prophetic biography

thumb|upright=0.8|An early manuscript of Ibn Hisham's Al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya (), commonly shortened to Sīrah and translated as prophetic biography, are the traditional biographies of the Islamic prophet Muhammad written by over centuries Muslim historians, from which, in addition to the Quran and Hadith literature, most historical information about his life and the early history of Islam is derived.

Early historiographic information in Islam emerged as the irregular products of storytellers (qāṣṣ, pl. quṣṣāṣ)—they were quite prestigious then—without details. While the narratives were initially in the form of a kind of heroic epics called magāzī,The earliest sources we have on the life of Muḥammad are the maghāzī, but they are far from being a consistent literary genre because they encompass a mix of different types of texts: lists of martyrs, poetry, Qurʾānic explanations, anecdotes resembling those found in the Bible, and of course accounts of military expeditions.https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004466739_005 details were added later, edited and transformed into sirah compilations. The stories were written in the form of "founding conquest stories" based on nostalgia for the golden age then. Humphrey, quoted by Antoine Borrut, explains that the stories related to this period were created according to a pact-betrayal-redemption principle. Western historians describe the purpose of these early biographies as largely to convey a message—of a hagiographic nature—rather than to strictly and accurately record history. Lawrence Conrad examines the early sirah books and sees that the dates of Muhammad's birth span a period of up to 85 years. Conrad defines this as: "the fluidity (evolutionary process) continued even in the written period." At the same time the study of the earliest periods in Islamic history is made difficult by a lack of sources.