| Moreover, many of them provide evidence of embellishment and invention that were introduced to serve the purposes of political or religious apologetic | 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 |
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| Lapidus 2002 , pp 0 | El-Cheikh, Nadia Maria Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs 2004, Harvard University Press p |
sources are not contemporaneous with the events they purport to relate and sometimes were written many centuries later.
21| See, for example, Bowersock, Glen Warren, Peter Robert Lamont Brown and Oleg Grabar Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World 1999, Harvard University Press p | Hitti, History of the Arabs, 10th edition 1970 , p |
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Kafih Jerusalem, 1984 , ch.
5| Peter Teed 1992 , p | Ideally, one would like to be able to check such accounts against contemporary evidence |
137 Netanel's work was virtually unknown beyond his native Yemen until modern times, so had little influence on later Jewish thought• 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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