River

-Emotional

You are obviously, making quite a few historical anomalies. Muslims did not fabricate a mythology that linked them with Abraham and Ishmael. Even before the Prophet, it was well known that the Kaaba structure was linked with Ishmael . Ishmael also known as "Abu Arab" is well known even before the advent of the Prophet to be the father of the Arabs and the one that built/rebuilt the Kaaba.

Ice

Ever read the Bible?

lpetrich

Except that this looks suspiciously after-the-fact. Is there anyone who wrote about all this before Mohammed was born? Mohammed the Prophet, of course.

The work of Wansbrough, Cook, Crone, and others points to a picture of the origin of Islam that is very different from what Islamic sources depict; I had given their conclusions in my Islamic-Revisionism thread.

There is some evidence that much of the Koran had once been in Syriac / Aramaic. The book "What the Koran Really Says", collected by Ibn Warraq, contains an article on that subject; essentially, Koranic versions of various people's names are closest to the Aramaic and not to (say) the Greek or Hebrew versions. Elsewhere, it's been seriously proposed that the Koran's houris are mistranslated white raisins.

Being translated into Arabic was part of seeking an Arabic identity for the sect that the 7th-century Arab conquerors had adopted; another was projecting the origin of their creed onto Arab lands and not the lands of the people they had conquered. Patricia Crone had looked for pre-Islamic evidence that Mecca had been a big trading center -- and came up empty-handed. Mecca was some distance from the known trade routes -- and active and often-described ones at that.

So Mecca may have been some small town with a shrine and a sacred meteorite that got adopted as Islam's home town because it was an Arab town far away from the towns of all the troublesome heretics of the Fertile Crescent. And as had happened with Judaism and Xianity, some paganism got an Islamic interpretation, complete with Abraham building the first Kaaba.

And when Mecca got adopted as Islam's hometown, the prayer direction got changed from Jerusalem to there; there are some old mosques with Jerusalem as their direction.

lpetrich

As to the various Islamic traditions themselves, they grew more detailed as time went on, with later Hadiths often having much more detail than earlier ones -- and being incredibly numerous.

They also have blatant partisanship, contradictions, and anachronisms; the pro-Sunni and pro-Shiite hadiths are a good example of this. Did Mohammed really take sides on the Sunni-Shiite split, and which side did he take?

A corollary is that a historical Mohammed had likely lived in the Fertile Crescent rather than in Mecca and Medina. And that many of the details of his life had been invented to serve as legal precedents and the like.

Thus, Mohammed's pedophilic marriage to Aisha may have been invented by someone who wanted to legitimize pedophilic marriages.

hinduwoman

don't know about Law of God replacing manmade law, but Hindu traders used to worship Kabba as a mnifestation of Shiva.

How precisely is Islam tolerant when the Koran plainly tells the faithful to kill non-believers or subdue them until allah rules everywhere?

tk

Pray, may I know where the "sublime" portions of the Koran are?