Humanism Ireland No 135 July-August 2012

Books

Roy Brown (former President, IHEU)

Did Muhammad Exist?

Robert Spencer ISI Books 2012
Also blown away by this comprehensive reappraisal of the evidence is the idea that there is only one Koran. Even discounting the discovery of many early Koranic manuscripts which show a large number of variants, the existence today of two significantly different editions of the Koran, one circulating in the Middle East and the other in West and North-West Africa, should finally lay that myth to rest. What then do we really know about Islam and the Koran? Little of modern belief regarding their origins stands up to detailed scrutiny . The beliefs now attributed to Muhammad arose in the religious milieu of the 7th century Middle East, from Arabia and conquered lands from Syria and Persia to Egypt. The written texts which ultimately became the Koran and which owed much to a strictly monotheistic version of Christianity were then garbled as their Arabic translators failed to understand the meaning of much of the original Syriac, the lingua franca of the Middle East at that time. The consolidation of these beliefs and texts into what became the Islamic canon dates from considerably later than the Islamic sources suggest. In particular, the story of the final compilation of the Koran by Caliph Uthman can no longer be viewed as authentic. The Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa took place without any Koranic exhortation to conquer the infidel. Why else would the leaders of the Arab conquests have minted coins bearing the Christian cross? And why would an army that conquered lands from Spain to the Indus valley have left no record (in either Arabic sources or in commentaries of the conquered) of Islam or the Koran? But as Spencer notes: In Islam, not only is the political component intrinsic to the faith in a way that it never was in Christianity even at the height of the Middle Ages and never was in any other faith, but in Islam the political and martial was historically primary. If there was any religious aspect to the Arab conquests at all it would have been in promoting a monotheistic, antitrinitarian version of Christianity that denied the orthodox view of Jesus as divine. Whatever Islamic mythology may tell us about what Allah revealed to Muhammed via the Angel Gabriel, it bore a striking resemblance to Nestorian Christianity . Will this book have any impact on the minds of Muslims, dent their faith or sow the seeds of doubt? Probably not, if evidence from the impact of research into early Christianity on the minds of believers is a yardstick Spencer concludes his book with the thought that in the minds of the fervent believers in Islam, Muhammad most certainly existed and continues to exist, and still does exactly what he was made to do: to inspire, motivate, unify, and comfort the hearts of the believers. For them, whether or not Muhammad existed never was a question, never will be, and never could be. But be that as it may, Did Muhammad Exist? is a mustread for anyone with a genuine interest in the origins of Islam and the Koran. The evidence is there. This review appeared in International Humanist News, May 2012

ID MUHAMMAD EXIST ? by Robert Spencer is a highly readable summary of recent research into the origins of Islam and the Koran. But by choosing a title calculated to get up the noses of every Muslim, Robert Spencer has done his work a grave injustice. Even so, Did Muhammad Exist? may well come to be seen as the most important popular work written to date on the origins of a religion that now holds sway over the hearts and minds of more than one billion people. Unlike research into early Christianity that began in Germany in the 19th century, and which demonstrated the Roman political origins of Christianity and the Bible, serious historical research into the origins of Islam is of very recent date, many of the most important discoveries having been made in just the past few years. A better title for this tour de force would have been The Christian Origins of Islam because this is precisely what Spencer, by bringing together an extraordinary array of evidence from both Islamic and Western sources, has managed to demonstrate. Islam emerged as a distortion of a particular branch of early Christianity. His book leaves little room for doubt in the mind of any impartial reader a truly remarkable achievement. Spencer brings to the wider public a wealth of numismatic, archaeological, linguistic and textual research which shows that the Arab conquests of the 7th century had little or nothing to do with Islam as we know it today; that the Koran is a compilation far later in date than most of the Islamic world believes; that many of the least comprehensible passages in the Koran are incomprehensible because the words used are of Syriac origin and appear here in Arabic for the first time; and that many of the stories in the Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad) are later compositions aimed at lending authenticity to this or that political position. But regarding the question posed in the title, it seems that we can conclude that there was a tribal leader, a warlord, who lived in the early part of the 7th century and who was given the honorific title Muhammad (the splendid one), a title which had earlier been given to Jesus: a misunderstanding that ultimately gave rise to the entire myth of the revelation of the Koran. Many obscure passages of the Koran have been clarified by the finding that many of these words are of Syriac origin, the most notorious of these being the promise of the 72 virgins, a misreading of the Syriac for ripe fruit! Other obscurities arose because the earliest Arabic texts did not contain the necessary diacritical marks differentiating between consonants, which meant that many words could be misread. And the absence of vowel signs in the earliest texts added further to the confusion. But happily for those who wish for a deeper understanding of the Koran modern scholarship has managed to shed light on many of these mysteries and clarify their probable original meaning.

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