The Historical and Theological Schools of Writing the Biography of the Prophet's Companions

The writers of the Companions’ biographies have structural differences in the compilation of their books, which led to divide them into two schools: ‘hadith’ and 'biography'. They also differ in the way they deal with content and text, i.e. in the kind of works which they wrote about the Companions. In this way, the "content-based" school has come to existence. An inquiry into the books on the Companions’ biographies shows that in this regard active schools which are concerned with content are generally divided into: 'historical' and "theological". These two schools have brought clear differences in the Companions’ biographies concerned with the content especially in writing the biographies of those Companions who have always been criticized for their political and ideological stances. In the "historical" school, apart from his being a jurist, a scholar of Hadith and a theologian, the biographer expounds the content according to the historians’ school, that is, while introducing the Companions, he points to some news that may not please some people. In the "theological" school, however, this kind of news is censored, criticized, and often either rejected or justified. This paper gives an account of the two schools and underlines the differences between them.