What's your opinion on Muhammad and Islam?
Based on my research, these are the opinions I developed on Muhammad and Islam:
1. Muhammad is possibly a fictional character:
Sirah (or Sira), the earliest source of Muhammad's life records, was written about 150 years after his alleged death, and the Sirah was written in Baghdad (Iraq), nearly 1000 miles away from where Muhammad allegedly lived.
The Islamic Hadiths, including Sahih (authentic) Hadiths, were written even later. The major collections of Hadith, Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, were compiled even later, roughly 200-250 years after Muhammad's alleged death. The Sirah is generally considered a weaker source for Islamic theology compared to the Hadiths.
Even if Muhammad was a real person, the stories of Muhammad described in the Sirah, Sahih (authentic) Hadiths and Hasan (good) Hadiths are highly unreliable as they were written several generations after the alleged death of Muhammad.
2. Islam is essentially 'Arab Judaism + Religious Proselytization + bits of others':
Islam and Judaism are political religions. These 2 religions have inbuilt legal systems that are morphed into 'will of God' and are supposed to be enforced in the name of God. Islamic Sharia has borrowed many, many elements from the Jewish law of Moses and Jewish Rabbinical traditions, such as male infant circumcision, some dietary laws like abstaining from pork, legalized enslavement of non-muslims, four wife limit, etc.
Whoever created Islam basically created an Arab Judaism, copying many traditions from the medieval Jewish communities of Medina
Islam claims Allah send prophets to every nation/ethnicity on Earth. However, most of the prophets mention Islamic books like Quran and Sahih Hadiths are characters from Jewish books like Adam, Abraham, Noah, Enoch, etc.
Jews were just one of thousands of ethnicities in the medieval period. So why are most prophets mentioned in Islam exclusively characters from Jewish books?
There are no Chinese or South African prophets mentioned in Islam. There are no Nordic or American prophets mentioned in Islamic books. No Indonesian or Sri Lankan prophets were mentioned in Hadiths and Quran. And, no Nigerian or Japanese prophets were mentioned in Hadiths and Quran.
Why most prophets mentioned in the Islamic books are exclusively of Jewish religion origin?
There are a few Islamic prophets like Hud and Salih mentioned in Islamic books that are not characters from Jewish books but most prophets mentioned in Islamic books are characters from Judaism and Jewish books/traditions. Additionally, Islam has also borrowed elements of pre-Islamic Arabia, such as the Kaaba stone in Mecca and a few gnostic Christian traditions such as 'Jesus did not died on the cross' and 'Jesus revived a dead bird.'
In conclusion, Islam is not an original religion. It's Arab version of Judaism with a few added elements from others like gnostic Christianity and Arab Paganism, and religious proselytization.