The study of Islam in universities and other academic institutions is often different to the study of Judaism and Christianity. This is because, unlike the Gospels and the Hebrew Bible, the methods of form criticism and source criticism have rarely been applied to the Qur’an or to the Sira (the biography of Muhammad). Furthermore, there is little tradition within the Muslim world of differentiating between the historical Muhammad and his symbolic or eschatological importance, as can be seen in the scholarship on the ‘historical Jesus’.
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