Islamic History

Menu

Prophet Muhammad is a Historic Person

By /

Last updated: April 7th, 2025 at 4:26 pm

Print

Prophet Muhammad was a real person who lived and breathed on this earth.

Historical evidence

British library houses a number of manuscripts in its Oriental Manuscript Collection.  One of them is BL Add. Mss: 14,461.  This manuscript has 107 pages and contains Gospel according to Matthew and Gospel according to Mark. Somebody scribbled a few lines on its folio number 1 a.  Wright, who catalogued this manuscript, brought to attention that the distinctly legible writing on its folio number 1 a is a nearly contemporary notice of taking of Damascus by the Arabs in 634 – 5 CE.1  What Wright had missed out, and realized by later scholars, was that it was the earliest notice of Prophet Muhammad himself.  Here is the scribbled text.  The writing being very faint, the reader has to add a few letters or words in between to make a sense.  Such letters are written within { }, whereas translator’s notes are written within [ ].  English translation of original Syriac reads:

In January {the people of} Ḥimṣ took the word for their lives and many
villages were ravaged by the killing of {the Arabs of} Mūḥmd [Muḥammad]
and many people were slain and {taken} prisoner from Galilee as far as Beth….
{…} and those Arabs pitched camp beside {Damascus?} {…} and we saw everywhe{re…} and o{l}ive oil which they brought and them.  On the
tw{enty-six}th of May the Saq{īlā}rā went {…} from the vicinity of Ḥimṣ
and the Romans chased them {…} On the tenth {of August} the Romans fled
from the vicinity of Damascus {and there were killed} many {people} some
ten thousand.  And at the turn {of the ye}ar the Romans came.  On the twentieth of August in the year n{ine hundred and forty-} seven there gathered in Gabitha {a multitude of} the Romans and many people {of the R}omans were kil{led} {s}ome
fifty thousand.2

There are certain observations to be made here.  The people of Ḥimṣ ‘took the word for their lives’ is an expression that they agreed to surrender in return for their lives.  Then there was a battle in Palestine with the ‘Arabs of Muhammad’ in which many villages were ruined and people from the region of Galilee and Beth [? Sacharya, South west of Jerusalem] were taken captive.  Then the Arabs laid siege to Damascus (as read by Noldeke:  T. Noldeke “Zur Geschichte Der Araber Im 1, Jahrh. d.H. Aus Syrischen Quellen’, Zeitschrift Der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, 1876, Volume 29, P 76).  In May Saqilara had limited success in the beginning but apparently, he was unable to lift the siege.3  The next battle took place in Gabitha, [a town to the north of river Yarmouk in the Golan massif].  The writing gives the date of battle of Yarmouk as 20th August 947 AG which is 20th August 636 CE.  Key word in this text is “we saw” which is written on line 13.  It means the writer was eyewitness to the events that were noted and that he had penned them down on or immediately after 20th August 636 CE.  According to Hoyland, an English historian, it was customary during those days to write down commemorative notes on the blank pages of Gospel.4  If we take the date of death of Prophet Muhammad as June 8, 632, above document was written just three years and three months after the death of Prophet Muhammad.

British library preserves another Syriac manuscript as well.  This is BL Add. Mss: 14,643.  This manuscript was first catalogued by Wright in 1870 and since then is giving frustration to the scholars.5  It contains so much incoherent material that it is difficult to make sense of any theme or year of its writing.  One entry in it is significant from point of view of Islamic history.

In the year 945, indiction 7, on Friday, 4 February, [634 CE] at the ninth hour,
there was a battle between the Romans and the Ṭayyāye [Arabs] of Mḥmt [Muhammad] in Palestine twelve miles east of Gaza.  The Romans fled, leaving

hind the patrician Bryrdn, whom the Tayyāye killed.  Some 4000 poor villagers of Palestine were killed there, Christians, Jews and Samaritans.  The Ṭayyāye
ravaged the whole region.6 

This is the first explicit reference to Prophet Muhammad in a non-Muslim source, and its precise dating inspires confidence that it ultimately derives from first-hand knowledge.  The account is usually identified with the battle of Dathin, which Muslim sources say, took place near Gaza in the spring of 634 CE.7  If we agree that the above document was written on February 4, 634 CE, this is mention of Prophet Muhammad even earlier than the previous one, just one year eight months after his death.

