The Seerah of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ

Lineage: Quraysh and Banu Hashim

He ﷺ was born into Quraysh, the tribe that held guardianship of the Kaaba and fed and watered the pilgrims — the most honoured house in Makkah. Within Quraysh, his clan was Banu Hashim, respected for its custody of the pilgrim rites even though it was not the wealthiest branch. His full name and line: Muhammad, son of Abdullah, son of Abd al-Muttalib (whose given name was Shaybah), son of Hashim — the line running back through 'Adnan to the Prophet Ismail, son of Ibrahim, peace be upon them.

His father Abdullah died before he was born, while away on a trading journey; his mother was Aminah bint Wahb of the clan of Banu Zuhrah. So the Prophet ﷺ entered the world already an orphan, a fact the Quran later recalls to him directly: Quran 93:6 — "Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter?" His grandfather Abd al-Muttalib, the chief of Banu Hashim, took him in. Sirah — Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sa'd

The Year of the Elephant, and his birth (~570 CE)

In the year he was born, an army from Yemen under Abrahah — the Abyssinian governor — marched on Makkah with a war elephant, intending to destroy the Kaaba. The attack failed catastrophically: the Quran records that Allah sent flocks of birds pelting the army with stones of baked clay, and left them "like devoured stalks." That season became known to the Arabs as the Year of the Elephant, and it fixes the Prophet's ﷺ birth at roughly 570 CE.

He ﷺ was born on a Monday — a day he kept fasting for the rest of his life, and explained why when asked about it:

Halimah and the desert childhood

By the custom of the Makkan nobility, infants were sent out to be nursed among the Bedouin, where the desert air and open life were thought to raise them strong and to give them the pure, unbroken Arabic of the tribes. He ﷺ was taken by Halimah bint Abi Dhu'ayb of the tribe of Banu Sa'd, and the sirah preserves her memory that her household filled with blessing from the moment she took him in — her tired camel outpaced the caravan, her flock came home full. He spent his early years in the open country of Banu Sa'd. Sirah — Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sa'd

The splitting of the chest

While he was still a small child among Halimah's family, an event took place that is preserved not only in the sirah but in a sahih narration: angels came to him, opened his chest, and purified his heart. Anas ibn Malik narrated it from the Prophet's ﷺ own account:

The same purifying of the heart is described again, years later, at the start of the Night Journey (below). Muslim scholars read the childhood incident as an early sign that this boy was set apart for something.

The deaths of Aminah, then Abd al-Muttalib

He was returned to his mother, but she did not live long. When he was about six, Aminah took him to visit his father's relatives at Yathrib (later Madinah); she died on the return journey, at a place called al-Abwa'. His grandfather Abd al-Muttalib then raised him with visible tenderness — the sirah records that the old man let the boy sit on his own cushion beside the Kaaba, which he allowed no one else. But when the Prophet ﷺ was around eight, Abd al-Muttalib died too. Twice orphaned and now without his guardian, the boy passed into the care of his uncle. Sirah — Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sa'd

The guardianship of Abu Talib

His uncle Abu Talib, full brother of his late father Abdullah, took him in and protected him for the next forty years — through childhood and, later, through the hardest years of the mission in Makkah. Abu Talib was not wealthy, and the young Muhammad ﷺ earned his keep, at times shepherding flocks. He later remarked that Allah sent no prophet who had not herded sheep, and that he himself had tended them for the people of Makkah. Sahih al-Bukhari 2262 (shepherding) · guardianship: sirah — Ibn Ishaq

The trading journeys and the monk Bahira

As a youth he travelled with Abu Talib's caravans toward Syria. The sirah tells of a Christian monk called Bahira at Busra who, seeing signs he recognised from scripture in the young traveller, urged Abu Talib to guard his nephew closely and take him home. The account is well known but reaches us only through the biographers, so it is treated as sirah, not as an established hadith. What is certain from his adult reputation is the character these years built: the Makkans, before ever he claimed prophethood, called him al-Amin — "the Trustworthy." Sirah — Ibn Ishaq, al-Tirmidhi (the Bahira report is graded weak by many)

