| Karen Armstrong narrates the beginnings of Islam a word which means submission and peace , and of the theological and political disputes that soon affected the lives of families living in the Mecca or Medina | The Bustan al-Ukul, by Nathanael ibn al-Fayyumi, edited and translated by David Levine, Columbia University Oriental Studies Vol |
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| Karen Armstrong narrates the beginnings of Islam a word which means submission and peace , and of the theological and political disputes that soon affected the lives of families living in the Mecca or Medina | Muhammad is described as a complex and passionate man, politically wise and true to what he understood to be a personal and transcendental mission |
| 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 | |
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| sources are not contemporaneous with the events they purport to relate and sometimes were written many centuries later |
"Muhmmad," Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim world• Seeing Islam as others saw it: a survey and evaluation of Christian, Jewish, Robert G.
15| 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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| 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 |
These sources contain internal complexities, anachronisms, discrepancies, and contradictions.