The first thing that should be known about Islam’s founder is that the man’s very existence is shrouded in doubt.
Since the Koran mentions him by name only four times, the story of his life—assuming he did live—has had to be cobbled together, from the outset, from the secondary but nonetheless highly revered documents known as the hadiths and the so-called “sira literature.”
This from frontpagemag.com.
Dating back, at the earliest, to the eighth century—long after the generally accepted date of Muhammad’s death—the hadiths originally numbered in the hundreds of thousands, only a small fraction of which came to be considered canonical. Many of them, instead of showing evidence of being based on reliable oral traditions, were patently invented out of whole cloth to support the author’s claim to a caliphate.
Robert Spencer maintains:
The sheer scale of fabrication is staggering.
Yet even though the historicity of the hadiths and sira literature is exceedingly dubious, the professors of Islamic and Middle East Studies in today’s Western colleges and universities—whose departments, not incidentally, receive their funding, to a great extent, from such centers of objective historical scholarship as Saudi Arabia and Qatar—treat all of the assertions in them as factual. Consequently, what these supposed educators are serving up in their classrooms is not history at all but Islamic apologetics.
For over two centuries, serious scholars of Judaism and Christianity have engaged in the critical study of biblical texts—which means, among much else, acknowledging internal contradictions in the books of the Bible, comparing historical claims made in the scriptures to those made in other sources dating to antiquity, and determining the order in which the gospels were written.
But such close analysis is essentially forbidden in the academic study of Islam. Moslems are obliged to believe or at least to profess to believe:
[T]hat every last statement in the Koran that reads like an assertion of historical fact is—however utterly contrary it may be to the fundamental laws of physics—not meant to be taken as a flight of fancy but, rather, as literal history.
A remarkable number of faculty members who teach Islam, whether they identify as moslems or not, feel obliged to treat the purportedly historical statements in the documents that the religion has agreed to consider sacred with this same mindless credulity.
Yes, they acknowledge that some of the sura (the chapters of the Koran) are theologically inconsistent with others, and in those cases they follow the long-established practice of declaring that the older sura are abrogated—that is to say, superseded—by later sura (which tend to be a lot more intolerant, brutal, and violent).
And on the rare occasions when such professors dare to reject—or to proffer strained and dubious interpretations of—certain passages of the Koran or hadiths or sira literature, they do so, as a rule, only to present a picture of the faith and its founder that will be:
[S]omewhat more palatable to the delicate sensibilities of Western students who may balk at the notion of revering a psychopath who had sex with children and, when it came to being a murderous megalomaniac, was right up there with Hitler and Stalin.
The contentions in the Islamic texts that are considered holy but that are deeply questionable are nothing less than multitudinous.
– Muhammad is said to have been born in Mecca and to have spent the first decades of his life there. But Mecca is mentioned only once in the Koran. Why?
– Furthermore, traditional [moslem] texts repeatedly depict Mecca as having been a major international trading center during the period when Muhammad lived there and started preaching Islam. Yet this claim seems almost surely to be erroneous, given that ‘virtually nothing’ is said about the city in contemporary records from, say, Greece, Rome, and Persia,
– Time and again, indeed, material that is presented in the hadiths and sira literature, and embraced by the faithful, as solid biographical information about Muhammad reveals itself to be, as Spencer puts it, ‘myth, fable, folk tales, sermonizing, factionalism, and guesswork,’ and
– The number of canonical Islamic texts that strain credulity to the breaking point, and whose less than realistic counterparts in the Bible are today read by almost all Jews and Christians as symbolic or allegorical, is beyond impressive:
– – [T]wenty-first-century [moslems] are obliged to attest, for example, that Muhammad was ‘born circumcised,’ and
– – Another tale that believers are obliged to consider historical has Muhammad traveling to Paradise and meeting Jesus, Moses, Abraham, and other figures from the Jewish and Christian scriptures—none of whom, incidentally, said anything to him that he considered worth passing along.
There’s more—lots more. The references in various approved texts to Muhammad’s birth, to the circumstances of his first marriage, and to the early days of his career as a prophet contradict one another wildly. In the hadiths and sira documents, the answers to these questions and many more are all over the place.
Another curious conundrum: If Islam began in Mecca, then why was the Koran composed in a dialect of Arabic that is very different from the Meccan dialect of the time, but that is strikingly similar to the dialect that was spoken in Petra, in what is now southern Jordan (which is over 800 miles away—or 32 hours by camel—from Mecca).
Then there’s the matter of the so-called Satanic Verses, which, in utter contradiction to everything said about infidels in the now-standard text of the Koran, described the gods to which certain non-Muslims prayed as authentic and deserving of worship. The episode and its implications were so ticklish for moslems that it was eventually dropped—down the memory hole—until the novelist Salman Rushdie brought it all up again, thereby ushering in the latest chapter in the centuries-old fractious relationship between the Christian West and the Islamic world.
Another story that many moslems would prefer to see disappear is that of Muhammad’s wife Aisha, who, according to “numerous Islamic traditions,” including some of the most widely credited hadiths, was six years old when she “married” the prophet and nine years old when the “marriage” was consummated.
There’s plenty more in Spencer’s book, of course: Seemingly endless accounts of bloodthirsty conquests, acts of barbaric hostility toward Christians and Jews, and the heartless execution of otherwise devoted moslems who had inadvertently said or done something that rubbed the boss the wrong way.
But back to the $64,000 question: Did the man even exist? Robert Kerr, has suggested “the life of Muhammad is patterned after a figure closer to hand than Moses: the Roman emperor Heraclius,” the key dates of whose life correspond to a surprising extent to the key dates in the canonical accounts of Muhammad’s life.
In any case, concludes Spencer, the total lack of any reference to Muhammad in “any remotely contemporary literature, and the abundance of contradictory materials, leads to the inevitable conclusion that in the hadith and sira literature, we are dealing with a collection of fables with apologetic intent, not scrupulously remembered or carefully compiled history.”
In short, Muhammad probably never even existed—a fact that makes it all the more ironic that the era in which we are living is increasingly being shaped (and not for the better, to say the least) by those who not only believe fervently that he did exist but who regard him as the ideal man.
Final thoughts: Christianity and Judaism are enmeshed in an existential battle with what may be the result of a vivid imagination or satanic visions.
