As Muslims know that it was a long time after Muhammad died before anything substantial was written about his life, but people did not cease talking about him.

For over two hundred years, stories about the Islamic 'prophet' were passed orally from person to person, and among the true accounts proliferated many fabrications. By the time a systematic effort was made to sort through them, over five hundred thousand (500,000) accounts of Muhammad’s life were in popular circulation, and it is commonly estimated that the vast majority of them were false.

HOW CAN WE KNOW WHICH ACCOUNTS OF MUHAMMAD’S LIFE ARE TRUSTWORTHY?

Let's assume the classical Islamic method for assessing the authenticity of hadith. In the field of uloom al-hadith, translated “the science of Muhammad’s sayings,” Muslim scholars grade individual accounts of Muhammad’s life based on criteria such as how well-known an account was and who the people relaying it were. The most trustworthy hadith are ultimately graded sahih, which means “true” or “authentic,” whereas the weakest hadith are labelled daeef (“weak”) or even maudu (“fabricated”).

Imam Bukhari and his student Imam Muslim were two highly respected scholars in the third century after Muhammad, and they collected only those hadith which they considered sahih and beyond dispute. Most Muslims consider their collections above reproach. In using only the hadith that they approved, Muslims were deluded to see Muhammad was the noble and peaceful man that they've always been taught, and that there were no problematic accounts in his life.
But this isn't the case. Problematic accounts existed even amid the sahih collections.

If you ask imams to resolve these problematic accounts found in the sahih, and also search online, you'll see how other Muslims responded to the criticisms. What I learned was that many were willing to accuse even the sahih collections of containing fabricated accounts, finding ways to dismiss those accounts that were considered authentic by the great Muslim scholars of old.

It was then I realized they were essentially finding ways to pick and choose from the ancient records which accounts were reliable and which were not, creating a Muhammad that they felt comfortable with.

If you want to know who Muhammad really was and whether you should follow him as your prophet, not to create a Muhammad in your mind that was worth following. I suggest you reconsider your approach and study Muhammad using the historical method instead of uloom al-hadith.

THE HISTORICAL METHOD

What were the earliest accounts written about Muhammad, and how soon were they written?

Here, you'll discover some shocking facts about early Islam. First, people were not writing books in Arabic during Muhammad’s time. The first Arabic book to have been written was the Quran, and even that was turned into a written book only after Muhammad died. There was no such thing as written Arabic literature, only oral. This is because, second, people were still figuring out how to write Arabic. Arabic script was far from standardized, having been invented only a century or two before Muhammad’s time. For these reasons and others, third, no one wrote a biography of Muhammad’s life until about 140 years after Muhammad died. By that time, there were certainly no eyewitnesses of Muhammad’s life, and people were generations removed from the events they discussed. Could we trust such an account to be an unfiltered and accurate depiction of Muhammad?

The first biography, Sirat Rasul Allah, was written by a man named Ibn Ishaq, but the book itself has actually been lost. Ibn Ishaq taught a man named al-Bakkai, who made his own edition of Ibn Ishaq’s book, and al-Bakkai taught a man named Ibn Hisham, who edited al-Bakkai’s edition, and it is this edition that we have today. Why did these men each make their own editions? Ibn Hisham tells us in his introductory remarks: “Things which it is disgraceful to discuss, matters which would distress certain people, and such reports as al-Bakkai told me he could not accept as trustworthy—all these things I have omitted.”¹ In other words, the earliest biography of Muhammad’s life was reputed to contain fabrications, disgraceful material, and distressing facts.² What we have today has been filtered many times, both for fabrications and for difficult truths.

It is because of such intentional editing that historians do not consider late accounts as trustworthy as early accounts, all else being equal. The earlier accounts have not been as filtered, and therefore are more likely to be true. Also, people are more prone to forget information over time, especially information that does not fit with the narrative at large. When it comes to the records of Muhammad’s life, we simply do not have such early or unfiltered data. Everything has been filtered through multiple generations.

