My dear friend, the renowned Islamic scholar Ibn Warraq, explains why, beyond shallow polemics and facile pseudo-historiography, there is abundant reason to question the standard Islamic account of the life of Muhammad.
Comments
somehistorysays
Someone wrote the book of demon filth. Does it really matter about his *name*?
Mark Twain wasn’t the given name of a writer and John Wayne wasn’t the given name of a beloved actor.
Whether a mass-murdering raper of children, sex-slave trading thief who couldn’t write a word about himself actually lived or some other son of demons just conjured him up as a way to get others to follow demands made to rape, steal and murder in his name, really doesn’t change anything
muzzies devoted to worshipping the book of demon filth and the supposed ghoul about whom it was written, aren’t going to change their lives even if they find out it’s all a bunch of balderdash and rotten evil. They won’t believe it anymore than they stop believing that they are going to some party of drunken rape upon young virgins.
PRCS USN (ret)says
I have several of his books.
Tough reads. But worth the time and effort to do so.
gravenimagesays
Agree.
Tim gallaghersays
I don’t believe mo existed but, if he did, he an evil piece of shit. Islam is evil, that is real problem. If god is an evil piece of shit like Allah then humanity is in huge trouble. Imagine a god picking a scumbag like mo as it’s chosen one any civilised human being with conscience would tell such an evil version of what god is to go fuck itself and the same for the equally non existent low life mo. If only non Muslims would wake up and ban evil islam. Should have happened ages ago the Hungarians are showing the way. Just ban the evil ideology that is what Islam deserves for all the evil it has done
Taffysays
Victor Orban has tightened the borders so the Muslim cancer bypassed his country, leaving Hungary the gem of Europe. As a result, Budapest is still a beautiful, safe city where one can wander the streets at 1 a.m. My only problem is that Hungarian is a tough language to learn.
Tim gallaghersays
I’m glad to hear that, taffy. Maybe other European countries see how pleasant a society without Muslims is and decide to throw all Muslims out. I believe that letting Muslims into our societies is dumbest and self destructive move ever I am used to warm weather so I couldn’t put up with the cold weather there. When it comes to islam the Hungarians are the wisest people around.
Joe Huntsays
There’s a very interesting documentary that pretty much proves Mo never existed. It was shown on Channel4 in the uk part 1 and the peace loving Muslims said if you show part 2 or part one ever again we will start murdering anyone connected with Channel4.
It was available on YouTube Islam: The Untold Story.
Excellent stuff from Tom Holland et all– highly recommend this piece. Terrible that Channel Four kowtowed to Muslim threats–they could not disprove any of these findings.
And note the M8sim who says that nfidels cannot understand anything about Islam, including its bloody conquests.
Westmansays
Education is an enemy of Islam.
Islam is a low-information life plan that was used to create plundering warriors for the community before the warriors had the maturity to question its motives. There is a reasom why nations conscript youth for war, young enough to be physicallly fit yet mentally immature.
Islam is the original apartheid culture, on steroids, rejecting those who haven’t or won’t accept it, equating them to zero.
The only 65 years-old Muslims still killing infidels are the leaders. Old Muslims have questions about Islam, yet go with the cultural flow to avoid losing friends, status and financial security.
Reziacsays
Clearly there was *someone* who was a desert raider and a horrible person, sufficient to be recorded, however uncertainly, in the near-contemporary writings. If there hadn’t been *someone* who started this mess, newly-Muslim warriors would not have spread carnage and conquest across Arabia and the Levant less than a generation later. I think that is the most compelling argument. Conquests with a unified theme don’t spring from the air, especially among barbarian tribes that all hate each other. *Someone* played the tough guy and got them all killing in the same direction, and did so approximately during the traditionally-specified timeframe, or the conquest wouldn’t have happened.
Prophet? No. Stark raving mad, and heard voices? Apparently. All the same person? Doubtful. I speculate that the “Mohammed” of Medina and Mecca were two different people (which does a better job of explaining the shift than Mo merely losing his cool because his notions were rejected), and were conflated with other desert raiders (and assorted folk tales and legends) over the next couple centuries to become the Mohammed we know and despise today.
So we’ve got a figure who has somewhat more reality than King Arthur (who may have been distantly based on a Roman officer’s bastard during Rome’s abandonment of Britain, but otherwise is entirely legend) but considerably less than say, Julius Caesar.
