Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Clivedurdle · 10-14-2006, 01:52 AM

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we can be reasonably sure that the Qur'an is a collection of utterances that he made in the belief that they had been revealed to him by God

Do we actually have evidence that the koran is written by one person as a kind of mindgame with themselves or is that not also a hypothesis?

I thought other people had said the koran was like a school teaching aid on religion, that brought together pre existing wise sayings, like some found on mosque walls - ie the koran collected together various pre existing strands.

Crone comments that the Mecca Medina stuff may all be mythical - a transplant of mediterranean olives into the middle of the arabian desert for example.

So do we have two traditions, a warlord and a religion that got spliced a hundred years later?

Is a direct comparison with King Arthur the best way to approach this? Are we looking at the equivalent of the Arthurian legends having turned into a world wide religion?

youngalexander · 10-14-2006, 02:05 AM

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Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

So do we have two traditions, a warlord and a religion that got spliced a hundred years later?

One things for sura (4.18)

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The forgiveness is not for those who do ill-deeds until, when death attendeth upon one of them, he saith: Lo! I repent now; nor yet for those who die while they are disbelievers. For such We have prepared a painful doom.

ASCH a fun development.:wave:

French Prometheus · 10-14-2006, 03:09 AM

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Originally Posted by Malachi151

I would say that there is no Muhammad. If there is any basis for Muhammad (which is questionable), thenhe was nothing like described by Muslims, in which case the Muslim Muhammad is still a fictional invention.

Here is agood book on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_f...rical_Muhammed

From your link:

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The Arab tribesmen who conquered great swathes of territory in the seventh century were not Muslims, perhaps they were pagans.
Most broadly, "there was no Islam as we know it" until two or three hundred years after the traditional version has it (more like 830 AD than 630);

These two points are very unlikely. We still have ancient Islamic coins (and I personally own a few), dating back to the second half of the 7th century, on which we can read Islamic phrases.

Before Caliph Abd al Malik's reform, Arabs would use Sassanian and Byzantine coins on which they merely added Muslim inscriptions.

Here's an example from Basra, minted between 674 and 683 CE :

Here's one minted in 698 CE, after Abd al Malik's reform :

Clivedurdle · 10-14-2006, 05:06 AM

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We still have ancient Islamic coins (and I personally own a few), dating back to the second half of the 7th century, on which we can read Islamic phrases.

Do you?

You have coins with religious phrases - in what language though? Who says they are post koranic? Why cannot the koran be a result of these sentiments?

Why are they "Islamic"?

Clivedurdle · 10-14-2006, 05:12 AM

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Summary of arguments

Although the unreliability of the Arabic literary sources has been known for a century, only recently have scholars begun to explore its full implications, thanks largely to the ground-breaking work of the British scholar John Wansbrough.
Philologists and scholars look skeptically at the Arabic written sources and conclude that these are a form of "salvation history" - self-serving, unreliable accounts by the faithful.
The huge body of material, that Islamic revisionist scholars find, is mostly spurious. So unreliable do the revisionists find the traditional account, Patricia Crone has written, that "one could, were one so inclined, rewrite most of Montgomery Watt's biography of Muhammad in reverse." For example, an inscription and a Greek account leads Lawrence Conrad to fix Muhammad's birth in 552, not 570.
Patricia Crone finds that Muhammad's career took place not in Mecca but hundreds of kilometers to the north.
Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren find that the classical Arabic language was developed not in today's Saudi Arabia but in the Levant, and that it reached Arabia only through the colonizing efforts of one of the early caliphs.
The Arab tribesmen who conquered great swathes of territory in the seventh century were not Muslims, perhaps they were pagans.
The Qu'ran is a not "a product of Muhammad or even of Arabia," but a collection of adaptations from earlier Judeo-Christian liturgical materials stitched together to meet the needs of a later age.
Most broadly, "there was no Islam as we know it" until two or three hundred years after the traditional version has it (more like 830 AD than 630);
Islam developed not in the distant deserts of Arabia but through the interaction of Arab conquerors and their more civilized subject peoples.
Quest for the Historical Muhammad raises basic questions for Moslems concerning the prophet's role as a moral paragon; the sources of Islamic law; and the God-given nature of the Koran.

From wiki link above.

Do we not need to carefully address all of this?

Clivedurdle · 10-14-2006, 05:16 AM

And does not one of those coins have a human face? Not very Islamic!

French Prometheus · 10-14-2006, 05:58 AM

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Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

Do you?

