Someone mention battles?
Where Dr. Markus Gross discussed the Buddhist influence on Islam, Professor Kropp explained the Ethiopian elements in the Koran. Independent scholar, traveller, and numismatist Volker Popp argued that Islamic history as recounted by Islamic historians has a Biblical structure –the first four caliphs are clearly modelled on Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses.
The Muslim historians transformed historical facts to fit a Biblical pattern.
Popp also developed a fascinating thesis that Islamic historians had a propensity to turn nomen (gentile) (name of the gens or clan) into patronyms; a patronym being a component of a personal name based on the name of one's father.
Thus Islamic historians had a tendency to take, for instance, Iranian names on inscriptions and turn them into Arabic-sounding names. Having turned Iranians into Arabs, the next step was to turn historical events connected with the original Iranians which had nothing to do with Islamic history into Islamic history.
For example, Islamic history knows various so called Civil Wars. One of them was between Abd-al-Malik, his governor al-Hajjaj and the rival caliph in Mecca by the name of Abdallah Zubair. The evidence of inscriptions tells us that the name Zubayr is a misreading. The correct reading is ZNBYL. This was made into ZUBYL by the Arab historians. From ZUBYL they derived the name Zubair, which has no Semitic root.
The real story is a fight between Abd al-Malik at Merv and the King of Kabulistan, who held the title ZNBYL. This took place between 60 and 75 Arab era in the East of the former Sassanian domains. The historians transferred this feud to Mecca and Jerusalem and then embedded the whole into the structure of a well known story from the Old Testament, the secession of Omri and his building the Temple of Samaria.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/19589/sec_id/19589