| Seeing Islam as others saw it: a survey and evaluation of Christian, Jewish, Robert G | |
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| 137 Netanel's work was virtually unknown beyond his native Yemen until modern times, so had little influence on later Jewish thought• sources are not contemporaneous with the events they purport to relate and sometimes were written many centuries later | 597, which notes that many of the details surrounding Muhammad's life as given in the biographies, are "problematic in certain respects, the most important of which is that they represent a tradition of living narrative that is likely to have developed orally for a considerable period before it was given even a relatively fixed written form |
Moreover, many of them provide evidence of embellishment and invention that were introduced to serve the purposes of political or religious apologetic.
| Lapidus 2002 , pp 0 | |
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| Ideally, one would like to be able to check such accounts against contemporary evidence | These sources contain internal complexities, anachronisms, discrepancies, and contradictions |
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| 5, "One major challenge to examining initial contacts between Byzantium and the early Muslim umma arises from the controversy surrounding the traditional Islamic account | |
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"Muhmmad," Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim world• El-Cheikh, Nadia Maria Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs 2004, Harvard University Press p.