Medieval critics read Muhammad through contemporary charlatans, not Meccan history

Evidence

If the easy dismissal, as truisms, of the revelation to Muhammad of the unity of God, of the warnings of hell-fire, of demands for belief in and submission to God, seem uncharitable and even obtuse, it must be remembered that no historical imagination could then reconstruct the Meccan situation in the time of the Prophet. On the contrary, the contemporary professional necromancer and charlatan fitted with the Scriptural picture and with the accepted caricature ot Muhammad. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 446

Categorization

• XREF: The pattern of explaining Islam’s founder by projecting a debased contemporary figure onto him recurs in later orientalist scholarship that the vault already tracks — the ‘charlatan-prophet’ template.