“As Spencer observes, “it would entirely reasonable to
expect that seventh-century chroniclers … would note the remarkable influence
and achievement of this man”, but no, “there is nothing dating from the time of
Muhammad’s activities or for a considerable time thereafter that actually tells
us anything about what he was like or what he did”.”
Mervyn F. Bendle
Mervyn F. Bendle has written a handy review
of Robert Spencer’s provocative 2012 book, Did
Muhammad Exist?: https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2012/07-08/the-revisionist-case-that-muhammad-did-not-exist/
I [Damien F. Mackey] would query only the
concluding quote from Spencer, that “as a
prophet of the Arabs who taught a vaguely defined monotheism, [Mohammed] … may
have existed”, based upon my view that Mohammed, a composite biblical character,
was based - especially for the first part of his supposed life - largely on Tobias
of the Book of Tobit.
For more
on this, see e.g. my:
The Revisionist Case That Muhammad
Did Not Exist
size=3 width="100%" align=center>
Robert Spencer, Did
Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins (Intercollegiate
Studies Institute, 2012), 272 pages, $39.95
Did Muhammad exist? No. And
neither did the Koran for that matter, at least not in the form or with the
status ascribed to it by Muslims. These are the two major conclusions of a
vigorous stream of revisionist scholarship that has struggled for many decades
to gain a hearing within the critically indolent field of Islamic Studies.
It is a primary virtue of a
new book by Robert Spencer, Did Muhammad Exist?, that it summarises and
explores this important work in a balanced, lucid and compelling fashion. It shows
that the vast presence that Muhammad enjoys in global history rests on flimsy
foundations, which Spencer’s new book systematically dismantles, leaving few
stones standing, synthesising the findings of revisionist scholars into a
devastating demolition of the traditional accounts of Muhammad and the origins
of Islam in all their aspects.
As Spencer acknowledges, he
builds on the work of earlier dissenting scholars, including Aloys Sprenger
(1813–93), Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), Henri Lammens (1862–1937) and Joseph
Schacht (1902–69), as well as more contemporary figures whose work is discussed
below. His book also complements several recent sets of related essays and
readings, including those edited by Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd R. Puin on The
Hidden Origins of Islam (2010), and by the pseudonymous Ibn Warraq on The
Quest for the Historical Muhammad (2000), Which Koran? (2007), and Virgins?
What Virgins? (2010). These have sought to raise the profile of the
revisionist perspective and to challenge the rather inertial state of
scholarship in this vital field.
The critical torpor that
afflicts Islamic Studies is understandable of course, especially when Western
scholars of Islam (and their universities) are dependent on petro-dollar
funding from Muslim benefactors, and the goodwill of Muslim countries in which
they carry out their research. Moreover, as Ibn Warraq observes in Virgins?
What Virgins?, scholars have been “crushed into silence out of respect for
the tender sensibilities of Muslims, by political correctness, postcolonial
feelings of guilt, and dogmatic Islamophilia”. Indeed, Edward Said’s massively
influential polemic Orientalism (1978) imposed a virtual prohibition on
the objective study of Islam, asserting that even the most innocuous commentary
is actually a form of Eurocentric oppression. Scholars are also aware of the
apparently limitless wrath of Muslims eager to react violently to any
suggestion that the fundamental tenets of their religion are being questioned
or shown insufficient respect. And, of course, the role of Muhammad as the
“Seal of the Prophets” and the status of the Koran as the pre-existing, eternal
word of God are foundational beliefs of Islam, and are at least as central to
that religion as Jesus Christ is to Christianity.
On the other hand, this
timidity cannot be completely excused, as other religions have faced scholarly
assaults upon their foundations. Christians have had to deal with relentless
challenges to key elements of their faith by increasingly outspoken scholars
for nearly 300 years. As long ago as the early eighteenth century Thomas Chubb
initiated “the search for the historical Jesus”, which was taken up by a later
Enlightenment intellectual, Hermann Reimarius, and promoted by Gotthold
Lessing, who disingenuously justified the systematic deconstruction of the
Christian faith on the basis that “the contingent truths of history can have no
impact upon the eternal truths of reason”, with which he identified Christian
theology. This deconstructive effort gathered pace through the nineteenth
century, culminating in Albert Schweitzer’s (in)famous book, The Quest of
the Historical Jesus (1906), and the subsequent work of Rudolf Bultmann,
who set out systematically to “demythologise” the New Testament, ridding it of
supernatural content, and conjuring up a Jesus who propounded an existentialist
philosophy that, predictably, mirrored that of Bultmann. Subsequent biblical
scholarship formulated increasingly powerful forms of historical and critical
analysis, and the historicity of Jesus became highly problematic, inspiring the
“death of God” school of theology in the 1960s.
More recently, Christians have
had to accommodate the influential iconoclasm of the Jesus Seminar, made up of
scholars and laypersons who regularly vote with coloured beads in a ballot on
the historicity of the accounts of the activities and teachings of Jesus.
Consequently, they portray him in a counter-culture or New Age guise, as an
itinerant Hellenised Jewish wise man and faith healer who challenged religious
dogmas and repressive social conventions, preached a theology of liberation,
and championed the cause of the marginalised and oppressed. And, of course,
according to the seminar, Jesus was not divine, but just an ordinary mortal of
normal parentage who was executed by a frightened establishment, and not as a
substitutionary atonement for the sins of the world, and who is also certainly
not the Second Person of the Trinity. Adding to such intellectual assaults,
Judaism and Christianity have to engage with two of the most exciting
archaeological discoveries in history—the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Nag-Hammadi
Library—both of which have the capacity to overturn and re-constitute the
earliest history of both religions.
