What do scholars of early Islamic history think of Lesley Hazleton's recent Muhammad biography, 'The First Muslim'?

I really don't think it's a work of 'rigorous scholarship'. I haven't read the book, but from what I've heard it is basically a paraphrasing of an important source for Muhammad's life, the Sira of Ibn Ishaq written in the late eighth century. Unfortunately this work only survives in an edited form produced by Ibn Hisham and with further excerpts preserved by al-Tabari, both writers from the ninth century. This is all very well, since both sources are excellent reads and I highly recommend anyone interested in Islamic history to take a brief look through al-Tabari to get a sense of what an excellent scholar he was, but modern academics have recognised how flawed this approach is. These sources were all written down too late to be trusted implicitly and they would have to be subjected to a rigorous ordeal of textual criticism before we can use them without any caveats (if that's ever possible).

This unfortunately was not the approach taken until the 1970s, when revisionist historians such as Patricia Crone and Michael Cook made the case for using earlier non-Muslim sources as the foundation for scholarship instead. This is I think an eminently sensible approach, since although seventh-century sources are extremely biased and not particularly good for details of Muhammad's life, they at least represent what some of his contemporaries thought - every source is biased anyway, so they are really no better or worse than more detailed sources from much later. Later sources are often contradictory and were the products of their Abbasid-era context, so we really shouldn't use them as the sole guide to Islam in the seventh century, which had been born in a very different context. They do contain kernels of truth and a lot of very impressive scholarship has developed on what we can extract from later traditions, but I'd need to be able to verify the scholar's methodology first before I'm willing to treat them as reliable sources. From what I've heard I don't think Hazleton did this and from her TED talks I get the impression that she generally took those sources at their words, which is anathema to anyone working on the seventh century. Anyone familiar with late antiquity will know that we should not trust any source implicitly. Even famous historians like the Venerable Bede or Gregory of Tours misrepresented important events in their histories. The former for instance provided a a very misleading picture of the Anglo-Saxon "invasion", whilst the latter was mistaken about the conversion of the Franks to Christianity - academic historians have long recognised their flaws, but their findings take a very long time to pass into the consciousness of the general public.

However, this was not the approach taken by many historians of Islam in the twentieth century or even now by popular historians. From what I've read, it seems that the popularisers fall broadly into three camps - writers who are relatively sympathetic to Islam but did not engage with modern scholarship (Lesley Hazleton and Karen Armstrong), people who took the source-sceptical approach far beyond the academic middle-ground (Tom Holland), and outright Islamophobes (Robert Spencer). In academia itself there is very little certainty about early Islam and historians are constantly re-examining the sources (I've only just discovered an article re-dating the First Arab Siege of Constantinople of 674-8 to 668 for instance). I simply don't think a modern biography of Muhammad can be written yet when there are debates over the basic facts of his life (such as whether he led the invasion of Palestine, which is a very recent and controversial argument that I outlined here) and when the source material is not open to the general public or even to scholars not trained in all the required languages. The translation of Ibn Ishaq used by Hazleton was presumably the translation of Alfred Guillaume (1955), which is very out of date now and is in dire need of a modern commentary to take into account various revisionist attacks on the text. Another important text, the Expeditions written by Maʿmar ibn Rashid in the eighth century, has just been translated into English, which is quite astonishing when it was written earlier than Ibn Ishaq's Sira! Then there are the various non-Muslim texts, which are almost exclusively in obscure languages like Syriac, Armenian and Coptic, all of which are quite difficult to access for the general public. Recent efforts by Robert Hoyland (Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, 1997) and Michael Philip Penn (When Christians First Met Muslims, 2015) have translated most of the relevant sources, but they have yet to be used to the full extent even in academia (let alone in Hazleton's book).

So what can anyone do in this topsy-turvy world? To get an understanding of Muhammad, I think reading the Qur'an is your best bet, as well as taking a look at Fred Donner's Muhammad and the Believers (2010) and Robert Hoyland's In God's Path (2014). The Qur'an is very sparse with details about Muhammad, but it has been recognised as the premier source for Muhammad's life, since it is one of only two sources that can be reliably placed to his life-time or soon afterwards. Donner and Hoyland on the other hand provide useful summaries of recent scholarship and both books were written for the general public, so they should be fairly accessible. Donner's thesis is a bit out there, but do still read it with an open mind. These two books are more general histories of early Islam, but they are probably the best introductions to this problematic field right now. For something focusing exclusively on Muhammad, Michael Cook's Muhammad (1983) is still pretty good despite its age. The fact that I have to recommend a book written three decades ago tells you a lot about academia right now - I'm not very keen on recommending books written before the 90s unless they are very good or the only option available! Hugh Kennedy's books are good as well, but I don't think he is sceptical enough of the sources and his book on the Arab Conquests (The Great Arab Conquests, 2008) has definitely been superseded by Hoyland's In God's Path.

For now, it might be useful to read this, in which I quoted pretty much all the early mentions of Muhammad from his near-contemporaries. This article by Chase Robinson, a very eminent historian, on the rise of the sceptical approach to early Islam, is also extremely useful, as it explains (with lots of examples) why we should not only use later sources and how modern academic views changed over time.