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Virtually nothing is written about Muhammad in the seventh century, when he is supposed to have flourished. A great deal is written about him in the eighth century, although most of it is lost. Then, in the ninth century, there is a veritable explosion of written material about Muhammad. While there are numerous contradictions in this material, the broad outlines of the story are generally stable.

This does not, however, necessarily mean that the broad outline of the story is historically accurate; in the absence of any attestation of Muhammad’s existence dating from the time he is supposed to have lived, the overarching unity in the traditions on the general outline of his life could indicate only that the core elements of the legend were agreed upon before most of it was committed to writing.

The ninth-century traditions are too far removed from what they describe, and there is far too much opportunity for additions, deletions, and other alterations for them to be taken at face value. This fact is becoming widely known, as is indicated in Islamic scholar Eric Ormsby’s review of the contemporary Islamic apologist Lesley Hazleton’s hagiographical biography of Muhammad, The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad. Ormsby observes that Hazleton “accepts the traditional Muslim account of Muhammad’s life and mission pretty much as it stands in the sources.” Ormsby adds that “it seems improbable that either of these narratives could be considered factually accurate in all or even most of their details.” Indeed.

In fact, the glimmer of hope that the material Islamic sources record about Muhammad contains some kernels of historically accurate information, although these are virtually impossible to distinguish from the rest of the material, becomes even dimmer in light of the fact that the ninth-century literature as we have it today does not date from the ninth century. It only comes to us from later manuscripts, allowing even more possibility for alteration.

The first biography of Muhammad that survives was written by Ibn Ishaq around the middle of the eighth century. Yet what Ibn Ishaq actually wrote has not come down to us. Parts of his work were preserved by the ninth-century history Ibn Hisham, and parts by the tenth-century historian and theologian al-Tabari.

Further complicating the situation is that Ibn Ishaq had two prominent students: Ziyad ibn Abdallah al-Bakkai and Yunus ibn Bukayr. According to the twenty-first-century Russian Islamic scholar Alexander Kudelin, al-Bakkai “considerably abridged the work of Ibn Ishaq. Ibn Bukayr “assured his listeners that he communicated Ibn Ishaq’s work ‘word for word,’” but actually, “the medieval biographical literature tells us that ‘he took the work of Ibn Ishaq, and then combined it with other ahadith.’”

This represents just a small part of a much larger problem: Kudelin adds that “the work of Ibn Ishaq exists in more than 15 various editions.” The renowned contemporary ex-Muslim Islamic scholar Ibn Warraq concurs, noting: “The lost original of Ibn Ishaq’s work has to be restored or recovered from at least fifteen different versions, excluding that of Ibn Hisham.” Kudelin points out that the Iraqi researcher S. M. al-Samuk has identified fifty different “transmitters” of Ibn Ishaq’s sira, with “considerable differences between the texts.”

Kudelin also notes that “the first publication of this monument,”Ibn Ishaq’s biography of Muhammad, was “wonderfully prepared by F. Wüstenfeld.” Ferdinand Wüstenfeld (1808–1899) was a German scholar who published an edition of Ibn Ishaq’s work in the 1860s. Wüstenfeld compiled his edition from Arabic manuscripts of varying reliability.

It was Wüstenfeld’s work that sparked interest in the early accounts of Muhammad’s life even among Muslims. “After Wüstenfeld’s edition of the Arabic text,” states the contemporary scholar Robert Kerr, “we start finding Western translations, biography being a Western literary genre. These editions were then taken up by Muslims. You see that the first Arabic (pseudo)-critical editions only commenced in the 1960s as a reaction to this.” He concluded that “Islamic interest in the Sirah [the early life stories of Muhammad] is derived from Western curiosity and has no long-standing tradition in Islam.”

Kerr also noted the development in the literature: “If we accept the general Islamic premise that Ibn Hisham transmitted content which he received orally and indirectly from students of Ibn Ishaq (certainly not from a written text if there ever was one, which I doubt, since Arabic was still in its infancy as a literary language in his days), then thereafter with al-Waqidi (Kitab al-Maghazi), and especially the latter’s scribe and student Ibn Sa‘d (Kitab at-Ṭabaqat al-Kabir), we see that blanks left by the previous author are filled in by those that continue the work, so too other later commentaries on al-Waqidi—suddenly dates, names of participants, geography and topography are mentioned in great detail, which prior authors seem not to have known.”

Given the general lack of interest among Muslims in this literature, it is possible that this development continued even beyond the ninth century and that the medieval manuscripts from which Wüstenfeld worked to compile his critical edition of Ibn Ishaq contain even more alterations from whatever the original work may have been.

Thus, the ninth-century literature cannot even be assumed with confidence to have existed at that time in the form we have it today.

Robert Kerr accordingly noted that the contemporary Islamic scholar Mohammed Ali Amir Moezzi “adheres to the notion of an historical Muhammad but said, roughly translated, that despite all the sources, all we know about him fits on one piece of paper.”

That roughly corresponds to what is said about Muhammad in the seventh century mentions of this name or title: a man arose from Arabia who was a warrior and a prophet. The rest is legend or history so mixed with legend that it is impossible to separate the two.

The implications of this are staggering, and have not yet even begun to be felt.

The material in this article is adapted from the book Muhammad: A Critical Biography, in which you can find out a great deal more about the search for the real Muhammad.