| 597, which notes that many of the details surrounding Muhammad's life as given in the biographies, are "problematic in certain respects, the most important of which is that they represent a tradition of living narrative that is likely to have developed orally for a considerable period before it was given even a relatively fixed written form |
"Muhmmad," Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim world• sources are not contemporaneous with the events they purport to relate and sometimes were written many centuries later.
| Kafih Jerusalem, 1984 , ch | |
|---|---|
| Ideally, one would like to be able to check such accounts against contemporary evidence |
Moreover, many of them provide evidence of embellishment and invention that were introduced to serve the purposes of political or religious apologetic.
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