‘Robert Spencer pulled off another masterpiece that will fortify many and unbalance many more’

Here is a thorough and thoughtful review of Muhammad: A Critical Biography by the courageous ex-Muslim intellectual Anjuli Pandavar:

“Peace be upon the least deserving; and how he was created,” by Anjuli Pandavar, Murtadd to Human, March 20, 2025:

This is not the story of a man, but the man of a story.

Muhammad: A Critical Biography can be described as the capstone of a Muhammad trilogy, starting with Robert Spencer’s 2006 The Truth about Muhammad, written “to clarify the question of why so many violent jihadis look to Muhammad as their guiding light and inspiration, even as so many others see him as “a gentle man, sensitive, faithful, free from rancor and hatred,” in which Spencer confines himself to what “the great majority of Muslims” believe. The second, Did Muhammad Exist? (2012, revised and expanded edition 2021), examines the historical problems of the early traditions and why many cannot take them seriously.

Robert Spencer pulled off another masterpiece that will fortify many and unbalance many more, by asking the next logical question: if Muhammad did not exist, then why was he invented? By the forensic standards that Spencer’s readers have come to expect, he examines not only all available evidence, but all unavailable evidence, which, as it turns out, includes almost all available evidence that is not evidence at all, at least not for the existence of Muhammad. The question that follows hard upon would be: if it is not evidence for the existence of Muhammad, then what is it evidence for? The answer to this question constitutes the groundbreaking contribution of Muhammad: A Critical Biography, (MACB), the work under review in the present essay.

By rushing in where lesser scholars fear to tread, namely, the historicity of Muhammad, Robert Spencer will not endear himself either to over a billion Muslims, or to those scholars for whom loyalty supersedes truth. The structure of MACB attempts no clever philosophical acrobatics, for none is needed: sticking closely to the actual tradition is acrobatic enough. The Introduction, titled, “Who Is This Man? Is There Even Anyone Here at All?” opens with one sentence attributed to Muhammad and quoted from the renowned Muslim historian Tabari’s monumental The History of Al-Tabari, that both summarises and foreshadows all that is to follow: “I have fabricated things against God and have imputed to Him words which he has not spoken.” And so we’re off……

The architects of Islam “needed an explanation for contradictions that would allow them to make the revisions they needed to adapt their new religion to changing circumstances.” (p97) The story of the Satanic verses perhaps best illustrates the nightmare that the editorial process must have been. Robert Spencer sums up the complex problems facing the editors at this point: the oneness of God, the perfection of the Qur’an and the infallibility of Muhammad are all, at this point, untenable and very obviously so. The Satanic verses damage-control measure turned into an ever-deepening hole that has offered much mirth to critics of Islam and much anguish to Islamic apologists, especially the Muslims amongst them, for they know exactly how embarrassing this all is, while the interfaith idealists perforce cannot acknowledge this mess, for they need to cherrypick their way through verses and hadiths to construct their ideal Muhammad that they can hold up to Muslims as their bona fides.

Throughout, the main ideological problem confronting the architects of Islam has been fortifying the concept of one god and maintaining it in the face of considerable countervailing forces, but at the same time clearly differentiating their one God from Judaism. The safest way to accomplish the latter without damaging the one God of Judaism was to separate Jews from Judaism and by declaring Judaism originally Islam, and the Jews people of irredeemable evil for turning Islam into what is now Judaism. Islam, as brought by the final prophet, would rescue the one God from the clutches of the Jews, restore it from the corruption of the Christians and shield it from the polytheism of the Arabs.

The biography under construction for this new prophet had to keep all these balls in the air in an age of oral predominance and constant self-interest-driven embellishment, contradiction and confounding of stories (the Muslim remedy for this being the laughable chain-of-narration principle). The Satanic verses incident very well illustrates just how intertwined the creation of the Qur’an, Muhammad, the Sira (his biography) and the hadith were and remain. Unfortunately for the architects of Islam, the contradiction that came to be know as the “Satanic verses incident” first came to light after that perfect word of Allah had been published. It was also the most critical failure in the editorial process. To this very day, Muslims remain bedevilled by it. They don’t take too kindly to anyone picking at that scab.

This review describes Robert Spencer’s three books on Muhammad as suggesting a trilogy. Such a relationship is more accidental than planned. In his first book, the 2006 The Truth about Muhammad, Spencer confines himself to what “the great majority of Muslims” believe, a fair-enough scope. By the third book in a conscious trilogy, the author might have broadened his scope to include what “the great majority of Muslims” are. This is only a tangential aspect of MACB, yet, in the present reviewer’s opinion, it already turns Muhammad: A Critical Biography into more than a great and well-written historical treatise; it is also a weapon of war.

There is much more. Read the rest here.