Does Muhammad's Life Look Like a Prophet's?

Summary

"Was Muhammad a prophet?" is not one question. It is at least five, and they predict different things. All five are stated before any evidence is examined: a true prophet; a sincere man who was mistaken; a deliberate fraud; a man sincere at Mecca who drifted at Medina; and a figure the sources are too late to judge.
The deliberate-fraud hypothesis fails, and Christians should stop using it. It fails on the tradition's own most trusted records. Muhammad spent about twelve or thirteen years at Mecca being boycotted, mocked and driven out of Taif, with no visible prospect of gain. He died owning a mule, some weapons and a piece of land he had already given away, with his armour mortgaged to a Jew for thirty measures of barley.¹² He barred his own family from the alms revenue he controlled.³
The Quran repeatedly rebukes its own messenger — for frowning at a blind man, for ransoming prisoners, for excusing shirkers, for concealing a private wish. Eighteen passages, nine Meccan and nine Medinan, so the rebukes are not confined to the powerless years.⁴⁵ A man composing scripture to build his own authority does not write these.
But a measurable pattern runs the other way, and it is measurable in the Quran alone. Counting only verses that give Muhammad personally a benefit, an exemption, or deference other Muslims do not get, this article finds 21 such verses, and all 21 are Medinan. Counting verses that impose on him personally a burden or limit heavier than other Muslims bear, it finds 12, of which 8 are Meccan. A purely mechanical check points the same way: the Quran addresses him by his title — "O Prophet," "O Messenger" — 15 times, and every one is in a Medinan surah.
Most of that asymmetry is explained away by the change in his circumstances, and the article says so at length. A man with no state cannot receive rules about dividing war spoils, because there are no spoils. What survives is small and sharp: the marriage exemptions of Quran 33:50-51, the verse commanding his marriage to Zaynab (33:37), and the blanket release from blame in 33:38. Quran 33:50 carries what every standard translation reads as the only phrase in the book carving out a rule for one named man against the whole community — khalisatan laka min duni al-mu'minin, "only for you, excluding the [other] believers."⁶ Watt read that clause differently, and the article gives his reading its full weight below.
Contemporaries noticed. Aisha's remark is in both Sahih collections: "I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires."⁷ Umar boasted that revelation three times matched advice he had already given.⁸
The character evidence cannot decide the question that matters. A true prophet and a sincere but mistaken man predict almost the same biography. What separates them is content — checkable prediction and independently attested miracle. On prediction the Quran gives almost nothing scorable. On miracles, the Quran itself declines to produce signs on demand, and the sign reports come from the later hadith and dala'il al-nubuwwa literature with no outside attestation.⁹ That standard also retires Elijah on Carmel, and this article says so rather than rigging the test.

Verdict. Muhammad's life does not look like the life of a cynical inventor. That reading is contradicted by the tradition's own records, and W. Montgomery Watt, an Anglican Arabist, Maxime Rodinson, a Marxist atheist, and Patricia Crone, the field's most determined skeptic, all reject it independently.¹⁰¹¹¹² What the evidence supports is narrower. Muhammad looks like a man who sincerely believed he was receiving revelation, whose message became inseparable from his political position, and whose revelations — in the one area where the change of circumstances does not explain them — tracked his personal wishes closely enough that his own wife said so to his face. That is a conclusion against the fraud reading and against an untroubled reading of prophethood alike. The case against his prophethood has to be made on other ground: the absence of evidential miracles he himself offered, the contradictions with the earlier revelation he claimed to confirm, and the moral problems in the record. Those are separate articles, and this one points to them.

Honest weaknesses of this article's own case. (1) Almost everything about Muhammad's life comes from one pool of sources whose reliability is exactly what is in dispute; if that pool is unusable against him it is also unusable for him, and the Meccan persecution goes with the rest. (2) The counting exercise depends on a judgement about which verses count as personal grants, and a reader who draws the line differently will get a different number — which is why the raw list is printed below. (3) The chronology used is the traditional Egyptian one, a medieval scholarly reconstruction, not a documented record. (4) The criterion the article uses against the miracle reports — independent attestation — scores zero for the Hebrew prophets too, and the article does not pretend otherwise. (5) Several of the most-quoted charges against Muhammad turn out to be weaker than apologists claim, and this article retires them. (6) The single sharpest item in the count — the "only for you, excluding the believers" clause at Quran 33:50 — rests on a reading of khalisatan that W. Montgomery Watt, this article's most-cited authority, thought less natural than a rival reading about the woman rather than the Prophet.

The claim being tested

The Muslim claim is stated in the shahada, the confession that makes a person a Muslim: there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. The Quran puts the claim about the man's honesty in its own words: "Your companion has not strayed, nor has he erred, nor does he speak from [his own] inclination. It is not but a revelation revealed."¹³ It also makes him the model for behaviour: "There has certainly been for you in the Messenger of Allah an excellent pattern" — uswa hasana, a good example.¹⁴

Those are not one claim but several, and popular argument on both sides blurs them. Separated out, they are:

Muhammad existed and preached in seventh-century Arabia. Nobody serious disputes this. Patricia Crone, who did more than any modern scholar to make the case for distrusting the Muslim sources, wrote flatly that "there is no doubt that Mohammed existed, occasional attempts to deny it notwithstanding."¹² That question has its own article.
He sincerely believed the Quran was revealed to him. This is a claim about his mental state.
The Quran actually came from God. This is a claim about the world.
His conduct was morally exemplary, and remains so. This is a claim about ethics.
He is the last prophet, and the Quran confirms and corrects the earlier scriptures. This is a claim about other religions.

Claims 2 and 3 are not the same claim, and the difference is the hinge of this whole article. A man can be perfectly honest and still be wrong about where his experiences come from. W. Montgomery Watt, the most-cited Western biographer of the twentieth century, made the point with unusual precision: "to say that Muhammad was sincere does not imply acceptance of the Qur'an as a genuine revelation from God; a man may without contradiction hold that Muhammad truly believed that he was receiving revelations from God but that he was mistaken in this belief."¹⁰

On the other side sits the claim this article tests hardest, because it is the one Christians most often make: that Muhammad knew he was not receiving revelation, and built a religion to get wealth, power and women. That is a claim about his motives, and it is checkable against the record. This article checks it, and concludes it fails.

What this article does not attempt: it does not adjudicate whether the Quran is a literary miracle (see the inimitability article), whether it contains scientific foreknowledge (see the science article), or whether the Bible was corrupted (see the tahrif article). Those are questions about the content of the revelation. This one is about the life of the man who delivered it.

The sources, and the rule this article follows

Almost everything anyone knows about Muhammad's life comes from one pool of texts, and the reliability of that pool is exactly what is in dispute. So the pool has to be described before it is used.

Source	Author's death	What it is	Distance from the events
The Quran	—	The one text every party agrees is substantially seventh-century	contemporary
Ibn Ishaq's sira, the biography, as edited by Ibn Hisham	Ibn Ishaq d. 150/767; Ibn Hisham d. 218/833	The earliest surviving continuous life, and only in a later editor's abridgement	about 120-200 years
al-Waqidi, Kitab al-Maghazi	207/822	Campaign history; rejected as a hadith transmitter, used for campaigns	about 190 years
Ibn Sa'd, Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir	230/845	Biographical dictionary; al-Waqidi's secretary	about 210 years
Sahih al-Bukhari	256/870	Hadith collection selected for chain reliability	about 240 years
Sahih Muslim	261/875	The same	about 245 years
al-Tabari, Ta'rikh al-rusul wa-al-muluk	310/923	History; preserves earlier material Ibn Hisham cut	about 290 years

Two words need glossing, because a reader will meet them constantly. Hadith is a report of something Muhammad said or did, transmitted through a named chain of narrators called an isnad. Sira is the narrative biography. They are different literatures with different standards: the hadith critics graded chains, and they never graded the sira. An episode that appears only in Ibn Ishaq is weaker evidence than one in Bukhari, and this article says which pool every report comes from, every single time.

The double-standard rule. A Christian apologist may not use Sahih al-Bukhari to convict Muhammad in one paragraph and dismiss Bukhari as late and unreliable in the next. If the chain method is worthless, then the report about Aisha's age is worthless too. The reverse applies to the Muslim side, and should be said politely: a Muslim who accepts Bukhari for law and creed cannot reject a Bukhari report solely because a critic quotes it. The reports about Aisha's age, the killing of Ka'b b. al-Ashraf, the Banu Qurayza, and Aisha's "your Lord hastens" remark sit in the same two collections, transmitted by the same men, graded by the same criteria as the reports Muslims cite daily.

In practice this produces four tiers, and the article labels each report:

In Bukhari and/or Muslim. Both sides are committed to these. Neither collection prints an external grade line, because inclusion is itself the claim.
In Ibn Ishaq's main narrative but not in the canonical hadith. Accepted by classical Muslim tradition as history, but not as hadith. The standard Muslim answer — that sira is not held to hadith standards — is legitimate and must be granted.
Only in al-Waqidi or Ibn Sa'd, or in material Ibn Hisham cut out. Weakest chains, and often the most vivid detail.
Modern reconstructions, used only where a named scholar has published the argument.

One further caution about Ibn Ishaq in English. A. Guillaume's The Life of Muhammad (Oxford, 1955) is the standard translation, but what it translates is Ibn Hisham's edition, into which Guillaume reinserted, in round brackets marked (T. ...), passages Ibn Hisham deleted and al-Tabari preserved. Several of the most damaging episodes sit inside those brackets. Citing "Ibn Ishaq" for such a passage without saying so is careless, and this article flags each one.

Five hypotheses, and what each predicts

A test is only worth running if the hypotheses expect different things. Where two of them predict the same evidence, that evidence cannot decide between them, and saying so is part of the test rather than a concession. All five are stated here, with their falsifiers, before any evidence is examined.

H1 — A true prophet. The Quran is God's speech, conveyed through a man who added nothing of his own. Predicts: content Muhammad could not have known; commands that cut against his interests as often as they serve them; moral teaching ahead of its time and place; public checkable signs if signs are claimed. Falsified by: content that tracks the speaker's needs at the moment of revelation; a failed public prediction; a false factual claim; a moral rule worse than the seventh-century Arabian norm.

H2 — A sincere man who believed he received revelation and did not. This is Watt's position and it is the default position of the academic field. Watt's own words, from Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman: "To say that Muhammad was sincere does not imply that he was correct in his beliefs. A man may be sincere but mistaken. The modern Westerner has no difficulty in showing how Muhammad may have been mistaken. What seems to a man to come from 'outside himself' may actually come from his unconscious."¹⁵ Predicts: costly, sustained commitment before there was anything to gain; revelations that surprise, embarrass and rebuke the speaker, because a self-deceiving mind does not police itself the way a liar does; and — the signature prediction — revelations that drift toward the speaker's interests as those interests grow, without the speaker noticing. Falsified by: a documented private admission of fabrication; or, in the other direction, content the speaker could not have supplied.

H3 — A deliberate fraud, building a religion for wealth, power and women. This is the standard popular-apologetic position, and it is almost absent from modern scholarship. Its serious statements are Victorian. D. S. Margoliouth, Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, compared Muhammad to a spiritualist medium and wrote that "the process of revelation was so suspicious that one of the scribes employed to take down the effusions became convinced that it was imposture and discarded Islam in consequence."¹⁶ Predicts: wealth accumulating to him and his heirs; exemptions taken and burdens dodged; no costly period, or a costly period with a visible expected payoff; revelations arriving on demand, with contemporaries noticing; and no self-rebuke, or only face-saving self-rebuke. Falsified by: a long costly period with no plausible payoff; personal poverty at death; the exclusion of his own family from a revenue stream he controlled; and self-rebukes that carry no compensating benefit.

H4 — Sincere at Mecca, progressively self-serving at Medina. Its classic statement is William Muir, a Scottish colonial administrator and Christian apologist whose bias is on the surface and should be labelled as such. Muir grants the first half: "We may readily admit, that at the first Mahomet did believe, or persuaded himself to believe, that his revelations were dictated by a divine agency. In the Meccan period of his life there certainly can be traced no personal ends or unworthy motives to belie this conclusion."¹⁷ Then: "But the scene altogether changes at Medina. … Messages from heaven were freely brought forward to justify his political conduct, equally with his religious precepts."¹⁷ Predicts: a measurable difference between the Meccan and Medinan material in the direction of its personal implications; revelations settling disputes in which he had a stake, at the moment of the dispute; contemporaries remarking on the timing; and continued sincerity behaviour alongside, because H4 is not H3. Falsified by: a null or reversed result on a count fixed in advance; or a demonstration that every apparently self-serving Medinan revelation is fully explained by the change in circumstances.

H5 — The sources are too late to decide. The revisionist option. Crone states it and states its limits in one short article: the Muslim literary sources "only begin around 750-800 CE … some four to five generations after his death." But she closes the strong form of the door: "we can be reasonably sure that the Qur'an is a collection of utterances that he made in the belief that they had been revealed to him by God. … that he uttered all or most of them is difficult to doubt."¹² Predicts: that the Quran is usable and the sira is not. Falsified by: early documentary corroboration of sira episodes, or chain-and-text analysis pushing a report back to the first Islamic century.

So H5 is not a rival to H2 on sincerity — the field's most determined skeptic grants that Muhammad uttered the Quran believing it revealed. It is a rival to all the others on the question of episodes, and it sets the ceiling on what any charge resting on the sira can establish. The counting exercise later in this article was built to sit under that ceiling, because it uses only the Quran.

The hypotheses side by side

Observation	H1 true prophet	H2 sincere but mistaken	H3 fraud	H4 Mecca-sincere, Medina-corrupt	H5 sources undecidable
Twelve years of persecution with no prospect	expected	expected	very unexpected	expected	sira-dependent
Personal poverty at death	expected	expected	very unexpected	unexpected	hadith-dependent
The Quran rebukes its own messenger	expected	expected	unexpected	expected for Mecca	Quran-based, survives
Self-benefiting rules clustered at Medina	not expected	expected	expected	strongly expected	Quran-based, survives
An explicit "for you only, not the believers" exemption	not expected	expected	expected	expected	Quran-based, survives
Contemporaries remarking on convenient timing	not expected	expected	expected	expected	hadith-dependent
A verifiable low-prior prediction that came true	strongly expected	not expected	not expected	not expected	—
A public miracle with independent attestation	expected if claimed	not expected	not expected	not expected	—

Read that table honestly and one thing jumps out. H1 and H2 make nearly identical predictions about Muhammad's character, and differ sharply only on the last two rows. Nearly all the popular argument, on both sides, happens in the rows where H1 and H2 agree. So the character evidence — the persecution, the poverty, the rebukes, the marriages, the battles — cannot decide between the two hypotheses that actually matter to a believer. What decides between them is content: does the Quran contain anything its speaker could not have supplied? That is the subject of the sibling articles, and this one stays out of their way.

The strongest case for the Muslim claim

This section states the case for Muhammad's sincerity at full strength, before any evaluation. It is a strong case, and an article that skipped it would be worthless.

Watt sets the burden of proof where the evidence puts it, and the sentence deserves to be quoted before anything else: "His readiness to undergo persecution for his beliefs, the high moral character of the men who believed in him and looked up to him as leader, and the greatness of his ultimate achievement — all argue his fundamental integrity. To suppose Muhammad an impostor raises more problems than it solves."¹⁸ He then states the rule he thinks a historian must follow: "we must in every particular case hold firmly to the belief in his sincerity until the opposite is conclusively proved; and we must not forget that conclusive proof is a much stricter requirement than a show of plausibility."¹⁸ This article accepts that rule and applies it.

The Quran rebukes its own messenger

The Quran reproves the man delivering it, repeatedly, by name and in the second person. Nineteen passages are relevant. One of them, Quran 53:2-4, is a defence rather than a rebuke, and is listed because it is the verse a Muslim will cite against this whole section. Of the other eighteen, nine are Meccan and nine are Medinan — so the rebuke material is not confined to the powerless early years. That is a real point for the Muslim side and against any crude version of H4. Surah placement and order below are the traditional Egyptian classification printed in the 1924 Cairo edition.

Verse	Surah, place, Egyptian revelation order	What is said to Muhammad
93:7	93 al-Duha, Meccan, 11	"Did He not find thee erring, and guide thee?" (Arberry)
53:2-4	53 al-Najm, Meccan, 23	Defends him against the charge of error — the counterpoint
80:1-10	80 Abasa, Meccan, 24	He frowned at a blind man and turned to a rich one; God rebukes him
17:73-75	17 al-Isra, Meccan, 50	He nearly inclined toward the pagans; double punishment threatened
17:86-87	17 al-Isra, Meccan, 50	God could withdraw the revelation and he would have no advocate
10:94-95	10 Yunus, Meccan, 51	"If you are in doubt … ask those who read the Scripture before you"
6:35	6 al-An'am, Meccan, 55	"So never be of the ignorant"
40:55	40 Ghafir, Meccan, 60	"Ask forgiveness for your sin"
18:23-24	18 al-Kahf, Meccan, 69	Never say "I will do that tomorrow" without "if God wills"
69:44-47	69 al-Haqqa, Meccan, 78	If he had invented sayings, God would have cut his aorta
8:67-68	8 al-Anfal, Medinan, 88	The ransom of the Badr captives; a great punishment was near
3:128	3 Al Imran, Medinan, 89	"Not for you is the decision"
33:37	33 al-Ahzab, Medinan, 90	He concealed in himself what God would disclose, and feared the people
4:105-107	4 al-Nisa, Medinan, 92	Do not be an advocate for the treacherous; seek forgiveness
47:19	47 Muhammad, Medinan, 95	"Ask forgiveness for your sin"
66:1	66 al-Tahrim, Medinan, 107	"Why do you prohibit what Allah has made lawful for you?"
48:2	48 al-Fath, Medinan, 111	Forgiveness of "your past and future sins"
9:43	9 al-Tawba, Medinan, 113	"May Allah pardon you; why did you give them permission…"
9:113	9 al-Tawba, Medinan, 113	He may not ask forgiveness for polytheists, even close kin

The sharpest of them are worth having in their own words.

Quran 80:1-10. A blind man interrupts him while he is courting the Meccan chiefs, and he is scolded for it: "He frowned and turned away when the blind man came to him — for all you know, he might have grown in spirit … but from the one who has come to you full of eagerness and awe you allow yourself to be distracted."⁴ The traditional occasion is recorded by al-Wahidi (d. 468/1075), the founder of the "occasions of revelation" genre, on Aisha's authority: the blind man was Ibn Umm Maktum, and Muhammad "kept avoiding him and turning to the others."¹⁹ Al-Wahidi's second report on the same page adds a detail that is hard to invent: afterwards Muhammad would greet the blind man with "Welcome to the one about whom my Lord has rebuked me!"¹⁹

Quran 8:67-68. After the battle of Badr he ransomed the prisoners. The revelation rebukes the decision he had just profited from: "It is not for any Prophet to have prisoners until he make wide slaughter in the land. You desire the chance goods of the present world, and God desires the world to come … Had it not been for a prior prescription from God, there had afflicted you, for what you took, a mighty chastisement."²⁰ Al-Wahidi preserves Umar's own account, which he notes is in Sahih Muslim: Umar found Muhammad and Abu Bakr weeping, and was told, "I am crying because of the suggestion of ransoming the prisoners which your fellow believers advised me to do. Your chastisement was closer to you than this tree."¹⁹

Quran 9:43. "May Allah pardon you, [O Muhammad]; why did you give them permission [to remain behind]?"⁵ Surah 9 is the last major surah on the standard chronology — number 113 of 114. A rebuke in the final year, when his authority over Arabia was absolute, is the single hardest datum for the Mecca-then-Medina hypothesis, and it should not be brushed past.

