No god exists but God, declares the Muslim profession of faith, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.

There is, in the opinion of those who recite it, only the one, transcendant proof of this remarkable claim: the body of revelations that supposedly descended from heaven to Muhammad, and which together constitute the holy book of Islam, the Quran. Unsurprisingly, then, the details of his life have always been a matter of obsessive concern to Muslims. In the Messenger of God, the Quran declares, you have an excellent example to follow. Over the centuries, biographies were duly written and collections of his sayings compiled that provided the Faithful with an almost pointilist record of his career. As a result, the curiosity of Muslims eager to know how their prophet might have cleaned his teeth, say, or what casserole he liked best for his supper, could readily be satisfied. In time, Western biographers too, as they woke up to the fact that more seemed to have been written about Muhammad than any other figure from antiquity, began adding to the plethora of books on him. Lesley Hazletons story of his life, The First Muslim, stands in a very long line indeed.

All the while, though, the challenge of writing a biography of Muhammad has been getting harder. There is currently no field of historical study more contested than the origins of Islam. Over the past half century, methods of analysis originally honed on Christianity have been applied to the foundational texts of the younger religion. The results have been devastating to the traditional model of Muhammads life. The sheer wealth of material obscures rather than illumines the beginnings of Islam. The earliest Muslim records of what Muhammad might have said or done originate almost two centuries after his lifetime. They were written, not by men concerned with history for historys sake, but by believers in a divine revelation, whose ambition was to elucidate the wishes of God. They are no more an unproblematic record of the historical Muhammads life than are Gnostic gospels written two hundred years after Jesus a credible source for early 1st century AD Judaea. To be sure, the oldest surviving biographies of the man

enshrined by Muslims as their prophet have a great deal to tell us about how Islam was crystallising at the time they were written; but whether they have anything to tell us about how the Quran actually came to be composed is, to put it mildly, controversial. At one end of the academic debate are those who consider Muhammad to have been precisely what his first Muslim biographers claimed him to have been, a prophet of God; at the opposite, those who deny that he so much as existed at all. The latter extreme, it is true, is very much a minority position. As the historian of early Islam, Chase Robinson, has observed, it is very unlikely that the tide of scepticism that has washed over early Islamic studies will ever rise so high that the outlines of a historical Muhammad will be washed away. One thing, though, is certain: there is very little about his life that can be taken for granted.

Lesley Hazleton must be aware of this. Listed in her bibliography are books that have questioned some of the most fundamental presumptions of the traditional narrative of Muhammads life: that the Prophets opponents were pagan; that the Quran originated in the depths of Arabia; that the House of God named in its verses stood at the place we now call Mecca. Hazleton describes herself as agnostic, and so presumably does not believe that the Quran derived from God but if not from God, then where? No attempt is made to answer this surely fundamental question. Whether you think the words he heard came from inside himself or from outside, Hazleton writes, it is clear that Muhammad experienced them, and with a force that would shatter his sense of himself and his world. But why is it clear? Judging by her narrative, Hazleton seems to feel that the traditional account of how the various verses in the Quran were revealed is to be trusted; but in that case, why is she not a Muslim? As it happens, an alternative case might just as easily be made: that many of the details of Muhammads biography evolved over the course of a century and more to explain passages within the Quran that had come to puzzle its readers. To explore that possibility, though or

even to have acknowledged it would have been to write an altogether more challenging book.

Why Hazleton should have ducked the opportunity to subject the sources for Muhammads life to a proper scrutiny is a puzzle. As an experienced reporter, based these past twelve years in the Middle East, she presumably recognises the importance of not relying solely on hearsay particularly when that hearsay reflects a massive and self-professed bias. It is almost as odd as the reluctance of a previous biographer of Muhammad, Karen Armstrong, to place Muslim scriptures under the same unsparing microscope that she has so forensically applied to the Bible. Perhaps it reflects a post-Satanic Verses nervousness about how believers might react; perhaps a desire to avoid causing offence. Whatever the reason, it is patronising to Muslims, and a dereliction of a biographers responsibilities, to presume that a life of Muhammad should be any less academically rigorous than one, say, of Jesus. Hazletons book is a well-written and engaging guide to what Muslims two centuries after their prophets death thought had been the details of his career; but it is no more than that. Readers wanting to know how far these traditions are to be trusted, and what can plausibly be said about the historical Muhammad, are recommended instead to try a book published last year: Stephen J. Shoemakers The Death of a Prophet. It is neither as easy a read as Hazletons, nor as cheap; but for anyone interested in the historical Muhammad, it is thoroughly worth both the effort and the expense.