Did Muhammad exist? The problem of ‘Muhammad’ as a title and definite articles in Arabic

An Islamic scholar named Joshua Little has published a defense of the standard Islamic narrative regarding Muhammad and the origins of Islam. I’ve been meaning to respond to it, but have been frightfully busy for months, and even now will only have time to respond to one part of his argument, but I intend to get to the others later, as time permits. Nowadays this would get much more attention if I made a video, but videos are more splash than substance, generate more heat than light, and all too often elevate self-important fools who don’t really know what they’re talking about but know how to enunciate it authoritatively to practically oracular authority. If fewer people see this because it’s in print and not in a video, so be it.

First, some background on Joshua Little. He is a Research Fellow at the Department of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Origins at the University of Groningen. He received an MPhil in Islamic Studies & History and a DPhil in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford. He is a standard-issue leftist academic who is deeply concerned about “Islamophobia,” and either unaware of or indifferent to the fact that the term itself was coined in order to intimidate and silence those who stand against jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women. In line with this concern, Little has claimed, although he doesn’t know me at all, that I only question the historicity of Muhammad (or, as he carefully calls him with dutiful dhimmitude, “the prophet Muhammad”) out of hatred for Muslims: “Robert Spencer, uh, and these guys are just Islamophobes, these guys are just, you know, extremely hostile to Islam and to Muslims, you know, and and that’s you know that’s it’s pretty straightforward, and so, um, uh, this sort of mythicist dance is just a vehicle for this sort of, uh, uh, resentment and aggression and hatred, uh, towards Muslims and Islam, right, it’s just sort of like, uh, tearing apart, sort of, you know, every possible aspect of Islam, you know, tearing apart sort of even the foundations of the religion, it’s just an extension of it, there’s just a type of Islamophobe who, uh, uh, you know is sort of drawn to this kind of thing, they just want to demolish everything about Islam, it just becomes a way for them to sort of you know, brow[beat?] and humiliate Muslims, right, so, you know, to try and destroy, uh, Islam in every way intellectually you know…”

This semi-articulate gabble speaks for itself on several levels. It doesn’t reflect well upon Little’s academic credentials that he is this inarticulate when thinking on his feet, but it also must be noted that among all his degrees, there is no degree in psychology. The man doesn’t actually know anything about me or my motivations, and here he is repeating standard “Islamophobia” boilerplate about how those who oppose jihad terror and Sharia oppression are only doing so because they hate Muslims. Not a critical or an original thinker, this guy. Anyway, the question of the historicity of Muhammad is simply a historical one. Would Little claim that investigations of the historicity of Jesus, which have been going on over two centuries, are motivated by hatred of Christianity? Almost certainly not. Muddling this issue are a spate of (again) videos claiming that we must not question the historicity of Muhammad because doing so is supposedly ineffective or even counterproductive for Christian proselytizing. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but outside YouTube world, the validity of an intellectual inquiry is not determined by its usefulness for one thing or another. It is simply a question of the pursuit of truth.

Little is also astoundingly inconsistent. He attempted, although apparently he is not a Muslim but a garden variety leftist academic, to do a powerful service for Islamic apologists in the West, writing a massive, 538-page doctoral dissertation purporting to establish that Aisha was not actually nine when Muhammad consummated his marriage with her. In the course of this elephantine work, however, he grants the fundamental claim that those who question the historical value of the Islamic texts regarding Muhammad: that the records are too late and clearly too manipulated to have any definite historical value. In this dissertation, Little wrote:

That Hadith are unreliable—that any given matn cannot be taken at face value as an accurate datum from the 1st Islamic Century, and that any given ʾisnād cannot be taken at face value as an accurate record of a matn’s provenance—cannot be seriously contested, for multiple reasons. Firstly, there is an overwhelming prior probability based upon the ubiquity of fabrication and pseudepigraphy in Late Antique and Mediaeval religio-historical (pagan, Jewish, and Christian) ascriptions. Secondly, there is the high frequency of contradictions within the Hadith corpus, which necessitates the occurrence of a huge amount of fabrication, interpolation, and/or mutation and, therefore, skepticism towards any given hadith. Thirdly, there is the ubiquity of fabrication and interpolation—both reported and demonstrable—in the Hadith corpus, which again casts doubt upon the rest of the corpus. Fourthly, there is the rapid, extreme mutation and growth of reports that evidently took place over the course of a century or more of oral transmission, which means that any given matn—regardless of the ʾisnād—is likely at best heavily distorted and at worst obliterated beyond its original form. Fifthly, there is the belated emergence of Hadith as a genre and corpus, largely during the 8th and 9th Centuries CE, which straightforwardly precludes the authenticity of most ascriptions to the 7th Century CE.

He adds that “the matns of hadiths,” that is, the stories of Muhammad themselves, “were variously: crafted by oral storytellers and preachers—who valued education, edification, and entertainment above all else—from a common stock of material (and reformulated through successive retellings); inferred into the mouths of early authorities by later jurists, theologians, and exegetes (and updated in the same way according to changing doctrines and understandings); speculated into being, or created through honest guesswork; formulated by sectaries, regionalists, and others as symbolic or ideal expressions of correct doctrine (i.e., as a kind of convention); and (mendaciously) fabricated and interpolated by propagandists and apologists for all manner of political, sectarian, regional, and other causes (whether for personal gain or the greater good).”

Yet now, after completely eviscerating any idea that the Hadith are historically reliable, he says this: “The extant Islamic historical sources thus constitute a vast corpus of material from diverse backgrounds, from multiple locations across the early Arab Empire and from multiple sectarian communities, all of which affirms Muhammad’s historicity. In other words, all of these sources agree that Muhammad was a man who lived in Western Arabia at the beginning of the 7th Century CE; that he was a member of the Quraysh tribe; that he married a woman named Khadijah and another named ʿAʾishah, amongst others; that he led a religious community in the town of Medina and fought against rival groups in Western Arabia; and that his community went on to establish the Arab Empire after his death…. Muhammad’s historicity is all the more likely given the diverse sectarian provenance of the Islamic sources: no matter where we look, whether the sources be Sunni, Shiʿi, Ibadi, or something else, the same basic picture of Muhammad emerges.”

That’s terrific, but it can’t bear the weight Little wishes it to carry. He is arguing on this basis (and, yes, others) that Muhammad must be an authentic historical figure. But all this really establishes is that either these sects emerged after the fundamental elements of the myth had been formulated, or that there really was a person who did those some or even all of these things, and upon whom the details of the myth were eventually overlaid. Little and some of the puffed-up YouTube scholars accuse me of inconsistency on this point, or even of a Motte-and-Bailey, that is, asserting an indefensible position, that Muhammad did not exist, and then withdrawing to a defensible one, that Muhammad may have existed but what he really said and did is shrouded in myth, when challenged. That is, however, not the case. I have said and am saying that Muhammad the prophet of Islam did not exist. What actually happened, we simply do not know. There may have been someone to whom these myths were later ascribed, but they are indeed myths. Or maybe the basic agreement about the details of his life came about at an earlier, non-written stage of the myth-making process. Again, we do not know, and most likely cannot know, but the questions and problems for the standard narrative are very much real.

Anyway, Little takes on one of the arguments that those who question Muhammad’s historicity make: that the name “Muhammad” appears to have been used, both before the traditional date of the advent of Islam and in the years of the early Arab conquests, as a title, not a proper name. One indication of this is the existence of mid-seventh century coins from the Arab empire, bearing the word “Muhammad” along with a cross. The standard narrative would have us believe that the early Arab rulers, having heard Muhammad himself say Jesus was not crucified (Qur’an 4:157) and that Jesus would return at the end of the world and “break the cross,” would put the hated symbol on their coins. If “Muhammad” was a title for someone else and the cross denunciations were formulated later, the problem these coins pose disappears. But Little claims that this is false simply on the basis of Arabic grammar in his article “Did Muhammad Exist? An Academic Response to a Popular Question,” by Joshua Little, Islamic Origins, June 27, 2025:

Many Muhammad mythicists also claim that muhammad in these inscriptions is an epithet or title for Jesus rather than the proper name of a recent Arabian man, or in other words: muhammad rasul allah should be read as “praiseworthy is the Messenger of God” (i.e., Jesus) rather than “Muhammad is the Messenger of God”. This is a fairly straightforward misreading of the text: titles and epithets in Arabic are typically definite, so if indeed muhammad was a title or epithet, it ought to be accompanied by a definite article (al-muhammad), which it is not. However, given that muhammad rasul allah looks like a standard Arabic nominal sentence (“X is Y”), and given also that muhammad is in the first position in the sentence and thus likely the subject (the “X” in “X is Y”), and given further that subjects in nominal sentences are almost always definite, it follows that muhammad is still very likely definite. This creates a serious problem for the mythicist reading of this word, since there are only three ways that a noun can be definite in Arabic: (1) with a definite article; (2) as part of a possessive construct known as an Idafah; and (3) as a proper name. Given that muhammad lacks a definite article, and given also that the sentence in question turns into gibberish if it is interpretated [sic] as an Idafah (“the praiseworthy one of the Messenger of God”), there is only one viable explanation: muhammad is a proper name. In other words, the traditional reading of the formula muhammad rasul allah is beyond reasonable doubt: “Muhammad is the Messenger of God”. And, if Muhammad is a proper name, we would naturally expect “Muhammad” (whoever he is) to be someone different from “Jesus”, since people almost always have only one proper name. Thus, when we find both “Muhammad” and “Jesus” referred to on the Dome of the Rock, the obvious implication is that “Muhammad” is someone other than Jesus. In short, the mythicist interpretation of muhammad in early Muslim inscriptions makes little sense: this is clearly the proper name of a man who was regarded to be a Messenger of God, which perfectly matches the unanimous testimony of the later Islamic historical sources that their religion and community—of which the makers of these inscriptions were a part—was ultimately founded by a religious leader named Muhammad. Once again, the inscriptional evidence fits comfortably with a historicist view, not a mythicist view.

Yeah, no. Little ignores the possibility that muhammad rasul allah means “the praised one is the messenger of Allah.” This would not require a definite article. In A Grammar of the Arabic Language by William Wright and Michael Jan de Goeje (Cambridge University Press, 1898), we find this: “The inchoative or subject of a nominal sentence cannot, according to the Arab grammarians, consist of an indefinite noun or one which is not qualified by an adjective, or an expression equivalent to an adjective … except in certain cases [p. 262] (i) When the subject is an adjective, agreeing with and taking the place of a suppressed substantive… The subject may also be indefinite in some cases in which a strong emphasis rests upon it.” This is saying that in certain cases, such as when the subject is an adjective, which is the case with “the praiseworthy one,” or “muhammad,” it can be indefinite, that is, it need not have the definite article and appear as al-muhammad. Little and those who follow his lead may dismiss this 1898 Arabic grammar as “Orientalist” and hence “Islamophobic,” but in reality, this book was not speaking about the historicity of Muhammad, but simply of Arabic grammar, and has no polemical axe to grind. For more on this, see the work of a genuine scholar, Robert Martin Kerr, “Du Désir À La Louange: À Propos de la Racine HMD et de la « Préhistoire » de Muhammad,” Acta Orientalica Belgica, Brussels, 2022, pp. 223ff., and specifically footnote 100.

The business about the necessity for the definite article, or the fact that it is not needed in certain cases, is a prime example of the truth of the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and a reminder of the danger of seeing something claimed in a video and thinking one has sufficiently informed oneself about the issue at hand.

More on this later. Meanwhile, get Did Muhammad Exist? here and Muhammad: A Critical Biography here.