Even though the earliest biography went through layers of filtering, it still contains shocking material. Some of them are listed here:

Muhammad personally oversaw the beheadings of up to nine hundred men on a single day, digging trenches in the marketplaces so that their corpses could fall into mass graves upon being decapitated.³

He ordered the assassination of an old man who had composed poetry complaining about Muhammad.⁴

A woman lamented the old man’s death in poetry, so Muhammad ordered her assassination, and her blood splattered on her children as she breastfed.⁵

Muhammad ordered the torture of a city treasurer to extract the location of the money, so his men kindled a fire with flint and steel on the treasurer’s chest until he was nearly dead, ultimately beheading him;⁶

When Muhammad was about to execute a man, the man pleaded, “Who will look after my children?” to which Muhammad responded, “Hell!”⁷

Just by scratching the surface of the earliest biography we find many troubling accounts of Muhammad. By the time hadith were written under men like Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim, many of these accounts were filtered out of Muhammad’s biography, just as Ibn Hisham and al-Bakkai had filtered the accounts that they received.

For this reason, selective filtration, the whole body of hadith is inherently flawed: They contain only those accounts that multiple generations of early Muslims each chose to save. As we have seen, even those that were kept are often considered flawed and fabricated.

WHAT CAN WE REALLY KNOW ABOUT MUHAMMAD?
For this reason, non-Muslim scholars of early Islam are very hesitant to trust the information about the life of Muhammad. Almost none accept the science of hadith criticism as it stands, most just hoping to extract historical kernels of truth from the hadith. Some scholars have even abandoned hope of that much success, saying virtually nothing can be known about Muhammad.
These scholars are from a variety of religious and nonreligious backgrounds. One Muslim scholar concluded that, given the nature of the evidence, Muhammad may not have even existed.

Muhammad Sven Kalisch completed his PhD in Islamic jurisprudence in 1997 and became Germany’s first professor to hold a chair in Islamic theology. When he arrived at Münster University in 2004, he struck some as too conservative on account of his zeal for sharia. But then, according to the Wall Street Journal, Kalisch “wanted to subject Islam to the same scrutiny as Christianity and Judaism.”⁸ At first he defended the historicity of Muhammad in print, but the more he studied, the more he realized there were significant problems with the record. The word Muhammad appears only four times in the Quran, and it is unclear whether it is a name or a title. Quran 61.6 appears to say that the Prophet’s name was Ahmad, not Muhammad.⁹ There is no other evidence of Muhammad’s existence until the turn of the eighth century, when coins bearing his name were produced. “The more I read, the historical person at the root of the whole thing became more and more improbable,” says Muhammad Kalisch.

Other scholars are coming to similar conclusions on account of the holes in the historical records. Their concerns are more than an argument from silence; if the traditional understanding of Islam is true, it is indeed very problematic that we do not find more about Muhammad in the earliest historical records. If Muhammad was the prophet of the Arabs, and if they were energized and motivated by his teachings, why is it that the Arab conquests of the Middle East, North Africa, and Persia never mention his name? These conquests occurred in the middle of the seventh century, immediately after Muhammad’s death, yet none of the contemporary records mention Muhammad. In fact, none mention a holy book or even the word Muslim. It is not that there are no records; considering the communications of the conquerors and the writings of the conquered, there are abundant records, yet Muhammad is never named, a holy book is never discussed, and the conquerors are never called Muslims.

Other evidence also has historians scratching their heads: Although Mecca is reputed to be a trade center, it never appears in any trade routes until the turn of the eighth century; none of the earliest mosques faced toward Mecca (all faced toward either Jerusalem or Petra until about the turn of the eighth century); Mecca is mentioned only once in the Quran; the descriptions of the land in the Quran sound very little like Mecca, much more like northern Arabia; and the list goes on.

For these reasons, not just one Muslim scholar but many scholars doubt the traditional origins of Islam and even the existence of Muhammad, at least as the early Islamic records describe him. According to them, the truth about the origins of Islam is unfortunately veiled. There is almost nothing we can know with certainty about the historical Muhammad.¹⁰

REFERENCES

1. Found in Ibn Hisham’s notes. The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, trans. Alfred Guillaume (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 691.

2. We can be sure the disgraceful material and distressing facts are related to Muhammad, since Ibn Hisham had already discussed excising material that was not related to Muhammad earlier in his list of omissions.

3. The Life of Muhammad, 494.

4. Ibid., 675.

5. Ibid., 675–76, with supplemental details from Ibn Sa’d: “Umayr Ibn Adi came to her in the night and entered her house. Her children were sleeping around her. There was one whom she was suckling. He searched her with his hand because he was blind, and separated the child from her.
He thrust his sword in her chest till it pierced up to her back. Then he offered the morning prayers with the prophet.” Muhammad Ibn Sa’d, Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir, trans. S. Moinul Haq, vol. 2 (Karachi:
Pakistan Historical Society, 1972), 30–31.

