What Western Historians Said About Prophet Muhammad ﷺ
Before you start
Non-Muslim historians have written about the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ for centuries, sometimes in remarkable terms. This is the long version of my notes on what they actually said - with the citations checked. Lamartine on the scale of the achievement, Michael Hart on why he ranked him first out of a hundred, Montgomery Watt on why the sincerity question resolves the way it does, plus Carlyle, Gibbon, Margoliouth and others. I've also included a full treatment of the fabricated-quote problem in this genre, starting with the George Bernard Shaw passage that circulates everywhere and doesn't survive checking.
What's on this page
- Why outside testimony is worth anything
- What these quotations can and can't do
- Lamartine: the question at the end
- What Lamartine was actually measuring
- Michael Hart: first out of a hundred
- Why Hart put him above everyone else
- Montgomery Watt: the sincerity problem
- Why Watt's argument is the strongest one
- Thomas Carlyle and the sincerity theme
- Edward Gibbon on the creed
- Others worth knowing
- About that George Bernard Shaw quote
- The other fabrications in circulation
- How to check a quotation yourself
- What the pattern actually shows
- Common questions
Why outside testimony is worth anything
I'll be honest about the limits of this before I start, because articles in this genre almost always oversell and I don't want to add to the pile.
A historian praising the Prophet ﷺ doesn't prove Islam is true. Historians aren't theologians. They disagree with each other constantly, they revise, and a compliment from a nineteenth-century French poet settles precisely nothing about whether revelation occurred.
So what are these worth? One specific thing, and it's narrower than most articles claim.
If the only people who found this life extraordinary were people already committed to believing in it, you could put the whole thing down to devotion — the way any community speaks about its founder. What's interesting is that observers with no stake in the conclusion, several of them actively hostile to Islam as a religion, kept arriving at similar assessments of the historical achievement.
That removes a shortcut. It doesn't win an argument. And I'd rather make the modest claim well than the grand claim badly.
What these quotations can and can't do
Worth being explicit about the categories, because a lot of confusion comes from mixing them.
What they can establish
That the historical achievement is recognised as exceptional by people applying secular criteria. That's a fact about the historiography.
What they can suggest
That the "obvious" sceptical explanations — fraud, ambition, opportunism — have been examined by specialists and found wanting.
What they cannot do
Prove revelation. No historian has access to that question, and none of the ones quoted here claimed to.
What they must not become
A substitute for the argument. If a case rests on borrowed authority, it collapses the moment the authority is questioned.
I'd add one more caution. Quoting a person's praise while ignoring their criticism is a form of misrepresentation even when the quote is accurate. Where the historians below said critical things too, I've said so.
Lamartine: the question at the end
Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) was a French poet, historian and politician who served in the provisional government of the Second Republic in 1848. In 1854 he published Histoire de la Turquie, and its passage on the Prophet ﷺ is by far the most quoted thing he ever wrote.
"Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images; the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire, that is Muhammad. As regards all standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask, is there any man greater than he?" Alphonse de Lamartine, Histoire de la Turquie, Paris, 1854
Three things make this citation solid where the Shaw one isn't. It names a real book that was actually published, by an author whose bibliography is well documented. The passage appears in the main text, not in a caption or a pull-quote. And Lamartine was a practising Catholic with no interest whatsoever in promoting Islam — the passage sits inside a general history of the Ottoman world, not a piece of advocacy.
What Lamartine was actually measuring
The reason this is more than decorative praise is that he states his criteria before applying them. He proposes that human greatness be assessed on three axes.
The size of the aim
What was the person actually attempting? To take a throne, or to reorder how a civilisation understands God and law?
The resources available
What did they begin with? An inherited army and treasury, or nothing at all?
The result achieved
What actually happened — and crucially, did it outlast the person by centuries?
That's a defensible framework and it's why the conclusion is hard to dismiss as sentiment. Take the three in turn.
The aim was total: not a reform of one practice but a replacement of the entire religious, legal, social and political order of a region.
The starting resources were close to zero. No inherited office. No wealth after the early years. No army. No political authority. A home city that turned hostile and eventually tried to kill him.
The result reshaped a vast stretch of the world within a century of his death, and the community he founded is still following the same book and the same practices fourteen hundred years later.
The ratio problem
Most historical greatness comes with a head start. Alexander inherited a trained Macedonian army. Caesar inherited Rome's machinery. Napoleon inherited a revolution already in progress. Lamartine's framework asks what a person did relative to what they were handed — and on that ratio he found no comparison in the record.
