| These sources contain internal complexities, anachronisms, discrepancies, and contradictions | Ideally, one would like to be able to check such accounts against contemporary evidence |
See, for example, Bowersock, Glen Warren, Peter Robert Lamont Brown and Oleg Grabar Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World 1999, Harvard University Press p.
17| "Muhmmad," Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim world• sources are not contemporaneous with the events they purport to relate and sometimes were written many centuries later | 597, which notes that many of the details surrounding Muhammad's life as given in the biographies, are "problematic in certain respects, the most important of which is that they represent a tradition of living narrative that is likely to have developed orally for a considerable period before it was given even a relatively fixed written form |
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The Bustan al-Ukul, by Nathanael ibn al-Fayyumi, edited and translated by David Levine, Columbia University Oriental Studies Vol.
27| Kafih Jerusalem, 1984 , ch | Moreover, many of them provide evidence of embellishment and invention that were introduced to serve the purposes of political or religious apologetic |
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| Denis Gril, Miracles, , Brill, 2007 |
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