By
Findalis
What an interesting question? Can one question the history of Islam? Did Muhammad actually exist? Was he really illiterate?
Creeping Sharia asks those and other questions.
The question really should be whether it is possible to question
Islam and not be threatened, injured or killed, slandered, or arrested.
Robert Spencer via PJ Media » Is It Still Possible to Question Islam?.
Is it “Islamophobic” to question whether or not the standard picture
of Muhammad as depicted in Muslim texts is historically accurate?
Certainly many people think so, notably the Organization of Islamic
Cooperation (OIC). The OIC is a fifty-six nation body (plus the
Palestinian Authority) that, since the demise of the Soviet Union,
comprises the largest voting bloc at the United Nations. It has been
working for years to compel the UN to criminalize “Islamophobia.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held a closed-door meeting with the
OIC in December 2011, apparently to facilitate just that and figure out
ways to circumvent the First Amendment’s protection of the freedom of
speech.
Journalist
Claire Berlinski notes that “the neologism ‘Islamophobia’ did not simply emerge
ex nihilo”:
It was invented, deliberately, by a Muslim Brotherhood
front organization, the International Institute for Islamic Thought,
which is based in Northern Virginia. … Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a former
member of the IIIT who has renounced the group in disgust, was an
eyewitness to the creation of the word. “This loathsome term,” he
writes, “is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in
the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down
critics.”
Yet the mainstream media has for the most part bought into this
perspective, treating all investigation of how Islamic jihadists use the
texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism as
“Islamophobic,” however useful it might be to understand the motives and
goals of those who have vowed to destroy the U.S. and Western
civilization. Into this atmosphere comes my book
Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins,
which doesn’t touch directly on terror issues at all, but does
demonstrate that Islam was political, supremacist, and violent before it
was religious — a fact with considerable implications for today’s
political scene.
In broad outline, the accepted story of Islam’s origins is well
known. It begins with an Arabian merchant of the Quraysh tribe of Mecca,
known to the world as Muhammad, a name that means the “praised one.” He
rejected the polytheism of his tribe and was given to frequent prayer
in the hills and caves outside Mecca. In the year 610, when he was
forty, he was praying in a cave on Mount Hira, about two miles from
Mecca, when he was suddenly confronted by the angel Gabriel, who
commanded him to
recite.
For the next twenty-three years, until his death in 632, Muhammad did
just that: He recited the messages he received from Gabriel, presenting
them to his followers as the pure and unadulterated word of the supreme
and only God. Many of his followers memorized portions. The Arabia in
which Islam was born was an oral culture that respected poetic
achievement, and thus the prodigious feats of memory required to
memorize lengthy suras were not so unusual. After Muhammad’s death, the
revelations he had received were collected together into the Qur’an, or
“Recitation,” from the accounts of those who had memorized them or
written them down.
Muslims around the globe are not the only ones who take this account
for granted; even non-Muslims generally accept the broad contours of
this narrative, which has been told and retold for centuries. However,
virtually none of that standard account stands up to historical
scrutiny, for several key reasons:
- No record of Muhammad’s reported death in 632 appears until more than a century after that date.
- The early accounts written by the people the Arabs conquered never
mention Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur’an. They call the conquerors
“Ishmaelites,” “Saracens,”“Muha- jirun,” and “Hagarians,” but never
“Muslims.”
- The Arab conquerors, in their coins and inscriptions, don’t mention
Islam or the Qur’an for the first six decades of their conquests.
Mentions of “Muhammad” are non-specific and on at least two occasions
are accompanied by a cross. The word can be used not only as a proper
name but also as an honorific.
- The Qur’an, even by the canonical Muslim account, was not
distributed in its present form until the 650s. Contradicting that
standard account is the fact that neither the Arabians nor the
Christians and Jews in the region mention the Qur’an until the early
eighth century.
- During the reign of the caliph Muawiya (661–680), the Arabs
constructed at least one public building whose inscription was headed by
a cross – a symbol abhorrent to Islam.
The lack of confirming detail in the historical record, the late
development of biographical material about the Islamic prophet, the
atmosphere of political and religious factionalism in which that
material developed, and much more suggest that the Muhammad of Islamic
tradition did not exist, or if he did, he was substantially different
from how that tradition portrays him.
Unmistakably historical, however, are the Arab conquests and the
empire they produced. Every empire of the day was anchored in a
political theology. The Eastern Roman Empire was Christian; the Persian
Empire was Zoroastrian. The realm of political theology offers the most
plausible explanation for the creation of Islam, Muhammad, and the
Qur’an. The Arab Empire controlled and needed to unify huge expanses of
territory where different religions predominated. Islam began as an
umbrella monotheistic movement that presented itself as encompassing the
true forms of the two great previous monotheistic movements, Judaism
and Christianity.
Historical records make clear that toward the end of the seventh
century and the beginning of the eighth, the Umayyad leaders of the Arab
domains began to speak much more specifically than anyone had before
about Islam, its prophet, and eventually its book. Muhammad, if he did
not exist, or if his actual deeds were not known, would certainly have
been politically useful to the new Arab Empire as a legendary hero. The
empire was growing quickly, soon rivaling the Byzantine and Persian
Empires in size and power. It needed a common religion—a political
theology that would provide the foundation for the empire’s unity and
would secure allegiance to the state.
In any case, the late appearance of the biographical material about
Muhammad, the fact that no one had heard of or spoken of Muhammad for
decades after the Arab conquests began, the changes in the religion of
the Arab Empire, the inconsistencies in the Qur’an—all of this needed to
be explained. But is attempting to do so “Islamophobic?” Or can
disinterested historical investigation still be carried out in the free
West?
It is most interesting that the book
Did Muhammad Exist? has
been greeted with silence or opprobrium. Yet now, more than ever
before, historical investigators have the opportunity—in fact, the
responsibility—to usher Islam’s origins out of the shadows and into the
light, and the responsibility not to be cowed by Islamic supremacist
intimidation in doing so. Were they not to discharge that responsibility
fully or properly, we will all be the poorer.
What an interesting question? Can one question the history of Islam? Did Muhammad actually exist? Was he really illiterate?
Creeping Sharia asks those and other questions.
