Qureshi begins his exploration of the historicity of Muhammad’s life, only to find himself shocked at the incompleteness of the picture he had grown up with. Even the earliest biographies of Muhammad are late in historical terms, based on long chains of oral transmission, and those biographies themselves admit that they have been selective in choosing what to depict and what to omit. Qureshi notes that this selection bias has continued in many Muslim cultures, such that the picture of Muhammad passed down is an airbrushed one: “Through selective quotation, Muhammad becomes the picture-perfect prophet” (216).

Qureshi decides to leave the biographies behind and go to the earliest sources available, the hadith. Even in the most highly-regarded collections, he is startled by a very different picture of Muhammad that emerges: One who is terrified by the revelations he is receiving, to the point of contemplating death by suicide—a far cry from the composed courage Qureshi expected to find.

Qureshi’s reading of the hadith continues to bring up unpleasant surprises. Far from Muhammad only prosecuting defensive wars, they show him going on the offensive at the earliest occasion, drawing first blood against the rival Meccans. When he consults with Abba about this, Abba simply directs him to study the scholars, as they have likely wrestled with the same questions and come up with the answers.

As Qureshi reads those scholars, he finds that they either admit the embarrassing details in the hadith or ignore them, explaining away inconvenient truths as unreliable points in the hadith tradition. Qureshi finds such dodges uncompelling, especially against the repeated, explicit evidence of brutal violence in the hadith’s traditions about Muhammad’s life.

While Qureshi has been researching Muhammad, David has been doing the same, and he hands over a binder of his findings to Qureshi. Some of his arguments seem trivial to Qureshi, but others are difficult to refute. As Qureshi tries to find responses, the only one that is available is not a rationally convincing one: “Muhammad must be a prophet, and therefore these stories must be false” (225). This tactic is not a sustainable one, though, for a very simple reason: If he kept denying the reliability of the historical traditions about Muhammad, he would have no sources to draw on to make a historically compelling case for Muhammad’s life and ministry.

Qureshi turns his attention to the defense of the Quran, which for Muslims is the absolute bedrock of faith. The nearest Christian analogy for the Quran’s place in Islam is not the Bible, but Jesus himself—the Word of God, transmitted in physical form to God’s people.

Muslims defend the Quran on several grounds, including its inimitability and its fulfilled prophecies. On the first mark, Muslims hail the Quran as so beautiful and elegant that no other literature can compare to it—indeed, so much so that it must come from divine inspiration. Nevertheless, Qureshi is surprised to come across a challenge to the inimitability argument, Al-Furqan al-Haqq—a book written to express the truths of the Christian Bible in the literary style of the Quran. Its beauty and compelling power has been so widely hailed that many Islamic nations have banned it.

Regarding the argument for fulfilled prophecy, Qureshi realizes that it is not a robust case, as not only did the Quran seldom make future predictions, but most of the cited passages were too vague, and too often taken out of context, to make a compelling argument.

Qureshi turns to the final two defenses of the Quran: Its purported scientific accuracy, and the reliability of its textual tradition.

The scientific defense of the Quran has become widely discussed in Muslim circles for the past half-century, largely associated with the work of the Frenchman Maurice Bucaille. Bucaille argued that while the Bible is riddled with scientific errors, the Quran is entirely accurate. As Qureshi studies Bucaille’s arguments, he finds them dubious at best. Bucaille, and other like-minded apologists, tend to reinterpret the terms of the Quranic quotations they are using, and ignore any inconvenient evidence opposing their interpretation.

With his knowledge of medicine, Qureshi realizes at a glance that Bucaille’s attempt to interpret a Quranic verse as relating to human embryology gets the science wrong. One has to approach the question with an already-established presumption that the Quran must be right, and only then could one hammer the contrary evidence into place.

According to Qureshi, much of Muslims’ confidence in the Quran is based on the idea of its perfect textual preservation. Qureshi’s research into the hadith does not buttress that confidence, instead undermining it considerably. “Once again,” Qureshi writes of the hadith, “it was the most trustworthy Islamic traditions that subverted my faith” (237).

Even in the most reliable hadith, the preservation of the Quranic text is portrayed as a scattered affair, reliant on human memories in a way that produced several alternate versions, and it wasn’t until a later caliph standardized the text and destroyed the other variants that the classic Quranic text took its final form. Even the men whom Muhammad had purportedly hand-selected as the best Quranic teachers had preferred other variants over the one that became dominant. When Qureshi goes to look at what Islamic scholars say of this scattered early tradition, he does not find any compelling denials, but only an argument that the process of standardization, as messy as it looks, was exactly how Allah had intended it. This is nearly the last straw for Qureshi’s faith.

There is one point of David’s binder, full of critiques of the Quran, that sticks in Qureshi’s mind. In several places, the Quran allows male Muslims to have sexual intercourse with “those whom their right hands possess” (242). David views this as referring to women captured in battle, but Qureshi cannot believe that to be the case.

He searches for alternative explanations, but the deeper he digs, the worse the picture gets. The context clearly favors David’s interpretation, but the earliest hadith which speaks of the matter makes the picture even worse. Not only was it an allowance for Muslims to take sexual advantage of captured women other than their own wives, but the stories told a yet darker tale of Muhammad making this allowance when the captives’ own husbands were still alive and present, and even after his own men had hesitated to take this liberty. To Qureshi, this is a clear picture of Muhammad commending brutality and rape. This was the point of no return: “I was done fighting. I was finally broken” (245).