Posted on 04/12/2025 9:23:50 PM PDT by Cronos
He had no doubts at first, but slowly they emerged. He was struck, he says, by the fact that the first coins bearing Muhammad’s name did not appear until the late 7th century — six decades after the religion did.
He traded ideas with some scholars in Saarbrücken who in recent years have been pushing the idea of Muhammad’s nonexistence. They claim that “Muhammad” wasn’t the name of a person but a title, and that Islam began as a Christian heresy.
Prof. Kalisch didn’t buy all of this. Contributing last year to a book on Islam, he weighed the odds and called Muhammad’s existence “more probable than not.” By early this year, though, his thinking had shifted. “The more I read, the historical person at the root of the whole thing became more and more improbable,” he says.
He has doubts, too, about the Quran. “God doesn’t write books,” Prof. Kalisch says.
Some of his students voiced alarm at the direction of his teaching. “I began to wonder if he would one day say he doesn’t exist himself,” says one. A few boycotted his lectures. Others sang his praises.
Prof. Kalisch says he “never told students ‘just believe what Kalisch thinks’ ” but seeks to teach them to think independently. Religions, he says, are “crutches” that help believers get to “the spiritual truth behind them.” To him, what matters isn’t whether Muhammad actually lived but the philosophy presented in his name.
This summer, the dispute hit the headlines. A Turkish-language German newspaper reported on it with gusto. Media in the Muslim world picked up on it.
Germany’s Muslim Coordinating Council withdrew from the advisory board of Prof. Kalisch’s center. Some Council members refused to address him by his adopted Muslim name, Muhammad, saying that he should now be known as Sven.
German academics split. Michael Marx, a Quran scholar at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, warned that Prof. Kalisch’s views would discredit German scholarship and make it difficult for German scholars to work in Muslim lands. But Ursula Spuler-Stegemann, an Islamic studies scholar at the University of Marburg, set up a Web site called solidaritymuhammadkalisch.com and started an online petition of support.
Alarmed that a pioneering effort at Muslim outreach was only stoking antagonism, Münster University decided to douse the flames. Prof. Kalisch was told he could keep his professorship but must stop teaching Islam to future school teachers.
The professor says he’s more determined than ever to keep probing his faith. He is finishing a book to explain his thoughts. It’s in English instead of German because he wants to make a bigger impact. “I’m convinced that what I’m doing is necessary. There must be a free discussion of Islam,” he says.
Christians read the writings of numerous individuals who either met Jesus of Nazareth or took down the accounts of people who did, and who believed that he was the only begotten Son of God. Proof of Jesus’ divinity, though, is entirely beside the point. If the Christian God wanted to rule by majesty and power, he would not have come to earth as a mortal to die on the cross. The Christian God asks for love and faith, not submission before majesty. The Christian is not asked to prove the unprovable, but to love and believe. Muslims have a different problem: if Mohammed did not receive the Koran from God, then what are they doing there to begin with?
“We hardly have original Islamic sources from the first two centuries of Islam,” Kalisch observes “And even when a source appears to come from this period, caution is required. The mere assertion that a source stems from the first or second century of the Islamic calendar means nothing. And even when a source actually was written in the first or second century, the question always remains of later manipulation. We do not tread on firm ground in the sources until the third Islamic century.”
This, Kalisch observes, is extremely suspicious: how can a world religion have erupted in a virtual literary vacuum? A great religion, moreover, inevitably throws off heresies: where are the early Islamic heretics and Gnostics? Later Islamic theologians knew the titles of some of their works, but the content itself was lost. “The only explanation for the disappearance is that it had long since become unusable theologically,” he alleges of certain Shi’ite sources.
It is a striking fact that such documentary evidence as survives from the Sufnayid period makes no mention of the messenger of god at all. The papyri do not refer to him. The Arabic inscriptions of the Arab-Sasanian coins only invoke Allah, not his rasul [messenger]; and the Arab-Byzantine bronze coins on which Muhammad appears as rasul Allah, previously dated to the Sufyanid period, have not been placed in that of the Marwanids. Even the two surviving pre-Marwanid tombstones fail to mention the rasul
VERY unlikely and definitely blasphemous.
“Off with his head....”
there also exist coins found in Palestine, probably minted in Amman, on which the word “Muhammed” is found in Arabic script on one side, and a picture of a man holding a cross on the other. Kalisch cites this and a dozen other examples. Citing Nevo/Koren and other sources, Kalisch also accepts the evidence that no Islamic conquest occurred as presented in much later Islamic sources, but rather a peaceful transfer of power from the Byzantine empire to its local Arab allies.
Kalisch concludes that Islam itself began as a Gnosis, a secret teaching much like the Gnostic Christian sources rejected by the Church Fathers. “The myth of Mohammed ... could be the product of a Gnosis, which wanted to present its theology in a new and original myth with a new protagonist, but actually is the old protagonist (Moses, Jesus). For the Gnostics it always was clear, that the issue was not historical truth, but rather theology. Moses, Jesus and Mohammed were only different characterizations of a mythic hero or son of god, who would depict an old spiritual teaching in mythical form.”
He explains,
In the Islamic Gnosis, Muhammed appears along with [his family members] Ali, Fatima, Hasan and Hussein as cosmic forces ... the Gnostic Abu Mansur al Igli claimed that God first created Jesus, and then Ali. Here apparently we still have the Cosmic Christ. If a Christian Gnosis was there are the origin of Islam, then the Cosmic Christ underwent a name change to Mohammed in the Arab world, and this Cosmic Mohammed was presented as a new edition of the Myth of Moses and Joshua (=Jesus) as an Arab prophet.
Islam is all about violins.
The other GGG topics added since the previous digest ping, alpha:
Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad all existed, too much evidence for all of them, no person who denies they existed is taken seriously by historians
How long before Prof. Kalisch is stabbed 20 times while being run over by a rental truck?
Just asking.
In “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel, he determined that there is more historical evidence for the existence of Jesus than for such historical figures as Charlemagne. When his wife converted to Christianity he was so offended that, being a historian, he decided to prove that Jesus had never existed, but instead he proved to himself that Jesus had, indeed, existed.
Compare that to the absence of historical evidence for the existence of Muhammad.
There is exactly zero contemporary evidence that Jesus or Muhammad ever existed.
If evidence mattered, it would be called "history." But it isn't, it's called "faith."
If your faith requires evidence, it isn't faith.
Who’s going to stand behind a microphone, in front of a bank of cameras, and make that official, public announcement?
Any takers? Anyone?
Not long. He's gonna have a helluva time getting reasonably priced life insurance now.
Exactly.
Salman Rushdie said “how’d ya like that?” and Prof. Kalisch said “hold muh beer ...”
You’d almost think Prof. Kalisch had nailed 95 Theses to a mosque door.
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