Quran 33:37. "…while you concealed within yourself that which Allah is to disclose. And you feared the people, while Allah has more right that you fear Him."²¹ Aisha's comment on the verse is in Sahih al-Bukhari: "If Allah's Messenger were to conceal anything (of the Qur'an) he would have concealed this Verse."²² The Study Quran, the standard modern English Muslim commentary, says the same from inside the tradition: "it is said that no verse was more severe with him."²³

Quran 69:44-47 threatens the messenger himself: if he had invented sayings and attributed them to God, "We would have seized him by the right hand; / Then We would have cut from him the aorta."²⁴

Quran 46:9 is easy to miss and is one of the strongest: "Say, 'I am not something original among the messengers, nor do I know what will be done with me or with you. I only follow that which is revealed to me, and I am not but a clear warner.'"²⁵ A man inventing a religion does not have his God announce that he does not know his own fate. Alongside it sit the disclaimers of power, all Meccan: "I do not tell you that I have the depositories … of Allah or that I know the unseen, nor do I tell you that I am an angel"; "if I knew the unseen, I could have acquired much wealth"; "It is not for me to change it on my own accord."²⁶²⁷²⁸

Twelve or thirteen years at Mecca with nothing to show

On the traditional chronology, about twelve or thirteen years passed between the first revelation and the emigration to Medina. Everything in this subsection is Tier 2 — Ibn Ishaq, not Bukhari — and that has to be stated up front, because it means this evidence is held to the same standard as the Medinan evidence used later against him. Both stand or fall together.

The Quraysh offered him a way out, and by Ibn Ishaq's account he refused it. Utba ibn Rabi'a speaks: "If what you want is money, we will gather for you of our property so that you may be the richest of us; if you want honour, we will make you our chief so that no one can decide anything apart from you; if you want sovereignty, we will make you king, and if this ghost which comes to you, which you see, is such that you cannot get rid of him, we will find a physician for you."²⁹ To his uncle Abu Talib, urged to give it up, the sira has him answer: "O my uncle, by God, if they put the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left on condition that I abandoned this course, until God has made it victorious, or I perish therein, I would not abandon it."²⁹

The costs are recorded in the same book. The poor converts were beaten and left in the sun; Bilal was pinned under a rock at midday and told, "You will stay here till you die or deny Muhammad."²⁹ The Quraysh wrote a boycott of his clan into a deed and hung it in the Kaaba: no marriage with them, no buying from them, no selling to them.²⁹ When he went to Taif to look for a new base, three chiefs refused him — one asked, "Could not God have found someone better than you to send?" — and a crowd of "louts and slaves" drove him out. The prayer Ibn Ishaq gives him afterwards is not the prayer of a man with a plan: "O God, to Thee I complain of my weakness, little resource, and lowliness before men. … To whom wilt Thou confide me? To one afar who will misuse me? Or to an enemy to whom Thou hast given power over me? If Thou art not angry with me I care not."²⁹

Watt states the force of this plainly: the fraud thesis "gives no satisfying explanation of Muhammad's readiness to endure hardship in his Meccan days, of the respect in which he was held by men of high intelligence and upright character, and of his success in founding a world religion which has produced men of undoubted saintliness."¹⁰ Nobody in 613 could have forecast 622, let alone 630. A man does not spend a decade being boycotted and stoned in order to become rich twelve years later, because the payoff was not visible and could not have been. This is decisive against H3 and does nothing at all against H1, H2 or H4 — a sincere man who later drifts is exactly as likely to have suffered at Mecca as a true prophet.

One qualification. The Utba offer and the sun-and-moon reply are the kind of set piece a devotional tradition produces, and The Study Quran itself deploys the offer as an apologetic argument.²³ They are the tradition's own testimony about its own founder and should be read on that footing.

He died poor

These are Tier 1 — Bukhari and Muslim, which print no grade line because inclusion is the claim.

Aisha to her nephew Urwa: "We used to see three crescents in two months, and no fire used to be made in the houses of Allah's Messenger." Asked what sustained them: "The two black things i.e. dates and water."³⁰
"Never had the family of Muhammad eaten to the fill since their arrival in Medina with the bread of wheat for three successive nights until his death."³¹
"The Prophet died when we had satisfied our hunger with the two black things, i.e. dates and water."³²
"Allah's Messenger died while his (iron) armor was mortgaged to a Jew for thirty Sas of barley."²
The estate: "he did not leave any Dirham or Dinar, a slave or a slave woman or anything else except his white mule, his arms and a piece of land which he had given in charity."¹
Umar, describing the room where he found him at the height of his power, lying on a palm-leaf mat with a leather pillow stuffed with fibre: "On seeing the marks of the mat imprinted on his side, I wept. … 'O Allah's Messenger! Caesar and Khosrau are leading the life while you, Allah's Messenger though you are, is living in destitute.'"³³
Asked what he did at home, Aisha said: "He used to keep himself busy serving his family and when it was the time for prayer he would go for it."³⁴

The strongest single item is not the poverty but the refused revenue stream, and it must be stated precisely because it is usually stated wrongly. Quran 8:41 does assign one fifth of battlefield gains to "Allah … and for the Messenger and for [his] near relatives," so his clan shares in that.³⁵ What they may not touch is sadaqa and zakat, the alms. Two of his own kinsmen asked to be made collectors so as to take the collectors' cut, and were refused: "It does not become the family of Muhammad (to accept) sadaqat for they are the impurities of people."³ He then had their dowers paid out of the fifth instead — which is the point: one stream is closed to his family, another is not. The rule reached a child: his grandson Hasan put a charity date in his mouth and was told, "Expel it from your mouth. Don't you know that we do not eat a thing which is given in charity?"³⁶ And prophets do not bequeath: Abu Bakr refused Fatima her inheritance on her father's own reported rule, and Bukhari records that she "got angry and stopped speaking to Abu Bakr, and continued assuming that attitude till she died."³⁷

What a self-interested founder would look like, for comparison: he would leave an estate; he would leave it to his children; he would take the alms; he would eat. On the tradition's own showing, Muhammad did none of these. This is very hard for H3 and moderately hard for H4.

Rules he did not exempt himself from

At Uhud he was wounded in the face and lost a tooth: "His canine tooth got broken on that day, and face was wounded, and his helmet was broken on his head."³⁸ At the siege of Medina he dug the trench with the men, with "a stone tied to his belly for we had not eaten anything for three days."³⁹ The night vigil of Quran 73:1-8 is imposed on him first and personally, in the third surah revealed on the standard chronology.⁴⁰

The honest counterweight belongs in the same subsection. Not every asymmetry runs the costly way. He forbade al-wisal, the unbroken fast, and was challenged because he practised it himself. His answer: "I am not similar to you, for during my sleep I have One Who makes me eat and drink."⁴¹ That is a rule binding on everyone else and not on him, justified by a reason nobody else can check. It belongs on the other side of the ledger, and it is put there below.

The revelation that did not arrive on demand

The best counter-example to the "convenient revelation" charge is supplied by the tradition itself, and any article that omits it is misrepresenting its own sources.

Aisha was left behind by the army and brought back by a young man. Gossip followed. A revelation eventually cleared her and made the accusation punishable by law.⁴² But it did not come at once. By her own long narration in Bukhari and Muslim, she was ill for about a month, felt her husband's kindness withdrawn, and only then learned what was being said. Meanwhile "the Divine Inspiration was delayed," and Muhammad called Ali and Usama "to ask and consult them about divorcing me." Ali's advice was blunt: "Allah does not put you in difficulty and there are plenty of women other than she, yet, ask the maid-servant who will tell you the truth."⁴³

If revelation were on tap, it would have come the first week. Instead the leader of Medina spent a month publicly doubting his own wife, interrogating her servant, and taking advice on divorce. This is the strongest single objection to the pattern this article documents later, and it comes from the same collections.

The amnesty at Mecca

When Mecca fell in 8/630, he had absolute power over the town that had tortured his followers and driven him out. Ibn Ishaq reports the scene: "'O Quraysh, what do you think that I am about to do with you?' They replied, 'Good. You are a noble brother, son of a noble brother.' He said, 'Go your way for you are the freed ones.'"²⁹ The same address abolishes the privileges of blood and paganism: "Man springs from Adam and Adam sprang from dust." Hind bint Utba, who had mutilated Hamza's corpse at Uhud, was pardoned.

The qualification, which should be given rather than hidden: the amnesty was general with a named exception list. The scribe Abd Allah ibn Abi Sarh, who had apostatised, was on the list of those to be executed and was spared only because his milk-brother Uthman interceded.⁴⁴ So: broad clemency, with a short proscription list, most of whom were in fact spared.

How much the criterion of embarrassment proves

The criterion of embarrassment holds that a tradition does not invent material that damages its own founder. Applied here it says: a man composing a scripture to build his own authority does not write into it that he frowned at a blind beggar, that God forgave him for a military decision, that he concealed a private desire and feared public opinion, that he wrongly let men shirk a campaign, and that God would have cut his aorta if he had made things up. Nor does he leave the word dallan — "erring," "lost," "wandering" — describing his own pre-prophetic state in Quran 93:7.⁴⁵ This is the best single argument for Muhammad's sincerity and it is a genuinely strong one. Watt, an Anglican Arabist, and Rodinson, a Marxist atheist, converge on it from unrelated starting points, and Crone, the field's most determined skeptic, concedes its conclusion. Any article that does not concede the defeat of the fraud hypothesis on this evidence is not arguing in good faith.

Four honest qualifications belong here too, and the first is the one a bare list of rebukes conceals.

First: three of the sharpest rebukes end by giving Muhammad what he wanted.

Verse	The rebuke	The outcome of the same passage
Quran 8:67-68	You should not have taken captives; a great punishment was near	8:69 immediately declares the ransom lawful and good to consume
Quran 33:37	You concealed what God would disclose; you feared the people	"We married her to you" — he marries Zaynab, and marrying an adopted son's ex-wife is legalised
Quran 66:1	Why do you prohibit what God has made lawful, seeking to please your wives?	66:2 releases him from the oath; 66:4-5 warn the two wives that God, Gabriel and the angels back him, and that better wives could replace them

A rebuke that ends in an authorisation is doing two jobs at once. It is not a counter-example to a self-serving reading; it is the mechanism by which a self-serving ruling could be made palatable. Whether that mechanism is conscious, unconscious, or divine is exactly the question, and the rebuke alone does not settle it.

Second: the rebukes are small. A frown, a ransom, a permission to stay home, an oath about honey. None concerns the killing of prisoners, the treatment of the Banu Qurayza, the assassinations, or the treaty denunciations — the acts modern readers find hardest. The Quran never says Muhammad was wrong about any of those. Watt is candid about why: the criticisms his contemporaries actually made were "based on no moral criterion, but on a conservatism which was akin to superstition."¹⁰ His contemporaries were not troubled, so no rebuke was needed.

Third: several rebukes are cushioned. Quran 9:43 opens with pardon before the reproof. Quran 48:2 promises forgiveness of "your past and future sins," which classical commentary reads as a proof-text for his sinlessness rather than against it.⁴⁶ Quran 80 turns within two verses to the exaltation of the revelation itself.

Fourth, and decisively: the criterion of embarrassment is a test of sincerity, not of revelation. It shows the speaker was not lying. It says nothing about whether the voice he heard was God's. Watt saw this exactly, and this article must not let the argument be smuggled from "sincere" to "correct."

Is there a measurable pattern? A count

This is the part of the article a reader can check for himself, so the rule is stated before the counting starts, applied without exception, and the raw list printed.

The rule. Only the Quran is used. Not the hadith, not the sira. That is deliberate. It makes the result immune to the revisionist objection, because every party to the debate — Muslim, Western academic, and Crone at her most skeptical — agrees the Quran goes back to Muhammad. It also removes the double-standard risk entirely.

A verse enters Table A if it confers on Muhammad personally — not on believers generally — one of: (M) a material benefit, meaning property, income or a marriage; (X) a legal exemption from a rule that binds other Muslims; or (D) a deference obligation owed to him by others in their personal dealings with him.

A verse enters Table B if it imposes on Muhammad personally a burden or a limit heavier than the one other Muslims bear.

Excluded from both: general commands to obey "Allah and His Messenger," of which there are dozens, because they are about the office and not the man; purely honorific descriptions; and general commands to fight or preach. Rebukes were counted in the previous section and are not counted a second time toward the same total.

One overlap has to be admitted, because a reader checking the lists will find it. Four passages appear both in the rebuke table above and in a table below: Quran 33:37, 66:1-2, 3:128 and 9:113. For 33:37 the two entries are different clauses of one verse — the rebuke is "you concealed within yourself," the grant is "We married her to you" — so counting each once in its own table is defensible. For 3:128 and 9:113 it is the same clause counted twice, and both times it lands in Table B, the column that cuts against this article's own leaning, so the double-count works against the article rather than for it. Quran 66:1-2 is the weakest entry in either table and is flagged as such where it appears.

Dating uses the Egyptian standard chronology printed in the 1924 Cairo edition and served by api.quran.com. Meccan and Medinan placement is not in dispute for any surah in either table: the Cairo edition and Theodor Noldeke's independent nineteenth-century reconstruction agree on all of them.⁴⁷

Table A — personal grants

#	Verse	Surah	Place	Cairo order	Type	What is granted
A1	8:1	al-Anfal	Medinan	88	M	Disposal of the spoils belongs to God and the Messenger
A2	8:41	al-Anfal	Medinan	88	M	One fifth of all booty to God, the Messenger and his near relatives
A3	59:6	al-Hashr	Medinan	101	M	Property taken without fighting goes to the Messenger
A4	59:7	al-Hashr	Medinan	101	M	Town fay' to God, the Messenger and his relatives; "whatever the Messenger has given you — take"
A5	33:37	al-Ahzab	Medinan	90	M	"We married her to you" — Zaynab
A6	33:50	al-Ahzab	Medinan	90	M, X	Marriage rules relaxed for him alone, explicitly
A7	33:51	al-Ahzab	Medinan	90	X	He may defer or receive any wife at will; no duty of equal turns
A8	33:52 (clause)	al-Ahzab	Medinan	90	X	The bar on further wives excepts "what your right hand possesses"
A9	66:1-2	al-Tahrim	Medinan	107	X?	Release from his own oath of self-prohibition. The weakest entry in either table: 66:1 is a rebuke, not a grant, and the oath-dissolution clause at 66:2 is addressed to Muslims generally — qad farada Llahu lakum tahillata aymanikum, "Allah has already ordained for you the dissolution of your oaths." A reader who strikes it leaves Table A at twenty verses, all still Medinan
A10	58:12	al-Mujadila	Medinan	105	D	A charity must be paid before a private consultation with him. The verse does not say the charity goes to him, and the next verse, 58:13, drops the requirement
A11	33:38	al-Ahzab	Medinan	90	X	"There is not to be upon the Prophet any discomfort concerning that which Allah has imposed upon him"
A12	33:6	al-Ahzab	Medinan	90	D	"The Prophet is more worthy of the believers than themselves, and his wives are their mothers"
A13	33:53	al-Ahzab	Medinan	90	D	Entry rules for his house; the screen; no one may ever marry his widows
A14	33:56	al-Ahzab	Medinan	90	D	God and the angels bless him; believers are commanded to do so
A15	33:57	al-Ahzab	Medinan	90	D	Those who abuse God and His Messenger are cursed in this world and the next
A16	4:65	al-Nisa	Medinan	92	D	They do not believe until they make him judge and feel no inner resistance
A17	24:62	al-Nur	Medinan	102	D	No one may leave a joint meeting without his permission
A18	24:63	al-Nur	Medinan	102	D	"Do not make your calling of the Messenger among yourselves as the call of one of you to another"
A19	49:2	al-Hujurat	Medinan	106	D	Do not raise your voices above his, or your deeds become worthless
A20	49:4	al-Hujurat	Medinan	106	D	Those who call him from behind his rooms "do not use reason"
A21	9:103	al-Tawba	Medinan	113	D	"Take, [O Muhammad], from their wealth a charity" — the alms levy is collected in his hands, though Sahih Muslim 1072a has him bar his own family from receiving any of it

Twenty-one verses — twenty if A9 is struck. Every one of them is Medinan. Not one is Meccan. Eleven of the twenty-one come from a single surah, al-Ahzab (33), traditionally placed around the siege of Medina in 5/627.

The explicit exemption. Quran 33:50 ends khalisatan laka min duni al-mu'minin — Saheeh International, "[this is] only for you, excluding the [other] believers"; Pickthall, "a privilege for thee only, not for the (rest of) believers"; Arberry, "for thee exclusively, apart from the believers."⁶ A direct search of the Uthmani Arabic text finds the feminine form khalisatan in five verses (2:94, 6:139, 7:32, 33:50, and 38:46 with the preposition prefixed, bi-khalisatin) and the phrase min duni al-mu'minin in four (3:28, 4:139, 4:144, 33:50). Other inflections of the same root sit at 16:66 and 39:3 and are irrelevant here. They occur together in exactly one verse in the whole Quran: 33:50. On the standard reading that is the only place where the Quran carves out a rule for one named man against the entire community.

And the standard reading is contested by the one scholar this article leans on most. Watt argues that taking khalisatan as "a special privilege for you" is "not impossible" but that "a more natural one would be to take khalisatan as an adjective qualifying 'woman', so that the clause would mean '(keeping herself) special for you and not (having sexual relations with other) believers'."¹⁰ On Watt's reading the clause is about the woman's exclusivity, not the Prophet's exemption, and the sharpest single item in this article's residue softens considerably. Watt is a lone voice here — the classical commentators and every translation consulted above read it as a privilege — but he is not a Muslim apologist, he is the article's own principal authority, and the reader is entitled to know that the strongest piece of evidence in the count rests on a reading he doubted. The general rule caps a Muslim man at four wives, on condition that he can be just between them.⁴⁸

Table B — personal constraints

#	Verse	Surah	Place	Cairo order	What is imposed
B1	73:1-8	al-Muzzammil	Meccan	3	Stand in prayer most of the night; "We will cast upon you a heavy word"
B2	7:188	al-A'raf	Meccan	39	He holds no power of benefit or harm; "if I knew the unseen, I could have acquired much wealth"
B3	17:79	al-Isra	Meccan	50	An additional night prayer, "for you"
B4	17:73-75	al-Isra	Meccan	50	Threat of double punishment in life and death if he had yielded
B5	10:15	Yunus	Meccan	51	"It is not for me to change it on my own accord"
B6	6:50	al-An'am	Meccan	55	He may not claim treasuries, knowledge of the unseen, or angelic status
B7	46:9	al-Ahqaf	Meccan	66	"nor do I know what will be done with me or with you"
B8	69:44-47	al-Haqqa	Meccan	78	The aorta threat if he invented sayings
B9	3:128	Al Imran	Medinan	89	"Not for you is the decision"
B10	33:52 (main clause)	al-Ahzab	Medinan	90	No further wives, no exchanging wives, even if their beauty pleases him
B11	5:67	al-Ma'ida	Medinan	112	If he does not proclaim, he has not conveyed the message at all
B12	9:113	al-Tawba	Medinan	113	He may not seek forgiveness for polytheists, even close kin

Twelve verses. Eight Meccan, four Medinan. Three of the four Medinan constraints need a caveat stated openly rather than buried.

33:52 is the only Medinan constraint that costs him anything material, and the Muslim tradition itself reports that it was lifted. Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3216 and Sunan an-Nasa'i 3204 both carry Aisha saying, "The Messenger of Allah did not die until the women had been made lawful for him."⁴⁹
9:113 forbids what he wanted to do — pray for his uncle Abu Talib — and it is among the last revelations. It cuts against the Mecca-then-Medina hypothesis and should be counted for the Muslim side.⁵⁰
5:67 is a burden of office rather than a personal cost, and the same verse promises him divine protection.⁵¹

Note the shape of Table B. The Meccan constraints are theological: you have no power, you do not know the unseen, you cannot change the text, God would kill you if you invented. The Medinan constraints are fewer and softer. That is the mirror image of Table A, and it is not an artefact of subject matter — a revelation limiting the messenger's claims could have come at any date.

