Sublime

In other words, the earliest biography of Muhammad’s life was reputed to contain fabrications, disgraceful material, and distressing facts.2 What we have today has been filtered many times, both for fabrications and for difficult truths.

The Sunna is composed of thousands upon thousands of stories, or hadith, that claim to recount Muhammad’s words and deeds, as well as those of the earliest Companions. As discussed in Chapter 3, as these hadith were passed down from generation to generation, they became increasingly convoluted and inauthentic, so that after a while, nearly every le

nearly one sixth of all “reliable” hadith can be traced back to Muhammad’s wife Aisha.