| Moreover, many of them provide evidence of embellishment and invention that were introduced to serve the purposes of political or religious apologetic | |
|---|---|
| Hitti, History of the Arabs, 10th edition 1970 , p |
Peter Teed 1992 , p.
| however, there is no relevant archaeological, epigraphic, or numismatic evidence dating from the time of Muhammad, nor are there any references to him in non-Muslim sources dating from the period before 632 | |
|---|---|
| Ideally, one would like to be able to check such accounts against contemporary evidence |
sources are not contemporaneous with the events they purport to relate and sometimes were written many centuries later.
| See, for example, Bowersock, Glen Warren, Peter Robert Lamont Brown and Oleg Grabar Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World 1999, Harvard University Press p | 597, which notes that many of the details surrounding Muhammad's life as given in the biographies, are "problematic in certain respects, the most important of which is that they represent a tradition of living narrative that is likely to have developed orally for a considerable period before it was given even a relatively fixed written form |
|---|---|
| "Muhmmad," Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim world• | Seeing Islam as others saw it: a survey and evaluation of Christian, Jewish, Robert G |
5, "One major challenge to examining initial contacts between Byzantium and the early Muslim umma arises from the controversy surrounding the traditional Islamic account.
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