A mechanical cross-check

The vocative ya ayyuha al-nabi, "O Prophet," occurs 13 times in the Quran (8:64, 8:65, 8:70, 9:73, 33:1, 33:28, 33:45, 33:50, 33:59, 60:12, 65:1, 66:1, 66:9). Ya ayyuha al-rasul, "O Messenger," occurs twice (5:41, 5:67). All fifteen are in Medinan surahs. In Mecca the Quran never addresses him by his title at all. These counts were made by normalising the Arabic text and matching the vocative phrase, not by reading a translation.

The confound, stated at full strength

There was nothing to distribute in Mecca. A man with no state, no army, no treasury and no captives cannot receive a revelation about dividing spoils, because there are no spoils. He cannot receive rules about who may enter his house because there is no household compound and no crowd of petitioners at the door. Roughly half of Table A — A1, A2, A3, A4, A10, A21, and arguably A12 through A20 — concerns the administration of a polity that did not exist before 622. The Medinan clustering of those verses is a clustering of subject matter, and by itself proves nothing.

This is Watt's objection, and Watt states it against exactly the conclusion this section is heading toward: "there are no solid grounds for thinking that Muhammad's character declined after the Hijrah. Too facile a use has been made of the principle that all power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely."¹⁰ He is right as far as he goes. The sample is confounded with the period. There are no Meccan atrocities on record because there was no Meccan army; there are no Meccan property revelations because there was no Meccan property.

What the confound does not explain. Four items survive it.

The marriage exemptions, A6 and A7 — Quran 33:50-51. Marriage law is not a function of statehood. A revelation relaxing marriage rules for one man could have come in any year, and the Quran legislates on marriage in Meccan surahs. It came at Medina, and it came with the unique "only for you, excluding the believers" formula.
A5 — Quran 33:37. The verse names a specific woman, a specific dispute, and a specific state of Muhammad's mind, and resolves it in his favour.
A11 — Quran 33:38. A general, forward-looking release from blame for whatever God ordains for him is not an administrative rule. It is an exemption with no subject-matter limit at all.⁵²
The direction of Table B. The confound explains why grants are Medinan. It does not explain why constraints on the messenger's claims are overwhelmingly Meccan, since those are equally available at any date.

Contemporaries noticed

This is the part that cannot be dismissed as a modern reading imposed on old texts, because it is in the tradition's own most trusted collections.

Aisha, on the revelation of Quran 33:51, which released her husband from taking equal turns among his wives: "I said (to the Prophet), 'I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires.'"⁷ Sahih Muslim has the same remark in different words: "It seems to me that your Lord hastens to satisfy your desire."⁵³ A third wording is in Bukhari 5113. Al-Wahidi records it again in yet another transmission.¹⁹ It is the sharpest sentence anyone has ever said on this subject, and it was said to his face by his own wife and preserved by his own partisans.

Umar ibn al-Khattab boasted that revelation three times matched advice he had already given, including the threat in Quran 66:5 that God could replace Muhammad's wives with better ones: "I said to them, 'It may be if he (the Prophet) divorced you, (all) that his Lord (Allah) will give him instead of you wives better than you.' So this verse (the same as I had said) was revealed."⁸ Umar also claimed to have proposed the seclusion of Muhammad's wives before the verse ordering it came down.⁵⁴ The tradition treats these as a proof of Umar's inspired insight, a recognised category called muwafaqat Umar, "Umar's agreements." Rodinson, reading the same reports, adds one more: after Muhammad's death Umar exclaimed, on a delicate question, "If God's Prophet were still alive, I daresay a Koran would have been revealed about this."¹¹

The Nakhla raid is the tightest reported sequence, and it comes from Ibn Ishaq — Tier 2, sira and not hadith, so it is not proof and is not treated here as proof. A raiding party sent out by Muhammad killed a Meccan and seized a caravan on the last day of Rajab, one of the sacred months in which fighting was forbidden. The community was scandalised. Ibn Ishaq's order of events is: the taboo violated; Muhammad refusing the booty — "I did not order you to fight in the sacred month" — and holding the caravan and prisoners in suspense; much talk; then the revelation of Quran 2:217, which weighs the violated month against the greater wrong of driving people from the sacred mosque; and then, in Ibn Ishaq's own words, "the apostle took the caravan and the prisoners."²⁹⁵⁵

Watt's answer to Nakhla is a real one and belongs beside it. He reads the episode as the one case where Muhammad's own community objected on religious grounds, and where Muhammad deliberately overrode them: "In this instance Muhammad deliberately decided in the end to oppose public opinion, believing that he was thereby following God's command and attacking a pagan superstition. In the circumstances, then, Muhammad's conduct is that of a moral reformer and not of a wicked man."¹⁰ The strongest honest form of the critical point is therefore not "he wanted the loot." It is that the moral cost of a violated taboo was cancelled by a text, and the loot was then collected.

The honest statement of the result

The Quran does show a chronological asymmetry. Personal grants are entirely Medinan. Personal limitations are overwhelmingly Meccan. Every one of the fifteen times the Quran addresses Muhammad by his title is Medinan.

Most of the grant side is explained by the change from persecuted preacher to head of state, and that explanation has to be granted in full. A residue is not explained: the marriage exemptions of Quran 33:50-51, the Zaynab verse at 33:37, and the blanket release of 33:38. That residue is the actual evidence, and it is smaller and sharper than the sprawling case usually made. Two verses a critic can point to and a Muslim must answer are worth more than fifty that prove nothing.

One further caution. Everything in Table A depends on the traditional chronology, which is a Muslim scholarly reconstruction rather than a documented record. Its Meccan and Medinan assignments at surah level are secure enough for this argument — the Cairo edition and Noldeke agree on every surah used. Assignments at verse level are not secure, and this article builds nothing on a verse-level claim.⁴⁷

The episodes that bear on character

These are the reports a critic reaches for and a defender dreads. Each one gets its source-critical status stated before it is used, and the strongest defence stated after. Several turn out to be weaker than the popular apologetic version, and this article says so.

Aisha's age

Status: Tier 1, and simultaneously the episode most likely to backfire. Bukhari and Muslim both carry it, several times over: the marriage contract at six or seven, consummation at nine.⁵⁶⁵⁷ Bukhari gives it a chapter heading of its own — "Whoever consummated his marriage with a lady of nine years of age."

Three defences are usually offered, and they are of unequal strength.

The chronological argument from Asma. Aisha's elder sister Asma is reported in later works to have died in 73 AH aged 100 and to have been ten years older than Aisha, which would make Aisha about nineteen at consummation. The death date checks out — al-Tabari has her dying "on Tuesday, 17 Jumada I 73/October 6, 692."⁵⁸ The two figures the argument actually needs, "aged 100" and "ten years older," could not be verified in any text opened for this article, and "one hundred years" is a conventional round number in Arabic biography. Two soft numbers subtracted from each other do not make a hard one.

The argument from Uhud. Aisha is reported carrying water-skins at Uhud in 3 AH, which on the traditional chronology makes her about ten; the age rule cited alongside it barred boys under fifteen from the battle. But that rule applied to combatants — Ibn Umar was refused permission to fight at fourteen and allowed at fifteen.⁵⁹ Nothing in it bars a ten-year-old from carrying water. This counterargument is weaker than apologists on either side present it.

The contextual defence, which is the strong one. Roman law, in force across the Byzantine world at the moment Islam began, set the legal marriage age for girls at twelve. Justinian's Institutes of 533 CE says so in as many words: girls "are held fit for marriage after completing their twelfth year."⁶⁰ Child betrothal was normal across the region, and rural, oral, stateless societies did not keep birth records. What this defends is that the practice was not criminal or bizarre by seventh-century standards, and that trying a seventh-century man by twenty-first-century ones is anachronistic. What it does not defend is that nine was typical — nine is below the Roman legal floor, and the Muslim sources record no other case of it in Muhammad's circle. Whether the Roman legal minimum reflected common practice is disputed: Keith Hopkins argued for early marriage and Brent Shaw argued from tombstone evidence that the median for ordinary Roman girls was in the late teens. Neither article could be obtained for this piece, so only the legal figure is asserted here.⁶¹⁶²

And then the finding that cuts against everyone. Joshua Little's 2023 Oxford doctorate traced every surviving version of the marital-age report and concluded that none can be traced earlier than mid-eighth-century Iraq. In his own summary: "all extant versions of the marital-age hadith trace back to Hišām after he moved to Iraq. … What actually explains all of this, and what is certainly the simplest explanation therefor, is that Hišām created this hadith." And, drawing the consequence himself: "it follows from my ultimate conclusion that we no longer have any solid basis for thinking that Muḥammad married ʿĀʾišah as a child."⁶³

So the strongest modern academic work says the report is not history. A Christian article that makes this its centrepiece is betting on a hadith the leading specialist rejects — while a Muslim who defends the hadith corpus cannot simply discard it, because it is sahih by his own criteria. What survives is methodological, and it survives whatever happened: the same corpus that grounds Islamic law carries a report the tradition itself turned into a legal precedent for marrying prepubescent girls, and gave a chapter heading. That is a fact about the law regardless of the event.

The Banu Qurayza

Status: Tier 1 for the judgement, Tier 2 for the numbers and the scene. After the confederate siege of Medina failed in 5/627, the Jewish tribe of Qurayza, which had negotiated with the besiegers, surrendered. Sa'd b. Mu'adh, chosen as arbiter, ruled that the men be killed, the property divided, and the women and children enslaved. Bukhari has the judgement and Muhammad's approval of it: "O Sa'd! You have judged amongst them with the judgment of the King Allah."⁶⁴ The Quran refers to the outcome in two verses.⁶⁵ Ibn Ishaq gives the scene: trenches dug in the market of Medina, men brought out in batches and beheaded, "600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900."²⁹

The revisionist escape route was tried and closed. W. N. Arafat argued in 1976 that the massacre never happened, on the ground that Ibn Ishaq is late and unreliable and that the Quran would have said more. That article could not be obtained for this piece; it is used here only through M. J. Kister's detailed line-by-line summary and quotation of it.⁶⁶ Kister, of the Hebrew University, dismantled it in 1986: "Arafat's arguments are however unfounded, his conclusions incorrect." Arafat's key claim was that Muslim jurists would have used the episode as a legal precedent and did not; Kister shows that al-Shafi'i (d. 204/819) did exactly that.⁶⁷

Kister's own reconstruction is worse for the tradition than Ibn Ishaq's, not better. He puts the executed men at about 400 and the enslaved women and children at about 1,000, catalogues the booty — "1500 swords, 300 coats of mail, 200 spears, 1500 shields" — and writes: "The suspicions that Qurayza attempted to plot with Quraysh against the Prophet would probably not justify the cruel punishment of execution of the fighting men and the sale of the women and children … There must have been an additional reason for the hostility of the Prophet against Qurayza, not disclosed in the vague accounts about the violation of the treaty."⁶⁷

The strongest defence, which must be conceded. This is a treason case inside a city that had just survived an attempt to destroy it. The arbiter was chosen by the defeated party's own allies. Collective execution of a treacherous garrison was within the range of seventh-century practice, and Muhammad's own followers were not scandalised — Watt makes exactly that point.¹⁰ Muslim writers since have argued that Sa'd's judgement matched the law of the Jews' own scripture, citing Deuteronomy; a reader who wants to test that should read Deuteronomy 20:12-14 for himself, since the Muslim writers who make the argument do not give the chapter and verse.⁶⁸

The assassinations

This is where the tier system does the most work, and collapsing the four cases into one list is the commonest error in the polemical literature.

Ka'b b. al-Ashraf — Tier 1. In both Sahih collections, in Bukhari's chapter titled "Telling lies in war." Muhammad asks, "Who is ready to kill Ka'b bin Al-Ashraf who has really hurt Allah and His Apostle?" The volunteer asks leave to lie to him: "Then allow me to say a (false) thing." The answer: "You may say it."⁶⁹⁷⁰ The defence is that Ka'b was a treaty-breaker who went to Mecca after Badr to incite war, and that deception is a lawful stratagem in wartime — which is what Bukhari's chapter title says.
Abu Rafi' — Tier 1, and usually omitted by critics. Also in Bukhari, in a chapter titled "Killing a sleeping Mushrik."⁷¹
Abu Afak and Asma bint Marwan — Tier 3. An old man and a woman, both killed for satirical verse. These are not in Bukhari or Muslim. They are in Ibn Ishaq's weakest material and al-Waqidi.²⁹ Most Muslim scholars today reject them as da'if, weak, precisely because of that, and that rejection is methodologically consistent and should be granted. What survives is a datum about the tradition, not about the man: Ibn Ishaq's community told these stories approvingly, and Hassan b. Thabit's celebratory verse on the same page reads, "Before midnight he dyed her in her blood / And incurred no guilt thereby."
Umm Qirfa — Tier 3, and the worst detail is a bracketed insertion. Guillaume's text says Zayd b. Haritha ordered her killed "cruelly"; the description of her being torn apart between two camels appears only in al-Tabari's recension, marked (T. ...), and not in Ibn Hisham's.²⁹ The order is attributed to Zayd, not to Muhammad. Both facts have to be said.

Slavery and concubinage

Status: Tier 1 on the central fact, which nobody disputes. The Quran permits sexual access to female war captives — "those their right hands possess" — and both Sahih collections record it in practice.⁷² Asked about withdrawal during intercourse with captives taken at the Mustaliq raid, Muhammad's reported answer concerned only the withdrawal: "It does not matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born."⁷³ Safiyya bint Huyayy was taken at Khaybar in the same expedition in which her husband and father were killed, reassigned from another man to Muhammad because "she befits none but you," then freed and married — Bukhari says the manumission itself was her dower.⁷⁴⁷⁵ Rayhana bint Zayd was taken from the Qurayza captives on the day of the executions.²⁹

The texts are strong enough without help, so the counter-evidence gets stated in full rather than trimmed. Rayhana's own reported words, in Ibn Sa'd, include an explicit exculpatory line — "He was not alone with me until after the captives had been divided" — and al-Waqidi himself is recorded in the same book doubting the reports.⁷⁶ And the case of Juwayriya bint al-Harith cuts the other way entirely: Muhammad paid her ransom and married her, and Aisha's report ends, "They released the captives in their possession and set them free, and said: They are the relatives of the Messenger of Allah by marriage. … One hundred families of Banu al-Mustaliq were set free on account of her."⁷⁷

Watt's framing is the right one to argue against, because it names the real question: "we may ask, 'Was Muhammad a good man according to the standards of the Arabia of his day?', or we may ask, 'Was he a good man according to the standards of, say, the best people in Europe about the year 1950?'"¹⁰ Watt then declines to answer the second question. A Christian cannot decline it, because the Christian claim is that there is a standard above both. But he also cannot pretend that a seventh-century Arabian who regulated an existing institution invented it.

The report the tradition later erased

The "Satanic verses" story is worth including for a reason that has nothing to do with scandal. In it, Muhammad, longing to reconcile his tribe, recites praise of three Meccan goddesses into Surah al-Najm; the Quraysh prostrate with him; Gabriel then tells him the words were not from God.⁷⁸ Status: Tier 2/3. It is not in Bukhari or Muslim. Ibn Hisham cut it out of Ibn Ishaq; the SUNY editors of al-Tabari say so in print, suggesting "he felt it was discreditable to the Prophet."⁷⁸ Ibn Sa'd's twentieth-century translators printed the report and then denied it in their own footnote: "This narration is not acceptable, because none of the first narrators is a Companion."⁷⁹

The popular apologetic use of this story overstates it badly, and Shahab Ahmed's Before Orthodoxy — the definitive study — does not say what apologists claim. Ahmed refuses the historicity question outright, concedes that all but one of the fifty reports carry defective chains, and in his closing pages demolishes the argument that Muslims would never have invented it: early Muslims "did not view the Satanic verses incident as objectionable … There is presumably no reason, therefore, why they could not have made it up."⁴⁴⁴⁴⁴⁴ The Study Quran adds a real chronological objection: the verses supposed to explain the incident come from surahs revealed five to eight years later.²³

What survives is narrower and more interesting than the scandal. Ahmed's demonstrated result is that the first two Muslim centuries overwhelmingly accepted the story, that acceptance fell to an even split by about 1100, and that near-universal rejection is modern.⁴⁴ Early Muslims held a picture of a prophet "whose Prophetic consciousness developed only gradually, who was affected by the pressures of his temporal circumstances, and who was ultimately susceptible to error even in the execution of his Divine mission."⁴⁴ Later orthodoxy replaced that picture. That is a claim about how the tradition edited its own memory, not about Muhammad's honesty — and it is the stronger argument.

What the test cannot decide

Everything above bears on one question: was Muhammad honest? The answer the evidence supports is yes. But a believer's question is different. He wants to know whether the voice was God's. On that question, sincerity is silent, and pretending otherwise is the mistake this section exists to prevent.

The biblical tests are circular here, and this article says so first

Deuteronomy 13:1-5 disqualifies a prophet who works a genuine sign and then says "let us follow other gods."⁸⁰ 1 John 4:1-3 disqualifies any spirit that refuses to confess Jesus as the Christ come in the flesh.⁸¹ Galatians 1:8 condemns any other gospel, even from an angel.⁸² All three are doctrinal tests, and Islam's answer is that the canon carrying them has been altered — the tahrif claim, which has its own article. To a Muslim, running Deuteronomy 13 against Muhammad is like running the Quran against Jesus. Deuteronomy 18:20-22 is the least circular, because anyone can check whether a prediction came true.⁸³ Even it has a complication: Jonah announces Nineveh's overthrow in forty days with no stated condition, and Nineveh is not overthrown.

The test that does not presuppose any scripture

Four criteria, none of which requires a reader to accept the Bible or the Quran:

Public, checkable, dated predictions with a low prior — said in advance, specific enough to fail, scored on the whole corpus rather than on curated hits.
Miracles with independent attestation — attested by parties with no stake, or at minimum reported early, by named witnesses, in sources circulating where the events allegedly happened.
Internal coherence — does the message contradict itself, or need an abrogation machinery to hold together?
The accuracy of verifiable claims about the world and the past.

These are the criteria this project already applies to Joseph Smith and to the New Testament. Applying a different standard here would be the exact double standard the series forbids.

On criterion 1 the Quran has almost nothing scorable. Joseph Smith is much easier to test, because he made dated, checkable predictions in documents that survive from before the events. Muhammad's corpus contains very few. Quran 30:2-4, the Byzantine victory "within a few years," is the standard example, and it is disputed on both its vowelling and its date; Noldeke himself warned that the reference of that passage to any particular battle "is by no means so certain that positive conclusions can be drawn from it."⁴⁷ So the prediction test has too little data to run, and that is a fact about the corpus rather than a verdict.

On criterion 2 the Quran and the hadith point in different directions. The Quran repeatedly refuses to produce signs on demand. Asked why no miracles are sent down, the answer is "the signs are only with Allah, and I am only a clear warner."⁹ When the Meccans list their demands — a spring, a garden, the sky falling in pieces, a house of gold, an ascent to heaven — the reply is a disclaimer, not a wonder: "Say, 'Exalted is my Lord! Was I ever but a human messenger?'"⁸⁴ The same pattern recurs at Quran 6:109, 10:20, 13:7, 21:5 and 25:7-8.

