Research needed to understand the sources: I have enough background in early Islamic history to have understood the first source, about the birth and infancy of Muhammad without trouble; I did need to refresh my memory of the Battle of Yarmuk and consult maps to make sense of the second source. If I were teaching the sources, I would of course need to solidify my understanding of the creation of the sources themselves, as well as of their readership, circulation, and so on.

Relevance to my classroom: The first source, the biography of Muhammad, would work nicely in a comparative context, serving as a counterpoint to sources from the Hebrew Bible and Christian Gospels. If I were teaching the rise of Islam in a comparative context, I would provide my students with background about the period, but the Sira lends itself well to an investigation of the lives of holy people, prophets, and so on, especially in a Christian and Muslim context. I would be more selective in my use of the second source, probably omitting most of it (I'm not a particular aficionado of battle accounts), but the late section about Christians and Jews who preferred Muslim rule to Byzantine raises all sorts of interesting questions about the relationships between different empires and religions in this region shortly after the emergence of Islam. 

Information to share with my students: Assuming that I were teaching the sources, I would want to begin by cleaning up the text of the Yarmuk source--OCR translation created a number of typographical errors that students would find distracting. I would of course use maps, time lines, and other materials to situate the sources.

Contextualizing the sources: This process would depend on the larger context within which I was teaching the sources. Since I do not teach Late Antiquity, the rise of Islam, or comparative religions, this question is hypothetical for me. However, if I were teaching a course on eastern Mediterranean and Southwest Asia, I would certainly consider incorporating the Sira of Ibn Ishak and sections of the Yarmuk account into a unit on the interactions between Islam and neighboring regions. If I were considering Christian and Ottoman relations in the early modern period, or even early twentieth-century Arab nationalism, I might use these sources to highlight relationships in the foundational years of Islam. More thematically, I could envision using the two sources to investigate the rapid spread of Islam and the confrontation and transformation of empires.