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The earliest Muslim sources of information for the life of Muhammad is the Qur'an, which gives very little information and whose historicity has been questioned. Next in importance is the sīra literature and Hadith, which survive in the historical works of writers from the second, third, and fourth centuries of the Muslim era (c. 700−1000 AD). There are also a relatively small number of contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous non-Muslim sources, which confirm the existence of Muhammad and are valuable both in themselves and for comparison with Muslim sources.
Views of modern historians
As early as 1930, the question for the existence of Muhammad was raised by Soviet orientalist Klimovich, yet his thesis found no resonance in Islamic Studies. The question for the historicity of Muhammad was put on the agenda, when in the 1970s the so-called Revisionist School of Islamic Studies raised fundamental doubts about the reliability of traditional Islamic sources and applied the historical-critical methods to the early Islamic period. After the first provocative theses, the revisionist approach differentiated and moderated and spread in Islamic Studies with various intensity. Today, only a minority of historians of early Islam doubt the historicity of Muhammad.
Attempts to distinguish between the historical elements and the unhistorical elements of many of the reports of Muhammad have not been very successful. A major source of difficulty in the quest for the historical Muhammad is the modern lack of knowledge about pre-Islamic Arabia. According to Harald Motzki, "On the one hand, it is not possible to write a historical biography of the Prophet without being accused of using the sources uncritically, while on the other hand, when using the sources critically, it is simply not possible to write such a biography."
Historian Michael Cook takes the view that evidence independent of Islamic tradition "precludes any doubts as to whether Muhammad was a real person" and clearly shows that he became the central figure of a new religion in the decades following his death. He reports, though, that this evidence conflicts with the Islamic view in some aspects, associating Muhammad with Israel rather than Inner Arabia, complicating the question of his sole authorship or transmission of the Qur'an, and suggesting that there were Jews as well as Arabs among his followers. For Patricia Crone, a single Greek text written at around the time of Muhammad's death provides "irrefutable proof" that he was a historical figure. There is also, she says, "exceptionally good" evidence that Muhammad was an Arab political leader and prophet. She says we can be "reasonably sure" in attributing all or most of the Qur'an to him. She takes a view that Muhammad's traditional association with the Arabian Peninsula may be "doctrinally inspired", and is put in doubt by the Qur'an itself, which describes agricultural activity that could not have taken place there, as well as making a reference to the site of Sodom which appears to place Muhammad's community close to the Dead Sea.
In their 2003 book Crossroads to Islam, Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren advanced a thesis, based on an extensive examination of archaeological evidence from the early Islamic period, that Muhammad may never have existed, with monotheistic Islam only coming into existence some time after he is supposed to have lived. This has been described as "plausible or at least arguable" and employing a "very rigorous historical methodology" by David Cook of Rice University, but has also been compared to Holocaust denial by historian Colin Wells, who suggests that the authors deal with some of the evidence illogically.
Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert and Germany's first professor of Islamic theology, has expressed the view that the Prophet Muhammad probably never existed. Similar views were also held by other scholars too as Professor Muhammad Sven Kalisch quotes in his conclusions. There are many such views doubting the historicity of Muhammed. Another example is the case of Hans Jansen, a Dutch scholar, who too has the opinion that the evidences supporting the historicity of Muhammad are lacking.
Popp (2004/5) proposed that both Muḥammad and ‘Alī originated as titles given to Jesus Christ by Syriac Christians in the Sassanid Empire (i.e. muḥammad "blessed" being the equivalent of the benedictus (ευλογηµένος) of the New Testament). In a numismatic study, Popp identified coins dated to AH 16 inscribed with mḥmd but lacking the rasūl allāh that later became common. Popp adduced Arabo-Sassanid and Syrian coins inscribed with MHMT in Pahlavi script, and also partly with mḥmd in Arabic script, in some cases combined with Christian symbolism. Heger (2008) argues that Muḥammad "the blessed one" being a title of Christ does not necessarily preclude the historicity of the prophet of Islam. It rather opens up a scale of possibilities summarised in three alternatives to the default assumption of the historicity of a Muhammad recognizably similar to the hadith accounts,
- the Islamic tradition on the life of Muhammad is entirely legendary,
- Muhammad is historical, but was active roughly a century later than suggested by Islamic tradition,
- there were two distinct people, both given the epithet Muhammad or "blessed", one active in the early 7th century, and author of the Meccan suras, and the other the Mamed of Johannes Damascenus, author of the Medinian suras.