Summary:Among Muslims, the study of the Prophet Muhammad’s life (sīra) has traditionally had three m

Summary:Among Muslims, the study of the Prophet Muhammad’s life (sīra) has traditionally had three main purposes: understanding him as the embodiment and moral example of Islam; better understanding the Qur’an through the historical context in which its verses were revealed; and providing a central foundation for studying and reconstructing the history of early Islam. For this reason, Muslims began recording and studying his life from the earliest centuries. However, sīra scholarship has never been straightforward: as with hadith, historical reports contain sectarian differences, contradictions, questions about individual narrators, and debates over the reliability of sources.In the West, writing about the Prophet’s life began in the Middle Ages, initially largely in the context of religious polemics. Academic Western study emerged in the mid-19th century, moving from broad confidence in Islamic historical and hadith sources to extensive skepticism, especially in the late 20th century, when scholars increasingly turned to non-Islamic sources, inscriptions, coins, and other physical evidence. Since roughly the second decade of the 21st century, a more balanced approach has emerged, combining critical use of Islamic sources with non-Islamic and material evidence. These sessions examine the history of Western scholarship on the Prophet, the Qur’an, material and non-Islamic sources, the history of early Islam, and the sīra-maghāzī literature.@Mesbahinfo