Marriage to Khadijah

His honesty in trade reached Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, a respected and wealthy Makkan merchant-woman. She hired him to take her goods to Syria, was struck by the profit and the integrity he returned with, and proposed marriage. He was about twenty-five; she was older, and had been married before. Their marriage lasted around twenty-five years, until her death, and he took no other wife while she lived. She bore him all his children except Ibrahim, and — as the next section shows — she became the very first person to believe in his message. Her full story is on her own page: Khadijah bint Khuwaylid. Sirah — Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sa'd

Rebuilding the Kaaba and the Black Stone

When he was around thirty-five, Quraysh rebuilt the Kaaba after a flood had weakened it. The clans came to blows over an honour: who would lift the Black Stone back into its corner. They agreed to accept the judgment of the next man to enter through the gate — and it was Muhammad ﷺ. He called for a cloak, laid the stone in its centre, and had a chief from each clan take hold of an edge; together they carried it to its place, and he set it with his own hands. A dispute that could have started a blood-feud was settled without a drop of blood. Sirah — Ibn Ishaq (Ibn Hisham)

The first revelation, in the cave of Hira

As he neared forty, solitude drew him. He would withdraw to the cave of Hira on the mountain of Jabal an-Nur above Makkah, worshipping alone for stretches of days. There, the first revelation came — narrated by his wife 'A'ishah in one of the most detailed reports in Sahih al-Bukhari:

Khadijah and Waraqah

Shaken, he told Khadijah what had happened and feared for himself. Her reply, preserved in the same Bukhari narration, is one of the most quoted lines in the Seerah: "Never! By Allah, Allah will never disgrace you. You keep good relations with your kith and kin, help the poor and the destitute, serve your guests generously and assist the deserving calamity-afflicted ones." She took him to her cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal, an old man who had become a Christian and knew the scriptures. Waraqah recognised what had come: "This is the same one who keeps the secrets (angel Gabriel) whom Allah had sent to Moses. I wish I were young and could live up to the time when your people would turn you out." The Prophet ﷺ asked, "Will they drive me out?" Waraqah replied that they would: "Anyone (man) who came with something similar to what you have brought was treated with hostility." Sahih al-Bukhari 3

The early, secret da'wah

For roughly the first three years the call was quiet, spread to those trusted and near. The first to believe was Khadijah; among the first were Abu Bakr from the men, 'Ali ibn Abi Talib — a boy in the Prophet's ﷺ own household — from the young, and Zayd ibn Harithah from the freedmen. Believers met discreetly, often at the house of al-Arqam near the Safa. Sirah — Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sa'd

Going public — and the wall goes up

Then the command came to warn openly. When the verse "And warn your nearest kinsmen" (Quran 26:214) was revealed, he ﷺ climbed the hill of as-Safa and called the clans of Quraysh by name until they gathered:

Quraysh turns to persecution

Open preaching brought open hostility. The powerless among the believers took the worst of it: Bilal ibn Rabah, an enslaved man, was pinned under a rock in the midday heat and kept repeating "One, One" until Abu Bakr bought and freed him; the family of Yasir — including Sumayyah, counted as the first martyr of Islam — were tortured to death. The Prophet ﷺ himself, protected by his clan, was mocked, pelted, and once had the entrails of a slaughtered camel thrown on his back while he prostrated at the Kaaba, until his daughter Fatimah came and lifted them off. Sirah — Ibn Ishaq (the torture of Bilal and the family of Yasir); the entrails while praying: Sahih al-Bukhari 240

The two migrations to Abyssinia

To spare the weak, the Prophet ﷺ told a group of believers to cross the Red Sea to Abyssinia (al-Habashah), whose Christian king, the Negus (an-Najashi), was known for justice. A first small party went, then a larger second migration of over eighty. Quraysh sent envoys to demand their return; the Negus heard both sides, listened as Ja'far ibn Abi Talib recited to him the passage of Surah Maryam about 'Isa and his mother, and refused to hand the Muslims over. It was the first time Islam found safety on foreign soil. Sirah — Ibn Ishaq; the Negus episode is also reported via Umm Salamah in Musnad Ahmad

