What should we say about Muhammad?

There is a tension in the academic study of religion between the views of religious adherents on one hand and the demands of critical scholarship on the other. The former emphasis was championed by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who once wrote that “a statement about a religion, in order to be valid, must be intelligible and acceptable to those within”. ¹ More recently, quite the opposite perspective was asserted by Bruce Lincoln: “When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which they will be understood… one has ceased to function as historian or scholar”. ² These conflicting methodologies have long confounded the study of Islam and in particular of its Prophet.