The hadith supply the signs anyway. The moon splitting; water flowing from between his fingers; one kid and a measure of barley feeding an army at the trench.⁸⁵⁸⁶³⁹ The classical harmonisation is coherent and is worth stating in the form a Muslim will recognise: Muhammad did work wonders, but they are not his defining sign. His own reported saying is in Bukhari: "Every Prophet was given miracles because of which people believed, but what I have been given, is Divine Inspiration which Allah has revealed to me."⁸⁷

The tension is real but should not be overstated. What the harmonisation cannot do is make the sign reports evidentially useful to an outsider, for four reasons. The Quran does not mention any of them, except on the standard reading of Quran 54:1-2, which is grammatically ambiguous between a past event and an eschatological one — which is why the commentators argue about it. They come from the hadith pool, whose weight is the subject of the hadith article. They belong to the genre built to answer inter-religious challenge: Mareike Koertner's study dates the "proofs of prophethood" literature to "a continuous tradition from the mid-2nd/8th century onward" originating "in circles of well-respected ḥadīth scholars."⁸⁸ And none has independent attestation — no non-Muslim source records the moon splitting, and a split moon is the most publicly checkable claim in the whole corpus.

The honest way to put this to a Muslim reader: the Quran's own strategy is not to point at wonders. It points at itself. That is a defensible strategy for a scripture. It also means the miracle reports are not where the Muslim case is strongest, and not where a critic should spend his fire.

Islam's own criteria, and when they were built

This line does not require the Muslim reader to concede anything at the start, which makes it stronger than Deuteronomy.

Isma, the doctrine that a prophet is protected from sin, is how the tradition absorbs the Quran's rebukes of its own messenger. The Study Quran states the mainstream Sunni position: after becoming a prophet "he is protected from sin, having thereafter the attribute of 'iṣmah."²³ Shahab Ahmed's work shows this doctrine hardening later, and shows why: "The logic of the Ḥadīth project required an infallible Prophet whose words and deeds would lay down legal, praxial, and creedal norms for pious mimesis."⁴⁴ The earliest exegetes read the Quran and the historical memory "to mean that Prophets apparently did err and did fall victim to Satan — even in the transmission of Divine Revelation."⁴⁴

That is not an argument that Muhammad was a false prophet. It is an argument that the Islamic standard for prophethood was assembled after the fact, around the man it was designed to certify — and it means the Quran's own rebukes sit awkwardly with the doctrine that later grew up to shield him. The reinterpretations are available and coherent: Quran 48:2 is read as pre-emptive forgiveness, Quran 80:1-10 as tark al-awla, leaving what is better rather than doing what is wrong. They are also visibly reactive.

Does the test convict a biblical prophet? Run it and see

A test built so that only Christianity can pass is not a test.

On independent attestation of miracles, the Hebrew prophets score zero. Elijah's contest on Carmel is reported only by the tradition that venerates him. A criterion demanding outside attestation retires most of the Old Testament along with the splitting of the moon, and this article admits it.
On prediction, the biblical record includes disputed cases inside its own covers. Ezekiel 29:18-20 concedes that after Nebuchadnezzar's long campaign against Tyre "he and his army received no wages from Tyre for the work he carried out against it," and offers him Egypt as compensation.⁸⁹
On self-serving legislation the contrast is real, and it is the sharpest instrument in the test. Samuel's public challenge is "Whose ox have I taken? Whose donkey have I taken? … From whose hand have I taken a bribe?"⁹⁰ Elisha refuses Naaman's gift — "I will take nothing from you" — and his servant is punished for taking it behind his back.⁹¹ Moses, the one Hebrew prophet who is also a legislator, legislates his own tribe out of land inheritance, gives the priesthood to Aaron's line rather than his own, and has his own disqualification from Canaan recorded in the same book.⁹²⁹³ A skeptic can reply that these are in-house stories too. He is right, and the reply is printed rather than hidden.
Jesus left no estate, took no wife, held no office, and was executed. The earliest Christian documents record his relatives disbelieving him, his closest disciple denying him, and his cry of dereliction. He scores at the top on embarrassment and at the bottom on independently attested miracle, since Tacitus and Josephus attest the movement and the execution, not the wonders. So the Muhammad case and the Jesus case fail the same criterion, and a Christian who leans on independent attestation against the moon-splitting owes an account of the empty tomb. This project's account is in the mythicism article.

The consequence has to be said out loud. The two criteria that actually separate "true prophet" from "sincere but mistaken" are prediction and independently attested sign. On Muhammad, the first has almost no data and the second scores zero by a standard that also scores zero for Elijah. The test does not deliver a clean win on the question that matters most. Pretending otherwise would be the exact failure this article was built to avoid.

Scoring the five hypotheses

Six axes, each with its evidence pool named, so that a reader who distrusts one pool can see exactly which findings move. The scores are reported separately and not added up, because the axes are not commensurable and a single number would hide the fact that the case is strong on some and empty on others.

Axis	Question	Pool	Result
1. Costly signalling	Did he bear serious, sustained cost before any prospect of gain?	sira + Meccan Quran	Long, severe cost with no visible return. Against H3.
2. Personal enrichment	Did he end rich? Did his family?	hadith	Died with a mule, weapons and land already given away; family barred from the alms. Against H3.
3. Self-serving legislation	Do the revelations grant him rights others lack, and do they track his power?	Quran only	21 personal grants, all Medinan, including an explicit one-man exemption. Most explained by circumstance; a residue is not. For H4 over H1.
4. Self-correction	Does the revelation rebuke him, and do the rebukes cost him anything?	Quran only	18 rebukes, 9 Meccan and 9 Medinan, including one in the last surah. Three of the sharpest end in an authorisation. Mixed, leaning against H3 and H4.
5. Checkable prediction	Low-prior, dated, pre-recorded predictions, scored on the whole corpus	Quran	Too few scorable items to run the test.
6. Independent attestation of signs	Are the claimed miracles attested outside the movement, or early and incidentally?	non-Muslim sources; earliest Muslim layers	None outside the movement. But this criterion also scores zero for Elijah.

Axes 1, 2 and 4 retire the fraud hypothesis. Axis 3 favours the Mecca-then-Medina reading over the true-prophet reading, though not as decisively as the raw count suggests. Axes 5 and 6 are the only two that separate a true prophet from a sincere man who was mistaken, and axis 5 has almost no data while axis 6 scores zero by a standard this article applies to the Hebrew prophets as well.

Where the evidence lands

The sharpest statement of the pattern in the whole literature is not by a Christian. It is by Maxime Rodinson, a Marxist and an atheist, in a book whose foreword calls Muhammad "a man who, during most of his life at least, was profoundly and sincerely religious."¹¹ Rodinson describes what happened to the revelations at Medina, borrowing a line from Leone Caetani: "the Koran became a kind of newspaper, publishing the orders of the day to the troops, passing judgement on domestic affairs and explaining the ups and downs of the conflict."¹¹ He then quotes the Danish Arabist Frants Buhl with approval: "when we see how his later revelations sometimes come to the aid of his less elevated inclinations, when we observe how he becomes increasingly cautious in producing revelations to back him up, and how these, obviously enough, often contain conclusions at which he has himself arrived after reflection and meditation on the needs of the situation or even as a result of suggestions made by those close to him, it is very hard for us to believe that they appeared in the same innocent fashion as in the earlier period."¹¹

And then Rodinson asks the question this article has been asking, and answers it: "Had the inspired visionary been transformed into an impostor, driven by necessity to produce a convenient revelation at the appropriate moment and at no other …?" His answer is two sentences long. "All this is true, but does not necessarily imply any deliberate deception. Men's capacity for self-deception is infinite."¹¹

That is where this article lands too, and it lands there by a different route. What is firm: the fraud hypothesis fails, and the revisionist ceiling limits any charge resting on the sira. What is reasonably firm: the chronological asymmetry inside the Quran is real, most of it is explained by the change from preacher to head of state, and a residue — Quran 33:37, 33:50, 33:51 and 33:38 — is not. What is uncertain, and stays uncertain: whether that residue is unconscious self-service or revelation with unwelcome content. Counting cannot settle it, and Watt's inversion of Aisha's remark is a good answer to it.

The bottom line. Muhammad's life looks like the life of a man who sincerely believed he was receiving revelation, whose message became inseparable from his political position, and whose revelations, in the one area where circumstance does not explain them, tracked his personal wishes closely enough that his own wife noticed out loud. That is a conclusion against the fraud reading and against an untroubled reading of prophethood alike. A Christian who wants to argue that Muhammad was not a prophet has to argue it on other ground: the absence of evidential signs the Quran itself declines to supply, the contradictions with the earlier revelation Muhammad claimed to confirm, and the moral problems in the record. Calling him a liar is not one of those grounds, and the sources will not carry it.

The strongest Muslim responses

These are the best serious answers, quoted accurately, traced to the evidence they rest on, and answered.

1. "The rebukes refute the whole thing." This is the strongest response and it is largely right. It defeats the fraud hypothesis outright. What it does not do is establish revelation, because — as Watt saw and stated — a man may be sincere and mistaken, and self-deception explains a rebuke as easily as divine authorship does. The answer this article gives is that the rebuke evidence is granted in full and moved to the column where it belongs.

2. "Watt himself rejects the idea that Medina corrupted him." He does, and it is the strongest objection to this article's own leaning: "there are no solid grounds for thinking that Muhammad's character declined after the Hijrah. … The allegations of moral defects are attached to incidents belonging to the Medinan and not the Meccan period; yet … they marked no failure in Muhammad to live up to his ideals but were in accordance with his moral principles. As the ruler of Medina was a man of his time, so also was the persecuted preacher of Mecca."¹⁰ The answer: Watt's point defeats the character version of the claim and this article does not make that version. It does not touch the textual version, which is that the Quran's personal grants are 21-0 Medinan and its personal limits 8-4 Meccan. Watt was not counting.

3. "Aisha's remark shows the opposite of what critics think." Watt makes this argument and it is a good one: she "was jealous, she cannot be taken as an impartial witness. On the contrary, if a remark like this could be made to Muhammad without disturbing his belief in himself, that tends to confirm the view that he was sincere."¹⁰ That is right, and it is why this article uses the remark to establish that the pattern was visible to contemporaries, not to establish fraud. A man who can hear that from his wife and not flinch is probably not running a con.

4. "The Zaynab marriage abolished a rule for everyone, not just for him." Quran 33:37 ends by giving the general purpose: so that there be no discomfort for believers concerning the wives of their adopted sons. Watt cites S. Kohn's version of the argument: if Muhammad had merely wanted to marry Zaynab, he could have made it a khalisa, a special privilege for himself; since he made it a general rule, something else must be involved.¹⁰ This is a real point. Two things weaken it. The Quran does use the khalisa formula elsewhere for exactly that purpose, thirteen verses later at 33:50 — so the option was taken in the neighbouring passage. And Watt himself thinks the erotic version of the story is later embellishment, noting that Zaynab was about thirty-five or thirty-eight at the marriage.¹⁰ Granting Watt that, the strongest form of the critical point is not lust. It is that a personal dispute was settled by a text.

5. "The marriage exemption is a burden, not a licence." Quran 33:52 then forbids him further wives, and 33:53 forbids anyone ever to marry his widows. He is locked in, not turned loose. This is a serious response. Its weakness is that the tradition itself reports 33:52 as later lifted — Aisha in Tirmidhi and al-Nasa'i: "The Messenger of Allah did not die until the women had been made lawful for him."⁴⁹ A Muslim who accepts those collections has to reckon with that; a Muslim who does not can decline it, since the printed grades are al-Albani's modern judgements.

6. "Most of the marriages were political." Umm Habiba was the daughter of Abu Sufyan, the Quraysh leader; Safiyya was the daughter of the Khaybar chief; Juwayriya's marriage freed a hundred families of her tribe. This is true and traceable, and it is a real answer to the "in it for the women" charge. It does not answer the exemption question, because a political motive for a marriage is not a reason for a scriptural exemption from the law binding everyone else.

7. "The occasions-of-revelation reports are interpretation, not memory." This is the sharpest methodological response, and it is correct. Al-Wahidi himself warned against inventing occasions, and his own translator notes that some of the occasions he prints are poorly authenticated, some are attached to more than one incident, some are self-contradictory, and "others are not occasions at all."¹⁹ The clearest demonstration is Quran 66:1-5: the tradition transmits two irreconcilable occasions for the same five verses — a jar of honey in Bukhari and Muslim, and Muhammad's Coptic concubine Maria in al-Nasa'i and Ibn Sa'd — and Ibn Sa'd simply prints both side by side without deciding.⁹⁴⁹⁵⁷⁶ That is a genuine and important point, and it cuts against a large part of the popular case. It is also why this article's counting exercise uses the Quran alone and does not depend on any occasion report.

8. "The sources are too late to convict." Legitimate, within limits. Any charge resting only on Ibn Ishaq or al-Waqidi — Abu Afak, Asma bint Marwan, Umm Qirfa's manner of death, the Satanic verses, the Nakhla sequence — can be declined without inconsistency, and this article marks each of those as sira-only. The limit is that the same move retires the Meccan persecution, the Utba offer and the sun-and-moon reply, which are the best evidence for Muhammad's sincerity and come from the same book. The Quran-only count in this article was built to sit under that ceiling and is unaffected by it.

Common objections and responses

"He invented Islam to get rich, powerful and married"

Retire this. It is the most common Christian claim about Muhammad and the tradition's own most trusted texts contradict it: the estate, the pawned armour, the alms ban, the Meccan decade. Watt, Rodinson and Crone — an Anglican, an atheist and a skeptic — reject the fraud reading independently. An apologist who leads with it will lose every informed reader in the room, and deserves to.

"The Satanic verses prove he was making it up"

Retire this too, in that form. Shahab Ahmed's study declines to say the incident happened and rebuts the argument that Muslims would never have invented it. Citing him as proving it historical is a misuse a well-read opponent will catch. What he does establish — that the earliest Muslims held a picture of a fallible prophet, and that later orthodoxy replaced it — is the stronger point.

"He had his critics murdered"

Half of this holds and half does not. Ka'b b. al-Ashraf and Abu Rafi' are in Bukhari. Abu Afak and Asma bint Marwan, the two that make the strongest rhetorical impression, are not in Bukhari or Muslim at all, and most Muslim scholars reject them on grounds that are methodologically consistent. Listing all four together as equally attested is the commonest error in the polemical literature.

"He married a six-year-old"

The report is sahih, and the leading modern study says it is not history. A Christian who uses hadith criticism elsewhere cannot ignore Joshua Little's conclusion here, and the contextual defence is real. What survives is narrower: the tradition turned the report into a legal precedent and gave it a chapter heading, and that afterlife is a fact whatever happened.

"The rebukes prove he was honest, so the Quran must be from God"

This is the mirror-image error, made from the Muslim side, and it does not follow. Honesty and accuracy are different properties, and every hypothesis except the fraud hypothesis predicts the rebukes equally well.

"You are judging a seventh-century man by twenty-first-century standards"

Partly fair, and this article grants it where it applies: polygamy, slavery, captive-taking and collective punishment were the surrounding norms, not innovations, and Muhammad's contemporaries were not scandalised by any of them. Watt puts the choice of standard honestly and then declines to make the second judgement.¹⁰ But a Christian cannot decline it, because the Christian claim is that there is a standard above both centuries. And the argument cuts both ways: the same claim that shields Muhammad from modern judgement also removes the claim that his moral teaching was ahead of its time, which is one of the four things a true prophet was predicted to deliver.

"Islam's spread proves God was with him"

Success is not evidence of truth, and no serious party should use it. If rapid growth certified a religion, it would certify several that Muslims reject. Watt's own verdict is the most generous thing a non-Muslim historian has said, and it still does not amount to certification: Muhammad "was a man in whom creative imagination worked at deep levels and produced ideas relevant to the central questions of human existence … Not all the ideas he proclaimed are true and sound, but by God's grace he has been enabled to provide millions of men with a better religion than they had before."¹⁵

What evidence would change the conclusion?

What would strengthen the Muslim claim.

A dated, checkable, low-prior prediction established from a Quranic text demonstrably fixed before the event. Quran 30:2-4 is the only candidate, and it is disputed on both its reading and its date. If it could be settled, axis 5 would come alive and this article would have to be rewritten.
Verse-level dating showing that Quran 33:50 and 33:51 were early Medinan responses to a documented crisis rather than convenient rulings. This is the single highest-value piece of work anyone could do against this article, because the whole residue of the counting argument sits on those two verses.
Any sign report traceable to a first-century source outside the "proofs of prophethood" genre, or to a non-Muslim source. That would move axis 6 off zero.
A demonstration that the Quran contains material its speaker could not have supplied. That is the only kind of evidence that separates a true prophet from a sincere man who was mistaken, and it belongs to the inimitability and science articles rather than to this one.

What would weaken it.

A documented early admission of composition, from any party. None exists.
Chain-and-text analysis pushing the "convenient revelation" reports — Aisha's remark, Umar's agreements — securely back into the first Islamic century. That would make the contemporary-perception point much harder to decline.
Evidence that the residue in Table A is larger than three or four verses. A reader who applies the counting rule and finds more of it than this article did should say so; the raw list is printed above precisely so that can be checked.

What would not change anything, in either direction. More episodes. The list of grievances is already long and it has stopped being informative. The persecution at Mecca and the poverty at Medina are equally predicted by three of the five hypotheses, and the twentieth episode of Medinan hard dealing will not separate them either. The question was never whether Muhammad's life contains disturbing material. It was whether that material shows him inventing a religion, and the answer the evidence gives is no.