Contemporary Christianity has
been able to accommodate this relentless historical-critical activity, not
without discord and division, but certainly without systematic intimidation and
acts of violence and assassination against those who voice reservations about
the truth claims being made. Indeed, many indubitably Christian scholars have
embraced the challenge of these new discoveries and explored new insights
generated by critical analysis of their source material.
Nothing comparable has
occurred in Islamic Studies, even though the tools of historical and critical
analysis are very applicable to that field of scholarship. Several tragic cases
can be cited concerning those who’ve tried. Professor Suliman Bashear was a
leading Arab scholar (Studies in Early Islamic Tradition, 2004) who was
badly injured after being thrown out of a classroom window by fundamentalist
students enraged by his revisionist argument that Islam evolved as a religion
within the matrix of Judeo-Christian monotheistic thought that prevailed in the
Middle East in Late Antiquity, rather than appearing abruptly as the result of
a prophetic revelation. Professor Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd also ventured too far
into this type of inquiry (Rethinking the Qur’an: Towards a Humanistic
Hermeneutics, 2004). He was one of Egypt’s leading Koranic scholars and a
very rare liberal Islam theologian who developed a humanistic form of Koranic
hermeneutics that he used to argue that Islam could accommodate itself to
modernity. Consequently, and despite his exemplary scholarly achievements, he
was refused promotion at his university, declared an apostate from Islam,
forcibly divorced from his wife, sentenced to death by Egyptian Islamic Jihad,
and driven into exile. Mention might also be made of Professor Muhammad Sven
Kalisch, a German convert to Islam who taught Muslim theology at the University
of Munster, but saw his career and his faith evaporate when he announced that
his research had convinced him that Muhammad never existed.
It doesn’t require much
imagination to envisage the bloody consequences of any “Muhammad Seminar” or
ballot on the reliability of the Koran conducted in a Muslim country, or indeed
in Western countries, paralysed as they are not only by threats of violence and
the withdrawal of financial and other support, but also by the ever-tightening
constraints of political correctness and proliferating laws on “hate speech”
and discrimination. Not surprisingly, at least two of the most important
Western scholars challenging the received account of the origins of Islam
publish under pseudonyms, and travel and appear in public in disguise and with
substantial security, wary of the fate suffered not only by Bashear and Abu
Zayd, but also by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Theo van Gogh, Salman Rushdie and Naguib
Mahfouz, amongst many other intellectuals victimised by Muslim authorities and
fanatics.
The scholarly insurgency in
Islamic Studies challenging the traditional orthodoxy made its breakthrough
about four decades ago, after an extended period of intellectual stagnation
amongst traditionalists, in a classic example of a paradigm revolution. As
Harald Motzki notes in his review of “Alternative Accounts of the Qur’an’s
Formation” in The Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an (2006), there was
very little development in Western scholarship concerning Islam until 1970 when
some very important work emerged to challenge the accepted wisdom about the
early history of the religion. A revolutionary paradigm had emerged suddenly to
challenge the dominant one.
According to the dominant
account, the Koran appeared in the first decades of the seventh century AD in
Mecca and Medina as a result of a series of divine revelations to a charismatic
religious and political leader, Muhammad, who had these recorded, and who then
edited and re-arranged them during his prophetic career. They were later
collected during the reign of the second caliph, ‘Umar, with the canonical
version being finalised under the third caliph, ‘Uthmān, some twenty years
after Muhammad’s death in 632. This was published as the official version of
the Koran and has prevailed to the present day; attempts to produce a critical
edition dealing with troublesome textual variations have been resisted.
This traditional account of
the origins of the Koran is based on what is asserted to be the stylistic
uniformity of the text, and (in a methodologically circular move) on evidence
believed to be found in the Koran itself, with the latter interpreted in the
light of other traditional Muslim accounts (hadith) about the life of Muhammad
and the compilation of the Koran. It is not based on external documentary,
archaeological or numismatic evidence. (Note that the apparently Koranic verses
inscribed in the Dome of the Rock, although early, contain variations that
raise more questions than they answer about the formation of the Koran, as
Spencer and other revisionists point out. For example, it appears that the
verses record a dissident Christian critique of mainstream Christology, predate
the Koran, and were incorporated into, rather than derived from it.)
The alternative paradigm
emerged in response to a range of unavoidable difficulties about the evidence
that scholars ultimately could no longer evade. The decisive step was taken by
John Wansbrough, an American-born historian at the School of Oriental and
African Studies at the University of London. As Motzki notes, “all the elements
of [the official] account have been challenged by John Wansbrough in his Quranic
Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977) and The
Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History
(1978)”, two works whose legendary difficulty unfortunately (or deliberately?)
limited their impact on a wide audience. At any rate, Wansbrough tackled
head-on the fundamental problem in the historiography of early Islam, the
absence of any original source material from the first century in the
religion’s history, and concluded that this was because such material existed
(if at all) only as an oral tradition or traditions, and relevant documentary
or other sources from the period, including any early forms of the Koran,
therefore never existed. Indeed, he dated the formation of the canonical
version of the Koran to no earlier than the third Muslim century (the ninth
century AD), some 200 years after Muhammad was said to have received his
revelations.
