Book excerpt: Ten revised versions of presentations at an international colloquium held in October 1997 in Nijmagen, the Netherlands, provide a range of methodological approaches and use varying types of evidence to examine issues around the sources for the several biographies of The Prophet written between the end of the second and end of the third Islamic centuries. Five of them look at the development of the sira tradition of writing the life of Muhammad; the other five at the historical reliability of the biographical source material, including that used by the earliest Christian writings. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.