The boycott of Banu Hashim

Unable to break the movement, the leaders of Quraysh imposed a total boycott on Banu Hashim and Banu al-Muttalib — no marriage, no trade, no dealings — to force Abu Talib to surrender his nephew. The clan was penned into a mountain valley (Shi'b Abi Talib) for around three years, reduced to eating leaves, the children's hunger heard outside the pass. The boycott document was hung in the Kaaba; the sirah records that it was eventually found eaten away by insects except for the mention of Allah's name, and the boycott collapsed. Sirah — Ibn Ishaq (Ibn Hisham)

The Year of Sorrow — Khadijah and Abu Talib

Not long after the boycott ended, the Prophet ﷺ lost his two greatest supports within a short span: his uncle and protector Abu Talib, and then his wife of twenty-five years, Khadijah — his first believer and closest comfort. The biographers name this the Year of Sorrow ('Am al-Huzn). With Abu Talib gone, Quraysh's hostility had no restraint left, and the mission's position in Makkah grew grave. Sirah — Ibn Ishaq; the naming "'Am al-Huzn" is from the biographers, not a hadith

Taif

Looking for a place that might receive the message, he ﷺ walked to Taif, a town in the hills southeast of Makkah. Its chiefs rejected him and set the town's youth and slaves to drive him out with stones until his sandals filled with blood. On the road back, exhausted, he was met by the angel in charge of the mountains, offering to crush the town between the two hills — and his reply is preserved in a sahih narration:

Al-Isra wal-Mi'raj — the Night Journey

In this same period of grief came the greatest honour of his life: in a single night he ﷺ was carried from the Sacred Mosque in Makkah to the Farthest Mosque in Jerusalem (the Isra), then raised through the seven heavens into the presence of his Lord (the Mi'raj), where the five daily prayers were made obligatory. The Quran opens Surah al-Isra with it: Quran 17:1 — "Exalted is He who took His servant by night from al-Masjid al-Haram to al-Masjid al-Aqsa." The detail of the night is preserved in the sahih hadith, including the long narration of Malik ibn Sa'sa'ah in which he passes Adam, 'Isa, Yusuf, Idris, Harun, Musa and Ibrahim at the heavens in turn. Our full page on it: Isra and Mi'raj.

The pledges of al-'Aqabah

At the yearly pilgrimage season, a handful of men from Yathrib (Madinah) met the Prophet ﷺ at a mountain pass called al-'Aqabah and accepted Islam. They returned the next year, twelve of them, and pledged themselves to him — the First Pledge of al-'Aqabah. He sent Mus'ab ibn 'Umayr back with them to teach Islam, and the faith spread through the two great tribes of the city, Aws and Khazraj. The following year some seventy-three men and two women came and gave the Second Pledge, promising to protect him as they would their own families. Yathrib was ready to receive him. Sirah — Ibn Ishaq (Ibn Hisham)

The Hijra, and the cave of Thawr

As believers slipped away to Madinah in small groups, Quraysh resolved to kill the Prophet ﷺ outright — a plot the Quran alludes to (Quran 8:30). He left Makkah with Abu Bakr, and the two hid three days in the cave of Thawr south of the city while search parties combed the hills. Abu Bakr, seeing feet at the cave mouth, whispered his fear, and the Prophet ﷺ answered him with the words the Quran itself would record:

They reached Yathrib — thereafter al-Madinah — safely. This migration, the Hijra of 622 CE, marks year 1 of the Islamic calendar. More on the city: Madinah al-Munawwarah.

The Prophet's Mosque and the brotherhood

His camel knelt on a plot of open ground, which he bought and built into the first Masjid an-Nabawi — a simple structure of palm trunks and mud brick, with his own quarters attached, that doubled as the community's centre of prayer, learning and government. He then bound the Makkan emigrants (Muhajirun) and the Madinan hosts (Ansar) into pairs of brothers, each Ansari sharing his home and wealth with a newcomer. One of the most striking exchanges of that brotherhood is sahih:

Badr — 2 AH

Permission to fight was given to a community that had been driven from its homes (Quran 22:39). The first major clash came at the wells of Badr in Ramadan of the second year. About 313 Muslims met a Makkan army of roughly a thousand and, against the odds, won a decisive victory in which several chiefs of Quraysh were killed. The Quran points back to it as a favour to remember:

Uhud — 3 AH

A year later Quraysh returned in force to avenge Badr, meeting the Muslims at the foot of Mount Uhud outside Madinah. The Muslims had the upper hand until a company of archers, told to hold their position whatever happened, left it to gather spoils; the Makkan cavalry swept round through the gap. The Prophet ﷺ was wounded, his uncle Hamzah ibn 'Abd al-Muttalib was killed and mutilated, and a rumour spread that the Prophet ﷺ himself had died. The Quran addresses the day at length, naming the archers' mistake plainly:

The Trench (al-Khandaq) — 5 AH

In the fifth year a grand coalition of Quraysh, Ghatafan and allied tribes — the Confederates (al-Ahzab) — marched on Madinah, some ten thousand strong. On the advice of Salman al-Farisi, the Muslims dug a trench across the exposed approaches to the city, a tactic the Arabs had not seen, which stalled the huge army. After a tense siege of several weeks, a bitter wind and internal discord broke the coalition and they withdrew without a battle. Surah al-Ahzab records the ordeal — the eyes fixed in terror, the hearts in the throats — and the deliverance:

Banu Qurayzah

During the siege the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayzah, bound to Madinah by treaty, went over to the enemy at the moment of greatest danger — a betrayal from within the walls. When the Confederates withdrew, the tribe was besieged and surrendered, agreeing to be judged by Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, chief of their old allies the Aws, whom they themselves chose as arbiter. Sa'd ruled by the law they knew: the fighting men to be executed, the women and children taken captive. The judgment is reported in a sahih narration:

Hudaybiyyah — 6 AH

In the sixth year the Prophet ﷺ set out with some 1,400 companions to perform 'Umrah, unarmed for war. Quraysh blocked them at al-Hudaybiyyah on the edge of the sacred precinct. After tense negotiation a ten-year truce was agreed on terms that looked, on their face, humiliating to the Muslims — including that they turn back this year and come the next. Some companions were dismayed; 'Umar most of all. Yet on the return the Quran called it exactly what it was:

The truce's peace let the message spread faster than any battle had — in the two years that followed, more people entered Islam than in all the years before. The sirah and the historians treat Hudaybiyyah as the hinge on which the conquest of Makkah turned.

Khaybar

Soon after Hudaybiyyah, the Prophet ﷺ moved against the fortified oasis of Khaybar to the north, a base of tribes hostile to Madinah. On the eve of the assault he said the banner would go to a man who loved Allah and His Messenger and was loved by them — and gave it to 'Ali ibn Abi Talib, whose sore eyes he first healed:

The letters to the kings

In the years after Hudaybiyyah the Prophet ﷺ sent envoys with letters inviting rulers beyond Arabia to Islam — among them Heraclius of Byzantium, Khosrow of Persia, the Negus of Abyssinia, and the governor of Egypt. Sahih al-Bukhari preserves the scene at Heraclius' court, where the emperor summoned Abu Sufyan — then still an enemy of Islam, in Syria with a caravan — and cross-examined him about the Prophet ﷺ before reading the letter aloud:

Mu'tah — 8 AH

The truce with Quraysh held, but the years between Uhud and the conquest were not idle: expedition after expedition went out to secure the tribes and the roads around Madinah and to the north. The gravest of them came in the eighth year, when the Prophet ﷺ sent an army toward Mu'tah, in the land of Sham — the first time the Muslims met the armies of Byzantium and their Arab allies, and a far larger force than their own. The campaign's setting and numbers reach us through the biographers, but the heart of the day is preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari: the banner passed through three commanders in turn — Zayd ibn Harithah, then Ja'far ibn Abi Talib, then 'Abdullah ibn Rawahah — and each was martyred carrying it. Far away in Madinah, before any rider could have brought word, the Prophet ﷺ announced their deaths from the minbar as the battle unfolded: Sirah — Ibn Ishaq (Ibn Hisham), for the campaign's setting

