Posted on 05/17/2012 6:36:46 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The year 1880 saw the publication of a book that ranks as the single most important study of Islam ever. Written in German by a young Jewish Hungarian scholar, Ignaz Goldziher, and bearing the nondescript title Muslim Studies (Muhammedanische Studien), it argued that the hadith, the vast body of sayings and actions attributed to the Islamic prophet Mohammed, lacked historical validity. Rather than provide reliable details about Mohammed’s life, the hadith, Goldziher established, emerged from debates two or three centuries later about the nature of Islam.
(This is like today’s Americans debating the Constitution’s much-disputed Second Amendment, concerning the right to bear arms, by claiming newly discovered oral transmissions going back to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Obviously, their quotations would inform us not what was said 225 years ago but about current views.)
Since Goldziher’s day, scholars have been actively pursuing his approach, deepening and developing it into a full-scale account of early Islamic history, one that disputes nearly every detail of Mohammed’s life as conventionally understood — born in a.d. 570, first revelation in 610, flight to Medina in 622, death in 632. But this revisionist history has remained a virtual secret among specialists. For example, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, authors of the synoptic Hagarism (Cambridge University Press, 1977), deliberately wrote obliquely, thereby hiding their message.
Now, however, two scholars have separately ended this secrecy: Tom Holland with In the Shadow of the Sword, and Robert Spencer with Did Muhammad Exist? As their titles suggest, Spencer is the bolder author, and so is my focus here.
In a well-written, sober, and clear account, he begins by demonstrating the inconsistencies and mysteries in the conventional account concerning Mohammed’s life, the Koran, and early Islam. For example, whereas the Koran insists that Mohammed did not perform miracles, the hadith ascribes him thaumaturgic powers — multiplying food, healing the injured, drawing water from the ground and sky, and even sending lightning from his pickax. Which is it? Hadith claim Mecca was a great trading city but, strangely, the historical record reveals it as no such thing.
The Christian quality of early Islam is no less strange, specifically “traces of a Christian text underlying the [Koran].” Properly understood, these traces elucidate otherwise incomprehensible passages. Conventionally read, verse 19:24 has Mary nonsensically hearing, as she gives birth to Jesus, “Do not be sad, your Lord has placed a rivulet beneath you.” Revisionists transform this into the sensible (and piously Christian) “Do not be sad, your Lord has made your delivery legitimate.” Puzzling verses about the “Night of Power” commemorating Mohammed’s first revelation make sense when understood as describing Christmas. Chapter 96 of the Koran, astonishingly, invites readers to a Eucharist.
Building on this Christian base, revisionists postulate a radically new account of early Islam. Noting that coins and inscriptions from the seventh century mention neither Mohammed, the Koran, nor Islam, they conclude that the new religion did not appear until about 70 years after Mohammed’s supposed death. Spencer finds that “the first decades of the Arab conquest show the conquerors holding not to Islam as we know it but to a vague creed [Hagarism, focused on Abraham and Ishmael] with ties to some form of Christianity and Judaism.” In very brief: “The Muhammad of Islamic tradition did not exist, or if he did, he was substantially different from how that tradition portrays him” — namely, as an anti-Trinitarian Christian rebel leader in Arabia.
It was only around 700, when the rulers of a now-vast Arabian empire felt the need for a unifying political theology, that they cobbled together the Islamic religion. The key figure in this enterprise appears to have been the brutal governor of Iraq, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. No wonder, writes Spencer, that Islam is “such a profoundly political religion” with uniquely prominent martial and imperial qualities. No wonder it conflicts with modern mores.
The revisionist account is no idle academic exercise but, as when Judaism and Christianity encountered the Higher Criticism 150 years ago, a deep, unsettling challenge to faith. It will likely leave Islam a less literal and doctrinaire religion with particularly beneficial implications in the case of doctrines of supremacism and misogyny. Applause, then, for plans to translate Did Muhammad Exist? into major Muslim languages and to make it available gratis on the Internet. May the revolution begin.
— Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution
And these nieve folks believe that muslim “clerics” would listen to logic?
Bwahahahahahahahahahah!
Logic and islam are not friends.
I have read three Tom Holland books: Rubicon, Persian Fire and
Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom. Very good writer accessible writer of history although the two books about Greece and Rome were better than the book about Medieval Europe in 1000. Persian Fire is a great book if you are a fan of 300. For example, Queen Gorgo in history was Leonidas’s niece, yuck! hee, hee
ML/NJ
“Aesop’s Fables, translated by Laura Gibbs (2002)
521. HERMES AND THE ARABS
Perry 309 (Babrius 57)
Hermes filled a cart with lies and dishonesty and all sorts of wicked tricks, and he journeyed in this cart throughout the land, going hither and thither from one tribe to another, dispensing to each nation a small portion of his wares. When he reached the land of the Arabs, so the story goes, his cart suddenly broke down along the way and was stuck there. The Arabs seized the contents of the cart as if it were a merchant’s valuable cargo, stripping the cart bare and preventing Hermes from continuing on his journey, although there were still some people he had not yet visited. As a result, Arabs are liars and charlatans, as I myself have learned from experience. There is not a word of truth that springs from their lips.”
Long before there was Muhammod or islam Aesope knew.
Satan tinkers. Some of his schemes fail utterly. Some have limited success. Others do fairly well and some simply go gangbusters. Fortunately, we know how this will all end.
” Logic and islam are not friends.”
You are correct. I have tried debating in forums.
Islam values rote memorization not logical/critical analysis.
To become Muslim one must submit to “Allah” without question or debate. One must become a slave to “Allah”.
Ping for later
well, half-niece. her father and leonidas were half-brothers. This union wasn’t so uncommon in the ancient world. Also Leonidas et al were pederasts and the 300 would have composed of homosexual partners. But that is history....
The various books of the Bible has been minutely examined, compared, and researched in just this way for millennia.
Moreover, "faith-based" does not mean "credulity-based" or "legend-based" or "fantasy-based." Both Judaism and historic Christianity argue that God's providence is played out in the arena of history, i.e. "Stuff that actually happened." The "faith" involved is not the gullibility of the incurious, but the "faithful" pursuit of truth as supported by converging lines of evidence.
Faith and Reason "Fides et Ratio" (Link) is the theme of centuries of fruitful investigation.
Christian Scripture says, (Heb 11:1) "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Especially in an incarnational, historic interpretive community like Catholicism, if there's no examination of here-and-now stuff ("substance"), no down-to-earth "evidence," there's literally nothing for faith to talk about.
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