While the existence of the Islamic prophet Muhammad is established by contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous historical records, attempts to distinguish between the historical elements and the ahistorical elements of many of the reports of Muhammad have not been very successful. Hence the historicity of Muhammad, aside from his existence, is debated. How much reliable history there is about Muhammad is disputed, with some Muslim sources maintaining that "everything he did and said was recorded", while other academic sources claim that almost all of the available information about Muhammad's life, apart from the fact of his existence, is not historically credible.