Parallel Framework of Muhammad and Moses's Story: An Analysis of the Narratives of Halimah Al-Sa'diyah

Modern studies of the origin of sīrah nabawiyyah have traced and suggested the existence of influence of previous scriptures and their elements within the sīrah narrative. The extraordinary speed and marks of physical maturity in Prophet Muḥammad’s wet-nurse period with Halimah, which, according to Raven, indicates a parallel occurrence with Jesus' precocity in the Gospels of the Infancy. Besides, Muslim scholars such as Ibn Hishām was found to consistently make parallel comparison between Muḥammad and Moses in his work. This study aims to explore the narratives of Prophet Muḥammad’s early life, with special focus to his period with Ḥalīmah al-Sa’diyyah and analyse the use of Quranic reference in the narrative. The study is qualitative in nature in which the researcher employed critical and textual analysis to examine the story. The present study in its finding proposes that there are two possible reasons which lead Ibn Hishām to adduce verse 28:12 of the Quran as his reference to the account of Muḥammad’s time as a suckling infant. The first is to elucidate lexical obscurity in the narration of Ibn Isḥāq. And the second is to give credence to the similarity between the accounts of two prophets, Muḥammad and Moses.