Historicity of Muhammad

Muslim religious scholars rely primarily for their understanding of the life of Muhammad on the Qur'an, which gives very little information and whose historicity has been questioned, and on the sīra literature and Hadith which survive in the historical works of writers of second, third, and fourth centuries of the Muslim era (c. 700−1000 AD). Modern historians have preferred to use as a starting-point a relatively small number of contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous non-Muslim sources and archaeological evidence, but also make use of later Muslim sources in their investigations.