Falsifying the Prophet: Muhammad at the Hands of His Earliest Christian Biographers in the West

Abstract

Arguably there is no better way to appreciate character assassination as practiced by medieval Christians than to consider early Christian biographies of Muhammad. One might think Muhammad would have rivals for this distinction among the Jews and the heretics, the two religious categories aside from Islam that played the biggest role in shaping early Christian identity. But as common as Christian treatises against the Jews were, their prophets were immune from Christian censure due to their perceived indispensability in corroborating Jesus’s identity as the Messiah; Muhammad, whose prophecies postdated the Incarnation, was not afforded the same consideration. And while Christian writers regularly excoriated heresiarchs like Arius and Nestor, the reactions that Muhammad evoked were still more visceral, for, unlike Arius’s innovation, Muhammad’s never went away, and unlike Nestor’s, it was linked to a polity that threatened to swallow Greek and Latin Christendom altogether. These circumstances combined to assure Muhammad the lion’s share of attention from medieval Christian character assassins.