The foregoing discussion brings us to matters directly germane to the narrative sources at hand, genres which will be considered briefly in the paragraphs to follow. The discussions above related to the literary domains of prophetic biography, and to Paleo-Muslim material more broadly conceived, namely ḥadīth, sīra, Qur’ānic asbāb al-nuzūl, all of which material appears in historical compilations, but all needing to be considered as specific genres. These separate but intersecting genres do not represent exactly the same material, although larger works within these domains contain essentially the same range of material, as indicated above, stabilised around AH 100, with a fairly secure chronological emplotment – the other sources, the Qur’ānic, Umayyad and ‘Abbāsid antiquarianism, and poetry will be treated separately below. In almost all cases, the question of lines of authentication is encountered, in somewhat different forms and with different kinds of histories of transmission, but with similar questions regarding authenticity and veracity. Some topical clusters, for instance those relating to the Satanic Verses, do not form part of ḥadīth transmission at all, and the argument has been made that exegetical and historical narratives are distinct from those treating of legal matters, unfortunately without broad assent.

The point that although there are indeed formal and substantive connections between historical and ḥadīth narratives, they are nevertheless deployed to different purposes and therefore subject to different forms of patterning, is a crucial one and has been in circulation for a long time now. Moreover, it has long been recognised that prophetic biography is quite distinct from exegesis. Yet the scepticism of recent vintage has insisted that such biographies were essentially exegetical exercises, without discriminating between genres or between the various components of biography; this exegetising motif has recently been extended to biographical materials emanating from the ayyām, and specifically, the biography of Imru’ al-Qays, where material that might well be taken to be legendary is taken for a general description of all material that is extant. Such discrimination would reveal that if an exegetical function in prophetic biography did in fact exist, it will have been confined largely to the mubtada’, narratives that related Muḥammad to earlier prophecy in the context of a salvation history.