| 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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| These sources contain internal complexities, anachronisms, discrepancies, and contradictions | Seeing Islam as others saw it: a survey and evaluation of Christian, Jewish, Robert G |
Ideally, one would like to be able to check such accounts against contemporary evidence.
18| 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 | |
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| Moreover, many of them provide evidence of embellishment and invention that were introduced to serve the purposes of political or religious apologetic |
"Muhmmad," Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim world• The Bustan al-Ukul, by Nathanael ibn al-Fayyumi, edited and translated by David Levine, Columbia University Oriental Studies Vol.
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