ABSTRACT
In the span of just over a century and a half, Muhammad has gone from being a figure who was "born in the full light of history" to almost a complete cipher. Even today a handful of scholars continue to labor intensively to prevent Muhammad from completely vanishing in what amounts to a near total epistemological collapse regarding the beginnings of Islam. The early "Pathological Lives" of Muhammad generally sought to diagnose him at a distance of more than a thousand years with epilepsy, based largely on reports from the traditional Islamic biographies. Historical criticism of the hadith and the sira traditions was more successful in taking hold, even as many scholars have nonetheless continued to resist its findings even up until the present. Eschatological lives of Muhammad have been relatively rare during the past century, and this view seems to have fallen out of favor until only very recently.
