A Christian scholar studied early Islamic sources for 13 years, then refused to call the Prophet ﷺ a fraud. His reasoning is worth a read.

Assalamu alaikum, I’ve been digging into Aloys Sprenger lately. He was an Austrian doctor who went to India in 1843 to work for the East India Company, but ended up as principal of Delhi College and sorting through the royal library in Lucknow. The guy properly learned Arabic and Persian and spent over a decade with manuscripts like Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham, and hadith collections. In 1851 he put out *The Life of Mohammad: From Original Sources*, one of the first Western biographies that actually leaned on the Arabic texts instead of just rehashing other Europeans’ takes. He was a Christian and stayed one till he passed in 1893. He had every career reason to just go along with the usual European line back then, which was calling the Prophet ﷺ an impostor. He wouldn’t do it. Here’s what he said instead: "It is not the doctrine of the impostor; it embodies the faith and sentiments of men who for their talents and virtues must be considered as the most distinguished of their nation." His thinking is kind of sociological: just look at who believed first. Abu Bakr, Khadijah, Uthman, Umar-these were some of the most respected folks in Mecca, and they stuck through the boycott, the persecution, even exile to Abyssinia. Scams don’t pull in a city’s finest and keep them for twenty years through huge hardship. He also talked about the Prophet ﷺ as someone whose "mind dwelt constantly on the contemplation of God," who "heard his voice in the thunder" and "in the hymns which the birds sing to his praise." That almost sounds like a spin on Quran 24:41 and 13:13, which hit me as pretty notable coming from a non-believer. To be honest, he never took the Quran as revelation and looked for natural causes, so this isn't some convert story I’m trying to dress up. He’s more like a reluctant witness who just had to admit what the sources showed him. I found those quotes with references on onegodpath.com in their bit about non-Muslim thinkers on Islam, and double-checked them against the 1851 edition on Google Books-they often get twisted online. Just wondering if anyone else has read Sprenger or other 19th-century orientalists firsthand, and how you all weigh stuff like this. Does a skeptic’s partial admission pack more punch than a full convert’s, or less?