People were not writing in Arabic in Muhammad's time. There was no such thing as Arabic literature during this time as people were still trying to figure HOW to write in Arabic.
The first Arabic book to be written was the Quran. However, it wasn't written until long after his death.
The first biography written of Muhammad was written ~140 years after his death. The biography, Sirat Rasul Allah, was written by a man named Ibn Ishaq, but the book itself has actually been lost.
Ibn Ishaq taught a man (oral tradition) named al-Bakkai, who made his own edition of Ibn Ishaq’s book, and al-Bakkai taught a man named Ibn Hisham, who edited al-Bakkai’s edition, and it is this edition that we now have.
What does this mean? There were no living eyewitnesses to Muhammad's life. The people who were discussing his life were generationally removed from the events they were discussing.
They created a biography ~140 years after Muhammad's death, they lose the biography, it's recreated by a guy who learned of the biography from the original author, and then another guy edits the biography... really?
Can you really trust such oral tradition, or such a depiction to be unfiltered and accurate concerning the life of Muhammad?
Why did these men each make their own editions?
Ibn Hisham, the last "editor", tells us in his introductory remarks: "Things which it is disgraceful to discuss, matters which would distress certain people, and such reports as al-Bakkai told me he could not accept as trustworthy—all these things I have omitted."
In other words, the earliest biography of Muhammad’s life was reputed to contain fabrications, disgraceful material, and distressing facts. What we have today has been filtered many times, both for fabrications, censoring, and for difficult truths.
When it comes to the records of Muhammad’s life, we simply do not have such early or unfiltered data. Everything has been filtered through multiple generations.
Still though... what we do have, displays shocking information concerning Muhammad.
From The Life of Muhammad:
Muhammad personally oversaw the beheadings of up to nine hundred men on a single day, digging trenches in the marketplaces so that their corpses could fall into mass graves upon being decapitated.
Muhammad ordered the assassination of an old man who had composed poetry complaining about Muhammad.
A woman lamented the old man’s death in poetry, so Muhammad ordered her assassination, and her blood splattered on her children as she breastfed.
Muhammad ordered the torture of a city treasurer to extract the location of the money, so his men kindled a fire with flint and steel on the treasurer’s chest until he was nearly dead, ultimately beheading him.
Muhammad was about to execute a man, the man pleaded, “Who will look after my children?” to which Muhammad responded, "hell!".
This is just scratching the surface. Admittedly, most Muslims only know what they've been taught by their Imams. Most do not dig into their own resources and may not be aware of any of this.
By the time hadith were written under men like Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim, many of these accounts were filtered out of Muhammad’s biography, just as Ibn Hisham and al-Bakkai had filtered the accounts that they received.
For this reason, selective filtration, the whole body of hadith is inherently flawed: They contain only those accounts that multiple generations of early Muslims each chose to allow.
Non-Muslim scholars who study early Islam are hesitant to trust the information about Muhammad’s life. Almost none of them accept the science of hadith criticism the way it stands. Most of them just hope to pull out some historical kernels of truth from the hadith. Some scholars have even given up on getting that far. They claim virtually nothing can be known about Muhammad. These scholars come from all kinds of religious and nonreligious backgrounds. One Muslim scholar even concluded that, given the nature of the evidence, Muhammad may not have even existed.
I mean, consider this... is Muhammad a name or a title?
Quran 61:6 [Sahih International]: And [mention] when Jesus, the son of Mary, said, “O children of Israel, indeed I am the messenger of Allah to you confirming what came before me of the Torah and bringing good tidings of a messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad.” But when he came to them with clear evidences, they said, “This is obvious magic.”
Is his name Muhammad, or Ahmad?
There is no other evidence of Muhammad’s existence until the turn of the eighth century, when coins bearing his name were produced. "The more I read, the historical person at the root of the whole thing became more and more improbable,” says Muhammad Kalisch.
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