So… did Mohammed exist? Someone, or several someones, had to. Exactly as is claimed by Islam? Obviously not. That much of the Noble Quran was plagiarized from Jewish and Christian works? That was perfectly normal, back in the day, and should surprise no one.
Arguments based on the numerous transliterations of the name are, however, downright silly, especially after it’s been through at least a couple layers of translation and who knows how many copies-of-copies and scribes who might have their own ideas about hoiw to write it. If you’re going to do that, you must do the same for the Bible, which has its own history of layers of translations and copies-of-copies and whatever alterations some ancient scribe may have made. It’s like an English speaker saying, “the name is Jesus, anyone else is not him!” and the Hebrew speaker says “Don’t be daft, that’s the Greek form. His name was Yeshua, you people just can’t spell.”
࿗Infidel࿘says
On a pure historical aspect, I tend to agree w/ Robert that there are good reasons to doubt that the Muhammad, as described in the islamic texts, never existed, and that this history of the Arab conquests started from Damascus, not Medina, as is commonly thought. And yeah, I do think it’s important to know real history for history’s sake
That said, I do agree w/ David and Raymond that this internecine warfare within the antiislamic camp is counterproductive, especially w/ the creation of a NoMo cult. I watched Raymond’s debate w/ Jay, and even though I am more of a skeptic in the existence of Muhammad, I’d have to say that Raymond won that debate. In particular, I agree w/ Raymond that nobody is gonna convince a muslim that Muhammad didn’t exist, just like nobody is gonna convince a Christian that Christ didn’t exist, or a Buddhist that Siddhartha didn’t exist, or a Hindu that Krishna didn’t exist. Also, a lot of Jay’s arguments, particularly the one about MHMD, were full of holes, given that different languages transliterated the same word differently based on their own alphabets, and that there are about so many ways Muhammad is spelled today – Muhammad, Mohammad, Muhamad, Mohamad, Mohammed, Mehmet, Mahmud, Mahmoud,…. So to just zero in on the MHMD argument makes little sense
I do think that there is one aspect of the NoMo argument that is useful: it can be used to completely discredit the al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock narratives. If enough of the non-muslim international community was convinced by this history that these adventures started w/ the Umayyads in Damascus, then it would be far more legitimate for Israel to demolish those islamic icons, and maybe build the Third Temple of Solomon there
But I don’t think that Jay’s argument, or now Ibn Warraq’s argument would work at all on muslims who are having doubts about islam. In fact, if they are convinced that he didn’t exist, while exiting islam is one possibility, another possibility is that they may decided that since nothing about Muhammad’s life is true, all they need to do is follow whatever is in the qur’an (which is now being given a new credibility by being shown to be plagiarized from Aramaic or Syriac literature), and do whatever they interpret it as. The hadiths, sira and tafseers would be irrelevant, but even just reading qur’an alone, there are enough hateful & violent verses that muslims worldwide follow today, and making Muhammad vanish from history won’t change that behavior
So I’m all for people using whatever strategy they think will work for going ahead w/ it. Jay’s strategy – of convincing people that the Muhammad of Mecca didn’t exist may work in Turkistan, but then again, it might excite them to know that the religion that they had been following before the Russians broke in was actually put together in their hearland – Buqhara, and inspire them to emulate the likes of Seljuq, Alp Arsalan, Timur or Babur.
gravenimagesays
Infidel, respectful disagreement is *not* “internecine warfare”. Do you really believe that David Wood and Raymond Ibrahim–both frequent contributors to Jihad Watch–are sworn enemies of Robert Spencer? They are not.
࿗Infidel࿘says
Graven
I was thinking less about Robert, and more about Jay Smith. I have read “Did Muhammad Exist” and found it more or less convincing, although Robert omits to then discuss the small side-issue of the Arab conquests, and where, how and on what pretexts they started. But there are a lot of the “NoMo’s” out there (the people who insist that Muhammad didn’t exist), and they hijack a lot of discussions about Muhammad to this point, usually citing Jay Smith as their ultimate source. Raymond and David discuss that at lenth in this 3+ hour video
So that’s the point I was making above. There is a proper place for this historical investigation of whether or not Muhammad existed, and if not, what exactly was the history of the Arab conquests (who spearheaded it?) and the creation of islam. It could be the subject of a lot of PhD courses in universities unafraid to pursue it
But from a point of persuading muslims to exit islam, this is not the right tool. When our side hasn’t (and can’t) definitely prove that Muhammad didn’t exist, that can’t be the primary tool in the efforts in question. However, that is what Jay Smith insists be the primary instrument used to de-islamize people, and he gives the example of Nigeria, where Christian missionaries supposedly tell him that they can’t use the sunnah literature to shame muslims b’cos of the violent repercussions, but that his material they can use. I actually don’t find that claim credible, since denying the historical existence of Muhammad would for muslims be tantamount to a denial of allah. However, Jay also concedes that this effort is not meant for the muslims on the streets, but in academics, which then begs the question: why is it being used by people on our side to derail debates b/w infidels and muslims about the morality of Muhammad and the values of islam
Reziacsays
Infidel, you make many excellent points.
