# Sourcebook — A Trust & a Journey Research consulted 7 September 2026. This is a selective illustrated biography, not an exhaustive account of Muhammad's life or a claim of scholarly consensus about every later report. The source links also appear beside each chapter. The Quran is the religious foundation. It is not arranged as a chronological biography. The screenplay therefore distinguishes Quranic material, later Sunni hadith reports, educational historical summaries, and modern dramatic invention. The collection dates of hadith are later than the events they narrate. Attribution to a hadith collection is not a claim of independent contemporary confirmation. ## Source register The full linked register is in [sources.json](sources.json). The main contextual sources are [The Met's Birth of Islam](https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-birth-of-islam), [PBS's life timeline](https://www.pbs.org/muhammad/timeline_html.shtml), [PBS's profile](https://www.pbs.org/empires/islam/profilesmuhammed.html), and [Uri Rubin's study of the Medina document](https://www.urirubin.com/downloads/articles/constitution.pdf). Quranic passages and individual reports are cited in the chapter player and in the transcript by source ID. ## Editorial decisions - Childhood and the dates before 622 follow a traditional outline and remain approximate. The Quran's orphan passage does not supply the parents' names. - The first revelation, Khadija's reassurance, and Waraqa's response use [Bukhari 3](https://sunnah.com/bukhari:3). The two spoken character passages are dramatic paraphrases, not exact quotations. - The sole short translated Quran quotation is 96:1 from Mustafa Khattab's *The Clear Quran*, with typographic brackets and the terminal dash normalised for speech. All other English summaries are identified as paraphrases. - Anonymous traders, the weaver, builders and travellers are invented supporting figures. Their speech is not attributed to Muhammad or to historical witnesses. - The migration across the sea is supported by [Bukhari 4230](https://sunnah.com/bukhari:4230). The approximate date of the deaths of Khadija and Abu Talib follows the traditional biographical chronology. - Quran 17:1 names the two sanctuaries. Jerusalem, ascent details and the five prayers are supplied by tradition, including Bukhari 3207. No later Jerusalem building is projected back into Muhammad's lifetime. - Quran 9:40 does not name the cave companion. Later reports identify Abu Bakr. The route is schematic. No spider-web or dove story is asserted. - The early mosque materials are specifically attested in [Bukhari 446](https://sunnah.com/bukhari:446); Bukhari 428 describes its building. The artwork omits domes, minarets and monumental later ornament. - Rubin's 1985 article discusses disputed identification of Jewish groups in the Medina document. The film avoids describing it as a modern constitution or claiming an uncontested list of signatories. - The Medinan years include caravan raiding as well as defence. The Qurayza episode is included without gore: Quran 33:26–27 supplies killing and captivity; [Bukhari 4122](https://sunnah.com/bukhari:4122) supplies the named group and judgment. The film gives no disputed casualty total and assigns no collective guilt to Jews. - The conquest of Mecca is described as meeting limited resistance. PBS's timeline's unqualified claim of no bloodshed is not repeated; Muslim 1780a records fighting as well as protection. - The farewell teaching paraphrases Muslim 1218a. It does not present a modern composite Farewell Sermon as a verbatim address. Quran 49:13 is read separately. - Death and Abu Bakr's reminder follow Bukhari 4452–4454 and Quran 3:144. ## Production All illustrations are original procedural Canvas artwork. People have animated walks, gestures and mouths; cloth, palms, water, birds, dust, lamp flames and camera positions move. Buildings, objects, clothing and boats evoke a historical setting without claiming archaeological reconstruction. Muhammad, other prophets, God, and angels are neither depicted nor impersonated. The original modern instrumental score and environmental effects are generated by `scripts/build_audio.py`. Music is removable in the chapter player and falls silent around Quran readings and paraphrases. It is not claimed as seventh-century music. No sacred audio recording is reused. English speech is synthetic, generated locally with Piper 1.8.0 and the public Piper voice models `en_GB-alan-medium`, `en_GB-alba-medium`, and `en_US-lessac-high`. These are build tools; no speech model is required to watch. The voice models were made available by Michael Hansen through [Rhasspy's Piper voice collection](https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices). They generate new readings of this screenplay; the people behind the source voices did not perform or endorse this film. | Build voice | Use in this film | Model and underlying-data credits | |---|---|---| | `en_GB-alan-medium` | Narrator, reader, Waraqa, builder, with different pacing | [Piper model card](https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/blob/main/en/en_GB/alan/medium/MODEL_CARD); [Mycroft's Alan Pope voice](https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3-voices/tree/master/voices/en_UK/apope_low). Its linked source license says Copyright 2022 Mycroft AI, All Rights Reserved. | | `en_GB-alba-medium` | Khadija and the fictional weaver | [Piper model card](https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/blob/main/en/en_GB/alba/medium/MODEL_CARD); Cassia Valentini-Botinhao and Junichi Yamagishi (2019), [Alba speech corpus](https://datashare.ed.ac.uk/items/f2e64e60-d516-4057-86d4-625983136cbd/full), University of Edinburgh, DOI 10.7488/ds/2506; [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). New synthetic speech was generated from the model, timed, normalised, and mixed. | | `en_US-lessac-high` | Fictional trader and traveller | [Piper model card](https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/blob/main/en/en_US/lessac/high/MODEL_CARD); Voice Factory International / Lessac Technologies [Blizzard 2013 materials and their research-data terms](https://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/blizzard/2013/lessac_blizzard2013/license.html). | The collection's repository metadata and the terms of its source datasets are distinct. This project does not redistribute model weights or source recordings, and does not assign a blanket open-content license to third-party materials. The preceding links preserve the model-specific provenance for review or reuse. [Piper](https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl) is a GPL-3.0 build tool. NumPy is used for original sound synthesis, FFmpeg for encoding, and Playwright/Chromium for rendering and verification. None is needed to play the delivered film. System fonts are used; no font files, stock images, music recordings, or scripture recitation recordings are bundled.