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The work of John Wansbrough, Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, Andrew Rippin and Gerald Hawting, which emerged initially from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies in the 1970s, questions not only Islam's own version of its origins; this "new history" of Islam takes as its starting point a problem that has long troubled scholars - the almost total lack of contemporary Islamic sources.

To name just a few 'dead people walking'.

Islam is, to put it delicately, inhospitable to non-Moslems who attempt to analyze the Koran ... especially if they reach conclusions incompatible with Moslem doctrine. I'll have to admit that Islam isn't the only religion that gets cranky when nonbelievers come up with unsympathetic conclusions about their holy writ, but Islam may be the only one that makes a point of trying to kill those nonbelievers.

It has long been known that Mohammed was much influenced by the folklore of his environment. He certainly knew something of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and of their non-scriptural folklore (e.g., interpretations and stories in Talmudic literature), but he sometimes either got it seriously wrong (e.g., he puts Haman, the villain from the Scroll of Esther, among the courtiers of the Pharoah in the story of Exodus, an error of about 5 centuries and 5000 miles) or he put a new spin on it (e.g., Ishmael, not Isaac, is the beloved son that Abraham was tested with, and it is Ishmael, not Isaac, who carries Abraham's legacy). Of course, if you say this sort of thing out loud in a Moslem country, things can get really ugly. Heck, things can get ugly if you say these things on most American college campuses.