Sources

1.
al-Bukhari, Muhammad. Sahih al-Bukhari 2739. n.d. Book 55 (Wills), Hadith 2: Narrated Amr bin al-Harith: “When Allah's Messenger died, he did not leave any Dirham or Dinar (i.e. money), a slave or a slave woman or anything else except his white mule, his arms and a piece of land which he had given in charity.” A collection of reports about what Muhammad said and did, compiled by Muhammad al-Bukhari (d. 256/870) about 240 years after the events. The collection carries no external grading of its reports, so inclusion in it is itself the compiler's claim. The article uses this report for the estate Muhammad left at his death: a white mule, his weapons and a piece of land he had already given away. ↩ ↩
2.
al-Bukhari, Muhammad. Sahih al-Bukhari 2916. n.d. Narrated Aisha: “Allah's Messenger died while his (iron) armor was mortgaged to a Jew for thirty Sas of barley.” A report from al-Bukhari's collection of hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did. The article uses it for the debt Muhammad left unpaid at his death, his iron armour mortgaged to a Jew for barley. ↩ ↩
3.
Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj. Sahih Muslim 1072a. n.d. Two of Muhammad's kinsmen ask to be appointed collectors of the alms so as to take the collectors' share. “He (the Holy Prophet) said: It does not become the family of Muhammad (to accept) sadaqat for they are the impurities of people.” He then orders their dowers paid from the fifth of the war gains instead. A report from the Sahih collection of Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 261/875), a collection of hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did. The article uses it for the refused revenue: Muhammad barred his own kinsmen from the alms he controlled. ↩ ↩
4.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 80:1-10: “The Prophet frowned and turned away / Because there came to him the blind man, [interrupting]. / But what would make you perceive, [O Muhammad], that perhaps he might be purified / Or be reminded and the remembrance would benefit him? / As for he who thinks himself without need, / To him you give attention. / And not upon you [is any blame] if he will not be purified. / But as for he who came to you striving [for knowledge] / While he fears [Allah], / From him you are distracted.” The bracketed words are the translators'. The words "The Prophet" in verse 1 are supplied by Saheeh International and are not in the Arabic; Pickthall (1930), Arberry (1955) and Abdel Haleem (Oxford, 2004) all read simply "He frowned." The Quran's own words, here a passage in which Muhammad is rebuked for turning away from a blind man. The article uses it as the first example of the Quran reproving its own messenger. ↩
1. 4a.
  Verse 80:1-10: Abdel Haleem's translation (Oxford University Press, 2004) reads: “He frowned and turned away when the blind man came to him — for all you know, he might have grown in spirit … but from the one who has come to you full of eagerness and awe you allow yourself to be distracted.” The passage shifts from third person in verses 1-2 to second person from verse 3 on: the grammar of a public reproof. ↩
5.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 9:43: Saheeh International's translation reads: “May Allah pardon you, [O Muhammad]; why did you give them permission [to remain behind]?” Abdel Haleem's translation (Oxford, 2004) reads: “God forgive you [Prophet]! Why did you give them permission to stay at home before it had become clear to you which of them spoke the truth and which were liars?” Surah 9 is number 113 of 114 in the Egyptian standard revelation order. The Quran's own words, here a verse in which God rebukes Muhammad for giving some people permission to stay behind. The article calls it the hardest datum for the Mecca-then-Medina hypothesis, because it is a rebuke given in the final year, when his authority over Arabia was absolute. ↩ ↩
6.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 33:50: “O Prophet, indeed We have made lawful to you your wives to whom you have given their due compensation and those your right hand possesses from what Allah has returned to you [of captives] and the daughters of your paternal uncles and the daughters of your paternal aunts and the daughters of your maternal uncles and the daughters of your maternal aunts who emigrated with you and a believing woman if she gives herself to the Prophet [and] if the Prophet wishes to marry her; [this is] only for you, excluding the [other] believers.” The closing Arabic phrase is khalisatan laka min duni al-mu'minin. Pickthall's translation reads: “a privilege for thee only, not for the (rest of) believers.” Arberry's translation reads: “for thee exclusively, apart from the believers.” The Quran's own verse listing the women made lawful to Muhammad. The article uses its closing phrase, which it says every standard translation reads as the only rule in the Quran set apart for one named man against the other believers. ↩ ↩
7.
al-Bukhari, Muhammad. Sahih al-Bukhari 4788. n.d. Book 65 (Tafsir), Hadith 310: Deprecated USC-MSA reference: Vol. 6, Book 60, Hadith 311. Narrated Aisha, on the revelation of Quran 33:51: “I said (to the Prophet), 'I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires.'” The same remark appears in Sahih Muslim 1464a as: “It seems to me that your Lord hastens to satisfy your desire,”. and in Sahih al-Bukhari 5113 as: “I do not see, but, that your Lord hurries in pleasing you.” A single report from al-Bukhari's collection, of the kind called hadith: a report of what Muhammad said or did. The report comes from his wife Aisha, and the article uses it as the sharpest remark anyone made to Muhammad about his revelations. ↩ ↩
8.
al-Bukhari, Muhammad. Sahih al-Bukhari 402. n.d. Book 8, Hadith 53: Narrated Umar ibn al-Khattab: “My Lord agreed with me in three things: ... -3. Once the wives of the Prophet made a united front against the Prophet and I said to them, 'It may be if he (the Prophet) divorced you, (all) that his Lord (Allah) will give him instead of you wives better than you.' So this verse (the same as I had said) was revealed.” The verse is Quran 66:5. A single report from al-Bukhari's collection, of the kind called hadith: a report of what Muhammad said or did. Its source is Umar ibn al-Khattab, and the article uses it for his boast that revelation three times matched advice he had already given. ↩ ↩
9.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 29:50-51: “But they say, 'Why are not signs sent down to him from his Lord?' Say, 'The signs are only with Allah, and I am only a clear warner.' And is it not sufficient for them that We revealed to you the Book which is recited to them?” Abdel Haleem renders the Arabic ayat here as "miracles": “They say, 'Why have no miracles been sent to him by his Lord?' Say, 'Miracles lie in God's hands; I am simply here to warn you plainly.'” The Quran's own words, here its answer to people who asked why no signs were sent down to Muhammad. The article uses it to show that the Quran refuses to produce miracles on demand, which matters for testing a claim to be a prophet. ↩ ↩
10.
Watt, W. Montgomery. Muhammad at Medina. Oxford University Press. 1956. The second of two volumes by W. Montgomery Watt on Muhammad, following Muhammad at Mecca. Its preface says the two together are meant to be a history of Muhammad's life and of the origins of the Islamic community, written so that a reader with no Arabic can follow it. The article uses it for Watt's own argument that Muhammad was sincere, and for his case that Muhammad's character did not decline after the move to Medina. ↩
1. 10a.
  Page 325: “These matters can only be satisfactorily explained and understood on the assumption that Muhammad was sincere, that is, that he genuinely believed that what we now know as the Qur'an was not the product of his own mind, but came to him from God and was true. This conception of Muhammad's sincerity, however, is open to possible misunderstandings and requires to be made more precise. Thus, to say that Muhammad was sincere does not imply acceptance of the Qur'an as a genuine revelation from God; a man may without contradiction hold that Muhammad truly believed that he was receiving revelations from God but that he was mistaken in this belief. Further, once this point is grasped, it should be clear that, even if true, the alleged fact that the revelations fitted in with Muhammad's desires and pandered to his selfish pleasure would not prove him insincere; it would merely show him to be capable of self-deception.” ↩
2. 10b.
  Page 325: “The extreme form of the view was that Muhammad did not believe in his revelations and did not in any sense receive them from 'outside himself', but deliberately composed them, and then published them in such a way as to deceive people into following him, so gaining power to satisfy his ambition and his lust. Such a view is incredible. Above all it gives no satisfying explanation of Muhammad's readiness to endure hardship in his Meccan days, of the respect in which he was held by men of high intelligence and upright character, and of his success in founding a world religion which has produced men of undoubted saintliness.” ↩
3. 10c.
  Page 332: “It may be remarked at this point that there are no solid grounds for thinking that Muhammad's character declined after the Hijrah. Too facile a use has been made of the principle that all power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The allegations of moral defects are attached to incidents belonging to the Medinan and not the Meccan period; yet, if the exposition just given of these incidents is sound, they marked no failure in Muhammad to live up to his ideals but were in accordance with his moral principles. As the ruler of Medina was a man of his time, so also was the persecuted preacher of Mecca.” The criticisms his contemporaries actually made are described on the same page as: “based on no moral criterion, but on a conservatism which was akin to superstition.” ↩ ↩ ↩
4. 10d.
  Page 328: “One point at which the actions of Muhammad or the Muslims were disapproved for no merely selfish reasons was the expedition to Nakhlah. The disapproval, however, was not on moral but on religious grounds; something sacred had been violated, and those who disapproved were presumably afraid of supernatural punishment. In this instance Muhammad deliberately decided in the end to oppose public opinion, believing that he was thereby following God's command and attacking a pagan superstition. In the circumstances, then, Muhammad's conduct is that of a moral reformer and not of a wicked man.” ↩
5. 10e.
  Page 328: “If contemporaries showed some surprise at the execution of all the males of Qurayzah, it was because Muhammad was not afraid of any consequences of such an act; the behaviour of Qurayzah during the siege of Medina was regarded as having cancelled their agreement with Muhammad.” ↩
6. 10f.
  Page 327: “With regard to standards there are two main possibilities: we may ask, 'Was Muhammad a good man according to the standards of the Arabia of his day?', or we may ask, 'Was he a good man according to the standards of, say, the best people in Europe about the year 1950?'” Page 333: Watt declines to render the second judgement, saying: “I do not propose here to attempt any judgement of this sort, but shall be content if I have fairly presented the evidence on which such a judgement must be based.” ↩ ↩
7. 10g.
  Pages 325–326: On Aisha's remark. “Even if she really said this (and it is not a later invention), it would only show that she was suspicious of the correspondence between the revelation and Muhammad's desires; but, as the remark itself suggests that she was jealous, she cannot be taken as an impartial witness. On the contrary, if a remark like this could be made to Muhammad without disturbing his belief in himself, that tends to confirm the view that he was sincere.” Watt's footnote at p. 325 n. 1 lists the sources for the remark as "IS, viii. 112. 5, 141. 2; Ibn Hanbal, vi. 134, 158; al-Bukhari, Tafsir (65) on Q. 33. 50/49," which independently confirms the Bukhari book number. ↩
8. 10h.
  Page 330: Note 3, citing S. Kohn. Watt reports the argument in this form: “if Muhammad had merely wanted to marry Zaynab, he could have made this a khalisah, special privilege, for himself; since he made it a general rule, other points must be involved.” ↩
9. 10i.
  Pages 329–331: “About the main outline of the story there can be little dispute, but the significance of the various actions is a matter for discussion. One point is tolerably certain, and that is the reason for the criticism of Muhammad's action by his contemporaries. They were not moved in the slightest by what some Europeans have regarded as the sensual and voluptuous character of his behaviour. They were opposed to the marriage because in their eyes it was incestuous.” “Despite the stories, then, it is unlikely that he was swept off his feet by the physical attractiveness of Zaynab. The other wives are said to have feared her beauty; but her age when she married Muhammad was thirty-five, or perhaps rather thirty-eight, which is fairly advanced for an Arab woman.” Watt also holds, at p. 329, that later Muslims: “seem to have touched up the stories about his relations with women, such as those about the jealousies in his hareem and his 'love at first sight' for Zaynab.” The lurid version, that he saw Zaynab undressed through a lifted door-covering, rests on a single late chain in al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari vol. VIII, The Victory of Islam, trans. Michael Fishbein (SUNY, 1997), p. 4 [Leiden I:1462-1463], transmitted from Ibn Zayd (d. 182/798). It is not in Ibn Hisham's recension of Ibn Ishaq. An article that leads with that image is leading with its weakest link. ↩
10. 10j.
  Page 395: In Excursus L, "Muhammad's Marriages," on the last clause of Quran 33:50, khalisatan la-ka min dun al-mu'minin: “These words are now always taken to mean '(this is a) special (privilege) for you as distinct from the believers'; the special privilege is often held to be marriage with a woman who gives herself to Muhammad without a wait and without a 'dower'. This interpretation is in harmony with the attempt by 'Umar and others to stop mut'ah unions, and could be a device to bolster up the prohibition of mut'ah. While this interpretation is not impossible, a more natural one would be to take khalisatan as an adjective qualifying 'woman', so that the clause would mean '(keeping herself) special for you and not (having sexual relations with other) believers'. This would be in line with the insistence on women becoming 'monandric'.” ↩
11.
Rodinson, Maxime. Mohammed. Allen Lane / Penguin. Translated by Anne Carter. 1971. Page xiii: Rodinson states his own position in the foreword, as an atheist writing about: “a man who, during most of his life at least, was profoundly and sincerely religious.” A biography of Muhammad by Maxime Rodinson, a Marxist and an atheist, first published in France in 1961 under the title Mahomet. Rodinson explains the Prophet's life through both his personal circumstances and the society around him, and says that no new source for it has been found or is likely to be. The article uses it because the sharpest statement of the pattern in the literature comes from him, and not from a Christian. ↩ ↩
1. 11a.
  Pages 218–219: “Had the inspired visionary been transformed into an impostor, driven by necessity to produce a convenient revelation at the appropriate moment and at no other, in the way that mediums have been known to resort to fraud in similar cases? 'A'isha certainly remarked sarcastically on one occasion on the Lord's readiness to answer her husband's wishes. There are also a number of difficult occasions, when we find him hesitating to make up his mind, asking advice and thinking things over, before the revelation suddenly descends from heaven and solves the problem along the lines of what human (sometimes all too human) cogitation might have suggested. 'Umar boasted innocently of having three times given advice which turned out miraculously to correspond with the dictates of heaven. And on one occasion after the Prophet's death, he exclaimed, with regard to a question of some delicacy: 'If God's Prophet were still alive, I daresay a Koran would have been revealed about this.'” ↩
2. 11b.
  Page 217: “What was needed above all was to mobilize men's energies for immediate action, to denounce the enemy, reassure the armies of the faithful, justify the decisions taken, brand traitors and irresolute people for what they were, and give the community of the Faithful some rules by which to live. The Voice from on high conformed to these altered perspectives and to a great extent the character of the revelations changed. As Caetani puts it, the Koran became a kind of newspaper, publishing the orders of the day to the troops, passing judgement on domestic affairs and explaining the ups and downs of the conflict.” The line quoted is Rodinson's rendering of Leone Caetani (1869-1935). ↩
3. 11c.
  Page 218: Quoting Frants Buhl (1850-1932) with approval: “His sincerity appears beyond a doubt, especially in Mecca when we see how Allah hustled, chastised and led him into steps that he was extremely unwilling to take. But it is said that in Medina, as Buhl has very aptly expressed it, when we see how his later revelations sometimes come to the aid of his less elevated inclinations, when we observe how he becomes increasingly cautious in producing revelations to back him up, and how these, obviously enough, often contain conclusions at which he has himself arrived after reflection and meditation on the needs of the situation or even as a result of suggestions made by those close to him, it is very hard for us to believe that they appeared in the same innocent fashion as in the earlier period.” ↩
4. 11d.
  Page 219: “All this is true, but does not necessarily imply any deliberate deception. Men's capacity for self-deception is infinite.” And, continuing on the same page: “With success achieved, his own faith acknowledged, strengthened and confirmed by thousands of disciples, it was only natural that he should have fewer and fewer doubts about the promptings of his inner voice; and that these, too, should have conflicted less and less with the results of his conscious deliberations and with the urge of those strong instincts which were fostered by the relative comfort of his position, by the intoxicating influence of success and by the consciousness of power.” Page 218: Rodinson's own summary of the fraud thesis: “For several centuries the explanation produced by Christians and rationalists has been that Muhammad was guilty of falsification, by deliberately attributing to Allah his own thoughts and instructions. We have seen that this theory is not tenable.” ↩
12.
Crone, Patricia. “What do we actually know about Mohammed?” openDemocracy. Jun 10, 2008. “There is no doubt that Mohammed existed, occasional attempts to deny it notwithstanding.” A short essay for the openDemocracy website by Patricia Crone, a scholar of early Islam, on what can be known about Muhammad. She argues that the Muslim literary sources for his life begin around 750-800 CE, four to five generations after his death, but that he existed and that he uttered most of the messages in the Quran. The article uses it as the testimony of a skeptic of the Muslim sources who still grants that Muhammad believed the Quran came from God. ↩
1. 12a.
  Section Opening section: “In the case of Mohammed, Muslim literary sources for his life only begin around 750-800 CE (common era), some four to five generations after his death, and few Islamicists (specialists in the history and study of Islam) these days assume them to be straightforward historical accounts.” “There is no doubt that Mohammed existed, occasional attempts to deny it notwithstanding.” ↩
2. 12b.
  Section Later section: “Most importantly, we can be reasonably sure that the Qur'an is a collection of utterances that he made in the belief that they had been revealed to him by God. The book may not preserve all the messages he claimed to have received, and he is not responsible for the arrangement in which we have them. They were collected after his death — how long after is controversial. But that he uttered all or most of them is difficult to doubt.” ↩
13.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 53:2-4: “Your companion has not strayed, nor has he erred, nor does he speak from [his own] inclination. It is not but a revelation revealed.” Arberry (1955) reads: “your comrade is not astray, neither errs, nor speaks he out of caprice. This is naught but a revelation revealed.” The Quran's own words, here its statement about the honesty of the man who brought it. The article uses it to show the Quran's own version of the claim that Muhammad was honest. ↩
14.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 33:21: “There has certainly been for you in the Messenger of Allah an excellent pattern for anyone whose hope is in Allah and the Last Day and [who] remembers Allah often.” The Arabic phrase is uswa hasana. The Quran's own words, here the verse that holds Muhammad up as a pattern for believers. The article uses it because the Quran makes him the model for behaviour as well as the messenger. ↩
15.
Watt, W. Montgomery. Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman. Oxford University Press. 1961. A one-volume life of Muhammad by W. Montgomery Watt, condensed from his two larger volumes, Muhammad at Mecca and Muhammad at Medina. The preface says it follows the events more closely in chronological order and leaves out some detail. The article uses it for Watt's clearest statement that a sincere man can be mistaken, which the article calls the default position of the academic field.
1. 15a.
  Page 17: “To say that Muhammad was sincere does not imply that he was correct in his beliefs. A man may be sincere but mistaken. The modern Westerner has no difficulty in showing how Muhammad may have been mistaken. What seems to a man to come from 'outside himself' may actually come from his unconscious. This, of course, is not a final solution of the problem. It explains the form of Muhammad's experiences, as it does that of the experiences of the Old Testament prophets who proclaimed, 'Thus saith the Lord, . . .'; but it does not explain the content of these experiences.” ↩
2. 15b.
  Page 240: “He was a man in whom creative imagination worked at deep levels and produced ideas relevant to the central questions of human existence, so that his religion has had a widespread appeal, not only in his own age but in succeeding centuries. Not all the ideas he proclaimed are true and sound, but by God's grace he has been enabled to provide millions of men with a better religion than they had before they testified that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God.” Page 232: Watt's verdict on sincerity is at p. 232: “There is thus a strong case for holding that Muhammad was sincere. If in some respects he was mistaken, his mistakes were not due to deliberate lying or imposture.” ↩
16.
Margoliouth, D. S. Mohammed and the Rise of Islam. G. P. Putnam's Sons. 3rd edition. 1905. A biography of Muhammad, here the third edition of a book first published in 1905. Its preface surveys earlier lives of the Prophet, naming Gibbon, Muir and Sprenger. The article cites it as a Victorian statement of the view that Muhammad built his religion as a deliberate fraud, a view it says modern scholarship has almost dropped.
1. 16a.
  Page 89: “The possession of these advantages greatly helped this medium in producing belief in his sincerity; but the historian of Spiritualism, though uncertain how to account for all the phenomena, and acknowledging the difficulties which attend his explanation, is inclined to attribute all that is wonderful in the medium's performances to trickery. What is clear is that Mohammed possessed the same advantages as Podmore enumerates, and thereby won adherents; that nevertheless the process of revelation was so suspicious that one of the scribes employed to take down the effusions became convinced that it was imposture and discarded Islam in consequence.” ↩