Michael Hart: first out of a hundred
Michael H. Hart is an American astrophysicist and historian who in 1978 published The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. He placed the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ at number one.
"My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular levels." Michael H. Hart, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, 1978
Hart is not a Muslim. I should also say plainly that his book has been criticised on methodological grounds, and that some of his later writing on unrelated subjects is genuinely objectionable. Neither affects what he wrote here, and I'd rather you learned it from me than from someone using it to discredit the article.
What makes his assessment useful is that the criterion was mechanical and stated in advance: measurable influence on the course of human history. Not admiration. Not moral approval. He was ranking impact, and he applied the same test to everyone on the list.
Why Hart put him above everyone else
The obvious question is how anyone arrives at that ordering when the list includes Newton, Jesus عليه السلام, Buddha and Confucius. Hart's reasoning was specific and it's worth following.
His argument turned on the concentration of influence in a single person. In most religious movements the founding work divides between figures — Hart's own comparison was that Christianity's historical development involved both Jesus عليه السلام and Paul, with Paul carrying much of the theological and organisational load.
The theology
The core creed delivered through one person, not assembled by later councils or a successor generation.
The practice
The forms of worship, the calendar, the ritual law — all fixed within the same lifetime.
The community
A functioning society with its own norms, not a set of beliefs held privately by scattered individuals.
The state
A political entity with treaties, taxation, administration and defence. Secular achievement alongside religious.
Hart's observation was that those four almost never come from one biography. Religious founders rarely govern; successful statesmen rarely found religions. Where the two combine at all, they usually combine across generations.
Misreading: Hart said Muhammad was the greatest man in history.
What he said: the most influential. Hart was explicit that his ranking measured impact on the course of history, not moral worth or personal greatness. It's a real distinction, and overstating it hands a critic an easy and deserved correction.
Montgomery Watt: the sincerity problem
W. Montgomery Watt (1909-2006) was Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh and an ordained Anglican priest. His two-volume study, Muhammad at Mecca (1953) and Muhammad at Medina (1956), remains standard academic reading.
Watt's contribution is different in kind from the other two. He wasn't ranking or admiring. He was addressing a narrow historical question — was this man sincere? — and answering it as a Christian clergyman with a professional specialism in the material.
"His readiness to undergo persecution for his beliefs, the high moral character of the men who believed in him and looked up to him as leader, and the greatness of his ultimate achievement — all argue his fundamental integrity. To suppose Muhammad an impostor raises more problems than it solves." W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, Oxford, 1953
That final sentence is the one I'd put in front of anybody. It isn't devotional. It's a working historian saying that the deception hypothesis is analytically weaker than its alternative — it generates more difficulties than it removes.
Why Watt's argument is the strongest one
Of the three, this is the one I'd build on, and it's worth unpacking why.
Lamartine and Hart both assess outcomes. Watt addresses motive — and motive is where the sceptical case actually lives. Nobody disputes that something historically enormous happened. The dispute is over what was driving it.
The persecution problem
Impostors typically stop when the cost gets high. Thirteen years of Meccan hostility, social boycott, physical danger and eventual exile is a strange career for a fraud who could have accepted the leadership he was offered to drop it.
The followers problem
The people most convinced were those closest to him — who saw him at home, exhausted, unguarded. Deception normally works the other way round: convincing at a distance, thin up close.
The outcome problem
What resulted was a durable moral and legal order that outlived him by centuries, not a personality cult that dissolved when the founder died.
The content problem
A text that rebukes its own deliverer, and records his errors, is difficult to explain as the output of someone building his own authority.
Watt disagreed with Islamic theology throughout his life and said so in print. That's exactly why this carries weight. He had every professional and personal reason to reach for the simpler explanation, examined it, and concluded it didn't hold.
The shape of the argument
Watt isn't saying "therefore the revelation was real". He's saying the man believed what he was saying. That's a much smaller claim — and much harder to argue with, which is what makes it useful.
Thomas Carlyle and the sincerity theme
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the Scottish historian and essayist, devoted a lecture to the Prophet ﷺ in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), under the title "The Hero as Prophet".
The lecture was notable in its own time for rejecting the then-standard European portrayal of the Prophet ﷺ as a deliberate deceiver. Carlyle argued that a false man could not have founded something so durable — his phrase was that a false man founding a religion is worse than useless, since it would not stand.
