Medieval polemicists gleaned shocking hadiths to brand Muhammad a fraud

Evidence

First Martí concedes that in some things Muhammad was truthful: here he gives a (now-familiar) list of Koranic precepts that are in agreement with Christian doctrine: the unity of God, the Virgin birth, the praise of Jesus and the Gospel, and so on. “Yet many of his words were false”14: the Koran claims that the Virgin Mary was the sister of Aaron, that Jesus announced the arrival of Muhammad, and that Jesus was not really crucified. Here, too, under the rubric of Muhammad’s “lies,” Martí presents the Muslim paradise, full of the pleasures of eating and love-making, and contrasts it with the pure and austere heaven of Paul and the Gospels. Martí also gleans some sayings attributed to Muhammad in the Hadîth collections of al-Bukhâri and Muslim b. al-Hajjâj: that flies wings’ contain poison and that the day of judgement would come within one hundred years of Muhammad. The choice of passages clearly shows the polemical purpose; by pouncing on whatever he finds to be shocking or ridiculous, he can conclude, “all these things seem to be the words of a stupid man or a scoffer rather than a prophet or messenger of God.” — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1199

Categorization

• XREF: This shows the deep source of the ridicule-of-Muslim-paraadise trope mapped in the vault via Anidjar/Aziz — the sensual-paradise-equals-false-prophet argument is already fully formed here in Ramón Martí.