History Forum / General / Ancient History / January 2006

http://www.atheists.org/Islam/mohammedanism.html

An Atheist's Guide to Mohammedanism

By Frank R. Zindler

This article was published in The American Atheist Vol. 40 #1, Winter
2001-2002.

Mohammedans don't like to be called Mohammedans - that smacks too
much of terms such as Christians. As everybody knows, Christians
worship Christ as a god. Mohammedans don't want people to think they
worship Mohammed (Arabic, Muhammad A - 'Praiseworthy'), and so dislike
referring to their religion as Mohammedanism. However, Confucians don't
worship Confucius (Chinese, K'ung Fu-tsu - 'K'ung [a family name] the
Grand Master'), even though their system is called Confucianism and
often is considered to be a religion. Even so, Mohammedans don't want
Mohammed to be viewed as a parallel of the Christ of the Christians.

Mohammed was merely a prophet, they will argue, who disclaimed the
ability to do miracles. Mohammed was just a man - albeit the perfect
man, leading a completely sinless life which has become the model for
all true believers to emulate. Moreover, it will be asserted, Mohammed
did not choose to be a prophet; he was chosen by Allah. He did not
himself compose the 'revelations' that were spoken from his mouth; they
were delivered to him by an angel who got them from the 'Mother of the
Book' which has existed in heaven either forever or for just a little
bit less.

Mohammed was a passive agent of Allah, simply serving as his mouthpiece
or oracle. It is his message that is important, not his biography. He
was one of a series of prophets who reported Allah's wishes to men
(perhaps even to some women). These prophets included Jesus (Arabic
'Issa), who, to spite the Christians, is demoted by Mohammedans from
non-profit to prophet status. Most importantly, Mohammed was Allah's
last prophet. Thus, Joseph Smith was an impostor, and Mormon
missionaries are not welcome in Mohammedan territories. (Of course, no
missionaries of any kind are welcome in such places, where it is often
a capital offense to convert a Mohammedan to 'infidelity'.)

Despite such protestations by the faithful (all non-Mohammedans are
infidels), the reverence accorded to Mohammed at times has bordered on
the threshold of worship if not actually transgressing it. Very early,
his followers came to attribute a number of miracles to him and passed
along fabulous tales of supernatural signs and wonders relating to his
birth and career. (One night, it is believed, Mohammed set out on a
nocturnal journey or Miraj up to the heavens where he communed with
Allah face-to-face.) It is still believed by many that at the Last
Judgment, Mohammed will be an intercessor like the Virgin Mary and the
Catholic saints, pleading for the exculpation of those who have
submitted themselves to his teachings.

Among the mystical Sufis (from the Arabic suf, meaning 'wool' -
alluding to the woolen hair shirts worn by early Sufis, not to the
woolliness of their thinking), exaltation and veneration of Mohammed
seems to have reached Christian proportions. In Sufism, Mohammed has
become the eternal manifestation of the Divine Light in the world,
pre-existent like the Christian Logos, representing the primal, divine
force which created and sustains the universe, the only intermediary
through whom one may approach Allah and have knowledge of him. For all
practical purposes, the Sufi Mohammed (peace be upon him) is a
supernatural being, even if not quite a full-fledged god.

Mohammedans prefer to be called Muslims B a term derived from the
Arabic 'aslama, meaning 'to resign oneself [to Allah]'. They prefer
their religion to be called Islam (from Arabic 'islam, meaning
'submission') rather than Mohammedanism. Most western scholars have
gone along with this, rather than risk the wrath of purportedly
peaceful members of 'the third great Abrahamic faith'. Nevertheless,
Mohammedanism seems to be a perfectly appropriate name for a religion
which currently poses so great a threat to secular civilizations
throughout the world. Despite this fact, it must be conceded that Islam
is easier to spell than Mohammedanism, and Muslim is less tedious to
type than Mohammedan. Consequently, these shorter words will be the
terms most often employed in the remainder of this guide.

The Five Pillars of Islam

Given the fierce monotheism professed by Muslims and their sometimes
violent rejection of all religions other than Islam, one might suppose
that intolerance would be the first and most fundamental 'pillar' upon
which their religious practice rests. Not surprisingly, however, this
greatest of Muslim virtues is not made explicit, but rather is allowed
to lurk hidden within the first of the five duties ('pillars') required
of all Muslim men.

The first pillar is the recitation (preferably in Arabic) of the creed,
or shahada: "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet."
If Allah is the only god in the neighborhood, Trinitarian Christians
and Hindus are endlessly blaspheming true religion. Despite the
occasionally tolerant references in the Qur'an to "People of the
Book" (Jews and Christians in addition to Muslims), the non-Muslims
need to be eliminated. Convert them or kill them, or make them pay a
religious ransom to continue the private practice of their religion.
(Of necessity, Muslims must reject the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights.) Atheists and Agnostics, who deny the reality of Allah, are
also wicked blasphemers. They need to be eliminated also. It is
preferable to kill them. Such intolerance, of course, is not unique to
Islam. It is a natural attribute of all monotheistic religions.

The second pillar of Islam, salat, is daily ritual prayer. This is
mandatory only five times per day (at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon,
sunset, and nighttime), but extremely religious Muslims such as suicide
bombers and aerial terrorists usually pray more frequently. Prayer
requires a person to face Mecca and the Ka'aba, a roughly cubical
building containing a magical black stone thought by some to be a
meteorite. (Archaeological and other evidence shows, however, that in
the early years of Islam, prayers were directed at Jerusalem, not
Mecca.) Prayer is preceded by ritual purification and involves a series
of bowings, prostrations, and recitations from the Qur'an. On
Fridays, prayer is communal and conducted in a mosque (Arabic masjid,
'place for prostration'). Led by an imam (from Arabic amma, 'to walk
before'), with worshippers standing in rows behind him, prayers
normally are followed by a sermon. (Contrary to common western opinion,
it is not mandatory for sermons to contain the slogans "Death to
America" or "Death to Israel.") Women do not generally attend these
public prayers, and when they do enter into mosques they are segregated
from the men. Although this offends the western sense of sexual
equality, it is quite understandable. The minds of men bowing down to
the ground might wander from thoughts of the singularity of Allah if
their noses were merely inches away from the raised derrieres of women
kneeling on prayer rugs in front of them. Even if the women were
completely shrouded in burqas, their intermingled presence would be a
deterrent to patriarchal piety.

The third pillar of Islam is zakat, the giving of a fixed percentage of
one's property to the poor and the homeless. Since there usually are no
formal arrangements made for collection of zakat, this generally is the
least burdensome of the five pillars.

The fourth pillar is the fasting required during the lunar month of
Ramadan, which can occur at any season of the year. During this period,
no food or drink may be consumed during daylight hours, although
pregnant women and certain others may be exempted from this rule.
Feasting is obligatory at the end of Ramadan, but with both pork and
alcohol being forbidden, this feast offers far less fun than that
enjoyed at, say, Irish or Polish Catholic festivals.

The fifth and final pillar of Islam is the Hajj, the pilgrimage to
Mecca every able-bodied Muslim is required to make at least once in his
life. Pilgrims must wear special dress, walk seven times around the
Ka'aba (Arabic ka'bun, 'a cube'), and kiss the talismanic black
stone enshrined like an idol in the southeast corner of the edifice.
Although probably a meteorite - and thus a truly heavenly stone - the
black stone is claimed to be one of the precious stones of paradise
given by the angel Gabriel to the patriarch Abraham when he built the
Ka'aba - in Arabia, contrary to Jewish and Christian opinion! Even
though the stone has been stolen, burned, and broken, it is the
veneration focal point for more than a billion Muslims in the world
today. (With so many Muslims required to come to Mecca, the logistics
of the Hajj are rapidly bursting the bounds of the possible.) The
Ka'aba temple is widely believed to be older than Mohammed, having
housed the pagan Arabian pantheon. All its idols were destroyed when it
was adapted to serve the Islamic cultus.

