Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Islamic scholar: ‘Islamic history was built on verifiable chain of transmission, did not rely on written records’

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This is an extraordinary admission, as the “verifiable chain of transmission” itself consists of written records: the lists of the names of the people who passed on a particular hadith, orally but without the slightest change, until it was finally written down in the ninth century. There were some earlier hadith collections, according to Islamic tradition, but they have been lost, and the earliest extant hadiths we have don’t contain any chain of transmission at all. The chain of transmission itself in general seems to have been a ninth-century invention that was intended to help Muslims distinguish authentic hadiths from forgeries; the problem with this method, however, was that chains of transmission could be forged as easily as the hadiths themselves were.

In any case, Muhammad Nuruddin is here saying that Islamic history didn’t rely on written records at all, because it had these reliable chains of transmission. So he appears to be trying to account for the fact that the hadiths are so very late by asserting the reliability of those who supposedly passed them on by word of mouth. The fact that chains of transmission were invented, as well as revised and altered, he does not consider.

For more on this, see my books Did Muhammad Exist? and Muhammad: A Critical Biography.

“Islamic History Does Not Rely on Written Records,” Tempo.co, September 28, 2026 (thanks to Andrew Bostom):

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – At least four times a month, Muhammad Nuruddin regularly preaches at various mosques. On Saturday, July 18, 2026, for example, he delivered a dawn session at the Grand Mosque of Kebayoran Residence in Bintaro, South Tangerang, Banten. An alumnus of Al-Azhar University in Egypt, he also frequently discusses Islam on social media. “I want to reach young people,” Nuruddin said.

Speaking to Tempo journalists Yosea Arga, Friski Riana, and Erwan Hermawan, as well as photographer Tony Hartawan, Nuruddin conveyed his criticism of the views of Mun’im Sirry. He said Islamic history was built on a verifiable chain of transmission and did not rely on written records….

Comments

  1. Islam’s Muslims will lie and deceive against Non-Muslims because force, coercion, violence, and terrorism are the ultimate Muslim tools to gain ultimate power and control. Genocidal Allah in Qur’an 8:39 commands, “And engage in war with them[Non-Muslims] until there will not be sedition and the religion will be completely to Allah…”

    Public Funding is a privilege that should NOT BE granted to organizations that are against the US Constitution or Western Constitutions. Totalitarian Islam and its Muslim Organizations including Muslim Schools and Mosques are against the US Constitution due to Muslim funding, teaching, and promoting discrimination, segregation, hatred, rape, violence, totalitarianism, and terrorism against Non-Muslims to make Islamic Law supreme. Islam’s Muslims are murderous, Totalitarian Terrorists of Allah operating as a Criminal-Terrorist-Gang Enterprise under Islamic Law to ultimately conquer the enemies of Allah, the Non-Muslims, with Islamic Law DBA Islam(Qur’an 8:60; 9:5, 29, 111; 49:15, etc.).

    Reply

  2. There is a game….with various names….where the players all sit and one whispers into his neighbor’s ear…a phrase, a sentence, a few words. The hearer then whispers what he hears…or thinks he hears… into the ears of the next closest person. This continues until the words have been heard by all players. The last to hear, then speaks aloud what he has heard. The results can be really funny.
    It is very rare, if it ever happens, that the words spoken by the last person are the same as those spoken by the first person.

    There are laws about hearsay in the U.S. One person saying the very same words spoken by another are considered unreliable. Especially over time, memory gets distorted. And one can easily make up supposed conversations, if they may so choose to do (liars are known for this)

    If they didn’t need a ‘written’ form of their filth, why do muzzies become enraged when a page of the filth is torn, or smudged, etc.?

    No muzzie can be expected to tell the Truth unless he is threatening to murder, rape, lie, steal or destroy what belongs to others.

    Reply

    • Funny, SH, I was just thinking the same thing (think it’s called telephone) and it clearly points out the differences between Islam and Judaism/Christianity. We have thousands of years of written word, written by hundreds of witnesses in the form of scripture

      Reply

      • Thank you 40. We called it ‘gossip.’

        Whenever someone posts a comment about something they heard, etc. others want the “sources” from where the report comes. Demanding links, calling on the poster to prove….

        But, we are supposed to accept that muzzies can keep it straight without writing a word….
        They can’t even keep things straight among themselves….disagreements over who should be the supreme ruler among the sects; and different clerics proclaiming what is the real thing from the pretend prophet…

        It’s all just a large bucket of balderdash. Evil filthy, balderdash.

