List of Killings Ordered or Supported by Muhammad: Difference between revisions

The sirah maghaazi literature, early biographical literature produced by the Arabic tradition, portrays Muhammad as a warlord and statebuilder par excellence. Although it does portray him sometimes showing mercy to his opponents, just as often if not more so it portrays him as ordering the killings of transgressors against the divine law, political and religious enemies, personal enemies or threats to his person, and poets who made fun of him. The earliest biographers such as Ibn Ishaq are quite detailed in showing how the prophet did not suffer poetry against him and made a point of ordering the murder of such poets. As with the rest of the sira maghaazi literature many questions remain about the reliability of these accounts from the perspective of ''wie es eigentlich gewesen'' or "as it actually happened." This caution is found not only in academia, but also among Islamic modernists, as well as in the broader Islamic tradition, a perception which has filtered through to public awareness today. While sirah material was of interest in legal and exegetical contexts, classical hadith scholars considered the sirah genre to lack any sound methodology for authenticating isnads (chains of narration; indeed, in some cases no isnad is given at all).