Reading the seerah with a critical eye

Seerah — Prophetic Biography · a self-paced course lesson

Ibn Ishaq (d. 150 AH) wrote the earliest full biography, surviving mainly through Ibn Hisham's edited recension. Al-Waqidi and Ibn Saʿd added detail on campaigns and the Companions. Alongside these sit the hadith collections, whose standards of transmission are stricter. Seerah literature was gathered with somewhat looser criteria than legal hadith — which is a fact about the genre, not a reason to discard it.

The full Seerah — Prophetic Biography course · School & Courses