Introduction

Ṣafī al-Raḥmān al-Mubārakpūrī was born in 1943 in Mubarakpur, a town in the Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh, India. He received his traditional Islamic education at Dār al-ʿUlūm Mubārakpur and subsequently dedicated himself to scholarship and teaching in the Indian Subcontinent before moving to Saudi Arabia, where he served as a researcher and teacher at the Islamic University of Madinah. A prolific scholar of hadith and seerah, he produced numerous works on the life of the Prophet and the sciences of hadith before his death in 2006. His crowning contribution to the literature of the Prophetic biography is undoubtedly al-Raḥīq al-Makhtūm, the Arabic original of When the Moon Split, which was awarded first prize by the Muslim World League in a global competition for the best biography of the Prophet Muḥammad, peace and blessings be upon him, held in Mecca in 1979. The English translation by Issam Diab brought this prize-winning text to the wider English-speaking world and has remained among the most widely read biographies of the Prophet in that language.

The biography traces the life of the Prophet Muḥammad from before his birth, through the social and religious conditions of pre-Islamic Arabia, across the full arc of his prophethood in Mecca and Madinah, to the completion of his mission and his passing in the eleventh year of the Hijra. Al-Mubārakpūrī's methodology throughout is to draw on the canonical collections of hadith and the major works of classical seerah, including Ibn Hishām's edition of Ibn Isḥāq and the historical works of al-Ṭabarī, while maintaining a narrative accessible to the general reader. Events are presented chronologically and supported with references to authenticated sources, allowing the reader to follow both the historical account and the scholarly basis for each report. The book pays particular attention to the military expeditions of the Prophet, the treaties and diplomatic engagements of the Madinan period, and the remarkable transformation of Arabian society that the prophetic mission accomplished within twenty-three years.

The scholarly recognition the book received from the Muslim World League reflects a genuine achievement. Al-Mubārakpūrī succeeded in producing a work that is simultaneously faithful to the classical sources, free of the sectarian polemics that mar some works of seerah, and written in a style that respects the dignity of its subject. The title itself, drawn from the Quranic verse in Sūrat al-Qamar referring to the splitting of the moon as a sign granted to the Prophet, signals both the miraculous dimension of the prophetic career and the author's conviction that the life of the Prophet is best understood within the Quranic framework the Prophet himself inhabited. This perspective keeps the biographical narrative anchored in the sources of Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jamāʿah rather than in the reconstructive or skeptical approaches that characterize some modern Western scholarship on early Islam.

Readers encountering this work for the first time will find it most rewarding when read with a spirit of reflection. The Quran itself exhorts the believers to know and love the Prophet, and the classical scholars understood biography as a form of devotional and legal knowledge, not merely historical curiosity. A reader who approaches When the Moon Split with this understanding will find it not merely a record of events but an account of how divine guidance took human form, shaped a community, and produced a civilization. Those who wish to pursue the subject further will find this book an excellent foundation from which to engage longer works of seerah, the books of prophetic character and description known as shamāʾil, and the vast hadith literature that records the words and practice of the Prophet in detail.