Resources and methodology of al-Madaini in the news of the Prophet's biography

Abstract

Islamic history writers used to call a group of history writers “informants” or “reporters,” meaning that the historians of that class used to write down specific news on various topics in the history of early Islam and issue it in the form of pamphlets and letters, which often did not exceed ten parts. The importance of the informants lies in the fact that they They formed an intermediate stage between the storytellers and narrators of the days of the Arabs and genealogies on the one hand, and the great historians of the third and fourth centuries AH who transformed or developed the news into history on the other hand. This means that the historical material, and not the view that we read from historians of the third and fourth centuries in particular, is derived in a large proportion from the letters and blogs of the informants, but although everything was written down, as the hadith and contemporary scholars have proven, most of the origin of those blogs and letters has been lost and has not reached us. We only know their titles, so our appreciation of their work is restricted to the excerpts that have reached us through later historians. Al-Mada’ani, who wrote about three hundred works, among them were various works on the biography of the Prophet, but of all his titles we have reached only two titles, and they are small works, so There is no way for us to know the features of his narrations in the reports of the Prophet’s biography and the sources of his sayings except by referring to most of the writings of those who followed his era Hardly any book of Islamic heritage, regardless of its type, is devoid of narratives in this aspect, and historical sources come at the forefront of heritage sources that have helped us in identifying these narratives, including, but not limited to, the book The History of Khalifa Bin Khayyat, and other history books, including The books that were written on lineage news, and have greatly constituted a subject for research, are the book Ansab Al-Ashraf by Al-Baladhuri .