Honesty requires a caveat here, and it's one most articles omit. Carlyle's lecture also contains passages that are dismissive of the Qur'an as literature and condescending about Arabs generally. He was breaking with his era's hostility, not endorsing Islam. Quote him for the sincerity argument, not as an admirer.
That caveat is the point of including him. A quotation used honestly, with its context intact, is more persuasive than the same quotation dressed up as something it isn't.
Edward Gibbon on the creed
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was no friend of organised religion — his treatment of Christianity scandalised his contemporaries.
In his chapter on Islam's rise he described the Islamic creed as one of eternal truth composed of a doctrine of the unity of God, and noted the absence of any priestly hierarchy or intermediary between the worshipper and God.
What makes Gibbon useful is his general posture. He was a sceptic about religious claims across the board. When a writer of that disposition singles out the simplicity and rational shape of a creed, it isn't enthusiasm speaking.
Others worth knowing
A few more that survive checking, briefly.
Reverend Bosworth Smith
In Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1874) he described the Prophet ﷺ as head of state and of religion at once — Caesar and Pope in one, but without the supports either normally required.
Annie Besant
In The Life and Teachings of Muhammad (1932) she wrote that the more she studied him the more her admiration grew for the mighty teacher.
Karen Armstrong
The modern biographer whose Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (1991) argues at length against the crusader-era caricature that shaped Western perception.
Marmaduke Pickthall
An English novelist who studied the sources, converted, and produced one of the enduring English renderings of the Qur'an.
I've kept this list short deliberately. There are pages online listing forty such names, and a good proportion of those entries are either fabricated, mangled or stripped of context. Four verifiable names are worth more than forty unverifiable ones.
About that George Bernard Shaw quote
Now the one you have almost certainly seen — and the reason I want to be careful.
A passage circulates everywhere attributing to George Bernard Shaw the claim that if a man like Muhammad ﷺ were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would solve its problems and bring peace and happiness. It is almost always cited to a book called The Genuine Islam.
Citation: George Bernard Shaw, The Genuine Islam.
Problem: no such book exists in Shaw's bibliography. The Genuine Islam was a periodical published in Singapore in 1936 by a missionary society, which carried an interview with Shaw conducted by Maulana Abdul Aleem Siddiqui. The famous passage does not appear in the body of that interview — it sits in a separate quote box beside it, without attribution.
And the surrounding evidence makes it worse rather than better.
His other statements
A 1933 letter describes Islam as "ferociously intolerant". His documented views run in the opposite direction to the quote.
The interview itself
Reading the actual exchange, Shaw spends it pressing sceptical rationalist questions rather than offering praise.
The public cost
The quotation was used in an Australian anti-Islamophobia advertising campaign and then publicly debunked in the national press.
The style tell
It reads like promotional copy. Shaw's actual prose is wry, hedged and frequently sarcastic — including in that very interview.
So I've left it out entirely, and I'd encourage you to stop using it. The three verified assessments above are stronger anyway, and they have the advantage of surviving a search.
Why one quotation matters this much
If your case rests on something a curious reader can disprove in two minutes, you don't merely lose that point. You lose their confidence in everything else you said — including the parts that were solid. That is a catastrophic trade for a sentence you never needed.
The other fabrications in circulation
Shaw isn't isolated, and it's worth naming the pattern so you can spot the next one.
The Napoleon quotes
Several elaborate statements about Islam circulate under Napoleon's name. Historians who have looked for them in his documented writings have not found them in the forms quoted.
Inflated scientist endorsements
Statements attributed to modern scientists supposedly declaring the Qur'an divine, several of which the individuals concerned later disputed or say were taken out of context.
Detached fragments
Real quotations severed from surrounding criticism, so a hostile writer appears admiring. Technically accurate and still misleading.
Encyclopaedia claims
Sweeping statements attributed to reference works that turn out to be paraphrase, or to be from an edition nobody can locate.
The common factor is that they say exactly what we would like to hear, in exactly the phrasing we would choose. That should be the warning rather than the appeal.
How to check a quotation yourself
Practical filter, in the order I now apply it.
1. Find the actual book
Title, publisher, year, ideally a page number. If the quote only ever appears on quote-sharing sites and da'wah graphics, treat it as unverified.
2. Check the bibliography
Does the cited work exist in the author's list of publications? The Shaw case falls at this step alone.