The "sword from the swords of Allah" was Khalid ibn al-Walid — the same commander whose cavalry had turned the day at Uhud, now only months a Muslim. He took up the banner, held the outnumbered army together, and brought it back to Madinah intact; the disengagement itself was the victory the Prophet's ﷺ words had named, and the title Sayfullah — the Sword of Allah — remained his for life. Zayd, Ja'far and Ibn Rawahah are counted among the most beloved martyrs of the Seerah: Zayd the Prophet's ﷺ freedman and among the very first believers, Ja'far the brother of 'Ali who had spoken for the Muslims before the Negus in Abyssinia. Sirah — Ibn Ishaq (Ibn Hisham); the martyrdoms and Khalid's title: Sahih al-Bukhari 4262

The conquest of Makkah — 8 AH

When Quraysh's allies broke the truce by attacking a tribe allied to the Muslims, the Prophet ﷺ marched on Makkah with an army of some ten thousand. The city that had driven him out surrendered almost without a fight. He entered as its master with his head bowed low on his mount in humility — not in triumph — cleared the idols from around the Kaaba, and then, to the Quraysh who had fought and exiled him for twenty years, declared: "Go — you are free." Sahih al-Bukhari records the entry and the order of the march:

Hunayn

Weeks after Makkah fell, the tribes of Hawazin and Thaqif massed to fight the now-large Muslim army in the valley of Hunayn. This time the Muslims' numbers pleased them — and at the first ambush of Hawazin archers the ranks broke and fled, until the Prophet ﷺ stood firm, calling them back, and the army rallied to victory. The Quran uses the day as a lesson that help comes from Allah, not from numbers:

Tabuk — 9 AH

In the ninth year, word came of a Byzantine mobilisation to the north, and the Prophet ﷺ called for the hardest expedition of all — a long march to Tabuk in the fierce heat of summer, through a season of drought and ripe harvest, so that the hypocrites made excuses to stay behind. No enemy army materialised, but the march itself sorted the sincere from the false. Three sincere believers who had stayed home with no excuse — among them Ka'b ibn Malik — were boycotted by the whole community for fifty days until their repentance was accepted from the heavens. Ka'b told the story himself in one of the longest sahih narrations there is:

The Year of Delegations

With Makkah taken and Arabia turning, deputations from tribe after tribe came to Madinah through the ninth year to accept Islam and pledge loyalty — so many that the biographers call it the Year of Delegations ('Am al-Wufud). It is the very scene the Quran had foretold in Surah an-Nasr: "you see the people entering the religion of Allah in crowds." Quran 110:2; the delegations year by year: sirah — Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sa'd

The Farewell Hajj and the Sermon

In the tenth year the Prophet ﷺ led the pilgrimage himself — his only Hajj, and his last — with well over a hundred thousand Muslims. Jabir ibn 'Abdillah preserved the whole rite in a single long, sahih narration that remains the template for how Hajj is performed — told in full on the dedicated page The Farewell Hajj & Sermon. Standing at 'Arafah, he delivered the Farewell Sermon, laying down the sanctity of life and property, ending the blood-feuds and usury of the old order, and charging the believers with the rights of women and the equality of all people before Allah:

During these days at 'Arafah came a verse of which a Jew later told 'Umar that, had it been revealed to them, they would have taken that day as a celebration (Sahih al-Bukhari 45):

His passing — 11 AH / 632 CE

Not long after returning to Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ fell ill with the fever that would take him. He continued to lead the prayer as long as he could, and when he could not, he told Abu Bakr to lead the people. He passed away in the month of Rabi' al-Awwal, 11 AH (632 CE), at about sixty-three years of age, his head resting on the lap of his wife 'A'ishah. She narrated his final moments:

He was buried in 'A'ishah's chamber, adjoining the mosque he had built — where he lies to this day beneath the green dome of Masjid an-Nabawi. He left behind no gold or land of note, but a completed religion, a Book preserved letter for letter, and an ummah that within a lifetime carried his message from Arabia across three continents.

A closing note

The Seerah is not a legend to be embellished; it is history, and Muslims are asked to love him ﷺ through the truth about him, not through invented marvels. That is why this page draws its spine from the Quran and the two Sahih collections, and marks the biographers' material as sirah wherever it stands alone. To read his life is to meet the man the Quran calls "a mercy to the worlds" (Quran 21:107) — and the only fitting response to knowing him is the one the believers have made for fourteen centuries: Allahumma salli 'ala Muhammad. Continue with the Companions, the Night Journey, Madinah, or the Islamic history timeline.