Muhammad ibn Muslim ibn Ubaydullah ibn Abdullah ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (; died 124 AH/741-2 CE), also referred to as Ibn Shihab or al-Zuhri, was a tabi'i Arab jurist and traditionist credited with pioneering the development of sīra-maghazi and hadith literature. Raised in Medina, he studied hadith and maghazi under Medinese traditionists before rising to prominence at the Umayyad court, where he served in a number of religious and administrative positions. He transmitted several thousand hadith included in the six canonical Sunni hadith collections and his work on maghazi forms the basis of the extant biographies of Muhammad. His relationship with the Umayyads has been debated by both early and modern Sunnis, Shias and Western specialists in Islamic studies. Biography Early life and career Muhammad ibn Muslim al-Zuhri was born in the city of Medina. His father Muslim was a supporter of the Zubayrids during the Second Fitna, while his great-grandfather Abdullah fought against Muhammad at the Battle of Uhud before converting to Islam. Despite hailing from the Banu Zuhrah — a clan of Quraysh — Zuhri's early life was characterised by poverty, and he served as the breadwinner for his family. As a youth, Zuhri enjoyed studying poetry and genealogy, and possessed an excellent memory which enabled him in this pursuit. He consumed honey syrup in a bid to sharpen it further, and wrote voluminous notes on slates and parchment to aid with memory recall. Dedicating himself to the study of hadith and maghazi narrations in his twenties, he studied under the Medinese scholars Said ibn al-Musayyib, Urwah ibn Zubayr, Ubayd-Allah ibn Abd-Allah and Abu Salamah, the son of Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf. He referred to them as four "oceans of knowledge". Using the traditions that were transmitted to him, Zuhri compiled a maghazi work of which fragments can be found in the writings of his students Ibn Ishaq and Ma'mar ibn Rashid. He may have been the first to combine multiple maghazi reports into one to produce a single, coherent narrative with collective chains of narration - a technique later used by Ishaq and Al-Waqidi. Encounter with Abd al-Malik In the account of the 9th-century Shia historian Ya'qubi, a teenage Zuhri was taken to caliph Abd al-Malik () while visiting Damascus in . The caliph sought to prevent the Syrians from performing the Hajj in Mecca, which was controlled by the Zubayrids. Adducing a hadith from Zuhri that permitted