It wasn't Mohammed who founded Islam.

[Rayaan]

But if he did manage to convince people of his prophethood and they did win so many battles and he became a legendary prophet, then why has nothing contemporary mentioning such an astonishing person ever been found?
We have lots of contemporary stuff for other people... older people... even for Herod (nothing mentioning a Jesus, nor a zombie apocalypse, curiously)... but for a desert dwelling, highly influential leader of a tribe in the early 600's there is a remarkable absence.
Why is everything written about the man from after his death?

Well, since there are no contemporary writings of the Prophet Muhammad, what is next most reliable are the later writings we have. And later writings are better than no evidence at all.

And the surfacing of later writings doesn't imply that it was all started as a rumor or an 'obvious jest'. It can just mean that it wasn't written down for that long. It can mean that it was being passed on from mouth to ear before it was written. This is called oral transmission, and this was the way knowledge used to be spread amongst each other in the early and Pre-Islamic times. And the best recording device that they had was not paper, but their own memories. The Arabs at that time were also known to be accomplished at retaining long lines poetry in their heads without needing to write any of that down. And these poems were transmitted orally for centuries:

The earliest examples of Arabic poetry that are available to us today were recorded in writing after the revelation of the Qur'an, but they belong to a tradition of orally performed and transmitted poetry that goes back several centuries; by the very nature of the transfer process—from one poet and bard to the next generation, we have no way of dating the origins of the tradition. The primary context of those poets and their poetry is the desert environment and the tribes who tended their animals there—prime amongst them, camels and horses. The poems, still prized by Arabs today as the major jewels of their literary heritage, are thus full of imagery of the desert—sand, wind, the occasional rain-cloud—and celebrate companionship and tribal solidarity while acknowledging the dangers of desert life and the need for sterling qualities to confront them.

http://www.pimsleurapproach.com/resource...iterature/


I get the impression that the difference between you and me is that you're just generally more distrustful of oral tradition (because you wrote: "with each retelling the ironic bits fell off and people started giving credence to the tale"}. That conveys to me that you assign a much less reliability to oral transmission than written transmission as an arbiter of what actually happened. You think that such huge-and-yet-undetectable distortions about a person can occur in orally transmitted information in merely 30 years after his death. I also regard written materials to be more reliable than oral transmission (since I can see them with my eyes), but that doesn't mean that all oral transmissions are to be considered untrustworthy or discredited as "rumors" only. The important thing is, writing and speaking are both two different modes of communication, and the latter is the type which was dominant in Arabia at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, so the absence of contemporary writings about him is not really surprising to me.

It doesn't make a difference to me if the quote attributed to Sebeos is not authentic either. The problem is yours, because you (and Min) seem to place a disproportionately high amount of credibility to the early/contemporary writings as compared to the later ones. But, unlike you, I treat them almost the same because I take into account the fact that writing was very uncommon in those times in Arabia, and oral transmission was the primary means of communication. Therefore it is perfectly reasonable that writings about Muhammad's life would surface later on instead of earlier. There is nothing strange or unlikely about that.

Human memory and history are two interconnected things. Both written and oral transmissions of past events are, ultimately, products of memory. So, if you're going to discredit the oral part of it and give credence to the writings only, then you've rejected a very basic method of historical transmission.

Memory has many flaws, yes, but it is also underappreciated nowadays since modern society has allowed us to live with the luxury of paper, books, and computers to record information on.