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Describe the historiographical problems that plague the study of Muhammad The study of Muhammad aside from its importance, per se, as a means of understanding the subjective and objective forces that galvanised the spirit of such a simple, unostentatious man who was later to become one of the world's greatest social reformers and leaders, also has wider implications for the study of the formative period of Islam as a whole. Our understanding of Muhammad and …

…some of our Muslim sources, we have no real criteria at present for understanding Muhammad and Islam wholly because we do not know enough about the social and historical contexts in which Islam emerged. It should, however, be the common aim of both Muslim and Western scholars to strive to employ the interpretive tools we have available to reconstruct a history of Islam which is more objective and neutral than the one we have now.