This solution, although
traumatic and resisted by those who adhered to the previous paradigm, could not
be avoided. As F.E. Peters observed in “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad”
(1991), in terms of any extant historical evidence illuminating its sudden
appearance in the mid-seventh century, the Koran “stands isolated like an
immense rock jutting forth from a desolate sea, a stony eminence with few marks
on it to suggest how or why it appeared in this watery desert”. As Daniel Brown
concluded in A New Introduction to Islam (2004): “Wansbrough’s
arguments, given the state of the evidence, are substantially irrefutable”; and
consequently,
students of Islam are faced
with a set of contrasting paradigms for the formation of the Qur’an. Proponents
of one paradigm accept the traditional Muslim view, sometimes with superficial
revision. The other paradigm places the canonization of the Qur’an in a Near
Eastern environment during the two centuries following the conquest.
These paradigms are quite
incompatible, the implications of the new one being devastating for Islam’s
traditional self-understanding of its history and the foundations of its
faith.
Wansbrough’s re-interpretation
did not stop there. He also rejected the basic assumption of the standard
source analysis of the Koran—that it was possible to identify facts in the text
that anchored it in history and provided reliable insights into “what really
happened” in the formative years of both the text itself and Islam. Instead, he
applied form criticism derived from the work of Bultmann and others in biblical
studies, where it had been honed to a sharp critical edge, and which approached
the Koran and the traditional accounts surrounding it as literature, that is,
as fictional accounts derived from various sources, including oral traditions,
woven together in a creative and collective fashion over an extended period.
He also noted that the Koran
and early Muslim documents made considerable reference to concepts, images and
theological issues associated with various forms of the Judeo-Christian
tradition that played a dominant role within a broader monotheistic matrix
prevailing throughout the Middle East at the time. He surmised that the
religious movement that eventually evolved into Islam had begun as a
Judeo-Christian sect in the western Arabian region, and that material derived
from this sectarian source was adapted to an Arab perspective over centuries to
ultimately become the Koran.
Consequently, in Wansbrough’s
interpretation, the official account of Islam’s origins is best seen as a
“salvation history”, constructed from various sources and projected back onto
the past by later generations as the Arab people sought to establish their own
religious identity and acquire a special status as the recipients of God’s
“final” revelation. Muhammad emerges as a similarly constructed mythical
figure, who served to provide the Arab people with their own prophet. Moreover,
he was also granted a special status, as the Seal of the Prophets, ranking
above all previous prophets of the Judeo-Christian tradition and disqualifying
any that might appear in the future. In summary, according to this analysis,
neither Muhammad, the Koran, nor Islam appeared miraculously in the seventh
century, as the traditional account maintains, but evolved instead over
centuries, as have other world religions.
The new paradigm had other
champions. In 1977, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook published what Spencer
describes as “the wildly controversial book” Hagarism: The Making of the
Islamic World. This book propounded a controversial re-interpretation of
the early history of Islam that “unleashed an avalanche of work on Islam’s
origins”, as Fred Donner reflected in “The Historical Context” in The
Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an. Like Wansbrough, Crone and Cook rejected
outright the basic axiom of most previous accounts of the early formation of
Islam—that it is possible to derive an historically reliable framework from
Islamic sources:
It is … well-known that these
sources are not demonstrably early. There is no hard evidence for the existence
of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century, and the
tradition which places this rather opaque revelation in its historical context
is not attested before the middle of the eighth. The historicity of the Islamic
tradition is thus to some degree problematic.
At most, “what purport to be
accounts of religious events in the seventh century are utilizable only for the
study of religious ideas in the eighth”, and consequently, for historical
purposes, “the only way out of the dilemma is thus to step outside the Islamic
tradition altogether and start again”.
The best external point of
departure for reconstructing the early history of Islam, Crone explained in Slaves
on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (1980), was a mass of
documentary material that has been systematically ignored because of its
non-Muslim provenance and implications:
All the while that Islamic
historians have been struggling with their inert tradition, they have had
available to them the Greek, Armenian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Coptic
literatures of non-Muslim neighbors and subjects of the Arab conquerors, to a
large extent edited and translated [over a century ago, but] left to collect
dust in the libraries ever since.
While this dismissive attitude
towards these sources was “striking testimony to the suppression” of historical
scholarship concerning the non-Islamic Middle East, this material was
invaluable, “because there is agreement between the independent and
contemporary witnesses of the non-Muslim world [and] they leave no doubt that
Islam was, like other religions, the product of a religious evolution”, and not
a sudden revelatory event of epochal significance that left, inexplicably, no
contemporary historical evidence to support subsequent traditional Muslim
claims about it.
Wansbrough had been a mentor
of Crone and Cook, although they diverged from his account in several areas,
accepting an earlier date for the final recension of the Koran, seen as a
compilation of material derived from Judaic forms of Christianity and Middle
Eastern pagan sources. In their view Islam, the caliphate, and the Arab
conquests were the ultimate results of a rebellion against the Byzantine and
Persian empires as they slid into crisis, initially involving a coalition of
Arabs and Jews inspired by Jewish messianism, and known in non-Muslim
contemporary sources as “Hagarenes”, because of their decision to claim descent
from Abraham through his slave wife Hagar as distinct from the Jewish claim of
descent from Abraham through his wife Sarah. At some point in the early eighth
century the coalition dissolved and the “Hagarenes” began to evolve a
specifically Arab version of monotheism as they recognised the need to
establish their own religious identity. In this fashion Crone and Cook reach
the same basic conclusion as Wansbrough, although they proceeded along a
slightly different route in a more combative fashion.