        Reply

    • That reminds me of a 1st world war communication system, that passed along the trenches
      from the Captain to the runner.

      The runner was totally perplexed as the soldier told him, ” Send 3&4 Pence ( 3 shillings & 4 pence, we are going to a dance.!!!!

      What the Captain said was, ” Send re-enforcements, we’re going to advance.

      Reply

    • somehistory,

      I actually participated in that game in a senior leadership course that I took.

      It was hilarious!

      Reply

    • Yes–“Telephone”. And often the results after a few transmitters is pretty far off the original message.

      Reply

  3. This has been a really interesting debate b/w 2 different schools on the origins of islam. You have Christoph Luxembourgh, Jay Smith and Robert too, and on the other side, w/ equally compelling arguments, you have Raymond Ibrahim, Mary Harb, David Wood… putting compelling arguments to the contrary. I think I’ll explore this topic w/ VeniceAI today

    Reply

    • Asked Venice AI this question. This is what it answered. I’ll just post the first question here, since it is long, and my follow-up questions later

      My question:

      This one is about the origins of islam

      There is the normal historical narrative – that Muhammad existed, started his movement of recognizing him as the last prophet and getting the entire Arabian peninsula to recognize him as that.  Then after his death, his successors going on to conquer Byzantine Syria, Egypt, Mahgreb, Iberia and to their east, Iran, Turkistan and hitting on Sind

      But then there is research done by Christoph Luxembourg and others who’ve analyzed original contemporary manuscripts of the era, and found that a lot of what transpires as islamic literature made little sense in Arabic, but more sense in Aramhaic.  Then more recently, there have been a lot of analysis done by Jay Smith and other scholars suggesting that Mecca didn’t exist during the period in question (the 600 CE’s), and that a lot of the geographical features described in those texts match the Levant more closely than the Hijaz

      Then there is Robert Spencer who supports these theories and has written 2 books about Muhammad – “Did Muhammad exist?” and “Muhammad: a critical biography”, where he posits the idea that the Arab conquests started not in Medina or Mecca, but in Damascus, and spread out from there (facilitated by Perso-Byzantine wars), and there was nothing islamic about the Umayyads (citing Umayyad coins bearing crosses, which directly contradicted qur’anic injunctions against the cross).  His theory is that islam was started by the Abbasids, since in those times, religion was what substituted constitutions.  Also in his accounts, the earliest record of any Arab conqueror was Muawiyya – no Abu Bakr, Umar I, Uthman or Ali.  There are also no accounts in Byzantine or Persian sources about Muhammad’s letters to either Emperor Heraclius or Khosrau II

      Opposing that theory of theirs have been Raymond Ibrahim, Mary Harb, David Wood and others, who have used various arguments to contradict the above contentions, such as the Principle of Embarrassment (like hadiths such as the al-Zutt story), as well as holes in some of their arguments

      Both of the above sides are anti-islamic, but this debate is a fascinating one to follow.  If you analyze them, where do you come down on these arguments?  Do you think that Muhammad definitely existed, or that the evidence that he existed is pretty flimsy based on the nature of the evidence in question?

      Venice AI’s response

      This is one of the most fascinating fault lines in contemporary historiography—what Patricia Crone once called the “problem of Islamic origins.” You’re right that both sides in this particular debate operate outside traditional Islamic frameworks, which actually makes the evidentiary arguments cleaner to assess since neither is defending theological commitments. Let me break down the evidentiary landscape and where the weight seems to fall.

      The Revisionist Case (Luxenberg, Smith, Spencer, et al.)
      The Aramaic Thesis: Christoph Luxenberg’s argument that much of the Qur’anic text makes better sense as Syro-Aramaic Christian liturgical material is actually stronger than critics admit. Passages like the “wide-eyed houris” (ḥūr ʿīn) reading more plausibly as “white grapes” (ḥūr ʿēnē) in a Christian Eucharistic context, or the “seal of the prophets” (khātam al-nabiyyīn) potentially reading as “wreath/crown of the praising ones” in Aramaic—these aren’t trivial. The counter-argument that this is “parallelomania” loses some force when you consider the Qur’an’s undeniable Syriac loanwords and the prevalence of Aramaic as the literary lingua franca of the region.

