Ibn Hishām
أبو محمد عبد الملك بن هشام
al-Muʾarrikh · al-Naḥwī
Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Hishām ibn Ayyūb al-Ḥimyarī al-Maʿāfirī
- Birthplace
- Baṣra, Iraq (Ḥimyarī origin; died in Fusṭāṭ, Egypt)
- Madhhab
- Grammarian and historian; no fiqh affiliation prominently recorded
- Reference
- Wikipedia ↗
Al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya — the canonical prophetic biography. His recension of Ibn Isḥāq's lost original is the oldest complete sīrah that has reached us, and the foundation for every sīrah written since.
Ibn Hishām was the Baṣran grammarian and genealogist who edited and preserved Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq's (d. 150 AH / 767 CE) pioneering biography of the Prophet ﷺ. Ibn Isḥāq's original Kitāb al-Maghāzī did not survive intact — what we possess today as 'the sīrah of Ibn Isḥāq' reaches us through the recension and careful editorial work of Ibn Hishām, who received it from Ibn Isḥāq's student al-Ziyād al-Bakkāʾī.
Ibn Hishām reorganised, pruned weak and legendary material, and added linguistic commentary rooted in his training as a grammarian. His version — al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya — became the canonical biography of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ in the Sunni tradition. Every subsequent classical sīrah — from al-Ṭabarī to Ibn Kathīr to al-Dhahabī — draws from Ibn Hishām's text. Along with his sīrah he authored Kitāb al-Tījān fī Mulūk Ḥimyar, a history of the pre-Islamic Yemeni kings of his own Ḥimyarī lineage. He settled in Fusṭāṭ, Egypt, where he died.
- Al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya (the recension of Ibn Isḥāq)
- Kitāb al-Tījān fī Mulūk Ḥimyar (The Book of Crowns on the Kings of Ḥimyar)
Without Ibn Hishām's recension, much of the earliest Muslim memory of the Prophet ﷺ would be lost. His sīrah is public-domain through its age, preserved in Shamela and every classical library, and the reference point from which every later sīrah — including Ibn Kathīr's al-Bidāyah wa al-Nihāyah — draws its narrative spine.