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Did Muhammad Exist?
A briefing by Robert Spencer
April 24, 2012
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Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, has released a new book
titled, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins.
On April 24th, Mr. Spencer spoke on his book at a joint meeting of
the Middle East Forum and Gatestone
Institute in New York City.
Did the Prophet Muhammad really exist, or was
he a sacred myth fashioned by the Koran decades after his purported death?
Robert Spencer has addressed this thorny question with a dual intent:
Blinded by dogmatic thinking, one could
dismiss the question as pure provocation, ignoring the abundance of
historical evidence supporting this thesis. Particularly intriguing is the
absolute absence of a mention whatsoever of Muhammad, Islam or the Koran,
either by the Arab conquerors or the conquered, in written records,
inscriptions, coins, etc. during 630-690, i.e. to the period of
Muslim conquests following the (alleged) death of Muhammad.
Furthermore, the life of Muhammad is shrouded
in mystery given that the first biographies were written no sooner than 125
years after his death, and it is well acknowledged by Muslim scholars, among
others, that many of the hadiths which hand down sayings and actions
of the Prophet are false, artfully created for political reasons.
Nor is the Koran itself a more reliable
source: it is supposed to have been collected and distributed in its standard
edition no later than in 653, but one cannot find any mention of it until the
690s, and the traces of Aramaic and Christian traditions inside the text
indicate a well established contact with the conquered territories.
In conclusion, historical evidence tells a
very different story from the traditional one, namely that of political
and military events which occurred at a time when some Arabian tribes
expanded at the expense of the "sick men" - the Persian and
Byzantine empires - and which necessitated a glue to bind them together and
to form a central focus of identification. And what could offer a better
nucleus for the nascent Arab empire than religion?
According to Spencer, such a study is of
paramount importance because demonstration of the political circumstances of
Islam's birth enables the contextualization of some of its elements in the
framework of a political and military agenda, thus making possible a
distinction between the religion and its secular, political, violent
outcomes. This doesn't infringe on religious freedoms of Muslims: why aren't
writers questioning Jesus' existence branded as "racist"? The
search for the truth is never a provocation.
Summary account by Tommaso Virgili, intern
for The Legal Project, an activity
of the Middle East Forum
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