From American Thinker.com (Sept. 12, 2021):
“A thorough review of the historical records provides startling indications that much, if not all, of what we know about Muhammad is legend, not historical fact,” writes Robert Spencer in his new edition of Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins. Therein this bestselling author, scholar, and world-renowned “Islamophobe” details numerous factual, fatal objections to the received faith-based narrative of Islam’s founding by a prophet named Muhammad.
Spencer surveys the historical record of various of various societies like the Byzantine Empire that bore the brunt of Arab invasions in the Middle East and North Africa following Muhammad’s supposed death in 632. The surprising documentary result:
No one who interacted with those who conquered the Middle East in the middle of the seventh century ever seems to have gotten the impression that a prophet named Muhammad, whose followers burst from Arabia bearing a new holy book and a new creed, was behind the conquests.
Spencer notes that “this silence is extremely strange. Islam, in its canonical texts, is an unapologetically supremacist religion.” Tellingly, “coins minted in the 650s and possibly as late as the 670s” by early Islamic caliphs like the Damascus-based Umayyads make no “reference to Muhammad as Allah’s prophet or to any other distinctive element of Islam.” Some of these coins even feature crosses, but “it is hard to imagine that such a coin would have been minted at all had the dogmatic Islamic abhorrence of the cross been in place at the time.”
Muhammad’s normative biography raises grave doubts for Spencer, based as it is largely on the hadith, or canonical narratives about Muhammad’s words and actions. Spencer observes that Islamic orthodoxy holds that the hadith passed from Muhammad’s lifetime to the ninth century in an uncorrupted oral tradition before Islamic scholars verified and transcribed hadith. “Seldom, if ever, has such a feat of memory been documented,” Spencer skeptically comments.
While theologically the short Quran’s sparse content is Islam’s primary document, “functionally, if not officially, the Hadith are the primary authority in Islam,” Spencer notes. This particularly results from the doctrine in Quran 33:21 and other verses that Muslims should emulate Muhammad, whose biography the hadith minutely chronicles in “dizzyingly voluminous collections.” Additionally, to a large extent, even the “Muslim holy book—not just its Arabic neologisms and turns of phrase -- would be incomprehensible without the Hadith,” Spencer analyzes, which “detail the occasions for the revelation of every passage in the Qur’an.”
The resulting potential for hadith fraud surrounding a holy lawgiver Muhammad is enormous, Spencer observes. Thus, “with Muhammad held up as an exemplar, the Hadith became political weapons in the hands of warring factions within the Islamic world. And as is always the case with weapons in wartime, they began to be manufactured wholesale.” “The consequence of all this was inevitable: utter confusion,” Spencer concludes; the “Hadith is riddled with contradictions.” [read more]
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