Most Islamic biographies deal with Muhammad's use of warfare by using an understandable but insufficient logic: that the Messenger of Allah was the ideal and paradigmatic human, so he must have been an ideal and paradigmatic military commander.

Wanting Muḥammad's behavior to conform to very modern ethical concepts and widespread (but not necessarily accurate) beliefs about the nature and conduct of war, the writers have created a narrative which, in significant ways, departs from the account clearly and consistently revealed in the earliest extant Arabic sources.

Professor Joel Hayward sees this as an unhelpful explanatory tendency and believes that the modern depiction of the Prophet's relationship with warfare - which presents him as being rather antipathetic to war, indeed as virtually a pacifist who only fought reluctantly in self-defense - cannot actually be sustained by a thorough and even-handed analysis of the early Islamic sources.