Status Updates From Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inq...

A summation of what the historical evidence shows, and how it doesn't match up with the traditional account. And an abundance of notes that includes some things as interesting as the text itself.

The timeline of the archeological evidence -- and the role of political theology in the empires of that age. To be a good citizen of a polity of that era, one must necessarily be an orthodox practitioner of the state religion. Heresy was effectively treason -- and the non-trinitarian Christians were not happy with being told to accept trinitarianism or be cast out.

Reviewing once again the canonical history of Muhammad, of his revelations and his struggle with his own tribe.

Even today there are still variant readings of the Quran, and some outright contradictions. But there is also evidence that power struggles in the early ummah resulted in passages being chosen because they supported one or another claimant's positions -- and contradictory passages being destroyed. If the process is erased, how can we determine what is legitimate and what is false?

More interesting absences -- of mention of the Quran as a received book in the early history of Islam. There are mentions here and there, but they feel like later interpolations.

Could the mysterious "Night of Power" in fact be the first Christmas, when the angels appeared to shepherds tending their flocks by night -- but the connection has been forgotten or at least obscured over the centuries?

Puzzling use of hanif, usually meaning pre-Islamic pagans, to refer to pre-Islamic monotheists of the Abrahamic tradition. Are we looking at echoes of a long-ago theological debate that otherwise left no traces?

A number of passages of the Quran that make far more sense when read as a Syriac text -- and sound surprisingly like Christian materials, albeit not the Orthodox theology of Constantinople, but something non-Trinitarian.

Some more rather technical linguistic information about how reading certain passages of the Quran with Syraic vowels gives us something very different from the standard Arabic reading. Materials that sound very much like another Abrahamic religion. Could its roots lie with a now-forgotten small-u unitarian Christian sect that opposed Trinitarianism?

Here we get into some evidence based on specialist knowledge of Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages of the era from which the Quran is supposed to have arisen. Words that aren't Arabic, that are used in no other documents, and commentators struggle with. Yet some of them have close cognates in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic (the probable mother tongue of Jesus). Like sijill, often translated "bound scroll."

The Quran proclaims itself to be an Arabic book -- yet the very proclamation draws attention to itself. What other book of sacred literature contains such adamant assertions about the language it is written in? And research quickly shows that major passages of the Quran are paraphrases or even direct translations of older Jewish and Christian sacred writings and commentaries on them.

More passages where the text doesn't represent a logical flow of ideas, suggesting that they have been redacted at some point for polemical reasons.

The mysterious Battle of Yamama which supposedly killed off a significant number of people who were the sole memories of parts of the Quran and led to the efforts to establish a master written copy -- but there's no historical evidence of this battle, or that significant numbers of Muhammad's inner circle were killed at it.

More *interesting* bits of history of the revelation of the Quran, from convenient abrogations to Muhammad's forgetfulness. Odd when the Quran is supposed to have been revealed from a perfect holy book in Heaven with Allah.

The argument that Islam must be true because the hadiths include some episodes that are less than flattering to the Prophet -- and who would include unflattering matter in a fabrication? Yet even the unflattering parts seem to be there to justify certain practices.

Chronological problems in the standard biography of Muhammad, dealing with the former use of a "leap month" (as in the Jewish calendar) to square a lunar calendar with the solar year -- possible evidence that the bio was fabricated after leap months were abandoned according to Quranic command? And if Muhammad was recognized as a prophet while young, why was his first revelation so terrifying?

Interesting discrepancy: the Quran states that Muhammad performed no miracles, yet his accepted biography is replete with them, some of which seem rather absurd to modern readers.

The problem of true and fabricated hadiths is further complicated by the peculiar way Islam determines them -- the ifnad, or chain of oral transmission from Muhammad's time to when it was formally collected and committed to writing. Sometimes a hadith with a weak ifnad is rejected, while an almost identical one with an ifnad full of highly respected early figures of Islam is accepted.

Hadiths, and their curious history. Caliphs who destroyed them and others who solicited them. Just how reliable are they, when many of them contradict one another -- and may well date as much as a century after the traditional date of Muhammad's death?

An interesting grammatical wrinkle with some early texts: although today we think of "Muhammad" as a personal name, it is in fact an Arabic gerund, and may have been used as a common noun: IOW, "the person who is being praised." In the context of some of these texts, might it have been Jesus? It would simplify some currently confusing texts, which seem to switch between two subjects without any transition.

Inscriptions in various buildings in the Middle East, which seem to represent an early proto-Islam in which the Muslim calendar epoch is present, but not with reference to the Hijra. References to Allah as the god of Musa (Moses) and Isa (Jesus), but no mention of Muhammad. Even the inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock contain phrases found in the Quran, but intermingled with other phrases and not in Quranic order.

After looking at contemporary records by various authors, mostly Christians, we now look at some early artifacts which combine characteristically Muslim language, particularly bismallah (in the name of Allah) with Christian visual elements, particularly the cross which Islam has historically abhorred and condemned. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said.

More early sources to what is probably the early days of Islam -- yet the terminology is different, confused. How much can be the result of outsiders using exonyms rather than endonyms, and how much represents a much different evolution of the faith than what Islamic tradition, codified much later, holds?

The paucity of explicit references to Muhammad in the Quran. Only four -- and the first is sufficiently ambiguous that it may have originally referred to Jesus. Did this reflect an Arian view of Jesus that was present in the earliest forms of what would become Islam and the Quran?

The puzzling paucity of references to Muhammad in the Qur'an, as compared to references to Moses in the Torah, or Jesus in the Gospels and even the Acts of the Apostles and the various Epistles. And at least one may be used as a title, rather than a reference to a specific individual.

The introduction is an introduction to how we go about determining the historicity of various figures of the past. Of course Richard M. Nixon is within living memory -- but in a few hundred years, when all of us who remember our 37th President are gone, how would a scholar go about proving that yes, Nixon was a living, breathing human being and not just a symbolic figure representing the late 20th century Presidency?