Let's Aim for Historical Accuracy: There May Have Been a Real King Arthur -- But Not a Real Mohammad

As an amateur historian -- and probably not a good one -- I go nuts when I see amateurish fictions tendered as core premises. This is no more frequently found than in Hollywood; but do not kid yourself, it is not confined to Hollywood.

The following famous movie scene (based on the play) is a case in point, one worse than most:

A) The King Arthur stories hail back to the collapse of Celtic Briton, after the Roman garrison left in 410 AD. England did not exist at the time.

B) King Arthur might have been based on the life of a Celtic tribal chief, who fought the Anglo-Saxons (the proto-English). The English were not the heroes.

C) The Medieval castle in the far background of the movie scene would not have existed at that time.

D) South Britain rarely has hard freezes as the movie shows. The Gulf Stream usually keeps London above freezing in winter. Miserably raw, but rarely snow and ice buildup on the trees.

E) The only thing the movie got right -- probably by accident -- was casting Richard Harris, an Irishman and Celt, in the role. Especially since Artuir mac Áedán, a sixth-century Gaelic Scot, the grandson of an Irish king, is the best possible candidate for the real Arthur (that link is great, but it also erroneously shows medieval castles). And even that speculation about Artuir mac Áedán is questionable.

FROM THE AUTHOR:

Not so with Islam.

When Western academics finally started applying higher criticism to Islam, unlike Christianity, Islam quickly folded like a deck of cheap cards. The Muslims cannot handle this.

The late Dr. Patricia Crone established the impossibility of Mecca being the ancient major city that Islam says it was.

Modern Mecca is completely missing from all maps, inscriptions, trade notes, graffiti, official documents and church records for the period up to the middle of the 8th Century... -- Did Mecca Exist At The Time Of Muhammad?

And not just Dr. Crone, but Dan Gibson has discovered the same problem.

The Quran does not even mention Mecca, but rather uses the term Bekkah.

Early mosques pointed to Petra -- a city hundreds of miles north -- not to Mecca.

The Quran describes Mecca with olive trees, which cannot grow in Mecca, but can grow in Petra.

This is not a minor issue. No one doubts that Jerusalem existed during the times of the prophets and Jesus. If Mecca did not exist as a city in the 7th century, the whole story of Islam collapses.

The original record of Mohammed was MHMD (ancient Arabic left out the vowels). This could mean “anointed one;” and as Dr. Smith points out, would be a title, not a name, and could actually be a reference to Jesus, not Mohammed.

[T]he Abbasids, who came to power in 749 AD pretty much destroyed all the records of the "hated" Umayyads, and with it any references to an evolving prophet named Muhammad. What we can say is that the Muhammad we know today is not the MHMD of the 7th century Jesus Christ, nor the MHMD of History, nor the Muhammad of the Umayyads, but was a creation of the Abbasids, post 750 AD. It was that Muhammad whom they then placed in a city called Mecca, who they say received a book called the Qur'an, and who then became the model and paradigm for every Muslim everywhere and for every place and time. - MHMD [09] Muhammad was JESUS' TITLE, then the Abbasids made him a PROPHET? (In the video description.

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In looking up the Aabasids - Arabs in the area of Iraq around 750 A.D. - it is often mentioned that the Aabadids made great achievements during their Caliphate - 7500-1258AD. Actually, the Aabasid Arabs did not bring any such achievements with them, and most of what is called “their” achievments they got from the Egyptians, Assyrians and Persians who they conquered.

The Abasids were conquered by the Mongols and Mongol rule was followed between tbe 13th and 17th cenutries with rule by various groups until the Ottoman Empire took over in 1639, which lasted till its formal end in 1922 following the Ottoman’s defeat in WWI (they erred in siding with Germany). But what the Aabasids’ created in Islamic literature never got a period of deep internal analysis and questioning, The likely reason was very early on in Islam the idea of a separation of Church and state was unthinkable - the state was the head of the church and the church was an institution of the state. When religious orthodo=xy and the state are joined, there is seldom religous questioning.

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