There are certainly ways of reading literary sources through the discursive patterning of narrative, and this is well demonstrated in historical scholarship overall, to which the writing of the history of the Arabs should not be taken as an exception. Stylisation is of course undeniable and inevitable, and Arabic sources are patterned according to a variety of ways, depending on the generic specificity of the source in question, ways which in themselves are rough indicators of the relationship between text and what it purports to relate. This is a relationship which has a history that reaches beyond that of the text’s transmission. Despite the fairly common currency of narrativist keywords, there is precious little study of the generic properties of Arabic historical narratives which might help to navigate them with view to writing history. Legend is readily recognisable even when it does not betray itself by the miraculous, among other things and quite apart from the obvious, by the repetition of standard motifs of extremely wide, even universal incidence, and by the relative neglect of factors of time and space which, however, can be filled in the process of composition and elaboration aiming at a clear progress of plot. Much the same might be said of myth, which shares structural and motifemic elements with legend, but which refers specifically to elements of the sacred.

That the biography of Muḥammad, and the history of Paleo-Islam more generally, contains legendary and mythical elements is of course evident. These detailed legendary and mythical components are distinguishable from other generic properties, and, like pseudo-historical accounts in the Old Testament, are intermixed with historical reportage and interpretative historical theology. Details of Muḥammad’s biography recorded in the early akhbār and qaṣaṣ were later inserted into the overall discursive structures of prophetic biography overall: the themes of withdrawal into the wilderness, call to prophecy, persecution, appeasement, triumph – in such a way that commonplace and attestable events were related as rites of passage within the overall narrative scheme, in a manner structurally comparable to that of other prophetic biographies, to hagiographies, and to heroic tales. Muḥammad was, after all, both Apostle of God and hero, the latter aspect of which is not noted often enough or consequentially enough.