As a Canadian Imam Calls for Jihad in Muhammad’s Name, a Tough Question Must Be Asked

New in PJ Media:

Adnan Abyat is an imam in Canada who recently preached a rousing sermon designed to get his congregation all fired up for jihad. As Muslim leaders all over the world speak of Hamas’ conflict with Israel as a jihad, it’s understandable that this kind of sermon would be common in the Islamic world these days. Abyat, like many others, attributed the jihad impulse to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Yet there is abundant reason to believe that Muhammad was not exactly what Adnan Abyat and so many others think he was.

In his sermon, which should have, but almost certainly didn’t, raise eyebrows among Canadian law enforcement and intelligence officials, Abyat said: “I attest that Muhammad is Allah’s servant and His prophet who awakened the desire for Jihad and incited the believers, who made Jihad for the sake of Allah the pinnacle of Islam, and the one who said that Paradise is underneath the shades of the swords.”…

All this raises the question once again: what if Muhammad really said none of this? What if the stories Islamic tradition tells us about what he said and did are more myth and legend than sober historical fact? Then Hamas and other jihadis all over the world are killing and dying for a fiction. It would be the cruelest of cruel jokes on the jihadis, but if this idea became widely known in the Islamic world, the result could be transformational.

I explored this question several years ago in a book entitled “Did Muhammad Exist?“, which, you might be surprised to learn, was controversial. In it, I demonstrated that the earliest available biographical data about Muhammad dates from two centuries after the traditional date of his death. There are a few mentions of “Muhammad” here and there before then, but none of them match what we know, or think we know, about the prophet of Islam….

The first six decades of the seventh-century Arab conquest contain no mention anywhere of the existence of the religion of Islam, or of the Qur’an, or of Muhammad as the prophet of Islam. The Arab conquerors had extensive contact with the people they conquered, many of whom wrote about these conquests. Yet Islam, the Qur’an, and Muhammad just don’t seem to come up.

Another problem is that the Islamic traditions themselves are full of contradictions on even the most basic points. In a new book, “Muhammad: A Critical Biography,” I examine those stories in detail and show all the contradictions and inconsistencies within what academics still present as sober, meticulously recorded history. Most Islamic traditions say that Muhammad was always the name of the prophet; others, however, assert that he was originally named Qutham and that his name was changed to Muhammad later. Most Islamic traditions state that the angel Gabriel appeared to Qutham/Muhammad and delivered the Qur’anic revelations to him; some, however, maintain that initially an angel named Saraphel visited the new prophet, and was only later replaced by Gabriel.

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