سیرت نگاری کے مصادر کی تفہیم نو

Abstract

Sῑrah or Life of the Prophet of Islam (Sal'lāllahu 'Alayhi Wa Sallam) has been a subject of great significance for Muslim scholarship and common man as a normative source of guidance. It has been a subject of endless series of writings and studies done by historians, traditionalists, jurists, and scholars interested in the disciplines of Islamic social sciences. In the 1st century of Islam, sῑrah became a vital source of developing the religious, socio-economic, and political laws of Islam, interpretation of the Holy Qur'ān, of Islamic history and other areas of the activity. The first three centuries of Islam is a period of compilation and classification of the available information about the life, conduct, personality, and statements of the Prophet of Islam (peace be on him). In the later period, the scholars focused on the interpretation of the collected data and the transformation of sῑrah as a systematic discipline. The arrival of Western colonial powers to the Muslim World in the late 19^th century opened a new era of studying of the life of the Muḥammad (peace be on him). Because of the intense intellectual encounter between the Muslim orient and colonial occident, new aspects of studying the life of Muhammad or Sῑrah, were discovered and a new genre of literature emerged in response to the large quantity of work produced by the Western writers on Sῑrah. However, the sources of Sῑrah-writing did not change. With this brief preamble, this paper presents an insight of the sources of Sῑrah-writing, useful to understand the nature of this work.