Medieval Europe’s portrait of Muhammad’s Arabia was largely accurate history

Evidence

Thus, in the less fabulous writers a fairly consistent picture of ancient Arabia develops: wild, barbaric, a simple and illiterate population, unorganised, ungoverned, at least in Medina; exposed to outside influences from the East Roman Empire, but penetrated rather by refugees from ecclesiastical conflict than by orthodox missionaries. Such unofficial missions succeeded, not among the superior mercantile community of Mecca, but among the rustics of Medina whose Jewish neighbours had already influenced them. Muhammad was the natural product of this world, sometimes as himself one of the dupes, but usually as the prime deceiver. This is not a ridiculously unhistorical picture, as is, on the contrary, that which imagined any considerable acceptance of orthodox Christianity in the Arabia into which Muhammad was born. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 482