As one of the primary religious leaders in history, Muhammad (570–632 CE) ranks second only to Jesus as a religious founder because the religion he is said to have founded, Islam, ranks second to Christianity in the total number of adherents. The principal events in his life have been repeated so many times that they are accepted by students of religion virtually without documentation of sources. Non-Muslims typically know of one Muslim book, the Qur’an, and assume it contains the basic information about his life. However, as an alleged collection of Muhammad's qur’an (“recitations”), it is bereft of anything but the barest hints of biography behind the collection.

Islamic scholarship dating to the nineteenth century has accumulated decades of critical leverage. A century ago Snouck Hurgronje summarized the standard biography as “tendentious fiction […]. Of Muhammad's life before his appearance as the messenger of God, we know extremely little: compared to the legendary biography as treasured by the faithful, practically nothing.” There was much “imitation of the Gospels” and stories “that do not belong to history. Fiction plays such a great part in these stories, that we are never sure of being on historical ground” (1916, xii–xiii). John Gunther defined the evidence for his biography sardonically in a single word: he “was born posthumously in A.D. 570” (1938, 518). The alleged “facts” of his life for which there are no contemporary records reside in a vast collection of “narratives” (hadith) that make up Islamic tradition. These developed from the second to fourth centuries of the Islamic era, that is, from the eighth to tenth centuries CE and have now achieved the status of sacred writings (Warraq 2000, 67).

According to this posthumous biography, his parents belonged to the Quraysh tribe; his father died before he was born, his mother when he was 6, leaving him an orphan with a tumultuous childhood of changing guardians. Various traditions have him living with desert Bedouins, foster parents, his grandfather, and his uncle who, by the time the boy was 9 or 10, took him on trading trips as far away as Syria that led him to a career as a merchant.