Clivedurdle

http://rorotoko.com/interview/201204...e_begin_islam/

Duvduv

History is at best an approximation.......

Duvduv

This was an interesting link. There is alot to put together based on "evidence from silence" in the emergence of islam.
Are there documents from the earliest centuries attesting to the Islam of the conquerors of North Africa and Asia?
Did any documents anywhere attest to the stories and life of a historical Muhammad prior to the writing of some biographies by biased sources and hadiths?
Were Arabs merely a variety of monotheistic syncretic beliefs that became crystalized under the Abbasid caliphate (Arab version of the Constantinian regime) in a collection of texts called the Quran on behalf of a prophet who is barely even mentioned in that book?

youngalexander

Having practiced & taught the discipline for 40 years, I dispute that.

Duvduv

What does this all have to do with the subject of this thread??

Clivedurdle

Holland Shadow of the Sword (or via: amazon.co.uk) is fascinating. He thinks there was a Mohammed, but Mecca did not exist. Mohammed was probably from the Dead Sea area - there is a pillar of stone there that is thought to be Lot's wife.

He notes the existence of a receipt with a date 22 or something, so there seems to be something the Islamic calendar is dated from.

But most of the stuff is hundreds of years later.

I think the weakened Empires idea is wrong - as I understand it it did not take long to rebuild, even if one had been hit by huge plagues as well.

I think that groups of warlike pastoralists managed to do enough damage to infrastructure, especially by not understanding irrigation and the complexities needed to run empires, then developing goat ecologies, with a raiding slave based economy that prevented the empires recovering.

Mo was possibly a warlord from Sinai, and again the one god psychological weapon made a huge difference, as it had with Darius and Constantine.

James The Least

Anyone interested in this subject should pick up a copy of Ibn Warraq's "The Quest for the Historical Muhammed." (or via: amazon.co.uk) I started reading it yesterday and couldn't put it down. Very comprehensive and thorough, well-written, and accessible. We also find the same divide that is found in Jesus studies. Arab scholars in places like Cairo accept as authentic a whole lot more than non-Arab scholars in places like London or New York. The latter point out that there is no evidence for the Koran prior to the 9th or 10th century.

Duvduv

Thanks for the reference. This conclusion about the Quran would therefore mean that there was no Muhammad as described in Islam before the 9th or 10th century. Interestingly enough, the name Muhammad appears only 4 times in the whole book, and since the hadith appeared later, this would mean that the earliest "Muslims" even according to their chronology, didn't know anything about their own prophet from the text itself.

It's rather curious that the redactors left the "prophecy" concerning Ahmad in the Quran and did not replace it with Muhammad.

Therefore, how could the "conquerors" from Spain to Afghanistan (between 620 and 750) have been conventional Muslims when they allegedly performed their conquests before the Quran even appeared? Doesn't conventional historiography accept traditional Islamic claims about the conquests of those regions by "Muslims"??

I just went over to Wiki about Ibn Warraq's book. Here are some summary points. I hadn't seen the page yet when I thought of the question of the so-called Muslim conquests:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Que...d_(Ibn_Warraq)
I also note that mainstream scholars hate Ibn Warraq's writing.

James The Least

"The Muslims' delusion that they have eyewitness reports for every aspect of Muhammed's life is similar to the delusion of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians that in the gospels they have eyewitness reports of the life of Jesus. Likewise, Orthodox Jews are convinced they have a record of all that is worth knowing about the life of Moses in the Pentateuch and the Talmud. The motivation for all these fantasies is the same. Believers, of necessity, need something to believe, and if the information is not to hand there are always those ready to supply it. Not always or necessarily in a spirit of deliberate falsification and conscious deceit, but as a natural product of the hothouse that is the pious imagination -- this is how it must have been -- given their view of God, man, history, and the scraps of information about the past that they happened to have. In other words, not what actually happened but what certain people believed to have happened. What we have in such documents as the Pentateuch, the New Testament, and the Sira (Life of Muhammed), is not history as understood by modern secular historians, but something that is at best called salvation, or sacred history, the history of God's plan for mankind. That is, not history at all in the sense of a record of real events in the ordinary world, but an imaginative literary genre."

Ibn al-Rawandi, "Origins of Islam: A Critical Look at the Sources," from Ibn Warraq, editor, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad (Prometheus Books, 2000),p. 92.

Duvduv

Ironically this would seem to go further than the critical work of scholars who do not critically examine the content and contexts of ancient Christian apologists, but who instead rely upon them.

On the other hand mainstream academics take at face value the historical narrative of Muslim apologetics. Yet the profession easily dismisses the narrative of Judaism without batting an eyelash.