6. The Life of Muhammad, 515.

7. Ibid., 308.

8. Andrew Higgins, “Professor Hired for Outreach to Muslims Delivers a Jolt,” Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2008, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122669909279629451.

9. Some may respond by objecting that Ahmad is a title for Muhammad, but that is begging the question.

10. For more on Western scholastic approaches to studying early Islam, read F. M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1998). For a more popular-level, engaging read, consider Tom Holland’s In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire (New York: Random House, 2012).

Na wetin you say make i come read be this?


The life story of Muhammad is clear to us and the fabrications are also clear!
No be Christians and orientalists go come dey tell us what we know!

How come Saudi Arabia still retain at least a little of the legacy of Islam from Muhammad as we read from the same texts you criticize but none of Jesus's so-called Christian legacies exists in Israel?

Abeg!

AbuTwins:


Na wetin you say make i come read be this?


The life story of Muhammad is clear to us and the fabrications are also clear!
No be Christians and orientalists go come dey tell us what we know!

How come Saudi Arabia still retain at least a little of the legacy of Islam from Muhammad as we read from the same texts you criticize but none of Jesus's so-called Christian legacies exists in Israel?

Abeg!

Name those legacies for me, then we can start from there. As you can see from my post, I have conversed with Muslim scholars from different countries and read widely on both sides of the divide. It's so pitiful that you could not even respond to footnotes 3-10. How could someone who claimed to be inspired of God order people to be assassinatiom, enslaved, raped, etc.? Is that who Allah is? The name 'Mohammed' was not even mentioned in the Quran you're holding. SMH

Akell:


Name those legacies for me, then we can start from there. As you can see from my post, I have conversed with Muslim scholars from different countries and read widely on both sides of the divide. It's so pitiful that you could not even respond to footnotes 3-10.

At least Saudi Arabia is still an Islamic country! Close to 96% are Muslims. That's a legacy!
They don't require any response!
What you copied and pasted looks like a journal so the response to it should also be academic as well.

And i don't have such time!

How could someone who claimed to be inspired of God order people to be assassinatiom, enslaved, raped, etc.? Is that who Allah is? The name 'Mohammed' was not even mentioned in the Quran you're holding. SMH

Are we talking about the historicity or there's a diversion to another topic?

I can also divert to the assassinations, enslavements, rape, etc in the Bible.
I have the records plenty!
And mind you no one should mention context here!

AbuTwins:


At least Saudi Arabia is still an Islamic country! Close to 96% are Muslims. That's a legacy!
They don't require any response!
What you copied and pasted looks like a journal so the response to it should also be academic as well.

And i don't have such time!


Are we talking about the historicity or there's a diversion to another topic?

I can also divert to the assassinations, enslavements, rape, etc in the Bible.
I have the records plenty!
And mind you no one should mention context here!

Well, I'm an academician so I write like one.
Why are you scared of context? You can't just read a verse and understand it's meaning, read a chapter before and a chapter after to understand what's being said.

So, bring it on. I mean, where Jesus commanded all of these things? I dey with you.
However, respond to the footnotes fess

Akell:


Well, I'm an academician so I write like one.

Na you write am?

Why are you scared of context? You can't just read a verse and understand it's meaning, read a chapter before and a chapter after to understand what's being said.

When Christians copy works of orientalists and other bigots there's no need wasting too much time on them.

So, bring it on. I mean, where Jesus commanded all of these things? I dey with you.
However, respond to the footnotes fess

Jesus didn't have time! Na just three years he used and he wasn't militarized like the Biblical Moses, Joshua, Saul, Samson, etc!

However, he still proposed war and death to his enemies!
And these enemies of mine who were unwilling for me to rule over them, bring them here and slay them in front of me.’” Luke 19:27

AbuTwins:
Na you write am?

When Christians copy works of orientalists and other bigots there's no need wasting too much time on them.



Jesus didn't have time! Na just three years he used and he wasn't militarized like the Biblical Moses, Joshua, Saul, Samson, etc!

However, he still proposed war and death to his enemies!
And these enemies of mine who were unwilling for me to rule over them, bring them here and slay them in front of me.’” Luke 19:27

😂
You know what? Almost every Muslim has a Bible. Why? With the sole aim of critiquing it. All your Imams have this Holy Book.