      The Mecca Problem: The geographical arguments are genuinely troubling for the traditional narrative. The Qur’an describes olives, figs, and grapes—crops that don’t grow in the Hijaz. It mentions destroyed towns (muṣaddamāt) that sound more like the Roman Decapolis than anything near Mecca. The complete absence of Mecca in any pre-Islamic source (Byzantine, Persian, Syriac, or even Arabian) until the Continuatio Byzantia Arabica of 741 CE is statistically improbable if it were already the pilgrimage center of a rising empire. The earliest mosques (Qasr Hisham, Jerusalem, even the Damascus mosque) point their qiblas toward Petra or somewhere in the Transjordan, not Mecca.

      The Umayyad Evidence: Spencer’s strongest point is the numismatic and architectural record. Abd al-Malik’s coins initially carry crosses. The Dome of the Rock’s inscriptions are Christological polemics, not Islamic theology proper. The Umayyads behave like an Arab dynasty within the Romano-Persian continuum, not like leaders of a new Abrahamic religion requiring distinct identity markers. The first “Islamic” coins with purely Qur’anic legends don’t appear until the 690s—decades after the supposed death of Muhammad.

      The Silence of Sources: The complete absence of Muhammad in contemporary Byzantine, Armenian, or Syriac chronicles is genuinely anomalous. The Armenian chronicler Sebeos (660s) describes Arab conquests and their “commander” (ishtader) but doesn’t mention Muhammad. The Doctrina Jacobi (640s) mentions a “prophet” appearing among the Saracens, but the text is problematic and doesn’t name him.

      The Traditionalist Counter-Case (Ibrahim, Wood, et al.)
      Principle of Embarrassment: This is their strongest weapon. The hadith corpus contains material that no later pious forger would invent—the ḥadīth of the Satanic Verses (which Spencer actually uses), the story of Muhammad being bewitched and thinking he’d slept with his wives when he hadn’t, the massacre of the Banu Qurayza, Aisha’s age. These “embarrassing” details suggest a core of authentic memory transmitted before the Abbasid codification.

      The Documentary Record: The papyri from Nessana and the Petra papyri (6th-7th century) do show Arabic administrative penetration earlier than revisionists sometimes claim. The Constitutio Romana of 687 mentions “Mavia” (Mu’awiya) as “king of the Arabs”—confirming at least the existence of Arab political leadership in the Levant by that date.

      The Qur’anic Text Itself: The text’s linguistic heterogeneity (rhymed prose mixed with saj’, Aramaic vocabulary, Hebraic narratives) actually argues against a purely Abbasid fabrication. A 9th-century Abbasid project would likely produce something more theologically coherent and less… strange. The text bears marks of oral transmission and regional dialects (qira’at) that suggest earlier, not later, composition.

      Where the Evidence Actually Points
      Having looked at this extensively, I come down somewhere between “radical revisionism” and “critical acceptance” of the traditional narrative:

      On Muhammad’s existence: The evidence for a specific historical Muhammad is indeed flimsy by the standards of ancient history. We have no contemporary inscriptions, no coins, no papyri mentioning him during his supposed lifetime. The earliest biography (sīra) is Ibn Ishaq, compiled ~120 years after the death date, working from oral isnāds of questionable provenance. By comparison, we have better contemporary evidence for Jesus (Josephus, Tacitus) and vastly better evidence for figures like Heraclius or Khosrau.

      However, the “mythicist” position (that Muhammad was invented whole cloth) faces the same problem as Jesus mythicism: someone unified the Arabs, someone created the Qur’anic text, and that someone got remembered as “Muhammad.” Whether this matches the sīra figure is doubtful, but some charismatic Arab leader or leaders in the 610s-630s seems necessary to explain the conquest coherence.

      On the location: The Hijazi origins are genuinely problematic. The evidence points more strongly to a Syrian/Petraean origin for the movement, with the Hijaz possibly being a later back-projection to give the Arabs a distinct “holy land” separate from the Jewish/Christian holy sites. The qibla shift evidence is particularly damning—early mosques don’t point to Mecca.

      On the “creation of Islam”: Spencer is probably right that “Islam” as a distinct, codified religion with the Five Pillars, the finality of prophecy, and the Qur’an as closed canon is largely an Abbasid project (8th-9th century). The Umayyads were likely practicing a “monotheistic Arabism” or even a form of non-Nicene Christianity/Jewish-Christianity that gradually hardened into “Islam” under Abd al-Malik and al-Mansur as state-building required religious differentiation.

