According to Fred Donner, Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago, sketches of Muhammad’s life are
drawn not from documents or even stories dating from Muhammad’s time, but from literary sources that were compiled many years—sometimes centuries—later. The fact, that these sources are so much later, and shaped with very specific objectives in mind, means that they often do not tell us many things about which we would like to know more…There is also reason to suspect that some—perhaps many—of the incidents related in these sources are not reliable accounts of things that actually happened but rather are legends created by later generations of Muslims to affirm Muhammad’s status as prophet, to help establish precedents shaping the later Muslim community’s ritual, social, or legal practices, or simply to fill out poorly known chapters in the life of their founder, about whom, understandably, later Muslims increasingly wished to know everything.
The vast oceans of traditional accounts…contains so many contradictions and so much dubious storytelling that many historians have become reluctant to accept any of it at face value (Muhammad and the Believers, 50-51).