When in Mecca kissing the Ka'aba, it is also incumbent upon pilgrims
to kill an animal in the Mina valley on the tenth day of the month of
pilgrimage, since Allah, like the Yahweh of the Jews, is believed to
enjoy having animals killed for his viewing pleasure. (It is amusing to
imagine what will happen if P.E.T.A. and the Animal Liberation Front
ever get wind of this. How Muslims would deal with the threat of
animal-rights terrorism would be something worth watching closely.)
After killing a goat or other suitable sacrificial species (for some
reason, dogs and pigs are deemed unsuitable), most pilgrims then betake
themselves to Medina (Yathrib), a city located 210 miles north of
Mecca, in order to pray at what is claimed to be Mohammed's tomb. (If
there are in fact human remains in the tomb, it would be interesting to
see if the DNA could be matched up to that of persons claiming descent
from the prophet.) I have been unable to learn whether pilgrims face
the tomb or Mecca when performing their Medina prayers.

The Legend of Mohammed

Although Mohammed is believed to have been born in the year 570 or 571
CE, it is not known what name he was given by his mother. Mohammed
('praiseworthy' or 'highly praised') is obviously an honorific title,
not a name. In fact, once in the Qur'an (at 61:6) he is called
'Ahmad, which in Arabic means 'more praiseworthy', and at times his
contemporaries are said to have called him al-'Amin, which means 'the
trustworthy one'. Despite this problem, Muslims believe that Mohammed -
whoever he may have been - was born in Mecca, an Arabian city supposed
to have been located at the intersection of major caravan trade routes.
Orphaned early in life, when he reached the age of twenty-five (595 CE)
he married a wealthy widow named Khadija, fifteen years his senior.
According to a traditional account, Mohammed had married his boss - the
merchant Khadija having been his employer at the time. Only after her
death in 620 did Mohammed begin to practice polygamy, taking perhaps a
dozen wives. Only one of his children survived, however, a daughter
named Fatima. (She married her father's cousin 'Ali, making him the
ancestor of all the prophet's later descendants.)

Tradition also tells us that in the year 610, while meditating in a
cave outside Mecca, a supernatural voice (later identified as the voice
of the angel Gabriel, the same heavenly messenger that previously had
delivered the results of the pregnancy test to the Virgin Mary)
commanded him to "Recite in the name of thy Lord, who created." Thus
began the alleged revelations of the Qur'an. This event is revered as
the "First Call" of the prophet and has been immortalized as the "Night
of Power."

At least at first, Mohammed's 'revelations' were like those of other
oracles, soothsayers, and religious con-artists whose utterances took
the form of rhymed prose. Mohammed convinced himself that he had been
called to be a prophet in the tradition of the Jews and of Jesus. He
also convinced a small coterie of relatives and friends that he had
tapped into a direct line to Allah. This quickly led to friction with
his tribe, the Quraysh, who were custodians of the Ka'aba, which at
the time was a pagan shrine housing all the idols of economic
significance to his tribe.

As is necessary for foundation myths of virtually all religions, the
first followers of the new faith had to endure persecution, fleeing to
Christian Ethiopia around the year 615. While those
Muslims-in-the-making were out of town, Mohammed and the disciples who
had stayed with him in Mecca were confined under siege - to be starved
into submission.

Just in the nick of time, Mohammed received a revelation that helpfully
clarified the theopolitical questions at issue for the Meccan guardians
of the gods in the Ka'aba. When Mohammed had reported that Allah was
the only god in town, it turned out that he hadn't received the entire
satellite transmission. Perhaps Gabriel had mumbled and Mohammed missed
part of the message. Wouldn't you know? The three favorite goddesses of
Mecca - al-Lat, al-Uzzah, and al-Manat - were also real! This saved
Mohammed's neck and all body parts attached thereto, and the exiles
were able to return from Ethiopia. Later, when it was safe to do so,
this all-important revelation was expunged from the Qur'an and it was
explained that the revelation had come from Shaitan (Satan), not Allah.
Thus began the legend of the "Satanic Verses," which more than a
thousand years later was to prompt the Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a
fatwa of death against the novelist Salman Rushdie.

To draw attention to the Satanic Verses is to galvanize a still-raw
nerve in the body politic of Islam.

To draw attention to the Satanic Verses is to galvanize a still-raw
nerve in the body politic of Islam. The Satanic Verses are an acute
embarrassment to Mohammedan authorities because they imply that it was
Satan, not Allah, who had saved their prophet's life. If Allah was the
only god, and if he had previously selected Mohammed to be his last and
greatest mouthpiece on this planet, why didn't he save his own
appointed prophet? Why would the god of evil want to save his enemy's
ambassador? Might not there be more Satanic Verses in the Qur'an -
verses that have never been recognized as the handiwork of the prince
of devils? Who knows what evils yet may lurk in the Book of Books?

In any event, the Satanic Verses didn't solve Mohammed's problems for
the long term, and Mohammed and his gang would have to leave Mecca. On
16 July 622 CE - a date that later would become the starting point of
the Moslem calendrical era C - some of his disciples left for the
town of Yathrib, several hundred miles to the north. Mohammed and his
friend Abu-Bakr followed them, arriving in Yathrib on 24 September 622
and renaming the town Medina (Arabic al-Madinah, 'the city' [of the
prophet]). Although the house-moving does not seem to have been all
that remarkable to a western observer, it was considered to be a
foundational event in the history of Islam. In Muslim literature, the
migration from Mecca to Medina is referred to as the Hegira (Arabic
hijrah 'migration').

While in Medina, Mohammed continued to dictate 'revelations' to various
of his disciples, apparently including some who were able to write.
(Mohammed is believed to have been illiterate.) More importantly,
however, he became a successful politician, contracting many alliances
by means of marriages. The most notable of these marriages was with
Aisha, the infant daughter of Abu-Bakr, who became the most influential
of all the prophet's wives. Many of the 'traditions' of the prophet are
claimed to have been transmitted through her.

Once his power base had grown sufficiently, Mohammed took to banditry,
attacking a Meccan caravan led by Abu-Sufyan of the Quraysh tribe as it
was returning from Syria in the year 624 CE, during the holy month of
Ramadan when fighting was prohibited. Somehow, the Meccans learned of
this and rushed to the aid of the caravan, meeting 300
Muslims-in-the-making with a thousand Meccan fighters on a battlefield
called Badr, approximately twenty miles southwest of Medina. Naturally,
a miracle occurred and the prophet's force was victorious. From this
time forward, the name Islam ('submission') was to belie the true
nature of the militant polity which to this day is an obstacle in the
path to planetary peace.

After consolidating his hold on Medina, Mohammed chased the Jews from
their farms and divorced his developing system from both Judaism and
Christianity. He ordered the faithful henceforth to pray facing Mecca,
not Jerusalem as had been the case up to then. In 628 Mohammed obtained
a truce with Mecca allowing his followers to make the pilgrimage to the
Ka'aba. Mecca became the religious capital of Islam and Medina
remained the political capital. In 630 Mohammed attacked Mecca,
conquered it, and smashed the 360 idols in the Ka'aba. He declared
the territory surrounding the shrine to be haram - forbidden - to all
non-Muslims. Even today, no Atheist or Christian could visit the taboo
area and escape with his life. Indeed, the entire region of Saudi
Arabia in which the holy cities of Mecca and Medina are located (the
Hijaz) is considered by Wahabi Muslims such as Osama bin Laden to be
haram and out-of-bounds for American military infidels.

On 8 June 632, Mohammed came down with a truly killer headache and died
suddenly. He died in Aisha's apartment and was buried right there.
(There is no proof whatsoever that he ever uttered the famous line,
"Not tonight, honey, I've got a headache.") Before he died, he had sent
forces to attack Syria, beginning a struggle that would not end until a
major part of the civilized world was subject to Arabs and their
new-fangled religion.

The Legend of the Qur'an

The Qur'an/Koran (Arabic Qur'an, 'reading' or 'recitation'), as
everybody knows, is the bible of the Mohammedans. It is the source of
their 'knowledge' that there is but a single god, Allah, and that for
men (and probably for women as well) after death there will be a
limbo-like state leading to the Last Day, the Resurrection, and
Retribution. In the thereafter, wicked men such as infidels will suffer
damnation. According to Sura 44:43-50, the fruit of the Zuqqum tree
will be their food and it will burn in their guts like molten brass and
boil like scalding water. They will be dragged into the midst of
blazing fire and then, just for good measure, boiling water will be
poured over their heads. "In front of such a one is Hell, and he is
given for drink boiling, fetid water. In gulps will he sip it, but
never will he be near swallowing it down his throat. Death will come to
him from every quarter, yet he will not die; and in front of him will
be a chastisement unrelenting" [14:16-17]. Islamic Hell would appear to
be even worse than 'life' in a Taliban society - which at least can
be circumvented by death.

The Muslim Paradise is decidedly a man's heaven, despite the fact that
Sura 9:72 promises to both believing men and women "gardens under which
rivers flow, to dwell therein, and beautiful mansions, in gardens of
everlasting bliss." Sura 44:51-54 promises believers they will be
rewarded in Paradise with houris (Arabic hur) "with beautiful, big, and
lustrous eyes." Such damsels are clearly the reward for Jihad-fighting
men. That they could also be rewards for burqa'-wearing women is
unthinkable. Occasional proof-texts to the contrary notwithstanding,
Mohammed's heaven is a penile paradise. (It is a pity no reliable
translation of the Qur'an exists in English; all available English
versions have been cleaned up and civilized by apologetic translators.)

As already noted, the Qur'an is supposed to have been revealed to the
allegedly illiterate Mohammed over a period of years until his death in
632 CE. (It is possible, of course, that his illiteracy was a
fabrication designed to counter charges that Mohammed had written up
the 'revelations' himself and had been educated enough to be able to
author the supposedly matchless Arabic prose with which they are
expressed.) There is a tradition that Mohammed dictated his revelations
to his secretaries, who either memorized them or wrote them down on
things like palm leaves, stones, and even perhaps camel shoulder blades
1 and other such publication media that existed in the advanced society
which the Lord of the Universe had chosen as the model for all
subsequent earthly societies. Almost certainly, at the time of
Mohammed's death, no single manuscript of the entire Qur'an existed.

There is a tradition that indicates that immediately after the death of
Mohammed in 632, during the caliphate of his friend Abu Bakr [632-634],
his friend 'Umar (Omar) became alarmed over the fact that so many
Muslims who knew by heart various parts of the Qur'an had been killed
during the Battle of Yamama in Central Arabia. Unless all parts of the
Qur'an were collected, there was serious danger that irreplaceable
rules and regulations for living would be lost forever. Very shortly
after the death of the prophet, then, Abu Bakr asked Mohammed's former
secretary Zaid ibn Thabit to write down all those dicta still in
people's memories, the entire collection then being transcribed onto a
more suitable writing material. The Qur'an thus assembled passed from
Abu Bakr after he died to his successor 'Umar, who in turn bequeathed
it to his daughter Hafsa. Ultimately, those precious words carried by
Gabriel to Mohammed were transmitted to sinful mortals such as we -
with perfect fidelity, so that we all can know Allah's whims and wishes
without ambiguity and without excuse.

The Legend of the Qur'an Examined

Unfortunately for Islamic orthodoxy, this encouraging tale of
Qur'anic origins proves to be a bit more complicated (and less
certain) than the mullahs and ayatollahs would have us believe. As is
the case when trying to reconstruct the early history of any religion,
there are conflicting traditions to be dealt with. There is a tradition
which has Abu Bakr first have the idea to collect the Qur'an, but
other traditions give the credit to the fourth caliph, 'Ali - the
Prophet's son-in-law and cousin (or brother, in one tradition). (It is
from 'Ali that the Shi'a sect claims its descent.) Adding to the
uncertainty and confusion, there are versions that exclude Abu Bakr
completely!

It is implausible, moreover, that such a task could be completed in a
mere two years. Furthermore, the warriors who fell at Yamama were
apparently mostly new converts who would unlikely have known many
verses by heart. On top of this, it seems inexplicable that no
publication of the Qur'an thus compiled was carried out. Instead, it
was treated as the private property of Hafsa. It seems likely that the
tradition of Abu Bakr's collection was invented in order to establish
the authenticity of the sacred text - by taking it as close to the time
of the Prophet as possible. 2 It has also been suggested that the story
was made up in order to take away the glory of Qur'anic creation from
'Uthman, the third caliph, who appears to have been widely disliked.
(This might explain why he was murdered in 656 CE.)

'Uthman became the third caliph [644-656] a mere dozen years after
the time allotted by tradition to Mohammed's death. Tradition credits
him also with having collected the Qur'an after being asked to do so
by one of his generals, who complained that theological quarrels had
broken out among troops from different provinces in regard to the
correct readings of the Qur'an. (Tradition is curiously silent as to
where these different versions of the Qur'an had come from and who
had written them down.)

It will be recalled that in the story of Abu Bakr's Qur'an, it was
the prophet's secretary Zaid ibn Thabit who wrote everything down.
Apparently unaware that he had done it all before, 'Uthman
commissioned ibn Thabit to prepare an official, standard text.
Supposedly, this was done with the aid of three representatives of
noble Meccan families, who compared a copy of unknown provenance in the
possession of 'Uthman with the 'leaves' (Arabic suhuf) owned by
'Umar's daughter Hafsa - the same manuscript that ten years earlier
Zaid is supposed to have written out himself!

Copies of 'Uthman's new version were sent to Kufa, Basra, Damascus,
and Mecca some time between 650 and 656, the year of 'Uthman's death.
The 'original' was kept in Medina. All other versions of the Qur'an
supposedly were destroyed. Since we know absolutely nothing of the
origins or authenticity of these other versions, we have no way to know
that 'Uthman's edition is the truest copy of the heavenly 'Mother of
the Book'. The Qur'an emanating from 'Uthman looks suspiciously
like the product of political expediency.

Lest even this analysis be thought to provide too much certainty
regarding Qur'anic origins, there are discrepancies even in the
traditions from which it has been constructed! In some cases, the
number of men on Zaid's commission varies, and men known to have been
enemies of 'Uthman are included on the roster. Without a wink
anywhere to be seen among the swarthy swappers of these traditions, men
are included in the project who were already dead at the time they were
supposed to have been enlisted for the job. Finally, the 'Uthman
traditions seem completely to be unaware of the 'fact' that Zaid ibn
Thabit had already transcribed the Qur'an ten years earlier, having
himself produced the standard 'leaves' in the possession of Hafsa.
(That the compiler of the Qur'an didn't remember he had done it all
before, let alone know by heart the entire text of Hafsa's 'leaves'
undercuts the apologetic Muslim notion that the early Arabs involved in
the transmission of the Qur'anic text had prodigious, 'Oriental'
memories.)

Qur'an there emerges a picture of somewhat coarse resolution. It
would appear that by the time of 'Uthman there had emerged a
theopolitical class that was challenging the authority of the caliphs
(Arabic kalifa, 'successor'), who had become the successors to
Mohammed's political office and were losing ground as successors to his
religious authority. The ubiquitous religious contest between priests
and politicians was beginning to develop in what we may call Islam's
embryonic period. Competing with the caliphs were the Qurra (Arabic for
'reciters' or 'readers') - men who were the masters of large volumes of
Qur'anic verbiage and could recite the supposed revelations when
called upon to lead in worship or settle disputes. Many Qurra claimed
to have actually learned their verses from Mohammed himself, although
many by now were second or even third scholarly generations removed
from the Prophet. The fact that the whole application of the Qur'an
depended upon memory invited abuse. Verses claiming to be Qur'anic
revelations could be - and were - invented to serve the economic and
political needs of individual Qurra. (It is likely that some of these
recited verses were written down in manuscripts of varying size, but of
course, no Qur'anic manuscripts have survived from this period -
forgeries to the contrary not withstanding.) To consolidate the power
of the caliphate and stop the abuses of the Qurra, it was necessary to
eliminate the contradictory oral Qur'ans and replace them with a
standardized written text, which could not be manipulated when
expedient. Exactly when this happened is not really known, but it may
have taken place as early as the reign of the caliph 'Uthman
[644-656], as many traditions record. Even so, Ibn Warraq has argued
quite persuasively in his The Origins Of The Koran 3 that both the Abu
Bakr and 'Uthmanic traditions of Qur'anic compilation and
standardization are tendentious tales confected in later times.

