of Arab Muslims on the lands of Romans at the end of each annual year. Two major Arab Muslims sieges and attacks were made on Constantinople in the seventh and the eighth centuries, first, in the time of Caliph Muawiya (R.A) and second in the time of Caliph Sulayman bin Abdul Malik. Despite the conquests on all fronts, Arab Muslim armies failed in their attempts to conquer Constantinople, because of internal political crises, environmental hindrance and fortification of Constantinople.