Muhammad The Ideal Prophet

Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi was an Indian and later Pakistani Islamic scholar, historian, biographer, and litterateur whose six-volume Sirat al-Nabi — completed by him from the manuscripts and research of his teacher Shibli Nu'mani — stands as one of the most ambitious and influential biographies of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ ever attempted in any language. Born in 1302 AH / 1884 CE in the village of Desna in Patna District, British India, into a family of Sufi-trained scholars, he was educated first by his elder brother and father before studying at Phulwari Sharif, Madrasa-e-Imdadia in Darbhanga, and finally Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama in Lucknow, where he spent seven years and graduated in 1906.

Nadwi joined his teacher Shibli Nu'mani as a literary assistant on the Sirat al-Nabi project beginning in 1910. After Nu'mani's death in 1914, he left his professorship at Deccan College in Pune and relocated to Azamgarh, where he edited the two volumes Nu'mani had completed and wrote the remaining four himself, drawing on his teacher's collected research. His other major works include Khutbat-e-Madras — eight 1925 lectures on the Prophet's ﷺ life — Ard al-Qur'an (a two-volume historical-geographical study of the Qur'an's lands), Sirat-e-A'isha (a biography of the Mother of the Believers, A'isha (RA)), Khayyam (a scholarly study of Umar Khayyam), and Hayat-e-Shibli (a biography of his teacher and a literary history of nineteenth-century Muslim India).

Nadwi was a co-founder of Darul Musannifin in Azamgarh and served as the founding editor of Ma'arif, an influential Urdu scholarly journal that continues to publish today. Aligarh Muslim University awarded him an honorary DLitt in 1940. He emigrated to Pakistan in 1950 and died in Karachi on his sixty-ninth birthday — 22 November 1953 / 14 Rabi' al-Awwal 1373 — and is remembered as one of the foundational figures of modern Indo-Pakistani Islamic scholarship.