The Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen has preserved one of the earliest manuscripts of the Quran, dating to the seventh century.
What makes a Muslim a good Muslim? Once the Arabs ruled the world from the Atlantic to Persia, this became an important question. After all, the sacred book of Islam, the Quran, is not a law code. Fortunately, there was the exemplary life of the Prophet. If someone took inspiration from Muhamad's conduct, he had to be a good believer.
Conundrums
So, Islamic scholars started to study anecdotes about the Prophet's life. There were many hadith, although some were suspect. However, there was some consensus about what was reliable, and in the mid-eighth century, a scholar named Ibn Ishaq used the hadith to compose a biography of the Prophet that seemed reliable. When nineteenth-century European scholars started to investigate the origins of Islam, they were convinced it could be relied upon.
Things are not so simple, however. In the 1970s, western scholars drew attention to the fact that the seemed to offer plausible contexts for Quranic verses, was it not possible that they had been created to explain problematic lines? Next: there were many parallels between the and Jewish and Christian legends. Was Ibn Ishaq's Muhamad not modeled on earlier prophets? And finally: there was strong evidence, also mentioned by Islamic scholars, that the Arabs of Late Antiquity had known monotheism. So, what was Muhamad's innovation?
