The Trusted

How do we know anything about the man who changed the world?

In the summer of 632, in a mud-brick room in an oasis town in western Arabia, a man of about sixty died of a fever. Within a hundred years the movement he founded governed territory from the Atlantic to the Indus - the fastest political transformation in recorded history.

It began with a man in a cave who thought, for a while, that he was going mad.

This is the first of seven volumes on the life of Muhammad, written for readers who are not Muslim. It assumes no prior knowledge, no shared vocabulary, and no shared beliefs - and it does not ask to be taken on trust.

Volume One builds the ground the story stands on.

Its first half describes the world he was born into, and almost nothing in it matches the popular picture. Two empires exhausted by a seventy-year war that destroyed them both. A peninsula that was neither empty nor isolated, but a busy periphery criss-crossed by traders, refugees, and missionaries. A monotheistic kingdom that had ruled southern Arabia for a century and a half, whose God was called the Merciful. Jewish and Christian communities far closer to Mecca than the story of "the idolatrous Arabs" allows.

Its second half asks the question that has to be answered before a single anecdote can be told honestly: where does any of this come from?

- The Quran - what kind of historical evidence it actually is, and what the manuscripts show

- The Hadith - how a corpus of several hundred thousand reports was sifted, and by what criteria

- The lost biography of Ibn Ishaq, which underlies everything written since and no longer exists

- The non-Muslim witnesses - a Syriac chronicler who names Muhammad within a decade of his death, a receipt for sheep dated by the Islamic calendar eleven years after it

- The argument in Western scholarship from 1850 to now: how the field moved from confidence to radical scepticism, and substantially back again

It closes with a method. Every claim in these seven volumes is marked by how much weight it will bear - secure, probable, contested, or late - so that a reader can see exactly where the author's judgement enters, and disagree with it.

"I am not asking to be believed. I am asking to be checked."

For readers of Karen Armstrong, Tom Holland, Reza Aslan, and anyone who has wanted a serious, unhurried, and genuinely honest account of where Islam came from.