This paper is a critique of F. E. Peters' Muhammad and the Origins of Islam. This scholarly study of the life of the prophet of Islam attempts to provide a historical accounting of Muhammad's life and times, a difficult job because of the scarcity of available sources. Written for scholars of religion who already have familiarity with Muhammad, the Quran, and Islam, this book wastes little time providing introductory material, making the work less accessible than it might be for the general student. Nevertheless, Peters paints a fascinating and detailed picture of a time, place, and individual little known to Western readers. His book gives life to the story of a man who changed history and whose influence continues to be felt throughout the world.
Peters sets out to reconstruct a biography of Muhammad. This is a difficult task, primarily because of the dearth of straightforward historical records and because of Islamic tradition. For Muslims, while Muhammad is venerated, he is not deified; his words, believed to be the received words of God, are more important than the details of his life. Moreover, early Muslims labelled the time before Muhammad's revelation the Era of Ignorance, "and thus the older religious traditions of Mecca were to a large extent rewritten, or misrepresented, or simply forgotten in the light of a new revelation that had annulled the beliefs and practices of an earlier age" (105).
Yet Peters has been able to construct a context and details, carefully noting the conflicts among sources, from a variety of materials. The first and possibly most valuable source is the Quran, the record of Muhammad's revelations:
This is the sacred book of Islam, the collection of divinely-inspired utterances that issued from the mouth of the Prophet of Islam over the last twenty-two years of his life. What commends it so powerfully to the historian is its authenticity, not as the Word of God, of course, as the Mu...