The History of Mahomet the Great Imposter is a Western rendition of the life of the Prophet Mohammed (c. 570-632 CE) and the founding of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula. (The name "Mahomet" is derived from "Mehmet", which is Turkish for "Mohammed", and the nearest Muslims to most Europeans would have been Ottoman subjects). This biography, however, is an attempt to de-legitimate Islam by claiming that Muhammed invented a religion for personal gain and was scheming with his first followers for economic benefit. This version of Mohammed's story (known as Sira in Arabic) refutes Mohammed's first visitations from the Angel Gabriel as mere trickery, and it also condemns the Christian and Jewish tribes (as well as the Polytheist tribes) of the Arabian Peninsula as heretics. 

Such misleading and demeaning perceptions of "Eastern" peoples- or rather "non-Western"- is a common fixture of European and later American literature and conceptualisations of the world. By discounting the tenets and legitimacy of other religions, the writers of such pieces would thus be reinforcing belief and the status of the dominant faith of their primary audience -- Christianity. These textual perceptions of foreigners also would infer that the culture of the main audience was morally superior and advanced, as the exoticised depiction of the foreign would be made to represent everything that Scottish -- and Western -- culture held itself as not being.