The Libri GmbH The Trusted: A Life of Muhammad-The First Forty Years

Before the prophet, there was a boy who owned nothing.
Forty years. A birth in a year that cannot be fixed, and a night in a cave outside Mecca when a man in middle age reported hearing a voice.
Between them lies more than half his life - and the tradition treats it as prologue. This volume argues it is nothing of the kind.
A posthumous child in a society built entirely on fathers. Four years with a nursing family in the desert. A mother dead on a road when he was six, a grandfather two years after that. By the age of eight he had been permanently separated from every adult responsible for him, four times over.
Then a poor uncle who kept him and never believed him. Sheep herded for wages, which is client work. The long walk north to Roman Syria with somebody else's goods. An oath about justice sworn in a Meccan house by five clans, which he was still praising fifty years later. A wealthy widow fifteen years his senior who employed him, judged him, and proposed to him - and to whom he stayed married, alone, for twenty-five years.
Six children. Three small graves.
Why this material can be trusted
Almost none of it does any doctrinal work. No legal question turned on whether he was a good shepherd. No faction was advantaged by the detail that his guardian could not pay his debts and lost an office over it.
When a tradition preserves things that serve nobody's argument - a slave woman's name, the colour of a nurse's donkey, a young man who twice set out for a wedding party and fell asleep on the way - the historian pays attention.
The legendary material is here too: the lights at the birth, the collapsing arches of the Persian palace, the monk who reads a seal between the shoulders. It is told in full, and then explained: what it is, when it entered the tradition, and what job it was doing. A reader who has watched an author decline to overclaim thirty times has grounds for believing the thirty-first claim.
The second of seven volumes on the life of Muhammad, written for readers who are not Muslim. No prior knowledge assumed. Every claim marked by how much weight it will bear.
"He had lived an entirely ordinary life. Everyone he knew expected him to go on living one."