There is yet another document of non-Muslim origin.  Doctrina Jacobi (teaching of Jacob) is a Christian polemical dialogue written in Greek against the Jews.8  It is about hundred pages long document from an unknown author.  The background of the dialogue is Carthage in Africa.  The dialogue is between Jacob, a Jew who has been forced to convert to Christianity and other Jews whom Jacob wants to convert to Christianity.  The dialogue touches current political affairs of the Byzantine Rome in the light of recent Arab conquests.  At one place it says, “When the Candidatus was killed by the Saracens, I was at Caesarea and I set off by boat to Sykamina.  People were saying ‘the Candidatus has been killed’, and we Jews were overjoyed. And they were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens, and that he was proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come.  I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him; ‘what can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?’  He replied, groaning deeply: ‘he is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword.  Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist.  Indeed, Isaiah said that the Jews would retain a perverted and hardened heart until all the earth should be devastated.  But you go, master Abraham, and find out about the prophet who has appeared’.  So I, Abraham, inquired and heard from those who had met him that there was no truth to be found in the so called prophet, only the shedding of men’s blood.  He says also that he has keys of paradise, which is incredible.”9  This is not a dated document but after the dialogue is over, one character is shown to leave Carthage on July 13th, 634 CE.  This very date gives a clue to Hoyland that it was not written much after 634 CE.10  Nau gives it a little later date of 640 CE.11  More recently Thummel has also agreed to the date of 634 CE.12  If we recognize July 13, 634 CE as the date of writing of Doctrina Jacobi, this becomes one of the earliest mentions of Prophet Muhammad in non-Muslim sources.  Though Prophet Muhammad is not named but apparently it is he who is being talked about.

Background of the debate

In 1930 Liutsian I. Klimovich, a Russian scholar, suggested that Prophet Muhammad is not a real historic personality.  Rather he is a legend created by Middle Eastern writers of mid-8th and 9th centuries.13  Liutsian argued that the earliest known biographies and reports of Prophet Muhammad are from mid-8th century.  If Prophet Muhammad were a real person why any evidence of his existence is not available for more than a century after his death?

Liustsian based his theory on research done only on early Islamic sources.  Earliest surviving biography of Prophet Muhammad is written by Ibn Ishaq and published in 750 CE.  Later historians searched the non-Muslim sources and found mention of Prophet Muhammad much earlier.

Why non-Muslim source mentioned Prophet Muhammad after death

Prophet Muhammad was of little consequence for outside world until after his death, so we have no contemporary external sources to elucidate his life.14

End notes

  1. William Wright, ‘Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired Since the Year 1838’ (London: Printed by order of the Trustees, 1870) Reprint Gorgias press 2002.  Part I, P 65 -66, No XCIV.
  2. A. Palmer (with contributions from S. P. Brock and R. G. Hoylnad), The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles Including Two Seventh-Century Syriac Apocalyptic Texts, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), 2, 3.
  3. This event of Saqilara is also mentioned by Theophanes the Confessor who writes: “The emperor …. Dispatched Sakellarios Theodore with a Roman force against Arabs.  Theodore met a host of Saracens near Emesa; he killed some of them (including their emir) and drove the rest all the way to Damascus” (Theophanes the Confessor, The Chronicle of Theophanes, trans. and ed. Harry Turtledove, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), P 37 annus mundi 6125.)
  4. R. G. Hoyland seeing Islam As Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish And Zoroastrian Writings On Early Islam, (Princeton (NJ): The Darwin Press, 1997), 116, 17.
  5. For the catalogue see: W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired Since the Year 1838, (London: Printed by order of the Trustees, 1870), Part III,  P 1440 – 1041,  No DCCCCXIII.  For the difficulties of interpreting the text see: A. Palmer (with contributions from S. P. Brock and R. G. Hoylnad), The Seventh Century In The West-Syrian Chronicles Including Two Seventh-Century Syriac Apocalyptic Texts, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), 5, 6.
  6. Thomas the Presbyter, Chronica minora II.  Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium.  Vol 3 (Scriptores Syri), ed. Ernest Walter Brooks, (Paris: Peeters Publishers, 1940), 147 – 48.
  7. R. G. Hoyland, seeing Islam As Others Was It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish And Zoroastrian Writings On Early Islam, (Princeton (NJ): The Darwin Press, 1997), 120.
  8. Nathanael G. Bonwetsch (ed.), “Doctrina Lacobi nuper baptizati”, in Abhandlungen der Koiglichen Gesellschaft der Wissenchaften zu Gottingen.  Philologisch-Historische Klasse: n.F., Band 12, Nro. 3. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1910) Reprint: Liechtestein: Kraus, 1970.  1 – 91.
  9. Vincet Dèroche, ‘Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati: juifs et chretiens dans l’orient du VIIe siècle.,’ Travaux let mèmoires 11 (College de France: Centre de recherché d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, 1991), 47 – 229.
  10. Robert. G. Hoyland. Seeing Islam As Others Was It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish And Zoroastrian Writings On Early Islam, (Princeton (NJ): The Darwin Press, 1997), 58.
  11. Francois Nau, ‘La Didascalie de Jacob: Premiere Assemblee’ in Patrologia Orientalis, Vol 8.  Eds. Rene Graffin and Francois Nau (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1912) 715.
  12. Hans Georg Thummel.  Fruhgeschichte der ostkirchlichen Bilderlehre: Texte und Untersuchungen zur Zeit vor dem Bilderstreit; (series: Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 139) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992), 232.
  13. Liutsian Klimovich, “Sushchestvoval li Mokhammed? Diskussiia v Komunisticheskoi akademii v antireligioznoi sektsii institute filosofii 12/XI 1930g. po dokladu L. I. Klimovicha”, Voinstvuiushchii ateizm no. 2 – 3 (1931), 189 – 218.
  14. Robert G. Hoyland, In God’s Path: the Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 37.
Scroll to Top