17.
Muir, William. The Life of Mahomet. Volume 4. Smith, Elder and Co. 1861. Volume 4 of Muir's Life of Mahomet, by William Muir, of the Bengal Civil Service as the title page gives him. This volume covers the sixth year of the Hegira (Muhammad's move from Mecca to Medina), dated A.D. 627–628 in its chapter heading, with its raids and expeditions and the pilgrimage to Al Hodeihia in March A.D. 628. The article uses it as the classic statement of the view that Muhammad was sincere at Mecca and became self-serving at Medina.
1. 17a.
  Page 317: “We may readily admit, that at the first Mahomet did believe, or persuaded himself to believe, that his revelations were dictated by a divine agency. In the Meccan period of his life there certainly can be traced no personal ends or unworthy motives to belie this conclusion.” ↩
2. 17b.
  Page 318: “But the scene altogether changes at Medina. There the acquisition of temporal power, aggrandisement, and self-glorification, mingled with the grand object of the Prophet's previous life; and they were sought after and attained by precisely the same instrumentality. Messages from heaven were freely brought forward to justify his political conduct, equally with his religious precepts.” Page 319: “As the necessary result of this moral obliquity, we trace from the period of Mahomet's arrival at Medina a marked and rapid declension in the system he inculcated.” ↩
18.
Watt, W. Montgomery. Muhammad at Mecca. Oxford University Press. 1953. A 1953 study of Muhammad's life in Mecca, written at Edinburgh, covering the Arabian background, Muhammad's early life and call, and his primary message. The article uses it for Watt's rule that a historian must hold to Muhammad's sincerity until the opposite is conclusively proved.
1. 18a.
  Page 52: “Since Carlyle's lecture on Muhammad in Heroes and Hero-worship, the West has been aware that there was a good case to be made out for believing in Muhammad's sincerity. His readiness to undergo persecution for his beliefs, the high moral character of the men who believed in him and looked up to him as leader, and the greatness of his ultimate achievement — all argue his fundamental integrity. To suppose Muhammad an impostor raises more problems than it solves.” ↩
2. 18b.
  Page 52: “Thus, not merely must we credit Muhammad with essential honesty and integrity of purpose, if we are to understand him at all; if we are to correct the errors we have inherited from the past, we must in every particular case hold firmly to the belief in his sincerity until the opposite is conclusively proved; and we must not forget that conclusive proof is a much stricter requirement than a show of plausibility.” ↩
19.
al-Wahidi, Ali ibn Ahmad. Asbab al-Nuzul. Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, Amman. Translated by Mokrane Guezzou. n.d. Al-Wahidi (d. 468/1075) founded the "occasions of revelation" genre, the reports of what happened when each passage of the Quran came down. He warned in his own preface against inventing occasions, and the modern translator notes that some of the occasions he prints "are not well-authenticated" and that some "are not occasions at all." The article uses his reports for the traditional circumstances of several passages, and treats them as interpretation, not memory.
1. 19a.
  Page 162: On Quran 80:1, from Aisha. “(He frowned and turned away) was revealed about Ibn Umm Maktum, the blind. The latter went to the Prophet, Allah bless him and give him peace, and kept saying: 'O Messenger of Allah, guide me', while there were with the Messenger of Allah the leaders of the idolaters. The Prophet, Allah bless him and give him peace, kept avoiding him and turning to the others.” ↩
2. 19b.
  Page 162: A second report on the same verse. “After this, the Messenger of Allah, Allah bless him and give him peace, used to honour him, and would say, whenever he saw him: 'Welcome to the one about whom my Lord has rebuked me!'” ↩
3. 19c.
  Page 85: On Quran 8:67, Umar's account, which al-Wahidi notes is in Sahih Muslim. “The following day, 'Umar said: I went to see the Prophet, Allah bless him and give him peace, and found him sitting with Abu Bakr. They were both crying. I said: 'O Messenger of Allah, what is it that makes you and your companion weep? …' The Prophet, Allah bless him and give him peace, said: 'I am crying because of the suggestion of ransoming the prisoners which your fellow believers advised me to do. Your chastisement was closer to you than this tree.'” ↩
4. 19d.
  Page 130: A further transmission of the same remark of Aisha's. “I see that your Lord hastens for you what you desire.” ↩
5. 19e.
  Section Translator's introduction: The modern translator notes that among the occasions al-Wahidi prints, some. “are not well-authenticated, some occasions are cited in connection with more than one incident, some are self-contradictory while others are not occasions at all.” Al-Wahidi's own preface warns against inventing occasions, but he does not always keep his own rule. ↩
20.
The Qur'an. Translated by A. J. Arberry. 1955. Verse 8:67–68: “It is not for any Prophet to have prisoners until he make wide slaughter in the land. You desire the chance goods of the present world, and God desires the world to come … Had it not been for a prior prescription from God, there had afflicted you, for what you took, a mighty chastisement.” Verse 69: Verse 69, immediately following, declares the ransom lawful. Saheeh International's translation reads: “So consume what you have taken of war booty [as being] lawful and good.” The Quran, the Muslim scripture, in the English translation named. It is the revelation that rebukes Muhammad for ransoming the prisoners taken at Badr, the decision he had just profited from, and the article uses it for that rebuke. ↩
21.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 33:37: “And [remember, O Muhammad], when you said to the one on whom Allah bestowed favor and you bestowed favor, 'Keep your wife and fear Allah,' while you concealed within yourself that which Allah is to disclose. And you feared the people, while Allah has more right that you fear Him. So when Zayd had no longer any need for her, We married her to you in order that there not be upon the believers any discomfort concerning the wives of their claimed [i.e., adopted] sons when they no longer have need of them. And ever is the command of Allah accomplished.” Arberry translates the same verse as: “and thou wast concealing within thyself what God should reveal, fearing other men; and God has better right for thee to fear Him.” The Quran, the Muslim scripture, in the English translation named. The verse says Muhammad concealed within himself what God would disclose and feared people, when God has more right to be feared. The article pairs it with Aisha's remark that, had Muhammad concealed any revelation, he would have concealed this verse. ↩
22.
Sahih al-Bukhari, hadith 7420. n.d. Book 97 (Tawhid), section Hadith 48: Narrated Anas: “Zaid bin Haritha came to the Prophet complaining about his wife. The Prophet kept on saying (to him), 'Be afraid of Allah and keep your wife.' Aisha said, 'If Allah's Messenger were to conceal anything (of the Qur'an) he would have concealed this Verse.' Zainab used to boast before the wives of the Prophet and used to say, 'You were given in marriage by your families, while I was married (to the Prophet) by Allah from over seven Heavens.'” A collection of hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did, here cited for Aisha's remark on Quran 33:37. The article uses it to show that the tradition itself records that remark. ↩
23.
The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary. HarperOne. Edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. 2015. A modern English translation of the Quran with a commentary, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Its commentary uses abbreviations for the classical commentators: IJ for al-Tabari, IK for Ibn Kathir, Q for al-Qurtubi and JJ for al-Jalalayn. The article quotes it as the standard modern English Muslim commentary and uses it to show how the tradition itself reads these verses.
1. 23a.
  Verse 33:37: “When Zayd told the Prophet that his wife, Zaynab bint Jahsh, wished to divorce him, the Prophet replied, Retain your wife for yourself and reverence God (IJ, IK, Q), in order to dispel the appearance that he was in favor of the divorce so that he himself could marry Zaynab. Apparently he was hiding what was in his soul, which could have been his love for Zaynab, or that God had willed Zaynab to be His wife, or that he preferred that she divorce Zayd, or that he would marry Zaynab, were Zayd to divorce her (IJ). That the Prophet 'feared the people' refers to his worrying that people would misunderstand and say, 'He commands a man to divorce his wife and then marries her' (IJ, Q), or, 'He has married his son's wife,' since at that time Zayd was still known by his adopted name, Zayd ibn Muhammad (JJ). … Given the rebuke that is here delivered to the Prophet, it is said that no verse was more severe with him and that were the Prophet to have hidden any verse of the revelation, it would have been this verse (IJ, Q).” ↩
2. 23b.
  Verse 22:52: In the course of the traditional case against the "Satanic verses" report. “The Prophet was a man known for his honesty and trustworthiness who had, for several years before this incident occurred, along with his followers suffered terribly for condemning the idols of the Quraysh. He had also resisted several offers of money and power to relinquish his mission.” ↩
3. 23c.
  Verse 22:52: “Chronological considerations also cast doubt on the story, or at least its connection with 22:52 and 17:73-75. … Many of the versions of the story place the 'story of the cranes' in the fifth year of the revelation, at the time when some Muslims had sought refuge in Abyssinia. Surah 17 would have been revealed five or six years later, while Surah 22 would have been revealed at least eight years later, according to some chronologies. If either 22:52 or 17:73-75 were meant to give comfort or explanation to the Prophet, such a time lag would be highly unusual.” The same commentary notes that. “the often contradictory versions of the story are poorly sourced and poorly corroborated,”. and that on Islamic doctrine the prophets are ma'sum, protected from sin, “and from this perspective such an incident by definition would have been impossible.” ↩
4. 23d.
  Verse 26:20: “theologians, though not most, admitted the possibility that a prophet could 'err' or commit a small kind of sin before being invested with his mission, but after becoming a prophet or messenger he is protected from sin, having thereafter the attribute of 'iṣmah, meaning 'protected [from sin]' or 'inerrant [with respect to sin]'.” ↩
24.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 69:44–47: “And if Muhammad had made up about Us some [false] sayings, / We would have seized him by the right hand; / Then We would have cut from him the aorta. / And there is no one of you who could prevent [Us] from him.” Pickthall (1930) translates it: “And if he had invented false sayings concerning Us, We assuredly had taken him by the right hand and then severed his life-artery.” The Quran, the Muslim scripture, in the English translation named. It threatens Muhammad himself, and the article uses it to show that the revelation threatens its own messenger if he had made up sayings and attributed them to God. ↩
25.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 46:9: “Say, 'I am not something original among the messengers, nor do I know what will be done with me or with you. I only follow that which is revealed to me, and I am not but a clear warner.'” The Quran, the Muslim scripture, in the English translation named. Surah 46 al-Ahqaf is Meccan (revealed at Mecca, before Muhammad moved to Medina), number 66 in the Egyptian revelation order, a standard list of when each surah was revealed. The article uses it as an early disclaimer: a man inventing a religion would not have his God say that he does not know his own fate. ↩
26.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 6:50: “Say, 'I do not tell you that I have the depositories [containing the provision] of Allah or that I know the unseen, nor do I tell you that I am an angel. I only follow what is revealed to me.'” The Quran, the Muslim scripture, in the English translation named. Surah 6 is Meccan (revealed at Mecca, before Muhammad moved to Medina), number 55 in the Egyptian revelation order, a standard list of when each surah was revealed. The article cites it with the other Meccan disclaimers of power, in which Muhammad denies that he holds God's stores of provision or knows the unseen. ↩
27.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 7:188: “Say, 'I hold not for myself [the power of] benefit or harm, except what Allah has willed. And if I knew the unseen, I could have acquired much wealth, and no harm would have touched me.'” The Quran, the Muslim scripture, in the English translation named. Surah 7 is Meccan (revealed at Mecca, before Muhammad moved to Medina), number 39 in the Egyptian revelation order, a standard list of when each surah was revealed. The article cites it with the other Meccan disclaimers of power, in which Muhammad says that if he knew the unseen he could have acquired much wealth. ↩
28.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 10:15: “Say, 'It is not for me to change it on my own accord. I only follow what is revealed to me.'” The Quran, the Muslim scripture, in the English translation named. Surah 10 is Meccan (revealed at Mecca, before Muhammad moved to Medina), number 51 in the Egyptian revelation order, a standard list of when each surah was revealed. The article cites it with the other Meccan disclaimers of power, in which Muhammad says it is not for him to change the revelation on his own accord. ↩
29.
The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford University Press. Translated by A. Guillaume. 1955. Ibn Hisham's (d. 218/833) edition of Ibn Ishaq's (d. c. 150/767) biography of Muhammad, translated with an introduction and notes by A. Guillaume, who put back in round brackets, marked (T. ...), passages Ibn Hisham deleted and al-Tabari preserved. This is sira (the biographical tradition about the Prophet), not hadith (his reported sayings and deeds), and the hadith critics never graded it. The article uses it for the Quraysh's offers, the persecution of the early Muslims, the conquest of Mecca and the Nakhla raid, and does not treat it as proof.
1. 29a.
  Page 132: Utba ibn Rabi'a speaks for the Quraysh: “'If what you want is money, we will gather for you of our property so that you may be the richest of us; if you want honour, we will make you our chief so that no one can decide anything apart from you; if you want sovereignty, we will make you king, and if this ghost which comes to you, which you see, is such that you cannot get rid of him, we will find a physician for you, and exhaust our means in getting you cured, for often a familiar spirit gets possession of a man until he can be cured of it,' or words to that effect.” ↩
2. 29b.
  Page 119: “He answered, 'O my uncle, by God, if they put the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left on condition that I abandoned this course, until God has made it victorious, or I perish therein, I would not abandon it.' Then the apostle broke into tears, and got up.” ↩
3. 29c.
  Pages 143–145, section The polytheists persecute the Muslims of the lower classes.: “Then the Quraysh showed their enmity to all those who followed the apostle; every clan which contained Muslims attacked them, imprisoning them, and beating them, allowing them no food or drink, and exposing them to the burning heat of Mecca, so as to seduce them from their religion.” Page 144: On Bilal: “Umayya b. Khalaf … used to bring him out at the hottest part of the day and throw him on his back in the open valley and have a great rock put on his chest; then he would say to him, 'You will stay here till you die or deny Muhammad and worship Al-Lat and al-'Uzza.'” ↩
4. 29d.
  Page 159, section The document proclaiming a boycott.: “they came together and decided among themselves to write a document in which they should put a boycott on B. Hashim and B. Muttalib that they should not marry their women nor give women to them to marry; and that they should neither buy from them nor sell to them, and when they agreed on that they wrote it in a deed. Then they solemnly agreed on the points and hung the deed up in the middle of the Ka'ba to remind them of their obligations.” ↩
5. 29e.
  Pages 192–193: The Thaqif chiefs refuse him; one says: “Could not God have found someone better than you to send?” Page 192: “But they did not do so and stirred up their louts and slaves to insult him and cry after him until a crowd came together, and compelled him to take refuge in an orchard.” Page 193: The prayer: “'O God, to Thee I complain of my weakness, little resource, and lowliness before men. O Most Merciful, Thou art the Lord of the weak, and Thou art my Lord. To whom wilt Thou confide me? To one afar who will misuse me? Or to an enemy to whom Thou hast given power over me? If Thou art not angry with me I care not.'” ↩
6. 29f.
  Page 553: “Then he added, 'O Quraysh, what do you think that I am about to do with you?' They replied, 'Good. You are a noble brother, son of a noble brother.' He said, 'Go your way for you are the freed ones.'” The bracketed continuation, present in al-Tabari's recension and not in Ibn Hisham's, reads: “Thus the apostle let them go though God had given him power over their lives and they were his spoil. For this reason the Meccans were called 'the freed ones.'” The same page carries the address: “Every claim of privilege or blood or property are abolished by me except the custody of the temple and the watering of the pilgrims. … Man springs from Adam and Adam sprang from dust.” ↩
7. 29g.
  Pages 287–288: The Nakhla raid. Page 287: “The raiders took council among themselves, for this was the last day of Rajab, and they said, 'If you leave them alone tonight they will get into the sacred area and will be safe from you; and if you kill them, you will kill them in the sacred month,' so they were hesitant and feared to attack them. Then they encouraged each other, and decided to kill as many as they could of them and take what they had.” “When they came to the apostle, he said, 'I did not order you to fight in the sacred month,' and he held the caravan and the two prisoners in suspense and refused to take anything from them. When the apostle said that, the men were in despair and thought that they were doomed.” Page 288: “And when the Quran came down about that and God relieved the Muslims of their anxiety in the matter, the apostle took the caravan and the prisoners.” This is sira, not hadith. ↩
8. 29h.
  Page 464: “Sa'd said, 'Then I give judgement that the men should be killed, the property divided, and the women and children taken as captives.' … the apostle said to Sa'd, 'You have given the judgement of Allah above the seven heavens.'” “Then the apostle went out to the market of Medina (which is still its market today) and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for them and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches. Among them was the enemy of Allah Huyayy b. Akhtab and Ka'b b. Asad their chief. There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900.” ↩
9. 29i.
  Pages 675–676: In Ibn Hisham's separate section of additions. Abu Afak, an old man killed for a satirical poem: “The apostle said, 'Who will deal with this rascal for me?' whereupon Salim b. 'Umayr, brother of B. 'Amr b. 'Auf one of the 'weepers', went forth and killed him.” Asma bint Marwan: “When the apostle heard what she had said he said, 'Who will rid me of Marwan's daughter?' 'Umayr b. 'Adiy al-Khatmi who was with him heard him, and that very night he went to her.” Hassan b. Thabit's verse on the same page: “Before midnight he dyed her in her blood / And incurred no guilt thereby.” Guillaume's own footnotes here compare al-Waqidi and note where lines are missing from him. Neither episode is in Bukhari or Muslim. ↩
10. 29j.
  Page 665: “Zayd ordered Qays b. al-Musahhar to kill Umm Qirfa and he killed her cruelly (T. by putting a rope to her two legs and to two camels and driving them until they rent her in two).” The parenthesis marked T. is present only in al-Tabari's recension; Ibn Hisham's text says only "cruelly." The order is attributed to Zayd b. Haritha. ↩
11. 29k.
  Page 466: “The apostle had chosen one of their women for himself, Rayhana d. 'Amr b. Khunafa, one of the women of B. 'Amr b. Qurayza, and she remained with him until she died, in his power. The apostle had proposed to marry her and put the veil on her, but she said: 'Nay, leave me in your power, for that will be easier for me and for you.' So he left her.” ↩
30.
al-Bukhari. Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. Book 81 (Riqaq), section Hadith 48, chapter How the Prophet and his Companions used to live: Narrated by Aisha to Urwa: “We used to see three crescents in two months, and no fire used to be made in the houses of Allah's Messenger (i.e. nothing used to be cooked).” Urwa asked what sustained them: “The two black things i.e. dates and water, except that Allah's Messenger had neighbors from the Ansar who had some milch she-camels, and they used to give the Prophet some milk from their house, and he used to make us drink it.” A collection of hadiths, reports of what Muhammad said or did, arranged in books and chapters. The sunnah.com number for this report is 6459. The article uses it for the household's diet, which was three crescent moons in two months, no cooking fire, and dates and water to live on. ↩
31.
Muslim. Sahih Muslim. n.d. Book 55, section Hadith 27: Aisha said: “Never had the family of Muhammad eaten to the fill since their arrival in Medina with the bread of wheat for three successive nights until his (Holy Prophet's) death.” A collection of hadiths, reports of what Muhammad said or did, arranged in books and chapters. The sunnah.com number for this report is 2970a. The article uses it for the report that the household did not eat wheat bread to its fill for three nights in a row after reaching Medina. ↩
32.
al-Bukhari. Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. Book 70 (Food), section Hadith 11: Narrated Aisha: “The Prophet died when we had satisfied our hunger with the two black things, i.e. dates and water.” A collection of hadiths, reports of what Muhammad said or did, arranged in books and chapters. The sunnah.com number for this report is 5383. The article uses it for Aisha's statement that the household's hunger was satisfied with dates and water when the Prophet died. ↩
33.
al-Bukhari. Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. Book 65 (Tafsir), section Hadith 433: Umar, describing the upper room in which Muhammad had secluded himself from his wives: “lying on a mat made of palm tree leaves with nothing between him and the mat. Underneath his head there was a leather pillow stuffed with palm fibres … On seeing the marks of the mat imprinted on his side, I wept. He said, 'Why are you weeping?' I replied, 'O Allah's Messenger! Caesar and Khosrau are leading the life while you, Allah's Messenger though you are, is living in destitute.' The Prophet then replied, 'Won't you be satisfied that they enjoy this world and we the Hereafter?'” A collection of hadiths, reports of what Muhammad said or did, arranged in books and chapters. The sunnah.com number for this report is 4913. The article uses it for Umar's account of Muhammad's bare room, set against the luxury of Caesar and Khosrau. ↩
