When he satirized Muhammad to a point when he could not bear it anymore, Muhammad asked his companions who would like to put Ka'b to death.

Review: [Untitled] Reviewed Work: Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources by Martin Lings". Acclaimed worldwide as the definitive biography of the Prophet Muhammad in the English language, Martin Lings’ Muhammad: His Life Based to the Earliest Sources is unlike any other. The book also includes excerpts from original English translations of speeches by men and women who lived close to Muhammad, heard him speak, witnessed his actions, witnessed the way he interacted with situations and witnessed events he encountered throughout various stages of his life.

Muhammad to go to mariyah (and have sex with her), the enslaved girl, and​ then​ rebuffs his wives for being jealous and so on (p 277). As you already know, the Bible is hardly ever reliable and not a lot of scholars think that those verses meant Abraham traveled to Arabia. You were sure therefore, that this writing by a converted Muslim would make you better understand the faith and its prophet. From one vantage point the religion known as Islam is an evolution, culmination or perfection of expression regarding the One essence that is also known as the Real.

The prophet was supposedly a good orator whose incising criticism so rattled the Quraysh that they exclaimed that ‘our fathers insulted, our ways scoffed at, and our gods reviled’. Perinnialist Poison in Martin Lings' Biography of the Prophet: A Discussion with Martin Lings" (PDF). When the clans in his own tribe of Quraysh could not come to terms on who should be privileged to carry the sacred black stone inside Kabah, he intervened with an ingenious plan which was acceptable to all.

Even when the prophet was thrown out of Mecca, Muslims were still allowed to stay in the city and permitted to pray in the Kabah. Lings seems to use accounts of certain events that aren't even the most well-known, much less the most authenticated.

Martin Lings cleverly describes the social, economic and political aspects of Makkah in the pre-islamic times before narrating the life of Prophet Muhammed(PBUH). I certainly think this book would be more appealing to Muslims who know the alternate versions of accounts than it would be to non-Muslims trying to find out about the Prophet ﷺ. I originally read this book as a teenager and really struggled with the portrayal of Muhammad pbuh in some chapters of this book. His contribution to Shakespeare scholarship was to point out the deeper esoteric meanings found in Shakespeare's plays, and the spirituality of Shakespeare himself.For Muslims, the book is an eloquently written narrative of the Prophet(PBUH) which provides chronology and context for the revelation of the the Holy Qur'an and the several important hadiths. Don't read the book because there are too many major mistakes but listen to the amazing lectures based on the book by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf.