C_Mucius_Scaevola

Mohammed is barely present in the koran; only a few episodes in his alleged life being alluded to. Most of what we "know" about Mohammed comes from Ibn Ishaq's lost work Sirah Rasul Allah (Life of the Prophet of Allah), via the later work of Al Tabari. Much of this "biography" is obviously mythical.

C_M_S

Imnotspecial

I thought it is a fact that Mo had epilepsy. We can't have it both ways.

Chili

It is a question of beauty, I agree.

Chili

The obvious here is that only a Christian would devote his life to defeat the enemy.

Chili

You mean fiction since mythical is true by way of allegory while fiction includes not iconic fantasy.

C_Mucius_Scaevola

Maybe I mean legendary, since Mohammed may have been a real person, while many of the stories in the Sirah are obviously not historical.

C_M_S

Chili

I know what you mean, but wanted to point out their error that is not inspired and therefore not iconic. So I wrote just to make a distinction between real and not real in this fashion.

So really it is not important if Muhammad was real or not, as long as his legend bears witness to truth, and this is where Jesus is real and died to prove he was (which is an allegory because he only died because he was not real, but was perceived as real and therefore needed to die by Jewish law only, and this entire [inspired] dimension is missing in Islam).

Perspicuo

We know writers take themes from real life. You can't just be born yesterday and write the works of Shakespeare.

Take something wild like J.K.Rowling's Harry Potter series. Yes, the magic is invented, but the personality dynamics, and what the fantastic elements represent are metaphors and human wishes/nightmares, not literal reality.

Sartre said "Hell is other people", and our wishes can be blissful hedonism, or murderous sadism. Some, like Apocalypse and Quran, have both.

steve_bnk

Same as with JC, are there any contemporaryy independent reports of the man?

I tgend to think there was. Tne Koran is a cclear purposeful book. Probaly embellished by those who did the actual writing.

Blui

I've looked into this before.

There are two main sources of info about Muhammad, the Islamic texts, and non-Islamic texts (where we can find them).

The Islamic texts are notoriously unreliable, and ive even read that the whole history of mecca and the quraish is in fact probably made up, because there is no historical evidence of the various groups supposedly existing there (sabeans, the pagans or the Jews).

On the external islamic ones, none of them support the existance of a muhammad, except for one that refers to a Muhammad that was leading raids against the Byzantine empire, which is long after the muhammad supposedly in the texts.

Make that what you will.