34.
al-Bukhari. Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. Book 10 (Adhan), section Hadith 70: Narrated Al-Aswad, who asked Aisha: “That he asked Aisha 'What did the Prophet use to do in his house?' She replied, 'He used to keep himself busy serving his family and when it was the time for prayer he would go for it.'” The often-quoted detail that he mended his own sandals is not in either Sahih; it is in al-Bukhari's separate and not uniformly sound work Al-Adab Al-Mufrad 540, sunnah.com/adab:540: “He mended sandals and patched garments and sewed.” A collection of hadiths, reports of what Muhammad said or did, arranged in books and chapters. The sunnah.com number for this report is 676. The article uses it for Aisha's description of his home life, in which he served his family and went to prayer when the time came. ↩
35.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 8:41: “And know that anything you obtain of war booty — then indeed, for Allah is one fifth of it and for the Messenger and for [his] near relatives and the orphans, the needy, and the [stranded] traveler.” The Muslim scripture, quoted here in the Saheeh International English translation. The article uses it because the verse gives one fifth of war booty to the Messenger and his near relatives, so his clan shares in that revenue. ↩
36.
al-Bukhari. Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. Hasan ibn Ali, Muhammad's grandson, puts a charity date in his mouth as a child, and. “the Prophet said, 'Expel it from your mouth. Don't you know that we do not eat a thing which is given in charity?'” A collection of hadiths, reports of what Muhammad said or did, arranged in books and chapters. The sunnah.com number for this report is 1491. The article uses it for the rule that Muhammad's family may not take charity, even as a child eating a charity date. ↩
37.
al-Bukhari. Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. Abu Bakr to Fatima: “Allah's Apostle said, 'Our property will not be inherited, whatever we (i.e. prophets) leave is Sadaqa (to be used for charity).'” Fatima: “got angry and stopped speaking to Abu Bakr, and continued assuming that attitude till she died.” A collection of hadiths, reports of what Muhammad said or did, arranged in books and chapters. The sunnah.com number for this report is 3092. Its parallel is Sahih Muslim 1759a (sunnah.com/muslim:1759a), which carries the same chain through Urwa from Aisha and the chapter heading "The words of the Prophet: 'We (Prophets) have no heirs and whatever we leave behind is charity.'" The article uses it for the rule that a prophet's property is charity and cannot be inherited, which closed one revenue stream to his family. ↩
38.
al-Bukhari. Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. On the battle of Uhud: “His canine tooth got broken on that day, and face was wounded, and his helmet was broken on his head.” Fatima washed the wound; Ali poured water from a shield; when the water increased the bleeding she burned a piece of mat and packed the ashes into it. A collection of hadiths, reports of what Muhammad said or did, arranged in books and chapters. The sunnah.com number for this report is 4075. Its parallel is Sahih Muslim 1790a. The article uses it for the wound Muhammad took at Uhud, in which he lost a tooth. ↩
39.
al-Bukhari. Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. Book 64 (Maghazi), section Hadith 145: Jabir, on the digging of the trench: “a stone was tied to his belly for we had not eaten anything for three days.” The same report continues with the multiplication of a kid and a measure of barley to feed the whole force. A collection of hadiths, reports of what Muhammad said or did, arranged in books and chapters. The sunnah.com number for this report is 4101. The article uses it for the hunger Muhammad shared with his men while digging the trench at Medina, and for the food miracle that the same report continues with. ↩ ↩
40.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 73:1-8: “O you who wraps himself [in clothing], Arise [to pray] the night, except for a little — Half of it — or subtract from it a little, Or add to it, and recite the Qur'an with measured recitation. Indeed, We will cast upon you a heavy word.” Verse 17:79: Also Meccan, it adds a night prayer described as nafilatan laka, "additional for you." The Muslim scripture, quoted here in the Saheeh International English translation. Surah 73 al-Muzzammil is Meccan, number 3 in the Egyptian revelation order. The article uses it for the night vigil that the Quran imposes on Muhammad first and personally. ↩
41.
al-Bukhari. Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. He forbids al-wisal, the continuous fast, and is challenged: “The people said to him, 'But you practice (Al-Wisal), O Allah's Messenger!' He replied, 'I am not similar to you, for during my sleep I have One Who makes me eat and drink.'” A collection of hadiths, reports of what Muhammad said or did, arranged in books and chapters. The sunnah.com number for this report is 1963. The article uses it for Muhammad's answer when he was challenged for practising the unbroken fast that he forbade to others. ↩
42.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 24:11: “Indeed, those who came with falsehood are a group among you. Do not think it bad for you; rather, it is good for you.” Verse 24:13: “Why did they [who slandered] not produce for it four witnesses? And when they do not produce the witnesses, then it is they, in the sight of Allah, who are the liars.” The Muslim scripture, quoted here in the Saheeh International English translation. The article uses it for the revelation that cleared Aisha of the slander and made the accusation punishable by law. ↩
43.
al-Bukhari. Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. Book 64 (Maghazi), section Hadith 185, chapter The narration of Al-Ifk: Aisha: “After we returned to Medina, I became ill for a month. The people were propagating the forged statements of the slanderers while I was unaware of anything of all that, but I felt that in my present ailment, I was not receiving the same kindness from Allah's Messenger as I used to receive when I got sick.” “When the Divine Inspiration was delayed. Allah's Messenger called Ali bin Abi Talib and Usama bin Zaid to ask and consult them about divorcing me. … Ali bin Abi Talib said, 'O Allah's Messenger! Allah does not put you in difficulty and there are plenty of women other than she, yet, ask the maid-servant who will tell you the truth.'” A collection of hadiths, reports of what Muhammad said or did, arranged in books and chapters. Its parallel is Sahih Muslim 2770a. The article uses it for Aisha's own account of her illness and the kindness she felt withdrawn, and for Muhammad's consultation about divorcing her. ↩
44.
Ahmed, Shahab. Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam. Harvard University Press. 2017. A study by Shahab Ahmed (1966–2015) of the early reports of the Satanic verses story, which it takes one by one, grouped by the transmitter who passed each one on. The article calls it the definitive study and uses it for how early Muslims understood the story and how that understanding later changed.
1. 44a.
  Page 293: Endnote 67 on that page. “'Abd Allāh Ibn Sarḥ's name was on the list of those slated for execution when the Prophet conquered Mecca, but he was spared on the intervention of his milk-brother 'Uthmān b. 'Affān.” Rodinson tells the same story at Mohammed p. 219. ↩
2. 44b.
  Page 6: “Scholarship on the Satanic verses incident in both the Islamic and Western academies has effectively confined itself to the question of whether the incident really took place. This issue, however, is of little interest to me. What I am concerned with is not whether the Satanic verses incident really happened, but whether or not Muslims through history believed it to have happened: if so, why; and if not, why not?” ↩
3. 44c.
  Pages 8–9: “as regards the Satanic verses incident, all but one of the fifty reports that narrate the incident are carried by defective chains of transmission — that is, by isnād-supports that include at least one (if not more) unreliable transmitters, or by chains that are incomplete and do not go back to an eyewitness.” ↩
4. 44d.
  Page 301: “In light of the fact that the Muslim community of the first two centuries of Islam overwhelmingly accepted the historicity of the Satanic verses incident, it is hard to see how it could have been fabricated and introduced into Muslim discourse by early enemies of Islam, as Islamic orthodoxy has argued. Orientalists have insisted that Muslims could not possibly have invented such an inauspicious story. We have seen, however, that early Muslim discourse did not view the Satanic verses incident as objectionable — or even as merely unobjectionable — but rather that the incident is illustrative of the standard understanding of Muḥammad's Prophethood among early Muslims. There is presumably no reason, therefore, why they could not have made it up.” ↩
5. 44e.
  Pages 2, 6–7: “The fundamental finding of the present volume is that in the first two centuries of Islam, Muslim attitudes to the Satanic verses incident were effectively the direct opposite of what they are today. This volume studies no less than fifty historical reports that narrate the Satanic verses incident and that were transmitted by the first generations of Muslims.” Ahmed's periodisation: near-universal acceptance c. 600-800; roughly even split c. 800-1100; rejection dominant and dissent charged with unbelief c. 1100-1800; near-universal rejection after c. 1800. ↩
6. 44f.
  Page 294: “The image of Muḥammad preserved in the early Muslim historical memory literature is thus one of a man whose Prophetic consciousness developed only gradually, who was affected by the pressures of his temporal circumstances, and who was ultimately susceptible to error even in the execution of his Divine mission.” Ahmed groups the Satanic verses with Quran 33:37 (Zaynab), Quran 4:34, Quran 11:12, Quran 17:73-75 and the Ibn Abi Sarh scribe episode as one class of early narratives of prophetic error; see pp. 290–294. ↩
7. 44g.
  Page 300: “In rejecting the Satanic verses incident, the Ḥadīth project — emerging with increasing force and definition from the mid-second century onward — was disapprovingly at odds with the early understanding of Muḥammad's Prophethood. The logic of the Ḥadīth project required an infallible Prophet whose words and deeds would lay down legal, praxial, and creedal norms for pious mimesis, as a definitive method by which to establish the veracity and authority of those prescribed norms. It is that logic, and that notion of Prophethood, that would later establish itself as Islamic orthodoxy.” ↩
8. 44h.
  Page 283: “The early mufassirūn read the Qur'ān and historical memory texts in their own way to mean that Prophets apparently did err and did fall victim to Satan — even in the transmission of Divine Revelation.” ↩
45.
The Qur'an. Translated by Arberry and Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 93:7: Arberry (1955) translates it: “Did He not find thee erring, and guide thee?” Saheeh International translates it: “And He found you lost and guided [you].” The Arabic word is dallan. The Muslim scripture, quoted here in two English translations. Surah 93 al-Duha is Meccan, number 11 in the Egyptian revelation order. The article uses it for the Arabic word dallan, which describes Muhammad's own state before his prophecy. ↩
46.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 48:2: “That Allah may forgive for you what preceded of your sin and what will follow.” The Study Quran, commentary on this verse: “Many commentators understand v. 2 to mean that God has forgiven the Prophet all of his sins, past and future; thus some take it as a proof-text for the spiritual inerrancy (ʿiṣmah) of the Prophet.” The Muslim scripture, quoted here in the Saheeh International English translation. The article uses it for the promise of forgiveness of past and future sins, which classical commentary reads as proof of Muhammad's sinlessness. ↩
47.
“The Egyptian standard chronology of the surahs.” Qur'an, 1924 Cairo edition. 1924. The surah placement and revelation order used in the article are the Egyptian standard chronology printed in the 1924 Cairo edition, a medieval scholarly reconstruction rather than a transmitted record. Gerhard Bowering, in the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an 1:322, records that Muslim scholars themselves circulated a list of 17 surahs whose Meccan or Medinan status was in dispute, to which other scholars added six more. Behnam Sadeghi's 2011 stylometric test in Arabica 58 confirmed the sequence of the early phases and explicitly failed to confirm the internal ordering of the Medinan material. The Noldeke periods are from Theodor Noldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, 1909, part 1, table of contents pp. IX-X. The article uses "Meccan" and "Medinan", which are secure, never argues from the relative order of two Medinan surahs, and observes both cautions. ↩ ↩
1. 47a.
  Pages 902–903: Noldeke, Theodor. "Koran." Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, volume 15 (1911). On the Byzantine prophecy of Quran 30:2-5, Noldeke discusses the traditional link to the Byzantine defeat near Damascus in the spring of 614 and warns that: “the reference of xxx. 1 seq. to this particular battle is by no means so certain that positive conclusions can be drawn from it.” Noldeke uses Flugel's verse numbers, which differ from the 1924 Cairo numbers used elsewhere in this article. ↩
48.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 4:3: “then marry those that please you of [other] women, two or three or four. But if you fear that you will not be just, then [marry only] one or those your right hand possesses. That is more suitable that you may not incline [to injustice].” The Muslim scripture, quoted here in the Saheeh International English translation. The article uses it for the standard reading of the verse, which Watt disputes. ↩
49.
at-Tirmidhi. Jami' at-Tirmidhi. n.d. Aisha: “The Messenger of Allah did not die until the women had been made lawful for him.” A hadith collection. The sunnah.com number for this report is 3216. Its parallel is Sunan an-Nasa'i 3204 (sunnah.com/nasai:3204). The grade lines printed on sunnah.com for both of these collections are Muhammad Nasiruddin al-Albani's twentieth-century judgements, not medieval ones, and should be described that way rather than as "graded sahih." The article uses it because the tradition reports that the constraint of Quran 33:52 was lifted before the Prophet died. ↩ ↩
50.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 9:113: “It is not for the Prophet and those who have believed to ask forgiveness for the polytheists, even if they were relatives, after it has become clear to them that they are companions of Hellfire.” The Muslim scripture, quoted here in the Saheeh International English translation. The article uses it because the verse forbids what Muhammad wanted to do for his uncle Abu Talib, and it is among the last revelations. ↩
51.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 5:67: “O Messenger, announce that which has been revealed to you from your Lord, and if you do not, then you have not conveyed His message. And Allah will protect you from the people.” The Muslim scripture, quoted here in the Saheeh International English translation. The article uses it for the verse that calls delivering the message a burden of office and promises divine protection. ↩
52.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 33:38: “There is not to be upon the Prophet any discomfort concerning that which Allah has imposed upon him. [This is] the established way of Allah with those [prophets] who have passed on before. And ever is the command of Allah a destiny decreed.” The Muslim scripture, quoted here in the Saheeh International English translation. The article uses it for the general release from blame for whatever God ordains for Muhammad, an exemption with no limit on its subject matter. ↩
53.
Sahih Muslim 1464a. n.d. Book 17, section Hadith 64: Aisha is speaking. “I felt jealous of the women who offered themselves to Allah's Messenger and said: Then when Allah, the Exalted and Glorious, revealed this: 'You may defer any one of them you wish, and take to yourself any you wish; and if you desire any you have set aside (no sin is chargeable to you)' (xxxiii. 51), I said: It seems to me that your Lord hastens to satisfy your desire.” The older USC-MSA numbering for this hadith is Book 8, Hadith 3453, which sunnah.com marks as deprecated. A collection of hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did. The article uses this report as the second wording of Aisha's remark about Quran 33:51, to compare it with the wording in Bukhari. ↩
54.
Sahih al-Bukhari 4790. n.d. Book 65 (Tafsir), section Hadith 312: Umar is speaking. “I said, 'O Allah's Messenger! Good and bad persons enter upon you, so I suggest that you order the mothers of the Believers (i.e. your wives) to observe veils.' Then Allah revealed the Verses of Al-Hijab.” A report in the book of Quran commentary (Tafsir) in Bukhari's collection of hadith, in which Umar describes advice he gave about veiling the Prophet's wives. The article cites it for Umar's claim that he proposed the seclusion of the wives before the verse ordering it came down. ↩
55.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 2:217: “They ask you about the sacred month — about fighting therein. Say, 'Fighting therein is great [sin], but averting [people] from the way of Allah and disbelief in Him and [preventing access to] al-Masjid al-Haram and the expulsion of its people therefrom are greater [evil] in the sight of Allah. And fitnah is greater than killing.'” The Muslim scripture, here in the Saheeh International English translation. The article cites it for the revelation that weighs the violated month in the Nakhla raid. ↩
56.
Sahih al-Bukhari 5158. n.d. Book 67 (Nikah), section Hadith 93, chapter Whoever consummated his marriage with a lady of nine years of age.: Urwa reports: “The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death).” The same figures are at Sahih al-Bukhari 3894, 3896, 5133 and 5134. Bukhari's chapter heading at 5133 is 'Giving one's young children in marriage.'. A report in Bukhari's collection of hadith, in the book on marriage (Nikah). The article cites it for the ages given at the marriage contract and at consummation. ↩
57.
Sahih Muslim 1422c. n.d. Book 16, section Hadith 83: “Allah's Apostle married her when she was seven years old, and he was taken to his house as a bride when she was nine, and her dolls were with her; and when he died she was eighteen years old.” Note that this version gives seven, not six, at contract. A report in Muslim's collection of hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did. The article cites it with Bukhari's report for the ages at the marriage contract and at consummation. ↩
58.
al-Tabari. The History of al-Tabari, volume XXXIX, Biographies of the Prophet's Companions and Their Successors. State University of New York Press. Translated by Ella Landau-Tasseron. 1998. A volume of an English translation of al-Tabari's history, this one of biographies of the Prophet's companions and their successors. The article uses it for the date of death of Asma, Aisha's elder sister.
1. 58a.
  Page 193: “Asma' died a few days after her son 'Abdallah b. al-Zubayr, on Tuesday, 17 Jumada I 73/October 6, 692.” Al-Tabari gives no age for her at death. ↩
59.
Sahih al-Bukhari 4097. n.d. Book 64 (Maghazi), section Hadith 141: Ibn Umar is speaking. “That the Prophet inspected him on the day of Uhud while he was fourteen years old, and the Prophet did not allow him to take part in the battle. He was inspected again by the Prophet on the day of Al-Khandaq while he was fifteen years old, and the Prophet allowed him to take part in the battle.” Aisha's water-carrying at Uhud is at Sahih al-Bukhari 4064: "I saw Aisha, the daughter of Abu Bakr, and Um Sulaim rolling up their dresses so that I saw their leg-bangles while they were carrying water skins on their backs." A report in Bukhari's collection of hadith, in the book of campaigns (Maghazi). The article cites it to show that the age rule for battle covered fighting, not carrying water. ↩
60.
Justinian. The Institutes of Justinian. Translated by J. B. Moyle. 533. Section 1.22 pr.: The Latin original, then the English translation. “pubertatem in masculis post quartum decimum annum completum illico initium accipere disposuimus, antiquitatis normam in femininis personis bene positam suo ordine relinquentes, ut post duodecimum annum completum viripotentes esse credantur.” “by the promulgation of our sacred constitution we have enacted that puberty in males shall be considered to commence immediately on the completion of the fourteenth year, leaving unaltered the rule judiciously laid down by the ancients as to females, according to which they are held fit for marriage after completing their twelfth year.” A Roman law text of 533 CE, here in J. B. Moyle's English translation. The article uses it for the age at which Roman law allowed girls to marry, which it puts at twelve. ↩
61.
Hopkins, Keith. “The Age of Roman Girls at Marriage.” Population Studies 18:309–327. 1965. A journal article that argues for early marriage among Roman girls. The article names it so readers can check the dispute over the marriage age, and no claim in the article rests on it. ↩
62.
Shaw, Brent D. “The Age of Roman Girls at Marriage: Some Reconsiderations.” Journal of Roman Studies 77:30–46. 1987. A journal article that argues from inscriptions (epigraphic evidence) that the median age at marriage for non-elite Roman girls was in the late teens, with early marriage concentrated among the aristocracy. The article names it so readers can check the dispute, and no claim in the article rests on it. ↩
63.
Little, Joshua J. “A Summary of My PhD Research.” islamicorigins.com. Feb 25, 2023. “The result of all of this was clear: this hadith cannot he traced back any earlier than the CLs ʾIsrāʾīl b. Yūnus (d. 160-162/776-779), Sulaymān al-ʾAʿmaš (d. 147-148/764-766), Hišām b. ʿUrwah (d. 146-147/763-765), ʾIsmāʿīl b. ʾabī Ḵālid (d. 146/763-764), and Muḥammad b. ʿAmr (d. 144-145/761-763).” “all extant versions of the marital-age hadith trace back to Hišām after he moved to Iraq. … What actually explains all of this, and what is certainly the simplest explanation therefor, is that Hišām created this hadith.” “it follows from my ultimate conclusion that we no longer have any solid basis for thinking that Muḥammad married ʿĀʾišah as a child.” The author's own published summary of his Oxford doctoral thesis, The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah's Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory (University of Oxford, 2023). The article quotes only this summary, not the thesis, and says so. ↩
64.
Sahih al-Bukhari 3043. n.d. Book 56, section Hadith 249, chapter If the enemy is ready to accept the judgement of a Muslim.: Abu Sa'id al-Khudri reports: “Sa'd said, 'I give the judgment that their warriors should be killed and their children and women should be taken as prisoners.' The Prophet then remarked, 'O Sa'd! You have judged amongst them with (or similar to) the judgment of the King Allah.'” A report in Bukhari's collection of hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did. The article cites it for Muhammad's approval of Sa'd's judgement on the Qurayza men. ↩
