Many are those who wrote about the life of the Messenger of God and analyzed it.  They presented it as an exemplar of human greatness, insisting on giving people to understand that his conquests were nothing more than a revolution of the economic Left against an extremist Right and deluding them into believing that the ulterior motive which led the Messenger of God to do what he did was his desire to transfer
sovereignty from the hands of non-Arabs to those of the Arabs.

The weaving of fabricated conceptions, however, proved to be incapable of turning truth into falsehood. Hence, the clouds blown in by such writings have dissipated and the bright truth has broken through once again.  People in general and intellectuals in particular have remained certain that the greatness of the Messenger of God was a fruit of his prophethood and that the conquests and sovereignty he realized were the execution of a divine command rather than a quest of wealth or dominion.

From Introduction to the second Edition

For this reason, the most important aim I have hoped to achieve through this book is to do away with whatever still remains of the aforementioned school of thought.  No Muslim should attempt for a single moment to understand the life of the Apostle of God (pbuh) as that of a great genius, a dignified leader, or a worldly wise 'fox”.  Such an attempt is nothing but wilfulness or a tampering with the major events with which the life of Muhammad (pbuh) was filled, and which demonstrated that he (pbuh) possessed all the qualities of nobility and of moral, mental, and psychological completeness.  However, all of this arose from a single, dominant reality in his life, namely, that he was a prophet sent by Almighty God.  It is a futile enterprise to place the branches where the root once was, then ignore the fact that the root even exists!  In any case, the only appropriate response to such an attempt is to draw people’s attention back to the root, and to the root alone.
So long as we acknowledge that the Prophet (pbuh) has a biography on the basis of which we can seek to understand his life, then no Muslim must imagine that his only miracle was the Qur’an. If, on the other hand, we deny that the Prophet (pbuh) even has such a biography, then we must also deny the miracle of the Qur’an, since the various miracles associated with the Apostle of God (pbuh) have reached us through the same sources from which we learn of the miracle of the Qur’an itself. A researcher who sets out to interpret some things metaphorically and to interpret others literally based on his personal desires or aims only debases himself in an attempt to concoct his own brand of inquiry and understanding; no one with any respect for his own intellect would engage in such a practice.

The satisfaction and enthusiasm with which readers have received this work of mine is the greatest proof of the fact that all the time and effort spent and all the exhaustive, successive writings that have been circulated by ill-willed individuals and the professional agents of the intellectual invasion being.

This Book is the subject of a course by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani which states the following on the  http://sunnipath.com/courses/productinfo.aspx?productid=HST101

This course will mainly use Shaykh Muhammad Sa`id Ramadan al-Buti’s, Jurisprudence of the Prophetic Biography (whose title should have ideally been rendered into English as Lessons from the Life of the Prophet) to look into the Prophet’s life in detail. Shaykh Buti’s text is widely regarded as one of the best Prophetic biographies written in the 20^th century and one of the most beneficial ever. Shaykh Buti goes beyond mere narration of the events of the Prophet’s life to look at the lessons and ‘religious understanding’ that can be gleamed from it.

This is an Ideal Book to Learn about

• the nature, need, and purpose of revelation and prophethood
• Arabia and the world before the birth of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him
• the life of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, up to the beginning of revelation
• the beginning of Revelation and the quiet calling
• the open calling up to migration
• migration and settling in Medina
• establishing Medinan society
• the Prophetic wars
• the opening of Mecca and the final years
• the Prophetic example
• key lessons from the Prophet’s life

About By Dr M Sa'id Ramadan al Buti