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.