Yeah, I collect various ancient items and that includes Islamic coins.

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You have coins with religious phrases - in what language though?

Islamic inscriptions on these coins are in Arabic.

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Who says they are post koranic?

I didn't say anything about the Koran. I specifically addressed the points cited in my previous post.

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Why cannot the koran be a result of these sentiments?

That's possible given that the Koran was probably altered several times before taking its present form. How's that relevant to what I said?

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Why are they "Islamic"?

That's what they're called by experts. They bear Islamic inscriptions in Arabic (like "bismillah", "lillah al hamd", "la Ilaha Illa Allah",...)

French Prometheus · 10-14-2006, 06:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

And does not one of those coins have a human face? Not very Islamic!

Like I said, the early Muslim invaders of Persia re-used Sassanian coins. They merely added Islamic inscriptions in Arabic on them. That's why these very early coins typically show Zoroastrian symbolism and the face of one of the late Sassanian rulers.

Under Caliph Abd al Malik, purely Islamic coins were created in a format that would last for centuries.

It should also be noted that some Muslim rulers (especially non-Arabian ones) had no qualm about putting human faces on coins.

Malachi151 · 10-14-2006, 06:12 AM

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Originally Posted by Suzume

One difference between the historical Jesus and historical Mohammad is that we have historical events that his existence seems to be needed to explain, where with Jesus only the belief in his existence is necessary.

What I mean is that starting in around 635 or so, united Arab armies attacked both the exhausted Roman and Neo-Persian empires, serverely damaging the first and destroying the second. Previously the Arabs had not been united, and posed a limited threat.

Hence we have to explain the new union. That this might lie in part due to some warlord using a combination of diplomacy and force to create the union is hardly unlikely, and is believed to have happened a number of times in history, such as with Chinggis Khan and Alexander the great.

So, we can consider this postulated warlord the 'Historical Mohammad'. To what extent he resembles the deeds associated with him is then the question.

Could he not have existed at all? Then we still have to explain the union of the Arabs. A council of various war leaders could have gathered, and perhaps decided to put away the sword amongst themselves in favour of the richer pickings of the weakend world superpowers, but even then it is likely that one would have become the chief, and again we have a historical Mohammad.

As for his name appearing to be a title, I don't find it that convincing. There are two rather simple explanations. The first is that this 'title sounding' name really was a common or rare name, such as john or peter is among us. The second is like the name Augustus, or Chinggis Khan. Both are really titles, but have displaced their common names sufficiently that only historians are familiar with their real name. That a warlord might have a similar history is hardly unlikely, and of course we do not have a great deal of history from that area to discover what his real name was.

I suppose what I mean is that in the case of the mystical Jesus only the belief in his existence requires explanation. In the case of Mohammad, both the belief in his existence and the recent union of the Arab armies needs to be explained.

As a matter of interest, do we have any historical documents suggesting any other explanation for the Arab union other then due to the actions of a warlord?

This I can go along with. My problem is that the Queran seems very much to be a collection of a variety of already exsiting laws and poems, etc., from among these tribes, which need no Muhammad to explain them.

So, what I would postulate is that at some point someone wanted to compile a unified code of law, etc., for these unified tribes, so they then crafted this story saying "Muhammad did it", when in reality "Muhammad" had nothing to do with the Queran and probably did not of the stuff in the hadiths and doesn't resemble the Muhammad of Islam in the slightest.

Malachi151 · 10-14-2006, 06:18 AM

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That's what they're called by experts. They bear Islamic inscriptions in Arabic (like "bismillah", "lillah al hamd", "la Ilaha Illa Allah",...)

Right, but what is there to say that they came after the Queran? That's the problem. "Allah" is just the Arab word for God, and we already know that a mix of Judaism and Christianity existed in this region for hundreds of years prior to "Islam", and that Islam is based on Judaism and "heretical" Christianity, so making a real distinguishment between "Islamic" and "pre-Islam" is not easy at all, and just because something says "Praise be to Allah" doesn't make it Islamic, or "post-Queranic".

This is the problem with an evolving religion, with Islam very much was (as they all are).

Since they early Muslims didn't mention Muhammad much, or at all, its very difficult to say what is "Islamic" and what is not.

With Christianity we have Jesus. Jesus defined being Christian, but for Islam, it si not defined by Muhammad per se.

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10-14-2006, 05:16 AM	#66
Clivedurdle Contributor Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: London UK Posts: 16,024	And does not one of those coins have a human face? Not very Islamic!

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