Sirat Rasul Allah
composition: probableauthorship: secure
witness: Ibn Hisham's recension, early ninth century; the original is lost
The first sustained biography of Muhammad, preserved only through a later editor who says openly what he has omitted, and the source of nearly everything later tradition narrates about the Prophet's life.
- continuous biographical narrative built from separately transmitted reports
- survival only through an editor who declares his omissions
- the principal source for nearly all later accounts of the Prophet's life
- transmission problems that the text itself makes visible
Ibn Ishaq assembled reports from the generations after the events into a continuous narrative running from pre-Islamic Arabia through the Meccan preaching, the migration to Medina and the campaigns. His own text is lost; what survives is principally the recension of Ibn Hisham, who states that he has left out material he considered offensive, unverifiable or irrelevant, and other fragments quoted by al-Tabari. That transmission history is the central problem in using the work, and it is unusually well documented.
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