65.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 33:26–27: “And He brought down those who supported them among the People of the Scripture from their fortresses and cast terror into their hearts [so that] a party [i.e., their men] you killed, and you took captive a party. And He caused you to inherit their land and their homes and their properties and a land which you have not trodden.” The Muslim scripture, here in the Saheeh International English translation. The article cites it for the Quran's own account of the outcome at Qurayza. ↩
66.
Arafat, W. N. “New Light on the Story of Banu Qurayza and the Jews of Medina.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 100–107. 1976. A 1976 journal article that M. J. Kister summarises at length. Arafat's core argument, in Kister's rendering: the later historians "draw, and in most cases depend on Ibn Ishaq" who "died in 151 A.H., i.e., 145 years after the event in question"; the only "contemporary and entirely authentic source" is the Quran; and if 600 or 700 people had been killed the Quran would have said more. Arafat also proposed that Jewish refugees from the Roman wars had superimposed the story of Masada onto the siege of the Banu Qurayza. Kister is a hostile but accurate reporter of it. The article names it as the revisionist answer that it argues failed. ↩
67.
Kister, M. J. “The Massacre of the Banu Qurayza: A Re-examination of a Tradition.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 8:61–96. 1986. A re-examination of the tradition about the Banu Qurayza massacre, by a scholar who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The article uses it for Kister's answer to Arafat and for his own reconstruction of the numbers and of the booty.
1. 67a.
  Page 66: “Arafat's arguments are however unfounded, his conclusions incorrect and his opinion about Sira tradition is misappreciative. Muslim jurists were well acquainted with the story of the Banu Qurayza and based themselves in their judgments and decrees on the account of the massacre. It was in fact al-Shafi'i (d. 204 A.H.) who with deep insight analysed the case of Banu Qurayza, defined the nature of their mischievous actions, assessed the character of the transgression committed by them and elucidated the problem of individual and collective punishment.” ↩
2. 67b.
  Pages 93–96: Kister's own reconstruction puts the executed men at about 400 and the women and children at about 1,000, and lists the booty: “1500 swords, 300 coats of mail, 200 spears, 1500 shields”. Page 95: “The suspicions that Qurayza attempted to plot with Quraysh against the Prophet would probably not justify the cruel punishment of execution of the fighting men and the sale of the women and children; Qurayza repented of their deeds, the people of Aus beseeched the Prophet, asking him to pardon Qurayza. One might have expected the Prophet to pardon them. There must have been an additional reason for the hostility of the Prophet against Qurayza, not disclosed in the vague accounts about the violation of the treaty.” Page 96: “The division of the land and property improved the status of the Muhajirun at Medina and helped them to gain their economic independence. The military strength of the Muslim community of Medina grew due to the weapons taken as booty; the sale of the captured women and children as slaves for horses and weapons enabled to enlarge the Muslim military force for further conquests.” ↩
68.
The NET Bible. 2.1 edition. n.d. Verse 20:12–14: “20:12 If it does not accept terms of peace but makes war with you, then you are to lay siege to it. 20:13 The Lord your God will deliver it over to you, and you must kill every single male by the sword. 20:14 However, the women, little children, cattle, and anything else in the city—all its plunder—you may take for yourselves as spoil. You may take from your enemies the plunder that the Lord your God has given you.” The Muslim writer Muhammad Hamidullah argued in Muslim Conduct of State that "In the case of the Banu Quraizah, it was the arbitrator of their own choice who awarded exactly what Deuteronomy provided"; Kister quotes him at JSAI 8, p. 64 n. 3. Neither Hamidullah nor Kister gives the chapter and verse, so the article supplies it here for the reader to check. Note that Deuteronomy 20:15 restricts the rule quoted here to "all those cities located far from you," not to the Canaanite cities, which 20:16–18 treat separately. An English Bible translation, cited here for the text of Deuteronomy 20. The article gives the chapter and verse that the Muslim writers who make the argument do not give. ↩
69.
Sahih al-Bukhari 3031. n.d. Book 56, section Hadith 238, chapter Telling lies in war: “The Prophet said, 'Who is ready to kill Ka'b bin Al-Ashraf who has really hurt Allah and His Apostle?' Muhammad bin Maslama said, 'O Allah's Messenger! Do you like me to kill him?' He replied in the affirmative.” A parallel report is in Sahih Muslim 1801, at sunnah.com/muslim:1801. A report in Bukhari's collection of hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did. The article cites it for the killing of Ka'b b. al-Ashraf and for the permission to lie that went with it. ↩
70.
Sahih al-Bukhari 4037. n.d. Book 64 (Maghazi), section Hadith 84, chapter The killing of Ka'b bin Al-Ashraf.: “Muhammad bin Maslama said, 'Then allow me to say a (false) thing (i.e. to deceive Ka'b).' The Prophet said, 'You may say it.'” Ibn Ishaq gives the same exchange in Guillaume's edition at p. 367: "He said, 'O apostle of God, we shall have to tell lies.' He answered, 'Say what you like, for you are free in the matter.'". A report in Bukhari's collection of hadith, in the book of campaigns (Maghazi). The article cites it with Bukhari 3031 for the permission to lie before the killing of Ka'b b. al-Ashraf. ↩
71.
Sahih al-Bukhari 3022. n.d. Book 56, section Hadith 231, chapter Killing a sleeping Mushrik.: A parallel is at Sahih al-Bukhari 4038. A report in Bukhari's collection of hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did. It describes the killing of the Khaybar chief Abu Rafi'. The article cites it as an instance that critics usually leave out. ↩
72.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 23:5–6: “And they who guard their private parts / Except from their wives or those their right hands possess, for indeed, they will not be blamed.” Verse 4:24: See also this verse. “[also prohibited to you are all] married women except those your right hands possess.” The Muslim scripture, here in the Saheeh International English translation. The article cites it for the permission to have sexual relations with female war captives. ↩
73.
Sahih Muslim 1438a. n.d. Book 16, section Hadith 146, chapter The ruling on coitus interruptus ('Azl).: Abu Sa'id al-Khudri reports: “We went out with Allah's Messenger on the expedition to the Bi'l-Mustaliq and took captive some excellent Arab women; and we desired them, for we were suffering from the absence of our wives, (but at the same time) we also desired ransom for them. So we decided to have sexual intercourse with them but by observing 'azl. … So we asked Allah's Messenger, and he said: It does not matter if you do not do it, for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born.” Parallels are at Sahih al-Bukhari 2542 and 4138. A report in Muslim's collection of hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did. The article cites it for Muhammad's answer about withdrawal during intercourse with captive women. ↩
74.
Sahih al-Bukhari 371. n.d. Book 8, section Hadith 23: “Dihya came and said, 'O Allah's Prophet! Give me a slave girl from the captives.' The Prophet said, 'Go and take any slave girl.' He took Safiya bint Huyai. A man came to the Prophet and said, 'O Allah's Messenger! You gave Safiya bint Huyai to Dihya and she is the chief mistress of the tribes of Quraidha and An-Nadir and she befits none but you.' So the Prophet said, 'Bring him along with her.' So Dihya came with her and when the Prophet saw her, he said to Dihya, 'Take any slave girl other than her from the captives.' Anas added: The Prophet then manumitted her and married her.” Sahih al-Bukhari 2235 adds: "the beauty of Safiya bint Huyai bin Akhtab was mentioned to him and her husband had been killed while she was a bride." A report in Bukhari's collection of hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did. The article cites it for the status of Safiyya bint Huyayy after her capture at Khaybar. ↩
75.
Sahih al-Bukhari 4200. n.d. Book 64 (Maghazi), section Hadith 240: “The Prophet made her manumission as her 'Mahr'”. That is, her freedom was her dower. Sahih al-Bukhari 5085 records the Muslims' own uncertainty about her status: "Is she considered as his wife or his slave girl?" A report in Bukhari's collection of hadith, in the book of campaigns (Maghazi). The article cites it for the terms on which Safiyya was freed and married. ↩
76.
Ibn Sa'd. Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir, volume VIII, The Women of Madina. Ta-Ha Publishers. Translated by Aisha Bewley. n.d. A volume of a biographical dictionary by Ibn Sa'd (d. 230/845), who was al-Waqidi's secretary. He wrote about 210 years after the events, so the article ranks him below the canonical hadith collections. The article uses it for Rayhana's account and for the two rival accounts of one passage in the Quran.
1. 76a.
  Pages 91–92: Rayhana's reported words: “He sent me to the house of Umm al-Mundhir bint Qays for some days until the prisoners had been killed and the captives divided. Then the Messenger of Allah came to me.” “She was asked, 'If you had asked the Messenger of Allah for the Banu Qurayza, he would have freed them.' She used to say, 'He was not alone with me until after the captives had been divided.'” Page 92: Al-Waqidi's own reservation, in the words of Muhammad ibn 'Umar: “Muhammad ibn 'Umar said, 'There is weakness in this hadith on two points.'” ↩
2. 76b.
  Pages 135–137: Ibn Sa'd prints the Maria version on the authority of Ibn Abbas, Jubayr b. Mut'im, Zayd b. Aslam and al-Dahhak, side by side with the other reports and without adjudicating between them. Page 135: On Ibn Abbas's authority: “Hafsa left her house, and it was the day of 'A'isha. The Messenger of Allah went in with his slavegirl who had her face veiled. Hafsa said to the Messenger of Allah, 'I saw what you did.' The Messenger of Allah said to her, 'Keep quiet about me. She is unlawful.'” That the tradition transmits two irreconcilable occasions for one passage, and that its own compiler declines to choose, is itself the evidence. ↩
77.
Sunan Abi Dawud 3931. n.d. Book 12, section Hadith 127: Aisha reports: “The Messenger of Allah said: Are you inclined to that which is better? She asked: What is that, Messenger of Allah? He replied: I shall pay the price of your freedom on your behalf, and I shall marry you. She said: I shall do this. She (Aisha) said: The people then heard that the Messenger of Allah had married Juwayriyyah. They released the captives in their possession and set them free, and said: They are the relatives of the Messenger of Allah by marriage. We did not see any woman greater than Juwayriyyah who brought blessings to her people. One hundred families of Banu al-Mustaliq were set free on account of her.” A report in Abu Dawud's collection of hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did. The grade printed on sunnah.com for this collection is Muhammad Nasiruddin al-Albani's twentieth-century judgement, not a medieval one. The article cites it for Aisha's account of Juwayriya's marriage and the release of her people. ↩
78.
al-Tabari, Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Jarir. The History of al-Tabari, volume VI, Muhammad at Mecca. State University of New York Press. Translated by W. Montgomery Watt and M. V. McDonald. 1988. A volume of an English translation of al-Tabari's history, this one covering Muhammad at Mecca. Al-Tabari died in 310/923 and wrote about 290 years after the events. He preserves earlier versions, including material that Ibn Hisham cut. The article uses it for the 'Satanic verses' report, which Ibn Hisham omitted.
1. 78a.
  Page 108: Leiden pagination I:1192–1196. “When the Messenger of God saw how his tribe turned their backs on him and was grieved to see them shunning the message he had brought to them from God, he longed in his soul that something would come to him from God which would reconcile him with his tribe. … Satan cast on his tongue, because of his inner debates and what he desired to bring to his people, the words: 'These are the high-flying cranes; verily their intercession is accepted with approval.'” Guillaume gives Ibn Ishaq's version of the same passage at p. 166, printed inside the (T. ...) brackets with which he marks material al-Tabari carries and Ibn Hisham does not: "these are the exalted Gharaniq whose intercession is approved." ↩
2. 78b.
  Page 108: The editors' note 170 reads: “This section is also omitted by Ibn Hisham, perhaps because he felt it was discreditable to the Prophet.” The section heading "Satan Casts a False Revelation on the Messenger of God's Tongue" is printed at the foot of the preceding page, p. 107, whose note 168 makes the same observation in a weaker form: "Ibn Hisham seems to have omitted this section, although Guillaume has not noticed the fact." ↩
79.
Ibn Sa'd. Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir. Volume I. Pakistan Historical Society, Karachi. Translated by S. Moinul Haq and H. K. Ghazanfar. 1967. An English translation of volume I of Ibn Sa'd's Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir. The translators print the Satanic verses report and then reject it in their own footnote, so the article uses this edition for both the report and the rejection.
1. 79a.
  Pages 236–239: An independent version of the story, carried through al-Waqidi. “Satan made him repeat these two phrases: These idols are high and their intercession is expected.” Page 238: The translators' own footnote, rejecting it: “This narration is not acceptable, because none of the first narrators is a Companion.” ↩
80.
The NET Bible. 2.1 edition. n.d. Verse Deuteronomy 13:1–3: NET follows the Hebrew versification here; in most English Bibles the same words are printed with the Hebrew 13:1 as 12:32. “13:1 Suppose a prophet or one who foretells by dreams should appear among you and show you a sign or wonder, 13:2 and the sign or wonder should come to pass concerning what he said to you, namely, 'Let us follow other gods' — gods whom you have not previously known — 'and let us serve them.' 13:3 You must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer, for the Lord your God will be testing you to see if you love him with all your mind and being.” An English translation of the Bible. The article uses it for Deuteronomy 13, a doctrinal test that disqualifies a prophet who works a genuine sign and then says 'let us follow other gods.'. ↩
81.
The NET Bible. 2.1 edition. n.d. Verse 1 John 4:1–3: “4:1 Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to determine if they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 4:2 By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses Jesus as the Christ who has come in the flesh is from God, 4:3 but every spirit that refuses to confess Jesus, that spirit is not from God.” An English translation of the Bible. The article uses it for 1 John 4:1–3, which disqualifies any spirit that refuses to confess Jesus as the Christ come in the flesh. ↩
82.
The NET Bible. 2.1 edition. n.d. Verse Galatians 1:8: “But even if we (or an angel from heaven) should preach a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be condemned to hell!” An English translation of the Bible. The article uses it for Galatians 1:8, which condemns any other gospel, even one from an angel. ↩
83.
The NET Bible. 2.1 edition. n.d. Verse Deuteronomy 18:20–22: “18:20 'But if any prophet presumes to speak anything in my name that I have not authorized him to speak, or speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet must die. 18:21 Now if you say to yourselves, "How can we tell that a message is not from the Lord?" — 18:22 whenever a prophet speaks in my name and the prediction is not fulfilled, then I have not spoken it; the prophet has presumed to speak it, so you need not fear him.'” The internal complication is Jonah 3:4, where the announcement of Nineveh's overthrow in forty days carries no stated condition and is not fulfilled; Jeremiah 18:7–8 states the conditional principle explicitly. An English translation of the Bible. The article uses it for Deuteronomy 18:20–22, which it calls the least circular test, because anyone can check whether a prediction came true. ↩
84.
The Qur'an. Translated by Saheeh International. n.d. Verse 17:90–93: The Meccans demand a spring from the ground, a garden with rivers, the sky falling in pieces, God and the angels face to face, a house of gold, and an ascent to heaven with a book brought down. Verse 17:93: “Say, 'Exalted is my Lord! Was I ever but a human messenger?'” A translation of the Qur'an, cited for the reply to the Meccans' demands for signs. The article uses it because the reply is a disclaimer, not a wonder. ↩
85.
Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. Ibn Mas'ud reports: “During the lifetime of the Prophet the moon was split into two parts and on that the Prophet said, 'Bear witness (to this).'” A collection of hadith, the reported sayings and actions of Muhammad. This report is number 3636 in it, and a parallel report is in Sahih Muslim 2800a. The article uses this entry for the report that the moon was split in Muhammad's lifetime, one of the signs it says the hadith supply. ↩
86.
Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. Abdullah ibn Mas'ud reports: “I saw the water flowing from among the fingers of Allah's Messenger, and no doubt, we heard the meal glorifying Allah, when it was being eaten (by him).” The same report opens with: “We used to consider miracles as Allah's Blessings, but you people consider them to be a warning.” A collection of hadith, the reported sayings and actions of Muhammad. This report is number 3579 in it. The article uses this entry for the report of water flowing from the Prophet's fingers, one of the signs it says the hadith supply. ↩
87.
Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. Section Hadith 4981: “Every Prophet was given miracles because of which people believed, but what I have been given, is Divine Inspiration which Allah has revealed to me. So I hope that my followers will outnumber the followers of the other Prophets on the Day of Resurrection.” The Study Quran quotes this hadith at Quran 29:51 as the standard harmonisation of the Quran's refusal of signs with the miracle reports. A collection of hadith, the reported sayings and actions of Muhammad. The article uses this entry for Muhammad's own saying that he was given Divine Inspiration where other prophets were given miracles. ↩
88.
Koertner, Mareike. “Dala'il al-Nubuwwa Literature as Part of the Medieval Scholarly Discourse on Prophecy.” Der Islam 95(1):91–109. 2018. “In this article, I examine early authorship in Dalāʾil al-Nubūwa literature by identifying numerous works that significantly predate Abū Nuʿaym and al-Bayhaqī. I argue that this literature constituted a continuous tradition from the mid-2nd/8th century onward and that it originated in circles of well-respected ḥadīth scholars who upheld their field's methodological processes of authentication.” Her book Proving Prophecy (Brill, 2023) makes the same claim, dating the genre to: “the late 2nd/8th century.” A journal article on the Arabic dala'il al-nubuwwa ('proofs of prophethood') literature. The article uses it to date that literature to the mid-2nd/8th century and to tie it to respected hadith scholars. ↩
89.
The NET Bible. 2.1 edition. n.d. Verse Ezekiel 29:18–20: “29:18 'Son of man, King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon made his army labor hard against Tyre. Every head was rubbed bald and every shoulder rubbed bare; yet he and his army received no wages from Tyre for the work he carried out against it. 29:19 Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: Look, I am about to give the land of Egypt to King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon. … 29:20 I have given him the land of Egypt as his compensation for attacking Tyre.'” An English translation of the Bible. The article uses it for Ezekiel 29:18–20 as a disputed case of prediction: it concedes that Nebuchadnezzar received no wages from Tyre, and offers him Egypt as compensation. ↩
90.
The NET Bible. 2.1 edition. n.d. Verse 1 Samuel 12:3: “Here I am. Bring a charge against me before the Lord and before his chosen king. Whose ox have I taken? Whose donkey have I taken? Whom have I wronged? Whom have I oppressed? From whose hand have I taken a bribe so that I would overlook something? Tell me, and I will return it to you!” An English translation of the Bible. The article uses it for Samuel's public challenge, which it sets against self-serving legislation as the sharpest instrument in the test. ↩
91.
The NET Bible. 2.1 edition. n.d. Verse 2 Kings 5:15–16: “He said, 'For sure I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel! Now, please accept a gift from your servant.' 5:16 But Elisha replied, 'As certainly as the Lord lives (whom I serve), I will take nothing from you.' Naaman insisted that he take it, but he refused.” An English translation of the Bible. The article uses it for Elisha's refusal of Naaman's gift, which it sets against self-serving legislation. ↩
92.
The NET Bible. 2.1 edition. n.d. Verse Numbers 18:20: “The Lord spoke to Aaron, 'You will have no inheritance in their land, nor will you have any portion of property among them—I am your portion and your inheritance among the Israelites.'” An English translation of the Bible. The article uses it for the statement that Aaron has no land inheritance among the Israelites, part of its case that Moses legislated his own tribe out of land inheritance. ↩
93.
The NET Bible. 2.1 edition. n.d. Verse 1 Chronicles 23:13–14: “23:13 The sons of Amram: Aaron and Moses. Aaron and his descendants were chosen on a permanent basis to consecrate the most holy items, to offer sacrifices before the Lord, to serve him, and to praise his name. 23:14 The descendants of Moses the man of God were considered Levites.” An English translation of the Bible. The article uses it for the statement that Aaron and his descendants were chosen for the priesthood, while the descendants of Moses were considered Levites. ↩
94.
Sahih al-Bukhari. n.d. Book 65 (Tafsir), section Hadith 432: Narrated Aisha: “Allah's Messenger used to drink honey in the house of Zainab, the daughter of Jahsh, and would stay there with her. So Hafsa and I agreed secretly that, if he come to either of us, she would say to him, 'It seems you have eaten Maghafir (a kind of bad-smelling resin), for I smell in you the smell of Maghafir,' (We did so) and he replied, 'No, but I was drinking honey in the house of Zainab, the daughter of Jahsh, and I shall never take it again. I have taken an oath as to that, and you should not tell anybody about it.'” Sahih Muslim 1474a attaches Quran 66:1–3 to the honey explicitly. A collection of hadith, the reported sayings and actions of Muhammad. The article uses this entry for the honey version of the occasion of Quran 66:1, one of two irreconcilable occasions it gives for Quran 66:1–5. ↩
95.
Sunan an-Nasa'i. n.d. Book 36, section Hadith 21: The competing version of the same occasion: “It was narrated from Anas, that the Messenger of Allah had a female slave with whom he had intercourse, but 'Aishah and Hafsah would not leave him alone until he said that she was forbidden for him. Then Allah, the Mighty and Sublime, revealed: 'O Prophet! Why do you forbid (for yourself) that which Allah has allowed to you.'” A collection of hadith, the reported sayings and actions of Muhammad. The grade printed on sunnah.com for this collection is al-Albani's twentieth-century judgement. The article uses this entry for the competing report of the same occasion, which tells of a female slave. ↩