The relationship between maghāzī and hadīth in early Islamic scholarship

Abstract

The relationship between the traditional biographical material on Muhammad (maghāzī-or sīra-material) and the narrations of his words and deeds (hadīth-material) has long been debated in Islamic studies. While some scholars have argued that the biographical material is fundamentally hadīth material arranged chronologically, others have argued the opposite: that hadīth material originally consists of narrative reports about the life of Muhammad which were later deprived of their historical context to produce normative texts. This article argues that both views are untenable and that maghāzī and hadīth emerged as separate fields; each influenced the other but they preserved their distinctive features. While traditions that originated and were shaped in one field were sometimes transferred to the other, the transfer of traditions from one field to the other apparently did not as a rule involve any deliberate changes to the text. © 2011 School of Oriental and African Studies.