[King Prout]

The Sharia was created by a bunch of fellows sitting around asking "What would Mohammad do". This is a dangerous practice.

...not least because, well, Old Mo would probably answer "Pillage! Murder! Plunder! Sack! Lie! Invade! Rape! Kill! Rape again!" to just about any iteration of any such question.

[muawiyah]

Well, maybe not, but who knows ~ the guys asking the question really had no idea themselves.

You do realize, of course, that for the first 300 years of its existence Islam was generally conducted right alongside Christian services, in churches.

Again, the Koran wasn't put together (or "written" as many people suspect) until well after the first stages of the Arabic conquest of the Middle-East. The core of the document appears to actually be a handbook written for Christian missionaries traveling to Mecca to convert the Arabs.