Important note: "Muhammad" was actually a title, meaning "annointed one," and before Islam was used in much of the Near East as a title for Christ. Even if we assume the historicity of the ahadith (and that's a big if), the "prophet" Muhammad's birth name was allegedly "Qutham" (the Arabic word for "feces"), and reeks of the millennia-old Near Eastern narrative trope of rags-to-riches origin stories for legendary historical/semi-mythical figures (a la the Biblical Moses). The extreme nature of Mo's rags-to-riches narrative (named "shit" from birth, born to a woman who bore him years after his alleged father died [thereby implying either supernatural significance or his mother's infidelity], abandoned by his wetnurse as a child for showing symptoms of demonic possession, bullied by his own family and tribe, being the employee/boy toy of a rich merchant woman, etc.) lend credence to the hypothesis that his past is a politically motivated fabrication, and bring his historicity into serious doubt. At any rate, Mo served as a perfect motivator/excuse for the conquests that followed in his name.
Important note: "Muhammad" was actually a title, meaning "annointed one," and before Islam was used in much of the Near East as a title for Christ. Even if we assume the historicity of the ahadith (and that's a big if), the "prophet" Muhammad's birth name was allegedly "Qutham" (the Arabic word for "feces"), and reeks of the millennia-old Near Eastern narrative trope of rags-to-riches origin stories for legendary historical/semi-mythical figures (a la the Biblical Moses). The extreme nature of Mo's rags-to-riches narrative (named "shit" from birth, born to a woman who bore him years after his alleged father died [thereby implying either supernatural significance or his mother's infidelity], abandoned by his wetnurse as a child for showing symptoms of demonic possession, bullied by his own family and tribe, being the employee/boy toy of a rich merchant woman, etc.) lend credence to the hypothesis that his past is a politically motivated fabrication, and bring his historicity into serious doubt.
At any rate, Mo served as a perfect motivator/excuse for the conquests that followed in his name.