Another central figure amongst
the revisionists must be noted. This is the pseudonymous scholar Christoph
Luxenberg, who argued in The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A
Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran (German edition
2000, English translation 2007) that the emergence of Islam is best understood
in terms of the evangelising activities of Syrian Christians who were active in
Arabia at the time. Their teachings were, of necessity, expressed in concepts
derived from their own Syro-Aramaic language, and those Arabs who responded
adopted many of these terms and incorporated them as loan words into an oral
tradition that eventually evolved into a central component of the Koran.
This theory allowed Luxenberg
to resolve many apparent inconsistencies and incoherencies of the Koran by
considering certain obscure words, phrases and sentences as originally Aramaic
loan words rather that Arabic. This procedure involved exploring ancient
Aramaic for relevant or plausible homonyms for terms found in the Koran on the
assumption that these had been imported into the oral tradition that later
found written Arabic form in the Koran after copyists and editors had guessed
at their meaning, thereby producing the difficulties that characterise the
text. A famous example of this is the rendering of one term as “virgins”
instead of “raisins”. According to Luxenberg, the word usually translated as
“virgins” or “dark-eyed maidens” is best understood as referring to “white
raisins” of “crystal clarity”, meaning that the promised delights awaiting
martyrs in Paradise are more culinary that carnal—a finding that may be
deflating for prospective suicide bombers.
Another scholar drawn into the
revisionist camp was Gerd R. Puin, a German authority on ancient Koranic manuscripts.
Puin was the head of a restoration project commissioned by the Yemeni
government to examine and catalogue a vast hoard of Koranic and non-Koranic
fragments discovered in Sana’a in 1972. Amongst the material was a palimpsest
which appears to contain the oldest Koranic texts in existence. Significantly,
the older of the texts can be radio-carbon-dated to no later than 660 AD. This
was after the canonical Koran was supposedly settled, and yet it exhibits
significant textual variations that suggest a process of formation of the Koran
that differs markedly from the traditional account, and is especially
challenging for Muslims who believe that the Koran is the eternal word of God
and arrived in this world perfect and fully formed. Based on this and evidence
derived from the other material, Puin and his associates concluded that the
proto-Islamic religious movement must have been in constant flux in its early
years and that the Koran is an amalgam of texts from various sources that were
apparently not fully intellectually assimilated even at the time of Muhammad,
and may date from at least a century before. In particular, Puin detected a
Christian substrate in the material from which may be derived an entire
“anti-history” of the origins of Islam.
In summary, what Ibn Warraq
identifies in Virgins? What Virgins? as “the Wansbrough/Cook/Crone line”
lies at the centre of the revisionist paradigm, supported, supplemented and
developed by the work of other scholars. Instead of the traditional view that
Islam appeared miraculously, as “a breach in cultural continuity unparalleled
among the great civilisations”, as Marshall Hodgson asserted in The Venture
of Islam (1974), the revisionists offer a more prosaic scenario. As Warraq
says:
Islam, far from being born fully
fledged with a watertight creed, rites, rituals, holy places, shrines, and a
holy scripture, was a late literary creation, as the early Arab warriors
spilled out of the Hijaz [the Western region of Arabia containing Jeddah, Mecca
and Medina] in dramatic fashion and encountered sophisticated
civilizations—encounters that forced them to forge their own religious identity
out of the already available materials, which were then reworked to fit into a
mythical Hijazi framework.
This included a holy scripture
to supplant those of the Jews and the Christians, and a prophetic figure to
supersede Jesus Christ. The profound implications of this paradigm shift have
been summed up by one leading proponent of the traditional position as follows:
“If the hypothesis of Wansbrough and others in his group turns out to be true,
it would serve to destroy the very basis of Islamic civilization” (Massimo
Campanini, The Qur’an: The Basics, 2007).
Robert Spencer’s new book
appears to signal a growing confidence amongst the revisionists. He published a
biographical study, The Truth about Muhammad, in 2006, based on the
earliest sources, and although he remarked then that “from a strictly
historical standpoint, it is impossible to state with certainty even that a man
named Muhammad actually existed”, he nevertheless felt compelled to concede
that “in all likelihood he did exist”. Now he believes that “may have been an
overly optimistic assessment”, as
even the pillars used to
support the traditional account begin to crumble upon close scrutiny … The
available historical records contain a surprising number of puzzles and
anomalies that strongly suggest that the standard Muslim story about Muhammad
is more legend than fact.
This is not surprising, as the
extant material concerning the historical figure of Muhammad is scant indeed,
as we have seen. And even in the Koran, Spencer reminds us, “the name Muhammad
actually appears … only four times, and in three of those instances it could be
used as a title—the ‘praised one’ or ‘chosen one’—rather than as a proper
name”, and no information is disclosed about his life. (By contrast, Jesus is
mentioned twenty-five times, eleven as the Messiah.) Elsewhere, the sources
fall into two categories. First, there is the biography by Ibn Ishaq and
related works composed in the ninth and tenth centuries; and, second, the
canonical collections of hadith from the same era. As Ohlig observes in The
Hidden Origins of Islam, “following the canons of historical-critical
research, these reports, written approximately two hundred years after the
fact, should be taken into consideration only with great reservations”; while
Brown confirms in A New Introduction to Islam that “all accounts of
Muhammad’s life lead back to Ibn Ishaq, an otherwise minor Medinian scholar who
secured a place in history by compiling the first full biography of Muhammad”.
