Reports on Tribal Delegations to the Prophet: Muḥammad b. Saʿd (d. 230/845)

Muḥammad b. Saʿd was a non-Arab Muslim historian, resident of Baghdad, and secretary to the also famous historian al-Wāqidī. Ibn Saʿd focused on biographies of transmitters of the Prophet’s words and deeds. His Kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr became a repository of information about thousands of the Prophet’s companions (ṣaḥāba) and their successors (tābiʿūn), classified according to regions and generations. In time, the ṭabaqāt literature came to comprise biographies of transmitters, poets, exegetes, linguists, mystics, jurists, and physicians. The first part of Ibn Saʿd’s Ṭabaqāt is dedicated to the biography of the Prophet (sīra, a disparate literary genre focusing on the events