Sean W. Anthony

Sean W. Anthony is a contemporary American scholar of early Islam, sīrah, Qurʾānic studies, and Late Antiquity. He received his doctoral training at the University of Chicago and currently serves as a professor of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on the emergence of Islam within the broader religious and political environment of Late Antiquity, with particular attention to the historical sources for the life of the Prophet Muḥammad.

Anthony has become one of the leading voices in contemporary sīrah scholarship through his effort to move beyond the polarization between traditional acceptance of Islamic sources and radical revisionist skepticism. Building upon the methodological contributions of scholars such as Harald Motzki, Gregor Schoeler, and Andreas Görke, he argues that the earliest Islamic traditions should neither be accepted uncritically nor dismissed wholesale. Instead, they must be examined alongside non-Muslim, epigraphic, documentary, and archaeological evidence in order to reconstruct the historical context of Muḥammad’s career.

His most important contribution to sīrah studies is the landmark work Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam (2020). In this book, Anthony combines Muslim and non-Muslim sources to reassess the earliest evidence for the Prophet’s life and the development of the sīrah-maghāzī tradition. He examines early testimonies concerning Muḥammad, the traditions preserved by Ibn Isḥāq and later historians, and the role of Late Antique religious culture in shaping narratives about the Prophet. The work has been widely praised for providing a balanced and methodologically sophisticated approach to the historical Muḥammad and for advancing the study of the origins of sīrah literature.

Anthony has also made important contributions through his studies of early biographies, non-Muslim testimonies about Muḥammad, and the transmission of historical traditions. His edition and translation of Maʿmar ibn Rāshid’s Kitāb al-Maghāzī (The Expeditions) made one of the earliest extant biographies of the Prophet accessible to modern scholars, while his numerous articles have explored subjects such as Ibn Isḥāq, al-Zuhrī, Christian-Muslim encounters, and the historical development of prophetic narratives. Through these works, Anthony has established himself as one of the foremost contemporary scholars of sīrah and early Islamic historiography.