“I do think that there is one aspect of the NoMo argument that is useful: it can be used to completely discredit the al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock narratives.”
Be careful what you wish for. There is pretty good evidence that what Jews revere as the remaining wall of the Jerusalem temple was actually the perimeter wall of the Roman fortress.
But it’s a good point that if the Islamic symbolism of those places can be shown to be broken, that will tend to erode Muslim faith in Islam’s own narrative. And the best thing we can sow is doubt.
But another thought comes into my head: What’s really needed is a Christian miracle (or at least what average Muslims will so interpret) performed at the Dome of the Rock, in such a way that it’s clear Allah is displeased and wants Islam to cede the territory.
Someone once pointed out that a large rock dropped on the Kaaba from a suitable height would have a devastating effect, by showing Islam as weak and abandoned by Allah.
࿗Infidel࿘says
Reziac
I am a Gentile, so what the Jewish clergy ultimately decides to do w/ that area once those mosques are demolished is totally up to them. I suggested a temple on the basis that the first 2 were destroyed, so maybe they’d like a replacement. But if there are scriptural/theological reasons as to why that shouldn’t happen, I’d be the last to intervene
Princesssays
300 years is not that long to pass on stories. It’s approximately 8 generations, if you assume that life expectancy averaged around 40 to 50 years.
OLD GUYsays
If he was made up or not makes little difference to those who believe his writings, no matter how evil or backwards that are. Christianity leads to love thy neighbor and Islam leads to brutality.
gravenimagesays
Ex-Muslim Scholar Ibn Warraq: Was Muhammad Even Real? The History They Don’t Want You to Question
……………………………………………………….
That is why it is impratnt that we ask.
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somehistory says
Someone wrote the book of demon filth. Does it really matter about his *name*?
Mark Twain wasn’t the given name of a writer and John Wayne wasn’t the given name of a beloved actor.
Whether a mass-murdering raper of children, sex-slave trading thief who couldn’t write a word about himself actually lived or some other son of demons just conjured him up as a way to get others to follow demands made to rape, steal and murder in his name, really doesn’t change anything
muzzies devoted to worshipping the book of demon filth and the supposed ghoul about whom it was written, aren’t going to change their lives even if they find out it’s all a bunch of balderdash and rotten evil. They won’t believe it anymore than they stop believing that they are going to some party of drunken rape upon young virgins.
PRCS USN (ret) says
I have several of his books.
Tough reads. But worth the time and effort to do so.
gravenimage says
Agree.
Tim gallagher says
I don’t believe mo existed but, if he did, he an evil piece of shit. Islam is evil, that is real problem. If god is an evil piece of shit like Allah then humanity is in huge trouble. Imagine a god picking a scumbag like mo as it’s chosen one any civilised human being with conscience would tell such an evil version of what god is to go fuck itself and the same for the equally non existent low life mo. If only non Muslims would wake up and ban evil islam. Should have happened ages ago the Hungarians are showing the way. Just ban the evil ideology that is what Islam deserves for all the evil it has done
Taffy says
Victor Orban has tightened the borders so the Muslim cancer bypassed his country, leaving Hungary the gem of Europe. As a result, Budapest is still a beautiful, safe city where one can wander the streets at 1 a.m. My only problem is that Hungarian is a tough language to learn.
Tim gallagher says
I’m glad to hear that, taffy. Maybe other European countries see how pleasant a society without Muslims is and decide to throw all Muslims out. I believe that letting Muslims into our societies is dumbest and self destructive move ever I am used to warm weather so I couldn’t put up with the cold weather there. When it comes to islam the Hungarians are the wisest people around.
Joe Hunt says
There’s a very interesting documentary that pretty much proves Mo never existed. It was shown on Channel4 in the uk part 1 and the peace loving Muslims said if you show part 2 or part one ever again we will start murdering anyone connected with Channel4.
