Leigh Kimmel’s Reviews > Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins > Status Update

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."