The earliest account of the compilation of the Qur'an is that of Ibn
Sa'ad [844 CE], followed by Bukhari [870 CE] and Muslim [874 CE]. 4
(Remember, Mohammed is supposed to have died in 632 CE.) Ibn Sa'ad
transmits ten somewhat contradictory traditions in which the
'Companions' of Mohammed had 'collected' the Qur'an during the life
of the prophet. Still another tradition has 'Uthman ibn 'Affan
collect the Qur'an, during the caliphate of 'Umar, not during the
lifetime of Mohammed. Still another tradition passed on by Ibn Sa'ad
attributes the collection of the Qur'an in suhufs to the caliph
'Umar himself!

More important in terms of influence, even though later, is Bukhari. 5
He reports a tradition in which the Qur'an was collected during the
lifetime of Mohammed by four helpers: Ubai ibn Ka'ab, Mu'adh ibn
Jabal, Zaid ibn Thabit, and Abu Zaid. In another tradition, Ubai ibn
Ka'ab is replaced by Abud-Darda. Still another tradition 'proves'
that the entire Qur'an was compiled under the caliphate of Abu Bakr
and was exclusively the product of Zaid ibn Thabit. This is followed in
Bukhari's account by the tradition which we have already examined,
viz., that Zaid had the help of three Qurayshites, and that all variant
versions in the provinces were destroyed. (Even though this account
appears 238 years after the death of Mohammed and is 26 years later
than the traditions recorded by Ibn Sa'ad, this is the 'True Account'
accepted by most scholars writing before the modern period of skeptical
inquiry.)

Yet further traditions about the origins of the Qur'an are found in
Arab historians such as Waqidi [d. 207 AH D/823 CE] who says that a
Christian slave named Ibn Qumta was the amanuensis of the prophet,
along with a certain 'Abdallah b. Sa'ad b. Abi Sarh, who reported
that "It was only a Christian slave who was teaching him [Mohammed]; I
used to write to him and change whatever I wanted." 6

Of course, all the above traditions are wrong, for Hajjaj b. Yusuf
Barhebraeus records that his boss the Caliph Abdul-Malik b. Marwan
[684-704 CE] was the collector of the Qur'an! 7

In this sand-storm of conflicting traditions, there is no way to descry
in Muslim sources just when the Qur'an came into being as a written
text. Only an examination of Christian accounts from the early
centuries of the Arab conquests can give us a clue. The Monophysite
patriarch of Antioch, John I, recording lengthy religious discussions
with General 'Amr b. al-'As on 9 May 639 CE says nothing that would
indicate that the 'Hagarians' or 'Ishmailites' (the earliest non-Muslim
names for Muslims) had a sacred book of their own - even though the
general had been shown the Torah, the Prophets, and the Gospels of the
Jews and Christians. 8 This was, of course, only around seven years
after the death of Mohammed, during the fifth year of the caliphate of
'Umar. Around 647 CE, during 'Uthman's caliphate, the patriarch of
Seleucia, Isho'yahb III, wrote a letter which betrays no knowledge of
the existence of the Qur'an, and scholars familiar with this famous
character are certain he would have mentioned or quoted the Hagarian
book if he had known of it or even simply had heard of it. 9

More than thirty years later still, in 680 CE, an anonymous writer from
the time of the Umayyad caliphate of Yazid ibn Mu'awiah discussed the
Arabs as the simple descendants of Ishmael who still practiced the
ancient Abrahamic faith and treated Mohammed as a purely military man,
betraying no awareness of any religious function or role played by the
conqueror. Even in 690 CE, John Bar Penkaye - although an eyewitness
of part of the Arab conquest - knows nothing of any Arabian sacred book
existing during the caliphate of 'Abdul-Malik [685-705]. 10

Quite clearly, Christian historians during the entire seventh century
of the common era had no idea that the Hagarite conquerors had a sacred
book. Only at the end of the first quarter of the eighth century does
the Qur'an become the subject of argumentation by Nestorian,
Jacobite, and Melchite Christians. Somewhat later, their polemics are
answered by the Muslims.

A lot can be learned from these arguments about Muslim Qur'anic
traditions. Of special interest is an apology for Christianity written
around the year 835 CE by a certain al-Kindi, whose work was discussed
in Alphonse Mingana's "The Transmission of the Koran," which has been
reprinted by Ibn Warraq in his extremely useful book The Origins of the
Koran. 11 Al-Kindi gives details of the stories circulating among the
Muslims some two centuries after the death of Mohammed:

   It [the Qur'an] was not at first collected in a volume, but
remained in separate leaves. Then the people fell to variance in their
reading; some read according to the version of 'Ali, which they
follow to the present day [i.e., c835 CE]; some read according to the
collection of which we have made mention [a collection made by Abu Bakr
himself]; one party read according to the text of Ibn Mas'ud, and
another according to that of Ubai ibn Ka'ab.

Al-Kindi gives an account of the 'Uthmanic collection of the Qur'an
which is recognizably the same as the one we have examined yet provides
some interesting details for the story:

   When 'Uthman came to power, and people everywhere differed in
their reading, 'Ali sought grounds of accusation against him,
compassing his death. One man would read a verse one way, and another
man another way; and there was change and interpolation, some copies
having more and some less. When this was represented to 'Uthman, and
the danger urged of division, strife, and apostasy, he hereupon caused
to be collected together all the leaves and scraps that he could,
together with the copy that was written out at the first. But they did
not interfere with that which was in the hands of 'Ali [the hero of
the Shi'ites], or of those who followed his reading. Ubai was dead by
this time; as for Ibn Mas'ud, they demanded his exemplar, but he
refused to give it up. Then they commanded Zaid ibn Thabit, and with
him 'Abdallah ibn Abbas, to revise and correct the text, eliminating
all that was corrupt; they were instructed, when they differed on any
reading, word, or name, to follow the dialect of the Quraish.

   When the recension was completed, four exemplars were written out
in large text; one was sent to Mecca, and another to Medina; the third
was despatched to Syria, and is to this day at Malatya; the fourth was
deposited in Kufa. People say that this last copy is still extant at
Kufa, but this is not the case, for it was lost in the insurrection of
Mukhtar (A.H. 67). The copy at Mecca remained there till the city was
stormed by Abu Sarayah (A.H. 200); he did not carry it away; but it is
supposed to have been burned in the conflagration. The Medina exemplar
was lost in the reign of terror, that is, in the days of Yazid b.
Mu'awiah (A.H. 60-64). [Emphasis added]

Thus, by the year 835 CE, three of the four official copies of the
Qur'an had been lost. But of course, other versions of the Qur'an
were intentionally destroyed:

   After what we have related above, 'Uthman called in all the
former leaves and copies, and destroyed them, threatening those who
held any portion back; and so only some scattered remains, concealed
here and there, survived. Ibn Mas'ud, however, retained his exemplar
in his own hands, and it was inherited by his posterity, as it is this
day; and likewise the collection of 'Ali has descended in his family.
[Emphasis added]

Assuming, as devout Muslims do, that the Qur'an contains the very
words of Allah, how can one know that the version of the Qur'an
surviving today is the correct one? Mohammedans are faced with the same
problem Christians must resolve when asked the embarrassing question,
"Since there once existed almost a hundred gospels that were sacred to
various Christian groups, how do you know that just these four gospels
are the right ones?" But the headache for Muslim apologists becomes a
migraine, if what al-Kindi wrote is true: 12

   Then followed the business of Hajjaj b. Yusuf, who gathered
together every single copy he could lay hold of, and caused to be
omitted from the text a great many passages. Among these, they say,
were verses revealed concerning the House of Umayyah with names of
certain persons, and concerning the House of Abbas also with names. Six
copies of the text thus revised were distributed to Egypt, Syria,
Medina, Mecca, Kufa, and Basra. After that he called in and destroyed
all the preceding copies, even as 'Uthman had done before him. The
enmity subsisting between 'Ali and Abu Bakr, 'Umar and 'Uthman is
well known; now each of these entered in the text whatever favored his
own claims, and left out what was otherwise. How, then, can we
distinguish between the genuine and the counterfeit? And what about the
losses caused by Hajjaj? The kind of faith that this tyrant held in
other matters is well-known; how can we make an arbiter as to the Book
of God a man who never ceased to play into the hands of the Umayyads
whenever he found opportunity?

How, indeed! It is immensely significant, I believe, that twenty years
after al-Kindi, when 'Ali b. Rabbanat-Tabari was asked by the caliph
Mutawakkil to write a counter-apology on behalf of Islam, 13 he
addressed not a single one of al-Kindi's charges concerning the
transmission of the Qur'an, falling back on a lame - but extremely
perceptive - ad hominem: "If such people may be accused of forgery and
falsehood, the disciples of the Christ might also be accused of the
same."

The Christian apologist receives unexpected corroboration from one of
the most famous Muslim commentators on the Qur'an, as-Suyuti [d. 1505
CE], who quoted Ibn Umar al-Khattab as saying, "Let no one of you say
that he has acquired the entire Koran, for how does he know that it is
all? Much of the Koran has been lost; thus let him say, 'I have
acquired of it what is available'." 14 He also quotes 'Aisha, the
favorite wife of Mohammed as having said that "During the time of the
Prophet, the chapter of the Parties used to be two hundred verses when
read. When Uthman edited the copies of the Koran, only the current [73
verses] were recorded." (Among the alleged verses omitted was that of
'The Stoning', which is supposed to have been Allah's order that "If an
old man or woman committed adultery, stone them to death.")

There remain more subtle problems, however, in the story of the
transmission of Allah's instructions to mankind after Gabe gave them to
Mohammed. Some of the suras of the Qur'an are extremely long
chapters. How could Mohammed have kept the whole thing in his head
after only one hearing? How could his amanuenses and secretaries have
remembered them, perhaps after a single recitation by the ecstatic
reporter of Allah's will? And when they wrote those priceless words
down on leaves and stones and camels' bones, how reliable was their
record? Even today, Arabic is written in a defective script, which does
not normally indicate the short vowels in words and makes the reading
of Arabic extremely difficult for a non-native speaker of the language.
Furthermore, in ancient times, the problem was even greater. For at
least a century after the death of Mohammed in 632, Arabic writing was
'unpointed' - that is, the dots now placed above or below certain
consonants to distinguish them were not used. This could cause enormous
ambiguity, since b, t, and th could not be distinguished from an
initial or medial y; f could be confused with q; j, h, and kh would
have looked the same; r could not be distinguished from z, s from d, s
from sh, d from dh, nor t from z.

So great is the ambiguity resulting from the defectiveness of the
Arabic script that even after pointed texts appeared it was necessary
to borrow (perhaps from the Arameans) a system for indicating the short
vowels in the sacred text. That this was understood to be of extreme
theological importance can be inferred from the fact that today the
Qur'an is practically the only book in which these vowel marks are
employed - apart from Arabic language textbooks and dictionaries used
to teach the throat disease believed by pious Muslims to be the
language in which the creator of the universe speaks.

The problem of this defective script led to a situation in which
different centers of Islamic studies had variant rules concerning the
pointing and vocalization of the sacred text. Variant texts survived,
despite 'Uthman's attempts at creating a Procrustean uniformity. Ibn
Warraq 15 quotes Charles Adams declaration that "It must be emphasized
that far from there being a single text passed down inviolate from the
time of 'Uthman's commission, literally thousands of variant readings
of particular verses were known in the first three [Muslim] centuries.
These variants affected even the 'Uthmanic codex, making it difficult
to know what its true form may have been."

The problem of ambiguity never ceased to plague Muslims who desired an
absolutely certain version of Allah's instructions on camel-castrating
or whatever. Under the direction of the Qur'anic scholar Ibn Mujahid
[d. 935 CE], 16 there was a canonization of a specific consonantal
system and a limit was placed on the vowels that could be used. This
resulted in seven officially sanctioned systems for reading of the
Qur'an, although some scholars accepted ten readings and still others
found fourteen of merit. In the end, just three systems prevailed: the
Medina system of Warsh [d. 812 CE], the Kufa system of Hafs [d. 805],
and the Basra system of ad-Duri [d. 860]. Presently, only two of these
seem to be in evidence: the system of Hafs, which was adopted for the
Egyptian edition of the Koran issued in 1924, and the system of Warsh,
which is used elsewhere in Africa. (Although Muslim apologists often
claim that the seven versions pertain only to methods of recitation,
this simply is not true.) 17

Clear proof that Qur'anic texts have evolved can be seen from the
fact that the first Qur'anic (more accurately, pre-Qur'anic)
quotations known are found on coins and inscriptions dating toward the
end of the seventh century. Many of these differ from the canonical
text. Substantial differences from the canonical text are also found in
the ornamental inscriptions decorating the Dome of the Rock in
Jerusalem, executed during the reign of Abd al-Malik in the
seventy-second year of the Islamic era [691-692 CE]. Finally, some
scholars have concluded that much of the Qur'an actually predates
Mohammed, being liturgical material that was used by monotheistic
Arabs, perhaps Judaeo-Christians or the mysterious Hanifs to whom
Mohammed joined himself early in his career. Much of this material, of
course, was unintelligible to later commentators of the Qur'an who
had to invent far-fetched explanations for the obscurities.

After this lengthy investigation of the origins and transmission of the
Qur'an, we can only come to the conclusion that Muslims have even
less grounds for thinking they have the genuine words of a god than do
the Christians with their epistles and gospels. In Islam as in
Christianity, a god is made to say what is expedient to support the
theopolitical claims of the parties that created him - parties that
make a living selling him to hapless buyers who have no Better Business
Bureau to which they can appeal.

The Legend of Mohammed Examined

A modern book written for beginning English-speaking Muslims 18 very
well summarizes the legend that needs to be examined critically:

   The life of Muhammad is known as the Sira and was lived in the full
light of history. Everything he did and said was recorded. Because he
could not read and write himself, he was constantly served by a group
of 45 scribes who wrote down his sayings, instructions and his
activities. Muhammad himself insisted on documenting his important
decisions. Nearly three hundred of his documents have come down to us,
including political treaties, military enlistments, assignments of
officials and state correspondence written on tanned leather. We thus
know his life to the minutest details: how he spoke, sat, sleeped
[sic], dressed, walked; his behaviour as a husband, father, nephew; his
attitudes toward women, children, animals; his business transactions
and stance toward the poor and the oppressed; his engagement in camps
and cantonments, his behaviour in battle; his exercise of political
authority and stand on power; his personal habits, likes and dislikes -
even his private dealings with his wives. Within a few decades of his
death, accounts of the life of Muhammad were available to the Muslim
community in written form. One of the earliest and the most-famous
biographies of Muhammad, written less than [a] hundred years after his
death, is Sirat Rasul Allah by Ibn Ishaq.

The fire of these ardent assertions is quenched, however, by the cold
water supplied by Professor John Burton, 19 an Islamologist at the
University of St. Andrews, as he comments on a translation of
al-Tabari's History as it deals with the life of Mohammed:

   None will fail to be struck by the slimness of a volume purporting
to cover more than half a century in the life of one of History's
giants. Ignoring the pages tracing his lineage all the way back to Adam
and disregarding the merely fabulous with which the author has padded
out his book, is to realize how very meagre is the hard information
available to the Muslims for the life of the man whose activities
profoundly affected their own as well as the lives of countless
millions. Of the childhood, the education of the boy and the influences
on the youth, all of which set the pattern of the development of the
man, we know virtually nothing. We simply have to adjust to the
uncomfortable admission that, in the absence of contemporary documents,
we just do not and never shall know what we most desire to learn.

How is an interested observer to choose between these diametrically
opposite opinions concerning Mohammed? Only by examining the
evidentiary sources upon which every Life of Mohammed must be based can
we decide. So we must briefly survey the material that has come down to
us.

Sources of Information on Mohammed

Evidence on the life of Mohammed is derived from literary sources,
papyri and manuscripts, inscriptions, coins, and archaeology. The
literary sources include the Sira (a life of Mohammed written by Ibn
Ishaq), the Maghazi (an account of the military acts and bandit raids
of Mohammed, ascribed to al-Waqidi, d. 823), the Hadith (originally
oral reports about the sayings and deeds of Mohammed), the Qur'an,
the tafsir (commentaries on the Qur'an), and the writings of early
non-Muslim critics and observers.

The Hadith

Since much of the literary evidence ultimately is derived from the oral
traditions captured in the Hadith (or books of traditions), it is well
to begin our criticism of the life of Mohammed by inquiring into the
reliability of the Hadith. The Hadith are alleged to be the collected
records of what Mohammed did, what he enjoined, what he did not forbid,
and what was done in his presence. They also contain the supposed
sayings and deeds of the prophet's companions. Each item is traced back
to Mohammed by means of an isnad, a chain of supposedly honest
witnesses and transmitters. The substance of such a report is called a
matn, and the total tradition of Islamic law and morals derivable from
the accredited Hadith is known as the sunna. Adherence to the sunna for
guidance in all matters for which the Qur'an is either obscure or
silent is a defining characteristic of the major Muslim sect of the
world today, the so-called Sunni. (The other major group of Muslims,
the Shi'ites, do not generally honor the sunna, and trace their
origin to a very early dispute over who should have been the immediate
successor of Mohammed, siding with Mohammed's cousin and son-in-law
'Ali and arguing that the leadership should have remained in
Mohammed's family.)

The Hadith are especially important in post-9-1-1 America, where
constant propaganda in favor of Islam is being broadcast even as part
of television news programs. "Islam is a religion of peace," it is
said. "Islam gave rights to women," they tell us, not mentioning Sura
2:282 which accords a woman only half the weight of a man as a witness
in court. We are assured that "It is contrary to Islam to commit
suicide," and that the kamikaze terrorists were not "true muslims."
Repeatedly it is argued that the Qur'an forbids the sort of things
that the Sunni E terrorists did to the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
While it is true that a selective reading of the Qur'an can justify
this self-serving twaddle, it is nevertheless ignoring a major source
that, with very little effort, can be manipulated to justify the moral
outrages that have been inflicted on our nation and other parts of the
civilized world. That source is, of course, the Hadith. It was the
Hadith plus the Qur'an that justified the Taliban in their
restoration of the Dark Ages. It was the same two 'moral guides' that
propelled the kamikaze martyrs on their one-way flights up to the
houris in heaven.

Sunni Muslims accept six collections of Hadith as authentic traditions
of Mohammed. These include the compilations of al-Bukhari [d. 870],
Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj [d. 875], Ibn Maja [d. 887], Abu Dawud [d. 889],
al-Tirmidhi [d. 892], and al-Nisai [d. 915]. In addition to these six
collections, there is the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal [d. 855], an
encyclopedia which contains nearly 29,000 Hadith! Reminding ourselves
that Mohammed died in 632, we must immediately question the
authenticity of traditions recorded well over two centuries after his
time. To be sure, each Hadith is supported by an isnad tracing its
transmission back to Mohammed. Nevertheless, modern scholars have been
able to demonstrate that the vast majority of these isnads are
fabrications created to serve the theopolitical needs of their
inventors. Indeed, the fraudulent nature of most of the Hadith was
detected already in olden times. Al-Bukhari, the first of the
above-named collectors, traveled from country to country to collect
Hadith. He was successful beyond his wildest dreams, discovering that
more than 600,000 Hadith were current in his day. 20 Unfortunately,
careful study convinced him that of that vast number only around four
thousand were authentic - and European scholars would discard at least
half of that two-thirds of one percent!

Islamic apologists face a terrible problem in the Hadith. Assuming as
they do that the story of al-Bukhari is true, how can they be sure that
not even one of those rejected 596,000 Hadith had been authentic? How
can they know that all of the four thousand are in fact true reports of
Mohammed's words and deeds? Surely, the story of al-Bukhari is a
powerful discreditation of the whole idea of Hadith. When we learn that
many collectors paid people to cough up new and useful Hadith, and when
we read even in Muslim sources that people often created Hadith to
support the pet projects and political needs of their masters, it is
obvious that we are not likely to find much if any authentic
information about the historical Mohammed in the Hadith.

The Sira and Maghazi

Well into the second Muslim century, scholarly opinion concerning the
birth date of the Prophet was spread over a space of eighty-five years!
Although the names of some seventy historians are known who are
believed to have dealt with the life of Mohammed and the prehistory and
early history of Islam up to the year 1000 CE, their works have not
survived and they are known only from quotations in later historians.
The Sira, or biography of Mohammed, is mainly known from a work by Ibn
Ishaq [c85/704 -150 AH/767 CE]. Ibn Ishaq was born into a family of
Medina that made a living procuring Hadith, and he followed the family
trade, ending his career in Baghdad. A number of early Muslim critics
held him to be a liar 21 in regard to his Hadith, and it is somewhat
ironic that he has ended up being the earliest Muslim historian whose
work is relied upon by modern Mohammedan apologists. Unfortunately, his
work has not survived in its original form. Rather it has been
transmitted in two highly altered and differing recensions: the most
popular one made by Ibn Hisham [d. 218 AH/833 CE] and another one made
by Yunus b. Bukayr [d. 199 AH/814-815 CE]. Some parts of Ibn Ishaq's
work that were suppressed by Ibn Hisham and Yunus b. Bukayr can be
found in quotations in the works of fourteen other historians writing
110 to 199 years after the Hegira. As a result, Ibn Ishaq's Sira has to
be reconstructed from the works of sixteen later historians! 22 Doing
so, however, is hardly worth the effort, considering the poor
reliability of the entire Sira literature.

The Maghazi, it will be remembered, is the chronicle of Mohammed's
bandit raids and military activities. One of the earliest authors known
to have collected Maghazi legends was Wahb b. Munabbih, who was born 34
years after the Hegira [654 CE] and lived until the year 110 AH [728
CE]. A fragment of his work has survived in the Heidelberg Papyrus
(early third/ninth centuries) which contains Maghazi traditions
attributed to him. It is important to note that Wahb did not know about
the use of isnads - the chains of transmitters used to establish the
authenticity of traditions. 23 It seems likely then, that any isnads
found in scraps of early historians are not authentic but were the
creations of later historians who wished to give the appearance that
their traditions are anchored in the secure moorings of primal
Mohammedanism.

Perhaps the major source for this part of Mohammed's life is the Kitab
al-Maghazi by al-Waqidi [130/747-207/822-823]. 24 He was a Shiite and
is credited with having first established the chronology of the early
years of Islam. He made extensive use of Ibn Ishaq's work and is
himself cited extensively by the later popular historian al-Tabari
[c224-225/839-311/923]. Ibn Warraq sums up the historical
significance - or lack thereof- of Ibn Ishaq and al-Waqidi: 25

   Both Ibn Ishaq and al-Waqidi's reputations have suffered in recent
years as a consequence of the trenchant criticisms by Patricia Crone
(especially in Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, pp. 203-30), where
she argues that much of the classical Muslim understanding of the Koran
rests on the work of storytellers and that this work is of very dubious
historical value. These storytellers contributed to the tradition on
the rise of Islam, and this is evident in the steady growth of
information: "If one storyteller should happen to mention a raid, the
next storyteller would know the date of this raid, while the third
would know everything that an audience might wish to hear about it."
Then, comparing the accounts of the raid of Kharrar by Ibn Ishaq and
al-Waqidi, Crone shows that al-Waqidi, influenced by and in the manner
of the storytellers, "will always give precise dates, locations, names,
where Ibn Ishaq has none, accounts of what triggered the expedition,
miscellaneous information to lend color to the event, as well as
reasons why, as was usually the case, no fighting took place. No wonder
that scholars are fond of al-Waqidi: where else does one find such
wonderfully precise information about everything one wishes to know?
But given that this information was all unknown to Ibn Ishaq, its value
is doubtful in the extreme. And if spurious information accumulated at
this rate in the two generations between Ibn Ishaq and al-Waqidi, it is
hard to avoid the conclusion that even more must have accumulated in
the three generations between the Prophet and Ibn Ishaq."

Thus, the biography of Mohammed is very much like that of Jesus Christ:
the later the biographer, the more he 'knows' about his character. The
earliest sources know little or nothing about their lives, and
biographies are built up from 'facts' that successive retailers of
tales 'discover' as needed. It has been shown 26 that the Sira (and
almost certainly the Maghazi as well) depends to a large extent upon
the Hadith, which we have already seen are mostly factitious creations
of theopolitical propagandists. Moreover, many Hadith have been shown
to be etiological expansions of Qur'anic passages, created to provide
a causal biographical or historical background for particular
'revelations'. This means that much of the Sira has been inferred from
ambiguous or unintelligible passages in the Qur'an! Would-be
biographers of Mohammed are faced with a chicken-or-egg conundrum at
this point, since the Qur'an itself would appear to be a somewhat
special collection of Hadith - many of which appear to have been
manufactured for sale.

The unreliability of the Sira as a source of information regarding the
life of Mohammed affects even the supposedly foundational datum of his
birth having been in the year 570/571 CE. Lawrence Conrad 27 has shown
that well into the second Muslim century, scholarly opinion concerning
the birth date of the Prophet was spread over a space of eighty-five
years! If Muslim scholars during that crucial formative century had not
yet decided when Mohammed had been born, what can we believe of the
other dates that later became 'facts' of Muslim chronology?

That the year 622 CE was indeed of early significance to the evolving
religion has been confirmed from coins which mark it as the beginning
of a new era. Nevertheless, there is no seventh-century source that
identifies this year as the year of the Hegira. Two Nestorian Christian
documents of 675 and 680 designate it as the year of "the rule of the
Arabs." Casting yet another shadow on the doctrine of the Hegira as
being a migration that took place in 622 CE is the Apocalypse of Samuel
al-Qalamun, written in the eighth century. In this Coptic Christian
prophecy, despite its having been composed in Arabic in Egypt, the term
Hijra (Hegira) is employed for the Arab conquerors themselves, not for
their move from Mecca to Medina!

So completely has the critical examination of Muslim sources revealed
the unreliability of the Sira as a biography and the weakness of all
available biographical data, a number of Soviet scholars have been able
to argue quite coherently that the historical Mohammed is as unreal as
the historical Jesus! N. A. Morozov, 28 for instance, propounded the
theory in 1930 that Mohammed and the first caliphs were mythical
figures and that Islam was a form of Judaism until the time of the
Crusades. In the same year, Klimovich 29 published "Did Muhammad
Exist?" and argued that all our information on Mohammed is late and
that his life was a necessary fiction springing from the euhemeristic
notion that all religions have to have had a founder and that all the
gods were once men. Yet another Soviet scholar, S. P. Tolstov, compared
the myth of Mohammed with the deified shamans of the Yakuts, et al. 30
and argued that the practical purpose of the Mohammed myth was to
prevent the disintegration of a political block of traders, nomads, and
peasants which had helped a new feudal aristocracy come to power.

It is not necessary to agree that Mohammed is a myth in order to
understand the practical significance of the fact that such a view
could be advanced in serious scholarly circles. Even if Mohammed did
exist, we can know nothing about him from the existing sources. He
might as well have been a myth.

The Witness of the Infidels

After considering the records of early non-Muslim sources that reported
on the Arab conquest or ancient writers who wrote about the caravan
trade before or during the supposed time of Mohammed, a writer styling
himself "Ibn al-Rawandi" 31 integrated those dates into his deep
understanding of the Muslim sources for their version of Islamic
history and concluded that

   Once the Arabs had acquired an empire, a coherent religion was
required in order to hold that empire together and legitimize their
rule. In a process that involved a massive backreading of history, and
in conformity to the available Jewish and Christian models, this meant
they needed a revelation and a revealer (prophet) whose life could
serve at once as a model for moral conduct and as a framework for the
appearance of the revelation; hence the Koran, the Hadith, and the
Sira, were contrived and conjoined over a period of a couple of
centuries. Topographically, after a century or so of Judaeo-Muslim
monotheism centered on Jerusalem, in order to make Islam distinctively
Arab the need for an exclusively Hijazi origin became pressing. It is
at this point that Islam as we recognize it today - with an inner
Arabian biography of the Prophet, Mecca, Quraysh, Hijra, Medina, Badr,
etc. - was really born, as a purely literary artefact. An artefact,
moreover, based not on faithful memories of real events, but on the
fertile imaginations of Arab storytellers elaborating from allusive
references in Koranic texts, the canonical text of the Koran not being
fixed for nearly two centuries. This scenario makes at least as much
sense of the sources as the traditional account and eliminates many
anomalies.

   From the vantage point of this skeptical analysis the narrative
related in the Sira, that purports to be the life of the Prophet of
Islam, appears as a baseless fiction. The first fifty-two years of that
life, including the account of the first revelations of the Koran and
all that is consequent upon that, are pictured as unfolding in a place
that simply could not have existed in the way it is described in the
Muslim sources. Mecca was not a wealthy trading center at the
crossroads of Hijazi trade routes, the Quraysh were not wealthy
merchants running caravan up and down the Arabian peninsula from Syria
to the Yemen, and Muhammad, insofar as he was anything more than an
Arab warlord of monotheist persuasion, did his trading far north of the
Hijaz; furthermore, Mecca, as a sanctuary, if it was a sanctuary, was
of no more importance than numerous others and was not a place of
pilgrimage.

Space will not allow examination of all the non-Muslim sources and
other evidence that led al-Rawandi to these startling opinions.
However, a few points can be noted. The tenth-century Armenian
historian Thomas Artsruni (Ardsruni) understood Mohammed's base of
operation to be in Midian, not in South Arabia, and identified Mecca
with the Pharan located in Arabia Petraea, which comprised modern
Jordan down into the Sinai peninsula. 32

Information on the qibla, the direction in which early Muslims prayed,
comes from the tenth-century Coptic bishop of Ashmunein in Egypt,
Severus b. al-Muzaffa 33 and from the Muslim historian Baladhuri, 34
who tells us that the qibla in the first mosque at Kufa (in Iraq) was
westward, instead of south-southwest as would be the case if
present-day Mecca were its focus. Added to other information that
Jerusalem, not Mecca, was the focus of early Muslim worship, the
archaeological discovery THAT an ancient mosque under the Great Mosque
of Wasit was not oriented toward Mecca adds weight to the thesis that
the Muslim movement started in northern, not southern, Arabia, and that
the traditional story of Mohammed's movement from Mecca to Medina and
back is a foundational myth concocted to completely Arabize a conquest
history which found it necessary to distance itself from Judaism and
Christianity for theopolitical reasons.

Investigation of the role of Mecca in the origin and early evolution of
Islam leads to the startling conclusion that the Mecca of Muslim
tradition never existed - perhaps being as fictional as the Nazareth in
the foundation myth of Christianity. In the Mohammedan sources, Mecca
is depicted as a wealthy trading center, a natural crossroads for
caravan shipment of goods by prosperous merchants not only from Yemen
in the south to Syria and the Roman empire in the north, but also for
east-west trade as well. 35 Unfortunately, the classical geographers
who showed considerable interest in Arabia knew nothing about it. (The
Macoraba of Ptolemy, which some Muslim apologists claim to have been
Mecca, is derived from a different root and clearly was not relatable
to the present-day city in the southern Hijaz.)&ngsp;36 The only place
name in Ptolemy which conceivably could be related to the name 'Mecca'
is Moka, a town in Arabia Petraea in present-day Jordan. Patricia Crone
37 sums up the evidence of non-Muslim sources as it pertains to the
myth of Mecca:

   It is obvious that if the Meccans had been middlemen in a
long-distance trade of the kind described in the secondary literature,
there ought to have been some mention of them in the writings of their
customers. Greek and Latin authors had after all, written extensively
about the south Arabians who supplied them with aromatics in the past,
offering information about their cities, tribes, political
organization, and caravan trade; and in the sixth century they
similarly wrote about Ethiopia and Adulis. The political and
ecclesiastical importance of Arabia in the sixth century was such that
considerable attention was paid to Arabian affairs, too; but of Quraysh
and their trading center there is no mention at all, be it in the
Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic, or other literature composed
outside Arabia before the conquests. This silence is striking and
significant.

   This silence cannot be attributed to the fact that sources have
been lost, though some clearly have. The fact is that the sources
written after the conquests display not the faintest sign of
recognition in their accounts of the new rulers of the Middle East or
the city from which they came. Nowhere is it stated that Quraysh, or
the "Arab kings," were the people who used to supply such-and-such
regions with such-and-such goods; it was only Muhammad himself who was
known to have been a trader. And as for the city, it was long assumed
to have been Yathrib. Of Mecca there is no mention for a long time; and
the first sources to mention the sanctuary fail to give a name for it;
whereas the first source to name it fails to locate it in Arabia. [The
Continuatio Arabica gives Mecca an Abrahamic location between Ur and
Harran.] Jacob of Edessa knew of the Ka'ba toward which the Muslims
prayed, locating it in a place considerably closer to Ptolemy's Moka
than to modern Mecca or, in other words, too far north for orthodox
accounts of the rise of Islam; but of the commercial significance of
this place he would appear to have been completely ignorant. Whatever
the implications of this evidence for the history of the Muslim
sanctuary, it is plain that the Qurashi trading center was not a place
with which the subjects of the Muslims were familiar.

With the disappearance of Mecca from the list of documentable facts
concerning the origins of Islam and the life of Mohammed, the character
known as Mohammed of Mecca becomes as problematic as the character
Jesus of Nazareth. Despite the claims of some Christian archaeologists
otherwise of good repute, the archaeological and literary evidence
shows that the place now known as Nazareth did not exist as an
inhabited town during the first centuries BCE and CE. Without a
Nazareth to come from, Jesus of Nazareth now seems as historical as the
Wizard of Oz. Unexpectedly and quite surprisingly, the debunking of the
Mecca of Muslim tradition makes it now seem likely that Mohammed of
Mecca will soon be joining Jesus of Nazareth, the Wizard of Oz, and
Peter Pan as a resident of Never-Never Land.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
The present essay has been greatly dependent upon the excellent books
written or compiled by Ibn Warraq and published by Prometheus Books.
Readers wishing to attain a solid understanding of the difficult
subject of Mohammedan origins are urged to obtain and read these books
- the first of which can be obtained from American Atheist Press: Why I
Am Not A Muslim, by Ibn Warraq. Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York:
1995.

The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, edited and translated by Ibn
Warraq. Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York: 2000. (Includes articles
by early-modern and recent critical scholars concerned with the origins
of Islam)

The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book, edited
by Ibn Warraq. Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York: 1998. (Includes
articles by early-modern and recent critical scholars concerned with
the origins of the Qur'an)

ootnotes:

A In transliterating Arabic, Hebrew, and other Semitic languages
several special characters are required for sounds that either are not
found in English or are not recognized as separate sounds having their
own alphabetic characters. The character | ' | is used to represent
the glottal stop - the brief constriction of the throat that occurs
when one pronounces a vowel at the beginning of an isolated word, but
which is often absent when the word is preceded by an. Thus, we have
'apple, pronounced with a glottal stop, but 'an apple which, when
smoothly pronounced, lacks the glottal stop before the second a. In
Semitic languages, the glottal stop is given a symbol of its own and
has the honor of being the first letter of the alphabet - alef -
although in Arabic it carries a special diacritical mark called hamza
to make it clear that the glottal stop is actually pronounced. Modern
Arabic and ancient Hebrew have another special sound, a deep-throated,
laryngeal glide, which is lacking in English but is considered to be a
separate letter of the alphabet - ayin - and is transliterated with the
special character | ' |. The difference between alef | ' [ and ayin

of alefs (glottal stops) is pronounced when one imitates the sound of a
machine-gun: 'aa!-'aa!-'aa!-'aa!-'aa! The ayin, on the other
hand, is the dipping glide one makes when imitating the sound of an
automobile engine being started up when it's ten below zero: 'aah
'aah 'aah 'aah 'aah. Arabic, like most Semitic languages, has
three gradations of aitch. The lightest of them, transliterated as h,
is identical to the aitch of English. The harshest of them, usually
transliterated as kh, is like the ch in the German name Bach. The
middle aitch, transliterated with the special character h, is pretty
much like the sound one makes when breathing heavily on bifocals to fog
them for cleaning.

Web article note: the web version of this article uses open and close
single quotes to represent ayin and alef. A small number of other marks
have been omitted. [back]

B The term Muslim is classical Arabic, whereas Moslem is colloquial
Arabic, where u has changed to o, and i has changed to e. Thus,
Mohammed is the colloquial equivalent of Muhammad, and Umar becomes
Omar. [back]

C The Muslim calendar, like the Jewish calendar, is a lunar calendar -
the year consisting of six months of 29 days and six months of 30 days
each. This adds up to only 354 days, creating a discrepancy with the
solar year of a little over three years per century. Unlike Jewish
calendrical practice, no attempt is made to bring the Moslem year into
accord with the solar year (the Muslim calendar falls behind eleven
days every solar year), intercalary days are added every three years or
so to make up for the fact that a lunation is a bit more than 29.5 days
lone. [back]

D AH = Anno Hegirae, 'In the year of the Hegira', reckoned from 16 July
622 CE. [back]

E Most of the terrorists, especially those from Arabia, have been
members of a fundamentalist Sunni sect known as the Wahabis. Founded by
Mohammed ibn-'Abd-al-Wahab [1703-1791 CE] of the Najd region of
Central Arabia, it is noted for its rejection of all 'novelties'
absorbed by Islam, rejecting music and the wearing of silk or jewelry.
Wahab rejected consensus of opinion as a source of authority. By
marriage he became allied with the family of Saud - the ruling family
of Saudi Arabia today. Recently, an Internet news site made the
unconfirmed claim that the great majority of imams who lead American
mosques are Wahabis. [back]

Reference Notes:

1 Alphonse Mingana, The Transmission of the Koran," in The Origins of
the Koran, edited by Ibn Warraq, Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998: 108.
[back]

2 Ibn Warraq, "Introduction," in The Origins of the Koran, 11. [back]

3 Ibid., 13. [back]

4 Mingana, op. cit., 98. [back]

5 Ibid., 99. [back]

6 Ibid., 102. [back]

7 Ibid., 102-103. [back]

8 Ibid., 104-106. [back]

9 Ibid., 106. [back]

10 Ibid., 107. [back]

11 Ibid., 108-109. [back]

12 Ibid., 109. [back]

13 Ibid., 110. [back]

14 Ibn Warraq, Koran, 14. [back]

15 Ibid, 15. [back]

16 Ibid, 16. [back]

17 Ibid, 17. [back]

18 Z. Sardar and Z. A. Malik, Muhammad for Beginners, 1994, quoted by
Ibn al-Rawandi, "Origins of Islam: A Critical Look at the Sources," in
The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, edited and translated by Ibn
Warraq, Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000: 89-90. [back]

19 Ibn al-Rawandi, op. cit., 90. [back]

20 Ibn Warraq, "Studies on Muhammad and the Rise of Islam," in The
Quest for the Historical Muhammad, 44-45. [back]

21 Ibid., 27. [back]

22 Ibid., 27-28. [back]

23 Ibid., 26. [back]

24 Ibid., 28. [back]

25 Ibid., 29. [back]

26 Ibid., 48. [back]

27 Quoted by Ibn al-Rawandi, op. cit., 102-103. [back]

28 Cited by Ibn Warraq, Muhammad, 49. [back]

29 Cited ibid., 49. [back]

30 Ibid., 49. [back]

31 Ibn al-Rawandi, op. cit., 104-105. [back]

32 Ibn Warraq, Muhammad, 33. [back]

33 Ibid., 33. [back]

34 al-Rawandi, op. cit., 96. [back]

35 Ibid., 98. [back]

36 Ibid., 98. [back]

37 Patricia Crone, quoted by al-Rawandi, op. cit., 99. [back]

Formerly a professor of biology and geology, Frank R. Zindler is now a
science writer. He is a member of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, the New York Academy of Science, the Society of
Biblical Literature, and the American Schools of Oriental Research. He
is the editor of American Atheist. His book The Jesus The Jews Never
Knew: Sepher Toldoth Yeshu and the Quest of the Historical Jesus in
Jewish Sources will be published by American Atheist Press in the
spring of 2002.