It was available on YouTube Islam: The Untold Story.
gravenimage says
Thank you, Joe. I found it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2JdTrZO1To
I’ll be watchng it.
gravenimage says
Excellent stuff from Tom Holland et all– highly recommend this piece. Terrible that Channel Four kowtowed to Muslim threats–they could not disprove any of these findings.
And note the M8sim who says that nfidels cannot understand anything about Islam, including its bloody conquests.
Westman says
Education is an enemy of Islam.
Islam is a low-information life plan that was used to create plundering warriors for the community before the warriors had the maturity to question its motives. There is a reasom why nations conscript youth for war, young enough to be physicallly fit yet mentally immature.
Islam is the original apartheid culture, on steroids, rejecting those who haven’t or won’t accept it, equating them to zero.
The only 65 years-old Muslims still killing infidels are the leaders. Old Muslims have questions about Islam, yet go with the cultural flow to avoid losing friends, status and financial security.
Reziac says
Clearly there was *someone* who was a desert raider and a horrible person, sufficient to be recorded, however uncertainly, in the near-contemporary writings. If there hadn’t been *someone* who started this mess, newly-Muslim warriors would not have spread carnage and conquest across Arabia and the Levant less than a generation later. I think that is the most compelling argument. Conquests with a unified theme don’t spring from the air, especially among barbarian tribes that all hate each other. *Someone* played the tough guy and got them all killing in the same direction, and did so approximately during the traditionally-specified timeframe, or the conquest wouldn’t have happened.
Prophet? No. Stark raving mad, and heard voices? Apparently. All the same person? Doubtful. I speculate that the “Mohammed” of Medina and Mecca were two different people (which does a better job of explaining the shift than Mo merely losing his cool because his notions were rejected), and were conflated with other desert raiders (and assorted folk tales and legends) over the next couple centuries to become the Mohammed we know and despise today.
So we’ve got a figure who has somewhat more reality than King Arthur (who may have been distantly based on a Roman officer’s bastard during Rome’s abandonment of Britain, but otherwise is entirely legend) but considerably less than say, Julius Caesar.
So… did Mohammed exist? Someone, or several someones, had to. Exactly as is claimed by Islam? Obviously not. That much of the Noble Quran was plagiarized from Jewish and Christian works? That was perfectly normal, back in the day, and should surprise no one.
Arguments based on the numerous transliterations of the name are, however, downright silly, especially after it’s been through at least a couple layers of translation and who knows how many copies-of-copies and scribes who might have their own ideas about hoiw to write it. If you’re going to do that, you must do the same for the Bible, which has its own history of layers of translations and copies-of-copies and whatever alterations some ancient scribe may have made. It’s like an English speaker saying, “the name is Jesus, anyone else is not him!” and the Hebrew speaker says “Don’t be daft, that’s the Greek form. His name was Yeshua, you people just can’t spell.”
࿗Infidel࿘ says
On a pure historical aspect, I tend to agree w/ Robert that there are good reasons to doubt that the Muhammad, as described in the islamic texts, never existed, and that this history of the Arab conquests started from Damascus, not Medina, as is commonly thought. And yeah, I do think it’s important to know real history for history’s sake
That said, I do agree w/ David and Raymond that this internecine warfare within the antiislamic camp is counterproductive, especially w/ the creation of a NoMo cult. I watched Raymond’s debate w/ Jay, and even though I am more of a skeptic in the existence of Muhammad, I’d have to say that Raymond won that debate. In particular, I agree w/ Raymond that nobody is gonna convince a muslim that Muhammad didn’t exist, just like nobody is gonna convince a Christian that Christ didn’t exist, or a Buddhist that Siddhartha didn’t exist, or a Hindu that Krishna didn’t exist. Also, a lot of Jay’s arguments, particularly the one about MHMD, were full of holes, given that different languages transliterated the same word differently based on their own alphabets, and that there are about so many ways Muhammad is spelled today – Muhammad, Mohammad, Muhamad, Mohamad, Mohammed, Mehmet, Mahmud, Mahmoud,…. So to just zero in on the MHMD argument makes little sense
I do think that there is one aspect of the NoMo argument that is useful: it can be used to completely discredit the al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock narratives. If enough of the non-muslim international community was convinced by this history that these adventures started w/ the Umayyads in Damascus, then it would be far more legitimate for Israel to demolish those islamic icons, and maybe build the Third Temple of Solomon there
But I don’t think that Jay’s argument, or now Ibn Warraq’s argument would work at all on muslims who are having doubts about islam. In fact, if they are convinced that he didn’t exist, while exiting islam is one possibility, another possibility is that they may decided that since nothing about Muhammad’s life is true, all they need to do is follow whatever is in the qur’an (which is now being given a new credibility by being shown to be plagiarized from Aramaic or Syriac literature), and do whatever they interpret it as. The hadiths, sira and tafseers would be irrelevant, but even just reading qur’an alone, there are enough hateful & violent verses that muslims worldwide follow today, and making Muhammad vanish from history won’t change that behavior
So I’m all for people using whatever strategy they think will work for going ahead w/ it. Jay’s strategy – of convincing people that the Muhammad of Mecca didn’t exist may work in Turkistan, but then again, it might excite them to know that the religion that they had been following before the Russians broke in was actually put together in their hearland – Buqhara, and inspire them to emulate the likes of Seljuq, Alp Arsalan, Timur or Babur.
