Did Muhammad Exist? Nah.
Robert
Spencer, Truthteller, is the Best Friend Muslims Ever Had
Historicity
is the quality of being objectively true, as opposed to merely a legend or
myth. Religions vary in the importance they accord to historicity. Hinduism,
possibly the world's oldest continuously practiced major religion, does not
rely on historicity. Hanuman, the monkey god, Shiva, blue-skinned and represented
by a phallus, and multi-armed Kali, who dresses in human skulls and severed
hands, all exist on a transcendent plane. Historians have never presented
peer-reviewed papers arguing for the historicity of an elephant-headed god.
Buddha and Confucius were both meant to be mere mortals, and historians agree
that both probably existed. For devout Buddhists and Confucianists, historicity
doesn't much matter. If meditation brings enlightenment, and if filial piety
holds families together and results in an orderly society, that is what
matters.
Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam all take historicity very seriously. The Old Testament
begins, not with laws, not with prayers, not with sins, saints, or visions, but
with an historical account of God's creation of the world. It continues with
God's calling of Abraham, God's freeing of Hebrew slaves, and other events,
meant to have occurred in real life, in real time. Biblical maximalists and Biblical minimalists engage in heated
debate over the extent to which the Bible's history is accurate, but objective
facts support that Jews have an ancient lineage in the Middle East, where they
worshipped Yahweh. These basic facts come from intense research into various
scholarly disciplines, including archaeology, genetics, and extra-biblical mentions, for example in the Merneptah and the Mesha
Steles.
Modern-day Jews, a small, scrappy people who manage to eke out David v. Goliath
victories against genocidal enemies, have so much in common with the Jews of the
Bible that the question of the historicity seems almost moot.
Christianity
hinges on the existence of a man named Jesus, who rose from the dead. If
someone found Jesus' corpse, Christianity would be proven false. The full,
fierce light of every possible scholarly tool, from archaeology to textual
criticism to paleography, has been focused on discovering as much as possible
about Jesus. Most historians agree, at minimum, on this basic biography: Jesus
was a Jewish preacher who lived roughly in the first third of the first
century. He was baptized by John the Baptist, he was said to be a miracle
worker, he was crucified by the Romans, and his followers claimed that he rose
from the dead.
Jesus,
Christians like to say, is the "best attested" figure from the
ancient world. By "best attested," claimants mean that there is a
larger number of documents, produced closer in time to Jesus' life, by authors
familiar with Jesus' milieu, and more widespread documentation for Jesus, than
for any other ancient figure. The New Testament works were written by men like
Jesus, that is, first century Jews. Even New Testament authors like Paul, who
did not know Jesus personally, knew his culture, his language, and his
acquaintances. The New Testament was first written for audiences close to the
events described therein, audiences that would object to fabrications. The
earliest New Testament books were written within twenty years of Jesus' death. Other
objective facts are marshalled to support the "best attested" claim;
see for example, this
page,
one of many available on the web. Bestsellers like Cold
Case Christianity, The Case for Christ, The Case for the Real Jesus, and Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of
Nazareth
have popularized the centuries of extensive, and ongoing, scholarship that
establishes Jesus' historicity.
Luke
receives a great deal of attention. He is the author of both the Gospel
according to Luke and the book of Acts, comprising almost 28% of the New
Testament. According to Princeton Bible scholar Bruce Metzger, "In the book of
Acts, Luke mentions 32 countries, 54 cities, and 9 Mediterranean islands. He
also lists 95 people by name, 62 of which are not named elsewhere in the New
Testament." Luke's
emphasis
on the who-what-when-where-why-how background of Jesus' life, facts that can be
checked against known history, is one criterion that separates the Gospels from
myth. As CS Lewis, a myth scholar, writes, "I have been reading … legends
and myths all my life … none of them are like this … Either this is
reportage…or else, some unknown writer … without known predecessors or successors,
suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic realistic
narrative."
Bart
D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at
the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, writes, "Serious historians of the early
Christian movement … have spent many years preparing to be experts in their
field. Just to read the ancient sources requires expertise in … Greek, Hebrew,
Latin … Aramaic, Syriac, and Coptic … Expertise requires years of patiently
examining ancient texts and a thorough grounding in the history and culture of
Greek and Roman antiquity … virtually everyone who has spent all the years
needed to attain these qualifications is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was a
real historical figure … Jesus did exist, as virtually every scholar of
antiquity, of biblical studies, of classics, and of Christian origins in this
country and, in fact, in the Western world agrees … I am an agnostic with
atheist leanings … But as a historian I think evidence matters … Jesus did
exist."
Islam
hinges on the following being factually accurate: in 610 AD, the angel Jibril (Gabriel)
revealed the Koran to Muhammad, an illiterate Arab camel driver. Muhammed
shared this revelation with his followers, who followed the Koran's many exhortations to jihad, and went on to the
Muslim Conquest and military, political, and religious domination of North
Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. If Muhammed never existed, Islam as a
religion would be reduced to something like the Heaven's Gate UFO cult. In
1997, thirty-nine Heaven's Gate members committed mass suicide to coincide with
the passage of the Hale-Bopp comet. Did God order someone named Muhammed to
fight and kill non-Muslims until Islam reigned over the entire planet, as
described in this hadith? Or have millions of jihadis spilled
the blood of others, and their own blood, in service to a lie invented by Arab
conquerors to unite and justify their empire?
Until
recently, the Koran had not been exposed to the kind of rigorous examination
that the New Testament has since it was first compiled. Why? The answer might
be found in a comparison of two anecdotes. John 20:24-29 tells the story of "Doubting
Thomas." Thomas, an apostle, said that he didn't believe that Jesus rose
from the dead. The risen Jesus later confronted Thomas. Jesus placed Thomas'
fingers in his crucifixion wounds, and invited Thomas, on the basis of that
evidence, to conclude that the miraculous news was true. Jesus encouraged his
followers to investigate facts and reach their own conclusions.
According
to Islamic traditions, some Bedouins embraced Islam. They later left Islam and
killed Muhammad's shepherd. Muhammad had their eyes gouged out with hot iron,
and their hands and feet amputated. They were thrown on stony ground where they
slowly died. They were punished for "making war on Allah." Anyone
else who did so should be crucified, as stipulated in Koran 5:33. Hadith
Bukhari 9:57 states "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill
him." Other hadiths support the death penalty for criticism
of Muhammad. Islam has long held that to question Islam is to cause others to
doubt, that is, to "wage war on Allah." "Leave what makes you
doubt for what does not make you doubt," says one hadith. The Koran states that "The
believers are only the ones who have believed in Allah and his messenger and
then doubt not," and "Allah will not be questioned." The Koran self-identifies, "This is the
book about which there is no doubt."
Islam's
emphasis on "submission" and its rejection of questioning informs
Muslim behavior every day. In August, 2021, Ridvan Aydemir, a former Muslim,
debated Hamza Myatt, a Muslim preacher, on YouTube. Aydemir pointed out that
the Koran makes demonstrably
false
claims about the history of the Kaaba, the physical center of Islamic worship. Myatt
was completely unaware of the Koranic verses to which Aydemir referred. If a
Christian preacher publicly revealed such ignorance of Bible verses, he would
have to apologize and his authority might never recover. When Myatt was
challenged on his lack of knowledge by Milahan, who watched the
debate on YouTube, Myatt, rather than confessing and apologizing for his own
ignorance, attacked Milahan for "siding with the enemy." "Your
name will get marked and that will be that," Myatt threatened. Myatt
bragged that he left school at 15. Muslims attacked Milahan as a traitor, a
closet Christian, or a CIA spy. Milahan could be killed for any of these
infractions. Milahan and Aydemir, in knowing and stating objective truths about
Islam, put their lives at risk.
Even
to acknowledge that the Koran is a manmade creation, rather than an uncreated,
eternal, and perfect document, is to invite death. Sam Shamoun quotes canonical Islamic sources recommending torture,
imprisonment, and death for anyone who says that the Koran is a manmade
creation.
Hatun
Tash, a Turkish-born former Muslim, preaches her Christian faith at London's
Speakers' Corner. In
one of her talks, she revealed that there
are differences in wording between copies of the Koran. On July 25, 2021,
Tash was repeatedly and violently
stabbed.
In previous assaults, Muslims have mobbed Tash, screamed for her death, punched
her,
and thrown her to the ground. Hatun is about five feet tall, a soft target for
jihadis. British
police, rather than arresting her attackers, have arrested her for preaching.
In
short, scholars have been able to research the Bible. Scholarship on the Koran
is unheard of in the Muslim world, and relatively recent in the West. Even so,
three obvious facts about the Koran suggest that Muhammad may never have
existed. Those three facts: the Koran's incoherence, the Koran's focus on
Jesus, and the Koran's hostility to Judaism and Christianity.
Anyone
who studies world sacred scripture comparatively cannot help but notice that
the Koran is poorly composed. The Koran is a mess in a way that the Popol Vuh,
the Vedas, African Anansi and Native American trickster tales, the Tibetan Book
of the Dead and Zen koans are not. A Woke person would object, "You don't
understand the Koran because you are not a Muslim." In fact Muslims
themselves don't understand the Koran. That is why there are literally dozens
of books, the sira and hadith collections, that explain Islam to believers. Robert
Spencer repeats a Muslim joke about a reader who read the Koran verse,
"This is the book with no doubt in it" as "This is the book with
no oil in it," a reasonable mistake given the Koran's ambiguity.
The
Koran uses pronouns like I, you, he, and they, and the reader cannot be sure to
whom these pronouns refer. The Koran does not finish most of the stories it
refers to. The Koran is not in chronological or subject order. The Koran is so
repetitive that if all the repeated material were removed, it would be 40% its
current length. The Exodus story is repeated 27 times. A notorious example of
the Koran's incoherence is verse 74:30. "Above it nineteen." Above
what, nineteen what, and what are these nineteen doing, exactly? This verse is
not unique. Scholars who have devoted their lives to studying the Koran report
that perhaps twenty percent of the Koran has no agreed upon meaning whatsoever.
Koran
2:1 reads simply "a-l-m." At least one
translator has decided that the verse's complete lack of meaning is a "miracle" because "None but Allah knows their
meanings." Another commentator reassures Muslims that
even if you don't understand the verse, you can still benefit from it.
"Deriving right guidance from the Qur'an does not depend on grasping the
meaning … anyone who fails to understand … may still live a righteous life and
attain salvation. The ordinary reader, therefore, need not delve too deeply
into this matter." This lack of emphasis on understanding, but an
insistence that mere exposure to the Koran brings blessings, is reflected in
the tradition of memorizing the Koran, even by people who don't understand a
single syllable they memorize. Merely mouthing alien, Arabic syllables is
deemed holy.
Adam,
Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Mary, Jesus, and many other Biblical characters,
including minor characters like Potiphar's wife, appear in the Koran. In
addition to canonical Biblical texts, the Koran makes use of folklore. Some of
the folktales found in the Koran: the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus; a legend about
Alexander the Great; a passage from the non-Biblical Infancy Gospel of Thomas,
about Jesus bringing life to clay birds; and, from the non-Biblical Gospel of
pseudo-Matthew, Mary picking dates from a palm tree that bent down for her. Folklorist Alan Dundes describes traditional
folktales in the Koran, including "The Hermit and the Angel" and
"The Animal Languages." These tales "Surely antedate the Koran.
We cannot assume that any of them were invented by Muhammad."
The
Koran purloins a line from the Talmud, "Whoever kills one man it is as if
he has killed an entire world." Sometimes the Koran author makes clumsy
errors with material with which he is not fully familiar. Mary, Jesus' mother,
who lived in the first century AD, is assumed, in some verses, to be the sister of
Moses, who lived over a thousand years before Mary. Why? Both Biblical women
shared the same first name. That other Koran verses reveal clearer knowledge of
Mary's identity suggests that more than one author produced this document.
"The
formulaic density of the Koran is well
in excess of 20%," writes Dundes. That is, much of the Koran consists, not of
substantial statements, but rather of oral formulae whose only purpose is to
aide someone memorizing the text, for example, "Allah is forgiving,
merciful," used dozens of times. "If one were to
subtract all the oral formulas from the Koran, one would have an overall text
reduced by as much as one third of its present length, if not more."
With
both Biblical narratives and extra-Biblical folklore, the Koran doesn't so much
tell stories as refer to stories. The Protoevangelium of James is the source of
one Koran story, that of Joseph being chosen by lots to be Mary's husband. The
Protoevangelium actually tells
the story
completely in a comprehensible narrative fashion. The story is alluded to in
Koran 3:44, but not told. The
verses before and after Koran 3:44 have nothing to do with the chosen-by-lots
story.
There's
another remarkable feature of the Koran, and of Islam in general. Placed in the
context of other world faiths, Islam is remarkable for the degree to which it
is less a declaration of a new faith than an angry critique of two previous
faiths, Judaism and Christianity. All religions express hostility towards other
groups. But one could extract Amalek from the Old
Testament, or anti-Buddhist rhetoric from Hindu scripture, or
the notorious Matthew 27:25 from Christianity, and still have
coherent religions.
In
Islam, by contrast, hostility to Jews and Christians occupies so large and
central a place that Islam would be substantially different if that hostility
were edited out of Islamic art, architecture, practice, and daily prayer. Jihad
has been a central feature of Islam since the seventh century to the present. Muslims
who follow Islam's prayer schedule repeat a given prayer seventeen times a day.
These repeated words identify Jews as angering God and Christians
as going astray. Islamic
commentary
makes this association clear: "These two paths are the paths of the
Christians and Jews, a fact that the believer should beware of so that he
avoids them." The prayer condemning Jews and Christians comes from the
very first chapter of the Koran, verse 7. The first six verses praise Allah,
and verse 7 condemns Christians and Jews.
There
are no parallels in any other world religion. Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians,
Christians, and Jews are not required to repeat seventeen times a day that
members of another religious group are disgusting to God himself. Given these
prayers, it is not surprising that in a 2011 Pew Poll, Muslims expressed a negative view of Westerners, describing Westerners
as "selfish, violent, greedy, immoral and arrogant." Indeed, Koran
98:6 condemns kuffar as "The worst of created beings." Kuffar, unbelievers, are "najis,"
"unclean," along with bodily waste, dogs, pigs, and corpses.
The
familiar phrase "Allahu akbar" is yet another feature of Islam
defining itself against a hostile view of other faiths. "Allahu
akbar" does not mean, as it is so often translated, "God is
great." Rather, it means that Allah, the god of Islam, is superior to all
other gods. Islamic records show that Muhammad shouted "Allahu
akbar" during terror attacks on civilians he had ascertained were
non-Muslims.
The
Dome of the Rock is one of the oldest examples of Islamic architecture. It was
completed a mere sixty years after the year Muhammad is believed to have died.
As such, one would expect its inscriptions to record a powerful encapsulation
of Islamic theology. In fact, the Dome is more anti-Christian than it is a
coherent expression of any new faith. It was built on the model of Christian
architecture, specifically the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, with that church's
dimensions. The Dome was placed on the Jewish Temple Mount, across from the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher, as a supremacist statement against both
Christianity and Judaism.
The
inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock are obsessively focused, not on Muhammad,
but on Jesus Christ. Jesus is not the son of God; Jesus is nothing more than a
prophet; no one should mention the concept of the trinity: these statements are
made over and over in the Dome's inscriptions.
Dr.
Bill Warner ran the numbers. "Islam devotes a
great amount of energy to the Kafir. The majority (64%) of the Koran is devoted
to the Kafir, and nearly all of the Sira (81%) deals with Mohammed's struggle
with them." Other tabulators have concluded that the Koran mentions Jesus 187 times. The word "Muhammad" is mentioned only four
times in the Koran. It is possible that those Koranic mentions use
"Muhammad" as a title, "praised one" or "chosen
one," not a name. These mentions of Muhammad may well refer to Jesus;
compare Koran 5:75 and Koran 3:144.
So,
we have a religion whose foundational scripture defies narrative standards.
This scripture makes use of material from two other faiths, Judaism and
Christianity. Unlike other world scriptures, it doesn't so much tell stories as
refer to stories it assumes its audience knows. This religion is often more
focused on critiquing two previously existing religions than on presenting a new
ethos. What do these facts suggest about the question of whether or not
Muhammad existed?
Before
we answer that, let's take a brief look at the centuries leading up to the
seventh century Arab Conquest. Muslims brag that the success of that conquest
is proof that Allah was on their side. History suggests otherwise.
From
the second to the fifth centuries, Christians engaged in heated debate over the
nature of Christ, including at the first seven ecumenical councils. Was Jesus a God, a
man, a combination of the two? A variety of schools offered a dizzying
array of theories of Jesus' true nature.
Nestorius,
a fifth century archbishop, held that Jesus had distinct human and divine
natures. The Council of Chalcedon, in 451 AD, held that Jesus was true God and
true man, and that any other understanding was wrong. Nestorius was
anathematized by his peers. The term Nestorian came to be applied to various
Christian groups who held heterodox interpretations of Christ's nature. These
Nestorian churches were located to the east of Constantinople, in places like
modern-day Syria and Turkey, and as far east as China. As we shall see, this
debate helped pave the way for Islam.
Other
events created a power vacuum that Islam would eventually fill. In 410,
Visigoths sacked Rome. This was the first time Rome had fallen to a foreign
invader in almost eight hundred years. As Jerome wrote, "The city which
had taken the whole world was itself taken." "Centuries later, the city which had at the height of its power
boasted a population of more than a million people, was reduced to a lawless,
ruined village of no more than 30,000 residents."
Medieval
scholar Michael McCormick nominates 536 as the worst year to be alive. An
Icelandic volcano erupted. "'The sun gave forth its light without
brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,' wrote Byzantine historian
Procopius … Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved,"
reports science writer Ann Gibbons.
The
Plague of Justinian in the sixth through seventh centuries wiped out up to 40%
of the population of Constantinople, and between a quarter and a half of the
population of the Mediterranean. In the early seventh century, Persia and
Byzantium fought their last war, which exhausted both sides.
All
these events contributed to the total exhaustion of the powers – Romans,
Greeks, and Persians – who had dominated the Mediterranean and Middle East for
a thousand years. Their exhaustion created a power vacuum and paved the way for
the Arab Conquest. Beginning in the seventh century, Arabs advanced on a good
portion of the world, from Spain to India and China. We think of these Arabs as
Muslims. Modern scholarship calls this identification into question.
Which
brings us back to those who had heterodox ideas about the nature of Jesus. Some
of them spoke Syriac, an Aramaic language related to Arabic. It is possible
that one or more of them produced a lectionary, that is, a collection of
scriptural readings. This proposed lectionary would contain many assertions
that Jesus was not God. This lectionary would make reference to, but not repeat
full texts of, Biblical stories and other material that the author knew his
audience would be familiar with. This proposed lectionary was later repurposed
by Arabs seeking a document that would unify and justify their new empire.
We
do not know the real name of Christoph Luxenberg, author of a 2000 book, The
Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran. Luxenberg theorizes that the Koran's
basis was a heretical Christian Syriac lectionary. For this, "Luxenberg"
faces death threats – thus the pseudonym.
The
Arab alphabet in use in the seventh century was a blunt instrument, given to
ambiguity. Luxenberg recognized, in those old manuscripts, that many words
could have different translations. In fact, Luxenberg believed, the source
document for the Koran was probably written in Syriac. He believes that his
Syriac reading renders clear currently unclear Koran passages. In the current
translation, Koran 29:24 reads as God saying to Mary, "Do not be sad. Your
lord has placed a little river beneath you." One wonders what on earth
this might mean. Luxenberg re-translates the verse, with an eye to
the Syriac language. "Do not be sad. Your Lord has made your delivery
legitimate." Luxenberg's translation takes a nonsensical line and renders
it completely sensible. Mary is a virgin and she is sad because she has just
given birth to a child without a natural father. God comforts Mary by telling
her that He, God, has rendered her child legitimate.
If
the source for the Koran were a Syriac lectionary that was worked over by several
editors to create a religious foundation for the new Arab empire, that would
explain the Koran's incoherence. The source document was not meant to be the
foundational scripture of a new revelation. It was also not written in Arabic.
It was merely a lectionary, a document that would make reference to, and
comment on, but never fully flesh out, pre-existence Biblical and folk narratives,
which is exactly what the Koran does. It would not be in chronological order,
but rather it would hop from story to story, as the author commenting on
stories saw fit to make the point he was trying to make.
Luxenberg's
theory would explain Islamic hostility to Judaism and Christianity. Perhaps the
author of the source document for the Koran was a heretical Christian who had
been anathematized and sent into exile for his belief that Jesus was not
divine. No wonder the Koran, the Dome of the Rock inscriptions, and other
Islamic material are full of denunciations of mainstream Christianity, and
repeatedly insist that Allah is the greatest, Allah never had a son, Jesus was
not divine, and the Trinity is an abomination.
Christoph
Luxenberg is not alone. Other authors have studied the same material and come
to similar, but slightly different, conclusions. One of the first of these
scholars was John Wansbrough (1928-2002). In 1977, one of Wansbrough's
students, Patricia Crone, (1945-2015), published, with her co-author Michael
Cook, "Hagarism:
The Making of the Islamic World." Crone and Cook also described the
Koran's roots in Jewish and Christian sources, material that had been edited to
serve the needs of Arab conquerors.
In
2015, Odon Lafontaine published "Le Grand Secret de l'Islam: L'histoire cachée de l'islam
révélée par la recherche historique." Lafontaine's
book popularizes a much longer and more scholarly book, "Le messie et
son prophète - Aux origines de l'Islam," published in 2005 by
Edouard-Marie Gallez. The Koran, Gallez and Lafontaine agree, is the record of
a heterodox community of believers who accepted some aspects of Christianity
and Judaism as we understand those religions today, and rejected other aspects.
They argue that the community that produced the documents that became the Koran
accepted descent from Abraham and the Torah, but that they rejected the
Babylonian Talmud, that appeared around 500 AD. Lafontaine says, for example,
that Koran
4:156-157
is an explicit protest against derogatory statements the Babylonian Talmud made about Mary.
Robert
Spencer's 2021 book, "Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure
Origins"
is an updated and expanded edition of his 2012 book by the same title. Spencer
performs the heroic task of presenting a fun-to-read popularization of
scholarly research into Muhammad's historicity. Spencer's book offers all the
rewards of a page-turner mystery. It's hard to believe that anyone could read
Spencer's book with an open mind and still believe that the Muhammad of the
standard Islamic narrative ever existed. Muhammad's life, as understood by
pious Muslims, is not supported by archaeology, geography, ecology, numismatics,
or detailed writings produced by contemporary authors directly affected by the
Arab Conquest.
The
hadith, that is, sayings of Muhammad, and the sira, or biography of Muhammad,
were written long after Muhammad is said to have died, by men utterly distant
from Muhammad's native geography, flora, fauna, language, and culture. Bukhari,
a prominent collector of hadith, was a Persian, not an Arab, and born in
Uzbekistan, almost 2,000 miles from Mecca. Bukhari's collection of the sayings
of Muhammad was produced c. 846 AD, over 200 years after Muhammad was said to
have died. Bukhari collected 600,000 hadiths and accepted only 7,563 as
"authentic." Bukhari's assessment that some hadiths are
"authentic" is transparently arbitrary. Muslims openly acknowledged
that other Muslims invented hadith to serve their own purposes. If someone
wanted to promote behavior X, that person merely invented a hadith approving of
behavior X. So-called "authentic" hadith contradict each other.
Muhammad drank while standing / never drank while standing; washed once /
washed twice / washed three times; Muhammad condemned / approved the killing of
women and children. Muhammad did / did not perform miracles.
The
first biography we have of Muhammad was produced by Ibn Hisham, who died in
833, two hundred years after Muhammad. Ibn Hisham lived in Cairo, a largely
Christian city, worlds away from the Meccan desert. As Spencer points out,
these volumes upon volumes of late-appearing hadith and sira are highly
detailed, reporting on the most trivial details of daily life. Aisha,
Muhammad's child bride, talks about washing
his semen out of his clothes and Muhammad going to pray with wet clothes;
she talks about playing
with dolls, and
also playing on a swing just before the
consummation of her marriage. Hadith describe highly detailed instructions on toilet use. Nothing in the scholarship on oral
cultures supports the supposition that it is plausible that reams of highly detailed,
personal information could be accurately safeguarded, and remain unknown to the
wider world, for two hundred years. Oral cultures retain general outlines of
history and basic facts about heroes. They don't retain dozens of volumes of
details like Aisha's heavy breathing before her marriage consummation.
Arabs
rapidly conquered ancient civilizations, full of scribes. If Arab conquerors
were inflamed by a scripture passed directly from an angel to a camel driver,
they could have hired scribes to write that material down. Arab conquerors were
writing things, Spencer reports, but their writings differ from today's Islam
in significant ways. For example, inscriptions on coins might include the word
"Muhammad" alongside a cross. The mere sight of a cross is an
abomination to orthodox Muslims. One Muslim was so anxiety-ridden about the
sight of a cross that he asked for advice on whether or not he could use a "plus" sign when adding numbers.
Apparently the questioner was not alone because many authorities had handed
down rulings on the use of the plus sign. Early Arab conquerors minting coins
with crosses defies Islam as it is understood today.
Muhammad's
canonical biography defies even common sense. It does not record any event in
his life taking place in the leap months that existed in Muhammad's lifetime,
but were later removed after a calendrical reform. In other words, those
recording biographies of Muhammad 200 years after his life appear to be unaware
of basic facts of the calendar Muhammad followed.
One
of the key features of Muhammad's biography is his placement, as a camel driver
who worked trade caravans, in Mecca. Mecca, these biographies insist, was a
major center of trade. But ancient authors who came from societies that engaged
in trade with Arabs, authors who wrote extensively about Arabs, say not a word
about Mecca. Early mosques did not face Mecca. Descriptions of Mecca in
canonical Islamic writings bear no relation to the real Mecca. "Not one
map before 900 AD even mentions Mecca," writes Dan Gibson.
Bukhari's
"authentic" hadith have Aisha referring to foliage that doesn't grow
in Mecca. Ibn Hisham describes Mecca as a town blessed with water and trees; in
fact it is a desert without water or trees. Bukhari describes Muhammad entering
Mecca via mountain passes; there are no mountain passes.
The
victims of the Arab Conquest certainly wrote about it. They didn't, at first,
write about Muslims, the Koran, or Muhammad. They did call the Arabs by names,
but the names were not "Muslim." Rather, they used names like
"Hagarians" or "Saracens."
Spencer
suggests that Islam as we know it today was more or less codified by Abd
al-Malik, Ibn al-Zubayr, and Hajjaj ibn Yusuf "to unify and strengthen
their empire." Spencer points out that 1,400 years ago, empires had state
religions. Byzantium was Christian; Persia was Zoroastrian. Invading Arabs
suddenly found themselves in control of an empire, and they needed a justifying
manifesto and a uniform practice that would unite wildly diverse populations under
one monolithic, imperial roof. Speak only Arabic when you pray; face Arabia
when you pray: soon Muslims from China to Spain would obey these imperial
dictates. Consider yourself, not a citizen of your own country, but of the
Ummah, the world empire of Islam. Muslims are the Dar al-Islam, the house of
peace. Kuffar are Dar al-Harb, the house of war. Islam is very much the
imperial religion Arab conquerors required.
A
"court industry" "unabashedly manufactured material about what
Muhammad said and did." It's clear that these unabashedly manufactured
hadith advanced ideas not found in the Koran, which, by the time the hadith
arrived, had been stabilized. For example, hadith were invented to sacralize
stoning and "suckling" as Koranic practices. Aisha is made to say
that if an unrelated man and woman must be together, contrary to Islamic
dictates of purdah, their contact can be made "halal," or permitted,
if the woman breastfeeds the man ten times. In Sunan Ibn Majah hadith 1944, Aisha is further made to say that the
reason the verse of suckling didn't make it into the Koran was that a sheep ate
the paper on which that verse was written. What is far more likely is that an
Islamic community found it hard to comply with the seclusion of women and
wanted an escape route. Inventing a hadith that allowed an unmarried man and
woman to spend time together if the woman breastfed the man first provided that
escape route.
Power
surrenders reluctantly and not without a fight. Islam is a center of power, and
it bestows power on imams, politicians, academics, and activists. Those who
benefit from the power Islam bestows hate Robert Spencer with a white hot
passion. Given that Spencer offers Muslims a chance to reconsider their
commitment to an ideology that lacks a foundation, Robert Spencer is one of the
very best friends Muslims have ever had.
Danusha
Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker
at a Monastery
