Following the generous invitation of the Qatar Foundation (Doha), His Excellency participated in the first meeting of the Advisory Committee for the Prophet’s Digital Biography Project (PBUH), also known as the Digital Sira Initiative.

His Excellency opened his speech by expressing his thanks to the Qatar Foundation and Hamad Bin Khalifa University for choosing him as a member of the Advisory Committee for this great and ambitious contemporary scientific project, which is the digitization of the biography of the Prophet (PBUH), and praised the scientific importance and intellectual necessity of such a project in the current era where digitization has become an essential and indispensable means to bring the youth closer to the Islamic heritage and encourage them to adopt and study it in an interesting and enjoyable method in line with intellectual and cultural realities. His Excellency also stressed the importance of digitizing the biography of the Prophet (PBUH) in the current era in order to facilitate for scholars to refer to its subjects and contents in an accessible manner in the hope of encouraging the youth to discover the biography of the Noble Prophet (PBUH), as well as to enable scholars and researchers to highlight the different aspects of his biography and its multiple dimensions through new technologies.

Furthermore, His Excellency mentioned the importance of using other social media, digital communication, as well as modern information technologies and exploiting them to present the Prophet’s biography in a beautiful, modern and interesting language that makes the rising generation of young people eager to multiply and benefit from the gems of the Prophet’s biography in all areas of their contemporary lives, noting in this regard the importance of revealing and presenting different aspects of his life, including emotional, social, cultural, human aspects, etc., as it is an urgent need to pay attention to these aspects of the biography, and to emphasize their impact on his message.

His Excellency pointed out that the digitization of the Prophet’s biography is of great scientific importance, considering that digitization can be used to achieve effective results at four levels, namely: The level of correcting misconceptions about his beautiful biography, where accusations and lies can simply be refuted by presenting facts, accurate information, and the second level is to bring more light and details about the aspects of his biography that have been dealt with in the books of the Seerah (biography of the Prophet) in a brief manner, despite the urgent need for research, and analysis, from various social and human dimensions that the Seerah books have exposed in a brief and concise manner. The third level is to highlight important aspects that other biographies have rarely elucidated, or to which modern studies have paid little intention, despite its primacy in educational, cultural, humanistic, and psychological aspects, such as his life as a husband, parent, father-in-law and other roles are often neither presented nor mentioned, so they deserve to be analyzed and enlightened. The fourth level is about reformulating the events of the biography in its different dimensions in a modern, enjoyable, easy-to-read language in accordance with the different intellectual levels of today’s youth.

His Excellency concluded his speech by calling on those responsible for this project to take advantage of many serious contemporary attempts to serve the biography of the Prophet (PBUH), to bring it closer and enable researchers to easily achieve their goals, stressing the need to include additional information on the most important sources and references of the Prophet’s biography, ancient and modern, in different languages to facilitate this for researchers wishing to know more about these sources and references.

His Excellency also noted the importance of seeking assistance from scholars who can differentiate in terms of legal provisions the different aspects of his life when seeking to follow him in some of his actions regarding the cultural, environmental, and social aspect, some of which should not be considered as absolute Shariah rulings for every time and place, but rather as a reflection and contemplation of his reality.

The digital biography of the Prophet, for which His Excellency was selected as a member of the advisory committee overseeing the project, is an ambitious project that the Qatar Foundation, in cooperation with Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, seeks to achieve in the coming years to address the Prophet’s Biography for the current times.