Back to the discussion. Read the passage you quoted from verse 12. Jesus was telling a parable. So, he wasn't the one sanctioning that.

Note that he's not a violent man. He's a not a rapist, he does not keep women for sex, he nebyer killed. Even if he had lived a 100 years, he could never have done any of the abominable things your prophet did.

Akell:


😂
You know what? Almost every Muslim has a Bible. Why? With the sole aim of critiquing it. All your Imams have this Holy Book.

This is a lie!

Not all of us have it.[/quote]

Back to the discussion. Read the passage you quoted from verse 12. Jesus was telling a parable. So, he wasn't the one sanctioning that.

Note that he's not a violent man. He's a not a rapist, he does not keep women for sex, he nebyer killed. Even if he had lived a 100 years, he could never have done any of the abominable things your prophet did.

So explain the parable. I have read the exegesis already it is war!
Even if Jesus didn't kill.
His father did!
Shebi they are one and together in Trinity?

AbuTwins:
This is a lie!

Not all of us have it.


Back to the discussion. Read the passage you quoted from verse 12. Jesus was telling a parable. So, he wasn't the one sanctioning that.

Note that he's not a violent man. He's a not a rapist, he does not keep women for sex, he nebyer killed. Even if he had lived a 100 years, he could never have done any of the abominable things your prophet did.

So explain the parable. I have read the exegesis already it is war!
Even if Jesus didn't kill.
His father did!
Shebi they are one and together in Trinity?

You just said you have read the exegesis. Hat else do you want me to explain to you?

Akell:


You just said you have read the exegesis. Hat else do you want me to explain to you?

Nothing of course!

Jesus will fight when he gets the opportunity and his military!

Akell:
As Muslims know that it was a long time after Muhammad died before anything substantial was written about his life, but people did not cease talking about him.

For over two hundred years, stories about the Islamic 'prophet' were passed orally from person to person, and among the true accounts proliferated many fabrications. By the time a systematic effort was made to sort through them, over five hundred thousand (500,000) accounts of Muhammad’s life were in popular circulation, and it is commonly estimated that the vast majority of them were false.

HOW CAN WE KNOW WHICH ACCOUNTS OF MUHAMMAD’S LIFE ARE TRUSTWORTHY?

Let's assume the classical Islamic method for assessing the authenticity of hadith. In the field of uloom al-hadith, translated “the science of Muhammad’s sayings,” Muslim scholars grade individual accounts of Muhammad’s life based on criteria such as how well-known an account was and who the people relaying it were. The most trustworthy hadith are ultimately graded sahih, which means “true” or “authentic,” whereas the weakest hadith are labelled daeef (“weak”) or even maudu (“fabricated”).

Imam Bukhari and his student Imam Muslim were two highly respected scholars in the third century after Muhammad, and they collected only those hadith which they considered sahih and beyond dispute. Most Muslims consider their collections above reproach. In using only the hadith that they approved, Muslims were deluded to see Muhammad was the noble and peaceful man that they've always been taught, and that there were no problematic accounts in his life.
But this isn't the case. Problematic accounts existed even amid the sahih collections.

If you ask imams to resolve these problematic accounts found in the sahih, and also search online, you'll see how other Muslims responded to the criticisms. What I learned was that many were willing to accuse even the sahih collections of containing fabricated accounts, finding ways to dismiss those accounts that were considered authentic by the great Muslim scholars of old.

It was then I realized they were essentially finding ways to pick and choose from the ancient records which accounts were reliable and which were not, creating a Muhammad that they felt comfortable with.

If you want to know who Muhammad really was and whether you should follow him as your prophet, not to create a Muhammad in your mind that was worth following. I suggest you reconsider your approach and study Muhammad using the historical method instead of uloom al-hadith.

THE HISTORICAL METHOD

What were the earliest accounts written about Muhammad, and how soon were they written?

Here, you'll discover some shocking facts about early Islam. First, people were not writing books in Arabic during Muhammad’s time. The first Arabic book to have been written was the Quran, and even that was turned into a written book only after Muhammad died. There was no such thing as written Arabic literature, only oral. This is because, second, people were still figuring out how to write Arabic. Arabic script was far from standardized, having been invented only a century or two before Muhammad’s time. For these reasons and others, third, no one wrote a biography of Muhammad’s life until about 140 years after Muhammad died. By that time, there were certainly no eyewitnesses of Muhammad’s life, and people were generations removed from the events they discussed. Could we trust such an account to be an unfiltered and accurate depiction of Muhammad?