gravenimage says
Infidel, respectful disagreement is *not* “internecine warfare”. Do you really believe that David Wood and Raymond Ibrahim–both frequent contributors to Jihad Watch–are sworn enemies of Robert Spencer? They are not.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Graven
I was thinking less about Robert, and more about Jay Smith. I have read “Did Muhammad Exist” and found it more or less convincing, although Robert omits to then discuss the small side-issue of the Arab conquests, and where, how and on what pretexts they started. But there are a lot of the “NoMo’s” out there (the people who insist that Muhammad didn’t exist), and they hijack a lot of discussions about Muhammad to this point, usually citing Jay Smith as their ultimate source. Raymond and David discuss that at lenth in this 3+ hour video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-o9g9Ph5Ak
So that’s the point I was making above. There is a proper place for this historical investigation of whether or not Muhammad existed, and if not, what exactly was the history of the Arab conquests (who spearheaded it?) and the creation of islam. It could be the subject of a lot of PhD courses in universities unafraid to pursue it
But from a point of persuading muslims to exit islam, this is not the right tool. When our side hasn’t (and can’t) definitely prove that Muhammad didn’t exist, that can’t be the primary tool in the efforts in question. However, that is what Jay Smith insists be the primary instrument used to de-islamize people, and he gives the example of Nigeria, where Christian missionaries supposedly tell him that they can’t use the sunnah literature to shame muslims b’cos of the violent repercussions, but that his material they can use. I actually don’t find that claim credible, since denying the historical existence of Muhammad would for muslims be tantamount to a denial of allah. However, Jay also concedes that this effort is not meant for the muslims on the streets, but in academics, which then begs the question: why is it being used by people on our side to derail debates b/w infidels and muslims about the morality of Muhammad and the values of islam
Reziac says
Infidel, you make many excellent points.
“I do think that there is one aspect of the NoMo argument that is useful: it can be used to completely discredit the al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock narratives.”
Be careful what you wish for. There is pretty good evidence that what Jews revere as the remaining wall of the Jerusalem temple was actually the perimeter wall of the Roman fortress.
But it’s a good point that if the Islamic symbolism of those places can be shown to be broken, that will tend to erode Muslim faith in Islam’s own narrative. And the best thing we can sow is doubt.
But another thought comes into my head: What’s really needed is a Christian miracle (or at least what average Muslims will so interpret) performed at the Dome of the Rock, in such a way that it’s clear Allah is displeased and wants Islam to cede the territory.
Someone once pointed out that a large rock dropped on the Kaaba from a suitable height would have a devastating effect, by showing Islam as weak and abandoned by Allah.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Reziac
I am a Gentile, so what the Jewish clergy ultimately decides to do w/ that area once those mosques are demolished is totally up to them. I suggested a temple on the basis that the first 2 were destroyed, so maybe they’d like a replacement. But if there are scriptural/theological reasons as to why that shouldn’t happen, I’d be the last to intervene
Princess says
300 years is not that long to pass on stories. It’s approximately 8 generations, if you assume that life expectancy averaged around 40 to 50 years.
OLD GUY says
If he was made up or not makes little difference to those who believe his writings, no matter how evil or backwards that are. Christianity leads to love thy neighbor and Islam leads to brutality.
gravenimage says
Ex-Muslim Scholar Ibn Warraq: Was Muhammad Even Real? The History They Don’t Want You to Question
……………………………………………………….
That is why it is impratnt that we ask.