One man's account, and what was built on it
The claim is that Islam did not arise in seventh-century Arabia on its own terms, but was assembled by the Roman Catholic Church as an instrument. In the version that reached the largest audience, the Church wanted Jerusalem, could not take it, and so raised up a religion whose followers would take it on Rome's behalf. Muhammad was the chosen man. Khadija bint Khuwaylid, his first wife, was said to have been a Catholic nun placed at his side by a bishop, with instructions to help him found it.
Every element of that came from one person: Alberto Rivera, born in Las Palmas in 1935, died in Oklahoma in 1997. He said he had been a Jesuit priest, brought into a seminary at seven years old and later sent by the Vatican to break Protestant churches from the inside. He said he had learned the history of Islam's founding in briefings given to senior Jesuits.
From 1979 the publisher Jack Chick turned Rivera's account into a series of comic tracts — Alberto, Double Cross, The Godfathers, The Force, Four Horsemen, and in 1988 The Prophet, which carried the Islam material. Chick tracts were printed in the tens of millions and handed out free. It is the reason a claim resting on a single uncorroborated testimony became one of the most widely distributed statements about Islam's origins in twentieth-century America.
What the 1981 investigation looked at
The first sustained examination came not from Catholics but from the evangelical press. Gary Metz published it in Christianity Today on 13 March 1981, and a version ran in Cornerstone. It did not address the theology. It addressed whether Rivera had been who he said he was, on the reasoning that the entire account depended on it.
What it reported: that Rivera had attended the Seminario Biblico Latinoamericano in Costa Rica and been expelled, in the seminary's words, for "continual lying and defiance of seminary authority"; that an acquaintance from Las Palmas said he had never finished high school; that no ordination certificate was produced; that the document Rivera offered as proof of his standing was a travel letter which the archbishop's office in Madrid-Alcala described as having been acquired "by deceit and subterfuge"; that he claimed doctorates he told one minister had come from a diploma mill in Colorado; that there were arrest warrants in Florida in 1969 over a stolen credit card and a car, and bad-cheque charges in New Jersey; and that during the years he described himself as a celibate priest he had fathered three children.
The investigation also noted that Rivera had given two different accounts of his own conversion — in 1964 placing it in July 1952, and later at three in the morning on 20 March 1967.
The Catholic Church stated that he had never been a Jesuit or a bishop.
What Chick Publications says
Chick Publications has never withdrawn the tracts and disputes the investigation directly. It points to a Spanish photo identification card describing Rivera as a priest, photographs of him as the director of a parish school, and the Madrid-Alcala travel letter, which it presents as genuine authorisation rather than a document obtained by deception. It characterises the press coverage as "a damage-control operation" by the Catholic Church, and says that other Christians who examined the charges "found him to be exactly what he claimed to be." A book-length reply, Sidney Hunter's Is Alberto For Real?, answers the accusations point by point.
Of Rivera himself the publisher says he "refused to spend his life arguing with his accusers. Instead, he just pushed on, preaching the gospel."
That is the shape of the dispute and it has not moved since the 1980s. What has not appeared on either side is a document about Islam's founding that originates anywhere other than Rivera. The tracts cite no archive, no Vatican record, no contemporaneous text. The account of the briefings is his own recollection of conversations he says he was present for.
The part about Khadija
The specific claim that Muhammad's first wife was a Catholic nun is the one point where the theory touches a person whose life is independently described.
Khadija bint Khuwaylid was born in Mecca around 555, was widowed and divorced before she met Muhammad, and ran a trading business substantial enough to employ him to take her caravans north to Syria. She proposed the marriage herself; he was about twenty-five and she is usually given as forty. She was the mother of his surviving children and, in the Islamic account, the first person to accept his revelation. She is not recorded as having any connection to a monastery, a bishop, or the Church, and nothing in the early biographical material places her in one.
There is a separate figure who sometimes gets folded into the story. Waraqa ibn Nawfal, Khadija's cousin, is described in the early sources as a Christian, and he appears at the beginning of Muhammad's prophetic career as someone Khadija consults. That a Christian relative existed is not in dispute. It is a considerable distance from there to an instruction issued by Rome.
Why it travelled
The tract form did most of the work. A Chick comic is short, free, drawn, and designed to be left somewhere for a stranger to pick up. It does not argue; it narrates, and it narrates in the voice of an insider who was there. Read that way, the absence of documents is not a gap — the whole premise is that the documents are held by the institution being accused.
The claim has outlived both men. It circulates now detached from Rivera's name entirely, as a free-floating assertion that the Vatican built Islam, which is a form that makes its single source harder to see. What can be checked is the source, and the source is one man's testimony about his own life, given after that life had been examined and found to differ from his description of it in the particulars a reader would need to trust before trusting the rest.