Akhbār, Ḥadīth, and Sīra

Until recently, modern scholarship (following Otto Loth) has tended to assume that classical Arabic biography arose in conjunction with the study of Ḥadīth and Ḥadīth-transmitters. Muslim scholars, we are told, set out to collect information on the reliability of transmitters. Eventually they extended their inquiries “to other groups – legal scholars, doctors, Sufi masters, and so on,” with the intention of showing “that the history of the Muslim community was essentially that of the unbroken transmission of truth and high Islamic culture.” This understanding of the genre is accurate in some respects: classical Arabic biography undoubtedly emphasizes the notion of transmission, and some of the earliest collections do list transmitters of Ḥadīth. Yet the genre itself did not originate among the Ḥadīth-scholars. Were this so, we would expect the earliest compilations to consist exclusively of entries about transmitters.