For most of a thousand years the figure Europe called Mahomet was less a historical man than a screen onto which Christendom projected its fears, and the history of that projection has itself become a field of study.
Medieval Latin polemic cast him as an impostor, a heretic, or an idol, the Chanson de Roland has Saracens worshipping a golden Mahound, and Dante placed him in the eighth circle of the Inferno among the sowers of discord. The Reformation turned him into a stick with which Protestants and Catholics beat each other. Only with the Enlightenment did the portrait divide: Voltaire made him a fanatic in one play and conceded his genius elsewhere, Gibbon wrote of him with cool respect, and in 1840 Thomas Carlyle delivered a lecture, The Hero as Prophet, that presented him as sincere, a decisive break with the imposture thesis.
The historian John Tolan, tracing this whole sequence, has argued its recurring lesson: the Western Muhammad has generally revealed more about the anxieties of the writer than about the man. The caricature has had real modern consequences, from Orientalist scholarship to present-day controversies over depiction.
Against all of it stands the reverence of the Muslims for whom he is the final Prophet: the blessing sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, invoked after his name, the celebration of the mawlid, and the strong reticence in most of the tradition about depicting him at all, a reticence rooted in the fear of idolatry rather than, as is often assumed, a specific Quranic ban.