Unlike other religions, declared the nineteenth-century French scholar Ernest Renan, Islam “was born in the full light of history.” Renan’s point, of course, was that whereas, for example, Jesus was unknown during his lifetime to the great world beyond Galilee and Judea, and the story of his life was set down, in various versions, only decades after his crucifixion, Muhammed was in his own lifetime a public figure of unparalleled eminence – the prophet of a new religion, the commander of an army that conquered much of the Arabian peninsula in the name of that religion, and the founder of an Islamic empire that, over the century or so after his death, would spread his religion from the western end of the Mediterranean to what is now India, and eventually threaten on more than one occasion to engulf the whole of Europe.