3. Read around it
What did this person say about Islam elsewhere? Praise quoted without adjacent criticism misrepresents them.
4. Judge the register
Fabrications read like advertising. Real historians qualify, hedge and write awkward long sentences.
5. Prefer specialists
A professor of Islamic studies outweighs a famous playwright on this subject, however much better known the playwright.
6. Accept the loss
If it fails, drop it. There is always a verified alternative, and it is always stronger.
Applying that filter is why this article names a handful of people rather than forty. It's also why every quotation in it can be looked up — which is the only property that actually matters when someone decides to check.
What the pattern actually shows
Set the verified assessments beside each other and something consistent emerges. They come from different centuries, countries and disciplines: a French romantic poet and politician, an American astrophysicist, a Scottish Anglican priest and Arabist, a Victorian essayist, an eighteenth-century sceptical historian.
Lamartine, 1854
Weighed aim against resources against result and found no comparable ratio in the historical record.
Watt, 1953
Examined the sincerity question professionally and found the impostor hypothesis analytically weaker.
Hart, 1978
Applied a mechanical influence metric and found an unmatched concentration of religious and secular success.
Carlyle, 1841
Broke with his era's hostility to argue that a false man could not have founded something that endured.
None of them was trying to prove Islam. Two were practising Christians, one of them ordained. One was a religious sceptic by temperament. And each, working inside his own method and for his own reasons, arrived at an assessment well above the ordinary.
Where I've landed: these quotations prove nothing about revelation, and I'd be suspicious of anyone presenting them as though they did. What they do is close off the lazy exit — the assumption that only believers could find this life remarkable. People with no reason to be generous, using criteria they set themselves, kept concluding otherwise. That's worth knowing, and it's worth knowing accurately. Which is why I've dropped the most famous quotation of the lot rather than pass on something that falls apart under the very first search a sceptical reader runs.
Common questions
What did Lamartine say about Prophet Muhammad?
In Histoire de la Turquie (1854) he listed the Prophet's ﷺ roles as philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior and founder of both terrestrial and spiritual empires, and asked whether by any standard of human greatness there is any man greater. He measured greatness by the aim pursued, the resources available and the result achieved.
Why did Michael Hart rank Muhammad number one?
In The 100 (1978) Hart wrote that he was the only man in history supremely successful on both the religious and secular levels. His criterion was measurable influence rather than personal greatness, and his argument was that theology, practice, community and state all came through one person rather than being divided among several figures across generations.
Did Hart say Muhammad was the greatest man in history?
No — he said the most influential. Hart was explicit that his ranking measured impact on the course of history rather than moral worth. Overstating it invites an easy and deserved correction.
What did Montgomery Watt conclude?
Watt, an Anglican priest and Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Edinburgh, wrote in Muhammad at Mecca (1953) that the readiness to endure persecution, the character of his followers and the scale of the ultimate achievement all argue his fundamental integrity — and that supposing him an impostor raises more problems than it solves.
What did Thomas Carlyle say?
In On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) he rejected the standard European portrayal of the Prophet ﷺ as a deceiver, arguing that a false man could not have founded something so enduring. His lecture also contains dismissive passages about the Qur'an and about Arabs, so he should be quoted for the sincerity argument rather than as an admirer.
Is the George Bernard Shaw quote about Muhammad genuine?
It doesn't survive checking. No book called The Genuine Islam exists in Shaw's bibliography — that was a 1936 Singapore periodical carrying an interview with him, and the famous passage appears in a separate unattributed quote box rather than in the interview itself. Shaw's documented remarks about Islam elsewhere are critical. It's best not used.
Why are so many quotes in this genre fabricated?
Because they say what people want to hear, in the phrasing they'd choose, and they spread faster than corrections. The same pattern affects statements attributed to Napoleon, several modern scientist endorsements, and real quotations severed from their surrounding criticism.
Do these quotations prove Islam is true?
No, and I'd distrust any article claiming they do. Historians aren't theologians. What they establish is narrower: that observers with no stake in the conclusion, applying their own criteria, consistently found the historical achievement extraordinary — which removes the assumption that only believers see it that way.
How can I check a quotation like these myself?
Find a real book with publisher and year, confirm the work exists in the author's bibliography, read what they said about Islam elsewhere, be suspicious of phrasing that reads like advertising copy, prefer specialists over famous names from unrelated fields — and if it fails any of those, drop it.
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