Moreover, the work of Ibn Ishaq is itself not even extant, but is known only
via the work of a ninth-century Muslim writer, Ibn Hisham, who explained that
he heavily edited Ibn Ishaq’s work to remove “things which it is disgraceful to
discuss [and] matters which would distress certain people” or otherwise
scandalise the devout. Nevertheless, Ibn Ishaq’s version remains the dominant
source of all later biographies of Muhammad, so much so that, in Brown’s view,
anyone who reads a modern biography, such as Montgomery Watt’s major two-volume
study, “is essentially reading Watt’s commentary on Ibn Ishaq”, and this
stricture applies to similar biographies and textbooks based on them, which
together shape much of what is accepted knowledge about Muhammad and the
origins of Islam.
Nor are external contemporary
sources of any assistance in establishing a reliable picture of the historical
Muhammad, despite the literally awesome impact he was alleged to have had on
the world at the time. As Spencer observes, “it would entirely reasonable to
expect that seventh-century chroniclers … would note the remarkable influence
and achievement of this man”, but no, “there is nothing dating from the time of
Muhammad’s activities or for a considerable time thereafter that actually tells
us anything about what he was like or what he did”. Moreover, what records do
exist produce more questions than answers. For example, there exists a
Christian account from around 635 of the conquest of Jerusalem by “the godless
Saracens … who give themselves up to prostitution, massacre and lead into
captivity the sons of men”, but it makes “no mention, even in the heat of the
fiercest polemic, of the conquerors’ god, their prophet, or their holy book”. A
similar account, the Doctrina Jacobi, written around 635 to 640, speaks
of an unnamed Saracen prophet emerging in the region, but this was in 635,
after Muhammad’s supposed death, and this prophet (if he existed) was
proclaiming not a new religion but “the advent of the anointed one, the Christ
who was to come”: a Jewish or Christian Messiah.
Notably, nowhere amongst such
accounts is there mention of “Muhammad”, “Islam”, the “Koran”, or “Muslims”,
with reference only to “Saracens”, or “Hagarenes”, and so on, and no indication
that a major new religion has emerged, led by a new prophet and supreme
political and military leader. Even more significantly, the Arab conquerors
themselves didn’t mention these terms, with the few references to “Muhammad” as
likely to be an honorific as a proper name, and in several instances these are
accompanied by the symbol of the cross, suggesting a Christian association. It
was only at the very end of the seventh century, sixty years after the
traditional date of Muhammad’s death, that any mention of him begins to appear,
and it was another sixty years before Ibn Ishaq’s biography was apparently
published.
Ultimately, it is only through
the wilful suppression and avoidance of historical evidence and the
implications that flow from it that the traditional accounts can be maintained,
and it is difficult to dissent from what Spencer calls “A Revisionist Scenario”
that offers a synthesis of what is known (and not known) about the appearance of
the Koran, Muhammad, and the origins of Islam. In his own attempt to provide an
evidence-based account, Spencer begins with the “immutable fact” of the Arab
empire that emerged at the time and quickly found itself requiring the
ideological legitimation that could only be provided by a political theology
similar to that exercised over their subject people by the Roman, Byzantine and
Persian states. The Arab rulers appear initially to have been adherents of
Hagarism, and rejected the mainstream Christian doctrines of the Trinity and
the divinity of Christ, with the latter seen instead as a messenger of God.
Around the beginning of the eighth century this allegiance began to fade in
favour of an embryonic version of Islam that nevertheless retained many elements
of the original religion.
This new faith emphasised an
extremely rigorous form of monotheism, within which “the ‘praised one’, Muhammad,
an Arabian prophet who may have lived decades before”, took centre stage. This
prophetic figure had to be not only an Arab, a warrior, and a political leader,
but also an inhabitant of central Arabia, to avert any suggestion that the new
divine dispensation was anything other than purely Arabian in origins and
nature. Similar considerations surrounded the advent of the Koran, which was
fashioned from various sources, including the inscription from the Dome of the
Rock, and other material that originally had a Judeo-Christian provenance,
resulting in the “numerous non-Arabic elements and outright incoherencies” that
came to characterise it. In summary, the imperatives of “empire came first and
the theology came later … the spiritual propositions that Islam offers were
elaborated in order to justify and perpetuate the political entity that
generated them”.
So, did Muhammad exist? In
Spencer’s view, “as a prophet of the Arabs who taught a vaguely defined
monotheism, he may have existed. But beyond that, his life story is lost in the
mists of legend.” Ultimately, “as the prophet of Islam, who received (or even
claimed to receive) the perfect copy of the perfect eternal book from the
supreme God, Muhammad almost certainly did not exist”.
Dr Mervyn F. Bendle is Senior
Lecturer, History and Communication, at James Cook University. He wrote on “How
Civilisations Die” in the April issue.
In 2003, Walter Williams, in his The Historical Origin of Islam, asserted that Muhammad is the brainchild of Arabian scholar Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) … who was the main individual involved in the morphing and mythologizing … of the making of the prophet Muhammad; he also shows that the … Koran is a mixture of Jewish literature, put together by Jewish scholars to include the Torah and the New Testament Gospels. [2]
Mackey’s comment: Based on my view (above) of the origins of the non-historical character, “the Prophet Mohammed”, the Koran is largely an Arabic appropriation of the Bible, including both Old and New Testaments.
