THIS BOOK IS ABOUT TEXTS, and the texts are about Muḥammad, the prophet of Islam. The texts-found in the earliest Islamic sources which have come down to us are studied in this book for the sake of the stories recorded in them, not for the sake of the events described in these stories. The question “what really happened” in Muḥammad's times is not the one asked in this book, which instead is concerned with the manner in which the texts tell the story of Muḥammad's life, and is aimed to discover how the various evolving versions of this story tell us about the image of the Prophet as perceived by the believers among whom these texts were created and circulated.

Many Islamicists who have already studied the story of Muḥammad's life have focussed their attention not only on the story itself, but also and mainly on the historical events which this story is supposed to record; they have conducted their research on the story with a view to revealing what the Prophet was “really” like, and what his enterprise “actually” was. They have noticed the existence of tendentious elaborations and legendary inventions in the early Islamic biographies of the Prophet, but have always regarded them as a secondary element, distinct from what they have considered to be the “early” and most “authentic” and “human” presentation of Muḥammad. They have believed that the “genuine” display of Muḥammad could and should be distinguished from the “later” legendary and tendentious one. This conviction is evident to various degrees of intensity in the studies of many leading Islamicists.

Already Ignaz Goldziher surveyed in some detail the legendary elements which found their way into the biographies of Muḥammad. In his view, these elements were only produced after the popular veneration of saints had already developed during the first decades of Islam. Originally, the Prophet was perceived as an ordinary human being; his legendary image was only established as a later development in contrast to the initial Islamic concepts. To use Goldziher's own words: “The power of ijma’ here scored one of its biggest triumphs in the whole system of Islam, insofar as the belief of the people succeeded in penetrating into the canonical conception of the Prophet and, so to speak, forcing it to make him into a fortune-teller, worker of miracles, and magician.“