The earliest account of the first revelation in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī does not flatter its subject. Muhammad returns from the cave of Hira trembling, asks to be wrapped in a cloak and tells his wife that he fears for himself. In another version a later narrator adds that, during a pause in revelation, he grieved so deeply that he went to mountain tops intending to throw himself down. Critics argue that a true prophet would not react this way, and some conclude that his experience was demonic. The sources deserve a closer reading than the charge gives them.
What the earliest account says
ʿĀʾishah’s narration, transmitted by ʿUrwah ibn al-Zubayr and al-Zuhrī, opens the collection. It describes true dreams, a love of seclusion, worship in the cave of Hira, and then the sudden arrival of the angel, who commands him to recite. He answers that he cannot, is pressed three times, and receives the opening verses of Sūrat al-ʿAlaq.
He returns home shaking and asks Khadījah to cover him. When the fear passes he tells her what happened. Her answer is the first assessment of his experience by anyone who knew him well:
She then takes him to her cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal, a Christian who knew the earlier scriptures, and Waraqah identifies the visitor as the same angelic messenger who came to Moses. The report records fear, and it records the people closest to him interpreting the event, from the start, as revelation from God.
Is fear the mark of a false prophet?
The critic’s first premise is that a genuine encounter with God produces peace, so terror is a warning sign. The biblical record does not support that premise. When Isaiah sees the Lord in the temple, his first words are a cry of ruin: he is a man of unclean lips who has seen the King.
Daniel, after his vision by the Tigris, loses his strength and falls into a deep sleep with his face to the ground. Moses hides his face at the burning bush because he is afraid to look at God. Jeremiah protests that he is only a child and cannot speak. In the scriptures that critics themselves accept, the first contact with the divine overwhelms the human being who receives it.
Measured against that pattern, Muhammad’s reaction is what one would expect from a man who did not seek prophethood and did not anticipate it. A fabricator inventing a call to prophecy has every reason to make the scene confident and triumphant. The early Muslim community preserved a version in which the Prophet is frightened and doubts himself. That is an embarrassing detail, and historians generally treat embarrassing details in a tradition as more likely to be authentic, precisely because no one would invent them.
The despair report and its chain
The sharpest form of the charge rests on the passage about the mountains. It appears in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 6982, after ʿĀʾishah’s account ends with Waraqah’s death and the pause in revelation. The Arabic contains a phrase that the English translations often blur:
The words fīmā balaghanā, “according to what has reached us,” belong to al-Zuhrī. They mark the sentence as something he heard without naming his source, which hadith scholars call a balāgh: a report with a broken chain. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, the principal commentator on al-Bukhārī, made this point in his commentary: the mountain passage is al-Zuhrī’s addition and is not part of ʿĀʾishah’s connected narration. Al-Bukhārī placed it where he did as supplementary material, and his own version of the account at the opening of the collection omits it entirely.
This matters for the argument. A connected report from ʿĀʾishah meets al-Bukhārī’s standard of authenticity. An unattributed remark from a narrator born decades after the event does not. The critic who presents the despair passage as the testimony of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī is presenting the weakest sentence in the report as if it carried the authority of the strongest.
Even granting the report, it describes grief at the loss of contact with God, and each time, it says, Gabriel appeared and told him that he was truly God’s messenger. The narrative’s own point is that the pause tested him and that God answered. Despair at divine silence is a theme the Psalms know well. Elijah, after his victory on Mount Carmel, sat under a tree and asked to die. Nobody concludes from that passage that Elijah was possessed.
The charge of madness in the Quran
The accusation that Muhammad was mad or possessed is older than his modern critics. His Meccan opponents made it, and the Quran records and answers it.
The Arabs of his day had clear categories for inspired speech that did not come from God: the kāhin (soothsayer), who spoke in short rhymed oracles for a fee; the majnūn (one touched by jinn); and the shāʿir (poet), whose verse was believed to come from a familiar spirit. The Quran rejects each label by name, and its content sits awkwardly with all of them. Soothsayers told fortunes and found lost camels. The Quran demands the worship of one God, forbids the practices on which soothsayers lived, condemns the idols of the Prophet’s own tribe and orders justice to orphans and the poor. A spirit seeking to lead people away from God has chosen a strange message to deliver.
The bewitchment report
Critics sometimes add the report in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5763 that a man named Labīd ibn al-Aʿṣam worked magic on the Prophet, so that for a time he imagined he had done something he had not done. The same report says that God informed him of the cause, that he was cured, and that the matter concerned ordinary daily affairs. Muslim scholars have long held that it touched nothing of the revelation, which the Quran guarantees. The report presents a prophet who suffered as other human beings suffer, and whom God protected.
What follows
The sources present a man who was frightened by his first experience, who was reassured by those who knew his character best, who grieved when revelation paused, and whose opponents called him mad while his message demanded the very things a demonic influence would oppose. The despair passage that carries the heaviest weight in the critic’s case is the one Muslim hadith scholarship itself identifies as disconnected. Read with the same standards that critics apply to Isaiah, Daniel, Moses and Elijah, the first revelation fits what the Quran calls it: the beginning of a burden that the Prophet carried for twenty-three years.