In 2007, Robert Spencer, founder of Jihad Watch (2003), author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (2005) and The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (2006), was at a conference with Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995), during the course of which they [went] for [a] walk together, discussing Islam, during which time Warraq made the following comment:
Spencer, who at the time believed that Muhammad was a "real person", who actually existed as an historical figure, i.e. he believed Muhammad was a "false prophet", someone who sold his own opinions off to people as divine revelations, and Warraq engaged into debated on issue. Warraq's reasoning and answers paused Spencer into reflection. In the next five years, Spencer came to reevaluate his position:
In existographies, Ibn Warraq (1946-) (FA:170) is an Pakistani-born English ex-Muslim secular humanist (1995) turned atheist (2009), pseudonymously named after Arabian god skeptic Abu Isa al-Warraq (c.815-870), noted for his 1995 Why I Am Not a Muslim, stylized as an Islamic version of Bertrand Russell's 1927 Why I Am Not a Christian, characterized as the "first Muslim history of doubt" (Hecht, 2003). Influences
Warraq was influenced, in respect to existive thinkers, by Salman Rushdie and the "Rushdie affair" and articles by pseudo Ibn al-Rawandi (see: Ibn al-Rawandi) in the New Humanist, into going public with his work in attempting to "sow a drop of doubt in a sea of dogmatic certainty. [5]
Warraq, in his 1995 book, cites: Xenophanes, Michel Montaigne, Galileo, Benedict Spinoza, Isaac La Peyrere, Thomas Hobbes, Edward Gibbon, Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Paine, Carlyle, Averroes, Avicenna, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Robert Ingersoll, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein, Reynold Nicholson, Christopher Luxenberg. (Ѻ) [5] ….
Kalisch's researched opinion is that Muhammad never existed; at the time, he was said to be in the middle of completing a book on this subject. [4]
In 2011, Hans Jansen, in his “The Historicity of Muhammad, Aisha and Who Knows Who Else”, argued the position that Muhammad is a fictional character. [5]
In 2012, Robert Spencer, in his Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins, asserted, per reason that there is no mention of a person named "Muhammad" in Arab literature until 692, a full sixty years … AFTER the purported death of Muhammad in 632, that what is Islamic revelation was an afterthought, a narrative created after the Arab conquests of the Near East, to give the new ruling elite an ideological pretext for power. [6] ….
Mackey’s comment: The writer of the article now proceeds to ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’, by generalising the non-existence of the mainstays of Judaïsm, Christianity and Islam:
How Robert Spencer came to his view
“In 2003, Walter Williams, in his The Historical Origin of Islam, asserted that Muhammad is the brainchild of Arabian scholar Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) …who was the main individual involved in the morphing and mythologizing …of the making of the prophet Muhammad; he also shows that the the Koran is a mixture of Jewish literature, put together by Jewish scholars to include the Torah and the New Testament Gospels”.
The anonymous author of the following article, “Muhammad never existed
”, does not miss out on anyone, moving on from getting rid of Mohammed to concluding also that Noah; Abraham and Sarah; Joshua; John the Baptist; Jesus, Mary and Joseph; did not have any real existence.
”, does not miss out on anyone, moving on from getting rid of Mohammed to concluding also that Noah; Abraham and Sarah; Joshua; John the Baptist; Jesus, Mary and Joseph; did not have any real existence.
Firstly, we read here (my comments added):
Muhammad never existed
American Robert Spencer's 2012 Did Muhammad Exist?, in which he recounts how he unlearned his previously held 2007 belief that Muhammad was a real historical figure. [6]
|
In religio-mythology, Muhammad never existed is the view, opinion, or reasoned belief that Muhammad (569 to 632), the supposed-to-have-existed prophet or figurehead of Islam, said to have penned the Quran, never existed as a real person, but rather is a mythical character sold as an historical figure.Overview
In 1239, Frederick II published a treatise that denied the divinity of Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad, declaring each of them imposters.
In 1930, Soviet Marxist theoretician Liutsian I. Klimovich, in his lecture “Did Muhammad Exist?”, argued the time gap between Muhammad’s alleged lifetime and the first written sources was so huge that we cannot suppose that any of the information given in these sources is authentic; that nothing is known for sure about the historical Muhammad, and that it is even likely that he never existed. Quite consequently, Klimovich assumed that the Koran was not Muhammad’s work but the product of a whole group of authors. Muhammad was created by later historians as a myth, designed to explain the emergence of the Islamic community out of the Hanif movement. The prophet was an invention to cover up early Islam’s character as a social protest movement. [1]
In 1239, Frederick II published a treatise that denied the divinity of Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad, declaring each of them imposters.
In 1930, Soviet Marxist theoretician Liutsian I. Klimovich, in his lecture “Did Muhammad Exist?”, argued the time gap between Muhammad’s alleged lifetime and the first written sources was so huge that we cannot suppose that any of the information given in these sources is authentic; that nothing is known for sure about the historical Muhammad, and that it is even likely that he never existed. Quite consequently, Klimovich assumed that the Koran was not Muhammad’s work but the product of a whole group of authors. Muhammad was created by later historians as a myth, designed to explain the emergence of the Islamic community out of the Hanif movement. The prophet was an invention to cover up early Islam’s character as a social protest movement. [1]
Mackey’s comment: I would generally agree with Klimovich’s observations.
Though, as I have argued in many places now, Mohammed is a composite biblical character and was unlikely “created” for the purpose as outlined here by Klimovich. Whether or not the latter explanation accounts for the emergence of Islam is, however, a separate matter.
