robert spencer-did muhammad exist__ an inquiry into islams obscure origins-intercollegiate studies institute (2012) (1)

nephew back to his country and guard him carefully against the Jews, for by Allah! If they see him and
know about him what I know, they will do him evil; a great future lies before this nephew of yours, so
take him home quickly.” 20
Johannes Jansen explains the motivation behind such stories:
The storytellers intended to convince their public that Muhammad has indeed been a prophet from God. In order to do so, they
assured their public that already Christians, even monks, had recognized him as such. They had no real memory of such an event, but
they wanted to convince their public that to recognize Muhammad as the prophet of God was a good thing. If a neutral, Christian
authority had already recognized Muhammad, they must have argued, how much more should others do so!
In this case, the storytellers could only get their message across if they could create a setting in which Muhammad might have
actually met a monk. Hence, they tell several stories of how Muhammad as a child went to Syria, together with one of his uncles. There
he met his monk, and the monk recognized him. The many stories about Muhammad's travels to Syria are not the product of real
historical memory, however vague, but a creation that was made necessary by the theological need to have Muhammad recognized as a
prophet by Christians, preferably a monk.
The story about the meeting of Muhammad and the monk is improbable, it appears in many contradictory versions, but it served its
purpose. 21
Such stories are also strange in light of the opposition that Muhammad faced among his own people, the
Quraysh, once he did proclaim himself as a prophet: If he really fulfilled the prophecies of a prophet who
was to come, why were the Quraysh so slow and obstinate about recognizing that fact? In this the life of
Muhammad resembles that of Jesus, whom the Gospel of Matthew in particular depicts as fulfilling the
prophecies of the coming Messiah and yet being rejected by the religious leaders most familiar with those
prophecies. This close resemblance indicates that the stories of Muhammad's being identified as a
prophet while a youth have a typological, legendary cast.
The legendary character of these accounts is especially obvious in light of their absolute
incompatibility with other Islamic traditions about how surprised and terrified Muhammad was by the
first visitation of the angel Gabriel. Ibn Ishaq himself reports that this encounter left Muhammad in such
extreme agitation that he said to his wife: “Woe is me poet [i.e., one who receives ecstatic visions and
may be insane] or possessed.” 22 If Muhammad had been repeatedly identified as a prophet when he was a
child and a young man, one might be forgiven for thinking that he should have seen it coming.
On this basis alone, the historical reliability of Ibn Ishaq is severely compromised. The material he
includes in his biography must have arisen long after the collection of the Qur'an. Even in that case, it is
odd that he would have included so much material that clearly contradicts the testimony of the Qur'an, a
book with which Ibn Ishaq was familiar at least in some form, as he frequently quoted passages that
appear in it.
If Ibn Ishaq's biography of Muhammad is largely or even wholly pious fiction, all the information about
Muhammad that is generally regarded as historical evaporates. Ibn Ishaq's overarching intention is to
demonstrate to his readers that Muhammad is indeed a prophet. But in doing so, he recounts so many
legends that fact cannot be separated from fiction. There is no reliable way to distinguish the miraculous
material in Ibn Ishaq's account from that which appears to be more straightforwardly historical.