The first biography, Sirat Rasul Allah, was written by a man named Ibn Ishaq, but the book itself has actually been lost. Ibn Ishaq taught a man named al-Bakkai, who made his own edition of Ibn Ishaq’s book, and al-Bakkai taught a man named Ibn Hisham, who edited al-Bakkai’s edition, and it is this edition that we have today. Why did these men each make their own editions? Ibn Hisham tells us in his introductory remarks: “Things which it is disgraceful to discuss, matters which would distress certain people, and such reports as al-Bakkai told me he could not accept as trustworthy—all these things I have omitted.”¹ In other words, the earliest biography of Muhammad’s life was reputed to contain fabrications, disgraceful material, and distressing facts.² What we have today has been filtered many times, both for fabrications and for difficult truths.

It is because of such intentional editing that historians do not consider late accounts as trustworthy as early accounts, all else being equal. The earlier accounts have not been as filtered, and therefore are more likely to be true. Also, people are more prone to forget information over time, especially information that does not fit with the narrative at large. When it comes to the records of Muhammad’s life, we simply do not have such early or unfiltered data. Everything has been filtered through multiple generations.

Even though the earliest biography went through layers of filtering, it still contains shocking material. Some of them are listed here:

Muhammad personally oversaw the beheadings of up to nine hundred men on a single day, digging trenches in the marketplaces so that their corpses could fall into mass graves upon being decapitated.³

He ordered the assassination of an old man who had composed poetry complaining about Muhammad.⁴

A woman lamented the old man’s death in poetry, so Muhammad ordered her assassination, and her blood splattered on her children as she breastfed.⁵

Muhammad ordered the torture of a city treasurer to extract the location of the money, so his men kindled a fire with flint and steel on the treasurer’s chest until he was nearly dead, ultimately beheading him;⁶

When Muhammad was about to execute a man, the man pleaded, “Who will look after my children?” to which Muhammad responded, “Hell!”⁷

Just by scratching the surface of the earliest biography we find many troubling accounts of Muhammad. By the time hadith were written under men like Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim, many of these accounts were filtered out of Muhammad’s biography, just as Ibn Hisham and al-Bakkai had filtered the accounts that they received.

For this reason, selective filtration, the whole body of hadith is inherently flawed: They contain only those accounts that multiple generations of early Muslims each chose to save. As we have seen, even those that were kept are often considered flawed and fabricated.

WHAT CAN WE REALLY KNOW ABOUT MUHAMMAD?
For this reason, non-Muslim scholars of early Islam are very hesitant to trust the information about the life of Muhammad. Almost none accept the science of hadith criticism as it stands, most just hoping to extract historical kernels of truth from the hadith. Some scholars have even abandoned hope of that much success, saying virtually nothing can be known about Muhammad.
These scholars are from a variety of religious and nonreligious backgrounds. One Muslim scholar concluded that, given the nature of the evidence, Muhammad may not have even existed.

Muhammad Sven Kalisch completed his PhD in Islamic jurisprudence in 1997 and became Germany’s first professor to hold a chair in Islamic theology. When he arrived at Münster University in 2004, he struck some as too conservative on account of his zeal for sharia. But then, according to the Wall Street Journal, Kalisch “wanted to subject Islam to the same scrutiny as Christianity and Judaism.”⁸ At first he defended the historicity of Muhammad in print, but the more he studied, the more he realized there were significant problems with the record. The word Muhammad appears only four times in the Quran, and it is unclear whether it is a name or a title. Quran 61.6 appears to say that the Prophet’s name was Ahmad, not Muhammad.⁹ There is no other evidence of Muhammad’s existence until the turn of the eighth century, when coins bearing his name were produced. “The more I read, the historical person at the root of the whole thing became more and more improbable,” says Muhammad Kalisch.

Other scholars are coming to similar conclusions on account of the holes in the historical records. Their concerns are more than an argument from silence; if the traditional understanding of Islam is true, it is indeed very problematic that we do not find more about Muhammad in the earliest historical records. If Muhammad was the prophet of the Arabs, and if they were energized and motivated by his teachings, why is it that the Arab conquests of the Middle East, North Africa, and Persia never mention his name? These conquests occurred in the middle of the seventh century, immediately after Muhammad’s death, yet none of the contemporary records mention Muhammad. In fact, none mention a holy book or even the word Muslim. It is not that there are no records; considering the communications of the conquerors and the writings of the conquered, there are abundant records, yet Muhammad is never named, a holy book is never discussed, and the conquerors are never called Muslims.