The article continues:
In 2003, Walter Williams, in his The Historical Origin of Islam, asserted that Muhammad is the brainchild of Arabian scholar Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) … who was the main individual involved in the morphing and mythologizing … of the making of the prophet Muhammad; he also shows that the … Koran is a mixture of Jewish literature, put together by Jewish scholars to include the Torah and the New Testament Gospels. [2]
Mackey’s comment: Based on my view (above) of the origins of the non-historical character, “the Prophet Mohammed”, the Koran is largely an Arabic appropriation of the Bible, including both Old and New Testaments.
The article continues:
In 2007, Robert Spencer, founder of Jihad Watch (2003), author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (2005) and The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (2006), was at a conference with Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995), during the course of which they [went] for [a] walk together, discussing Islam, during which time Warraq made the following comment:
“I don’t think Muhammad ever existed at all.”
— Ibn Warraq (2007), comment to Robert Spencer during walk [3]
Spencer, who at the time believed that Muhammad was a "real person", who actually existed as an historical figure, i.e. he believed Muhammad was a "false prophet", someone who sold his own opinions off to people as divine revelations, and Warraq engaged into debated on issue. Warraq's reasoning and answers paused Spencer into reflection. In the next five years, Spencer came to reevaluate his position:
“Ibn Warraq is responsible for the fact that I no longer believe in Muhammad. I no longer believe Muhammad existed as an historical figure.”
— Robert Spencer (2013), “Interview with Ibn Warraq” [3]
Mackey’s comment: Ibn Warraq is, according to the following, an “ex-Muslim secular humanist (1995) turned atheist (2009)”: http://www.eoht.info/page/Ibn+Warraq
Ibn Warraq
In existographies, Ibn Warraq (1946-) (FA:170) is an Pakistani-born English ex-Muslim secular humanist (1995) turned atheist (2009), pseudonymously named after Arabian god skeptic Abu Isa al-Warraq (c.815-870), noted for his 1995 Why I Am Not a Muslim, stylized as an Islamic version of Bertrand Russell's 1927 Why I Am Not a Christian, characterized as the "first Muslim history of doubt" (Hecht, 2003). InfluencesWarraq was influenced, in respect to existive thinkers, by Salman Rushdie and the "Rushdie affair" and articles by pseudo Ibn al-Rawandi (see: Ibn al-Rawandi) in the New Humanist, into going public with his work in attempting to "sow a drop of doubt in a sea of dogmatic certainty. [5]
Warraq, in his 1995 book, cites: Xenophanes, Michel Montaigne, Galileo, Benedict Spinoza, Isaac La Peyrere, Thomas Hobbes, Edward Gibbon, Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Paine, Carlyle, Averroes, Avicenna, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Robert Ingersoll, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein, Reynold Nicholson, Christopher Luxenberg. (Ѻ) [5] ….
The article continues:
In 2008, German jurist and former Islamic theologian Sven Kalisch, whose doctoral thesis (1997) was on “common sense and flexibility in Islamic legal methodology” (see also: Goethe's jurisprudence issues and student reactions), completed at the Faculty of Law and Economics at the Technical University of Darmstadt—a Protestant-to-Muslim convert (age 15) turned Muslim-to-nonbeliever convert (age 44)—made controversial headlines by stating, in an article entitled “Islamic Theology Without the Historic Muhammad: Comments on the Challenges of the Historical-Critical Method for Islamic Thinking”,
“Muhammad probably never existed.”
— Sven Kalish (2008) (Ѻ)
Kalisch's researched opinion is that Muhammad never existed; at the time, he was said to be in the middle of completing a book on this subject. [4]
In 2011, Hans Jansen, in his “The Historicity of Muhammad, Aisha and Who Knows Who Else”, argued the position that Muhammad is a fictional character. [5]
“It may sound crazy but it is not as crazy as it sounds: a number of scholars consequently suspect that Muhammad is not a historical figure, but a literary character that was created by ancient Arab storytellers, perhaps early in the eighth century of our era.”
— Hans Jansen (2011), “The Historicity of Muhammad” [3]
In 2012, Robert Spencer, in his Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins, asserted, per reason that there is no mention of a person named "Muhammad" in Arab literature until 692, a full sixty years … AFTER the purported death of Muhammad in 632, that what is Islamic revelation was an afterthought, a narrative created after the Arab conquests of the Near East, to give the new ruling elite an ideological pretext for power. [6] ….
Mackey’s comment: The writer of the article now proceeds to ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’, by generalising the non-existence of the mainstays of Judaïsm, Christianity and Islam:
The general issue, to summarize this general Muhammad did not exist view, is that all of the main figures, characters, and prophets of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, each of which progressively building on the other, are human character re-writes, aka "god reduction" morphs, of what were primarily original Egyptian mythological gods and stories, as the works of the 100+ religio-mythology scholars have shown, e.g. Noah is the god Nu (Noah never existed), Abraham is the god Ra (Abraham never existed), Sarah is the star Sirius, Virgin Mary is the goddess Isis, Jesus is the god Osiris (see: Jesus never existed), Joshua is the god Shu (see: Joshua 10:13), John the Baptist is the god Anubis, Joseph is the god Geb, and so on (see: Egyptian-to-Christian transliteration); hence, if the Islamic figure Muhammad claimed to have "spoken" to all of these so-called prophets, e.g. during his famous "night journey", then he too is a mythological figure, sold to people, over time, as a real person, as a way to found Islam on the historical religions, aka ancient mythologies.
….References
1. (a) Existence of Muhammad (section) – Wikipedia.
