"Even if modern day Muslims are prepared to reject the Mohammed as portrayed by Ibn Ishaq, the book has still been immensely powerful in shaping the Islamic view of the world, since Muslims throughout the last millennium did not reject Mohammed as portrayed in Ibn Ishaq: that is the Mohammed that Muslim cultures throughout the world have passed on by word of mouth to their children for generation after generation. Moreover, the current edition of this book was reissued in modern day Pakistan, a state whose full title is The Islamic Republic of Pakistan. This Islamic state condemns to death those convicted of defaming the Prophet Mohammed. Since 1967 Oxford University Press have been selling this Guillaume edition of The Life of Muhammed, which is printed in Pakistan. No-one from that company has been charged with “defaming the Prophet Mohammed”, so we can take take from this continued publication and the lack of prosecutions, that contemporary Pakistani Muslims do not consider this work blasphemous. Thus we regard any rejection of the Sira of Ibn Ishaq by contemporary Muslims living in the West as either a sign of their duplicity or a sign of their ignorance about Islam."
Ibn Ishaq

January 1, 1970