| 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 | 5, "One major challenge to examining initial contacts between Byzantium and the early Muslim umma arises from the controversy surrounding the traditional Islamic account |
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| 137 Netanel's work was virtually unknown beyond his native Yemen until modern times, so had little influence on later Jewish thought• 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 | sources are not contemporaneous with the events they purport to relate and sometimes were written many centuries later |
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| Denis Gril, Miracles, , Brill, 2007 | 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 |
Moreover, many of them provide evidence of embellishment and invention that were introduced to serve the purposes of political or religious apologetic.