| 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 | See, for example, Bowersock, Glen Warren, Peter Robert Lamont Brown and Oleg Grabar Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World 1999, Harvard University Press p |
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| however, there is no relevant archaeological, epigraphic, or numismatic evidence dating from the time of Muhammad, nor are there any references to him in non-Muslim sources dating from the period before 632 |
"Muhmmad," Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim world• Hitti, History of the Arabs, 10th edition 1970 , p.
| 137 Netanel's work was virtually unknown beyond his native Yemen until modern times, so had little influence on later Jewish thought• These sources contain internal complexities, anachronisms, discrepancies, and contradictions | 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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| sources are not contemporaneous with the events they purport to relate and sometimes were written many centuries later | Kafih Jerusalem, 1984 , ch |
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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