(b) Klimovich, Liutsian. (1931). “Did Mohammed exist? The debate in the Communist Academy in anti-religious section of the Institute 12/1930 CI philosophy. on the report of LI Klimovich” (“Sushchestvoval li Mokhammed? Diskussiia v Kommunisticheskoi akademii v antireligioznoi sektsii instituta filosofii 12/XI 1930g. po dokladu L.I. Klimovicha”), in: Voinstvuiushchii ateizm, No. 2-3, (1931), 189-218.
2. Williams, Walter. (2003). The Historical Origin of Islam (abs). Maathian Press.
3. (a) Spencer, Robert. (2013). “Ibn Warraq Exposes Islam on ABN” (Ѻ), Betsy Ross, Jan 31.
(b) Robert Spencer (author) – Wikipedia.
4. (a) Kalisch, Sven. (2008). “Islamic Theology Without the Historic Muhammad: Comments on the Challenges of the Historical-Critical Method for Islamic Thinking”, (in German), Publication.
(b) Anon. (2008). “Excerpt: Muslim Academic Questions Muhammad’s Existence”, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 15.
(c) Higgins, Andrew. (2008). “Professor Hired for Outreach to Muslims Delivers a Jolt” (Ѻ), The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 15.
(e) Historicity of Muhammad – Wikipedia.
(f) Thims, Libb. (2011). Purpose? (in a Godless universe). (94-pg manuscript) (unfinished); Online as 105-page unfinished manuscript (14 Apr 2013). IoHT publications.
(g) Sven Kalisch – WikiIslam.net.
(h) Sven Kalisch (German → English) – Wikipedia.
5. Jansen, Hans. (2011). “The Historicity of Muhammad, Aisha and Who Knows Who Else” (Ѻ), Trykkefrihed.dk, May 16.
6. (a) Spencer, Robert. (2007). The Truth About Muhammad (Ѻ). Publisher.
(b) Spencer, Robert. (2012). Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (foreword: Ibn Warraq). Open Road Media.
(c) Zmirack, John. (2012). “Amazon Review” (Ѻ), Apr 9.
….References
1. (a) Existence of Muhammad (section) – Wikipedia.
(b) Klimovich, Liutsian. (1931). “Did Mohammed exist? The debate in the Communist Academy in anti-religious section of the Institute 12/1930 CI philosophy. on the report of LI Klimovich” (“Sushchestvoval li Mokhammed? Diskussiia v Kommunisticheskoi akademii v antireligioznoi sektsii instituta filosofii 12/XI 1930g. po dokladu L.I. Klimovicha”), in: Voinstvuiushchii ateizm, No. 2-3, (1931), 189-218.
2. Williams, Walter. (2003). The Historical Origin of Islam (abs). Maathian Press.
3. (a) Spencer, Robert. (2013). “Ibn Warraq Exposes Islam on ABN” (Ѻ), Betsy Ross, Jan 31.
(b) Robert Spencer (author) – Wikipedia.
4. (a) Kalisch, Sven. (2008). “Islamic Theology Without the Historic Muhammad: Comments on the Challenges of the Historical-Critical Method for Islamic Thinking”, (in German), Publication.
(b) Anon. (2008). “Excerpt: Muslim Academic Questions Muhammad’s Existence”, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 15.
(c) Higgins, Andrew. (2008). “Professor Hired for Outreach to Muslims Delivers a Jolt” (Ѻ), The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 15.
(e) Historicity of Muhammad – Wikipedia.
(f) Thims, Libb. (2011). Purpose? (in a Godless universe). (94-pg manuscript) (unfinished); Online as 105-page unfinished manuscript (14 Apr 2013). IoHT publications.
(g) Sven Kalisch – WikiIslam.net.
(h) Sven Kalisch (German → English) – Wikipedia.
5. Jansen, Hans. (2011). “The Historicity of Muhammad, Aisha and Who Knows Who Else” (Ѻ), Trykkefrihed.dk, May 16.
6. (a) Spencer, Robert. (2007). The Truth About Muhammad (Ѻ). Publisher.
(b) Spencer, Robert. (2012). Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (foreword: Ibn Warraq). Open Road Media.
(c) Zmirack, John. (2012). “Amazon Review” (Ѻ), Apr 9.
Mackey’s comment: Given the incident of which we read in Acts 14:11-13 - far more recent than Abraham - the attempted apotheosis by the Lycaonians of Paul and Barnabas:
When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices in the Lycaonian language: ‘The gods have come down to us in human form!’ Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought bulls and wreaths to the city gates, hoping to offer a sacrifice along with the crowds [,]
then it would not be surprising if some of the great biblical characters were to have been assimilated to certain of the pagan gods.
This is most especially applicable to the antediluvian patriarchs. See e.g. my:
Cain and Osiris
which article includes mention of the likely divinization of Noah as well.
Regarding the above observation: “Noah is the god Nu (Noah never existed)”, I would readily agree at least with Noah’s identification by the Egyptians as Nu. See e.g. my:
Noachic Flood in Egyptian Legend
As for: “Abraham is the god Ra (Abraham never existed), Sarah is the star Sirius”, the god Ra was anciently established in Egyptian religion long before the emergence of Abram (Abraham), whose historical reality has been greatly strengthened by Dr. John Osgood’s determination of a most suitable archaeology for the patriarch and his era (not to mention the Bible’s naming Abraham’s contemporaries over a vast section of the then-known world). See e.g. my:
Narmer a Contemporary of Patriarch Abraham
But Abraham and Sarah may indeed have entered into ancient mythologies. See e.g. my:
Abraham and Sarah in Greek Mythology?
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