Other evidence also has historians scratching their heads: Although Mecca is reputed to be a trade center, it never appears in any trade routes until the turn of the eighth century; none of the earliest mosques faced toward Mecca (all faced toward either Jerusalem or Petra until about the turn of the eighth century); Mecca is mentioned only once in the Quran; the descriptions of the land in the Quran sound very little like Mecca, much more like northern Arabia; and the list goes on.

For these reasons, not just one Muslim scholar but many scholars doubt the traditional origins of Islam and even the existence of Muhammad, at least as the early Islamic records describe him. According to them, the truth about the origins of Islam is unfortunately veiled. There is almost nothing we can know with certainty about the historical Muhammad.¹⁰

Why will you make blatantly false claims?

In the year 661, Sahl ibn Abī Ḥathma, Abdullah ibn Abbas, and Saʿīd ibn Saʿd ibn ʿUbāda al-Khazrajī wrote about Muhammad in various historical texts. These three writers were contemporaries of the Prophet Muhammad and played significant roles in documenting his life and teachings.

Does 661-632 =140 years? Please what form of maths is this?

Ok! Let me school you a bit. Arabic writing was far from perfected during the time of Muhammad, which is why there was no such thing as a written Arabic book (Any reference to an Arabic kitab, the word for “book,” was actually an oral text that was handed down through poets and reciters. It was not a written book). When initially writing the text of the Quran, letters and vowel markings were still being standardized, which led to confusion. For these reasons, what the scribes wrote were memory aids for the oral text. This is actually a fairly uncontroversial fact even among Muslim Quran scholars.

The text of the Quran was fluid during the time of Muhammad. He would recite the same verse multiple ways, saying he could do so up to seven ways. If at any point a text needed to be canceled, it could simply be abrogated and replaced with another text.

Since the text of the Quran was not seen as a written text, this caused little problem: All that was required was to stop reciting certain verses and to “forget” what had been revealed.

Explore2xmore:



Why will you make blatantly false claims?

In the year 661, Sahl ibn Abī Ḥathma, Abdullah ibn Abbas, and Saʿīd ibn Saʿd ibn ʿUbāda al-Khazrajī wrote about Muhammad in various historical texts. These three writers were contemporaries of the Prophet Muhammad and played significant roles in documenting his life and teachings.

Does 661-632 =140 years? Please what form of maths is this?

AbuTwins:


Nothing of course!

Jesus will fight when he gets the opportunity and his military!

He had a lot of opportunities. But you know what? He's not like the other guy who slaughters people like chicken. Read Luke 22:50-51

Akell:


He had a lot of opportunities. But you know what? He's not like the other guy who slaughters people like chicken. Read Luke 22:50-51

He is.

Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever!

He was the one killing everywhere in the old testament!

Akell:
Ok! Let me school you a bit. Arabic writing was far from perfected during the time of Muhammad, which is why there was no such thing as a written Arabic book (Any reference to an Arabic kitab, the word for “book,” was actually an oral text that was handed down through poets and reciters. It was not a written book). When initially writing the text of the Quran, letters and vowel markings were still being standardized, which led to confusion. For these reasons, what the scribes wrote were memory aids for the oral text. This is actually a fairly uncontroversial fact even among Muslim Quran scholars.

The text of the Quran was fluid during the time of Muhammad. He would recite the same verse multiple ways, saying he could do so up to seven ways. If at any point a text needed to be canceled, it could simply be abrogated and replaced with another text.

Since the text of the Quran was not seen as a written text, this caused little problem: All that was required was to stop reciting certain verses and to “forget” what had been revealed.

Desperately trying to force down your lie?


Die ältesten Berichte über das Leben Muhammads: Das Korpus 'Urwa ibn az-Zubair
Translated title of the contribution: The Earliest Reports About the Life of Muhammad: The Corpus of 'Urwa ibn al-Zubayr


These accounts were collected and spread in the last third of the 1st/7th century by Urwa ibn al-Zubayr.

In what Century did Prophet Mohammed pbuh die?

In other words, the earliest biography of Muhammad’s life was reputed to contain fabrications, disgraceful material, and distressing facts.2 What we have today has been filtered many times, both for fabrications and for difficult truths.