Muhammad: Birth to Ministrywalk through a gate to the Ka`ba, which did not even exist durin^41 g his
lifetime.^42
Narrations about soothsayers and fortune-tellers, who all^43 egedly foretold
Muhammad's advent, are also unreliable (since Muhammad would have no
doubt referred to such testimonies later) and one would expect the mention
of such in the Qur'an, had they really taken place.^44
With respect to the various versions of traditions relating to supposed
Jewish prophecies concerning Muhammad, it is obvious that Messianic
predictions were applied to Muhammad by Muslims in some, an^45 d that
others were simply invented. With the respect to the books o^46 f the Old
Testament, the Qur'an (7:156) claims that the Torah mentions the coming of
an unlearned (or heathen) prophet, in which Muhammad is mea^47 nt (Qur'an
7:158), Nevertheless, none of the early Islamic sources attempt to produce
any evidence for this claim, but rather try to show that it is^48 Muhammad
who is referred to in a distorted Islamic version of Is. 42:1-7.^49
The Qur'anic verse (7:156), moreover, maintains that the unlearned (or
heathen) prophet and his message are mentioned in the Gospel, but instead
of pursuing this, the earliest Muslim scholars tried to find a confirmation
for Qur'an 61:6, in which Jesus is said to have proclaimed the coming of
Ahmad (Muhammad). Generally, Islamic sources claim that Jes^50 us'
statements regarding the Paraclete are the evidences of thi^51 s, but such^52
notions are not very credible.^53
Other alleged Christian testimonies to Muhammad's advent, including those
where a physical description of him was said to have been given in certain
books, also seem to be later Islamic additions, in that the Qu^54 r'an makes no
allusions to them.
Although the stories about Salman al-Farisi and the four non-polytheists
may contain some authentic materials, their general credib^55 ility is doubtful,
since references to "the religion of Abraham," which are at ti^56 mes crucial
to the plot of the narration, are most probably anachronisms.^57