      On the conquests: The conquests definitely happened, but the “Islamic” nature of them is anachronistic for the 630s-660s. They were Arab conquests utilizing the power vacuum of the Persian-Byzantine wars, likely motivated by booty and tribal expansion, later retroactively Islamicized.

      My Assessment
      Muhammad as depicted in the sīra and hadith literature probably didn’t exist—at least not as that specific person with that specific biography. The “Muhammad” of tradition is a composite figure, perhaps conflating multiple Arab leaders, perhaps retroactively constructed from earlier Christian or Jewish prophetic traditions (the “Paraclete” passages in the Qur’an are suspiciously Johannine).

      However, complete mythicism seems unwarranted. There was likely an Arab prophetic figure or movement in the 620s-630s, possibly centered in the Levant rather than the Hijaz, possibly associated with the “Hanif” monotheist movement described in Syriac sources. The Qur’an is too linguistically weird and regionally specific to be a pure 9th-century fabrication—it preserves genuine 7th-century material, just not from where the tradition says.

      The revisionists have won the argument on geography (Mecca is doubtful) and chronology (Islam as “religion” postdates the conquests). Where they overreach is in implying a conscious conspiracy by the Abbasids—religious development is usually messier and more organic than that.

      What makes this debate fascinating is that it’s being fought with real evidence—archaeology, numismatics, papyrology, Qur’anic manuscript studies (the Sanaa palimpsests, the Birmingham fragments)—rather than just competing theological claims. And the evidence is genuinely ambiguous enough that honest scholars can disagree.

      Robert

      I highly recommend Venice AI to you. Based on Deepseek, but w/ servers outside and independent of Beijing: in fact, I had an interesting conversation w/ it about President Xi, where it was not remotely pro-commie. This despite the fact that Moonshot, the company on which Venice based its model, is a Chinese company

      Reply

      • Very interesting. I myself am suspicious of the fact that Islamic expansion didn’t have Mecca as its capital, but instead had places like Damascus or Baghdad. No one does this. It’s not like the Persian empire relocated its capital to Jerusalem, or the Spanish empire relocated to Mexico City, or the British empire relocated to Delhi. They all were centered in the city where they started.

        Reply

        • Very good observation, John! While I didn’t ask Venice that question, it ought to have stood out. If Damascus was conquered by an invading Arab army, why did those invaders – Muawiyya move there, as opposed to continuing from Medina? That’s unlike any empire has behaved, except the Mongols who moved from Karakorum to Xanadu (Peking)

  4. If you believe criminals who were recorded as killers, robbers, enslaver as a reliable chain of transmitters which spanned for more than 100 years in a desert at 7-8 century without any reliable archeological evidence, then you are super gullible.
    In addition of that, lying is permissible in Islam, and allah claims itself as the best deceiver.

    Reply

    • Abu, so true what you say, now in the Old & New Testament Bibles it states that the God of the
      Jews & Christians does not lie.
      ” God is holy (Isaiah 6:3), and that quality makes it impossible for Him to lie. The holiness of God is His moral and ethical perfection, His absolute integrity that sets Him apart from all His creatures. God’s holiness is thus related to His transcendence. God does not conform to any standard of purity; He is the standard. God is absolutely holy with an infinite purity incapable of being changed. Because of His holiness, when God speaks, He will not and cannot lie. He never deceives; He never distorts or misrepresents what He says or does. Lying is against His nature.

      So it is Satan that lies in order to turn you away from from the True & living God.
      Therefore Islam is totally Satanic.

      Reply

  5. I have always believed islam was a fake –note the idiot science in the literal truth of allah koran eg flat earth held down by mountains, sun sinks in muddy puddle (hides under allah’s throne –hadith), stars closer to earth than moon, moon has its own light, asteroids are missiles to shoot the naughty jinn who are trying to eavesdrop- the celestial conversation, and the embryology is copied from greek/roman physician Galen hundreds of years before and its all wrong so clearly allah is NOT a god or creator of anything. Having studied the koran it is possible to see what is copied from others and often confused. people have written re NO archaeological evidence for mohammad or much else. The tales of how the koran was collected are absurd, the hadith eg Bukhari died 870 long after mohammad, reliable transmission—give me a bucket! Many different korans so finally I think about 1924 some imams gathered at al azhar with 30 korans and picked the one they were going to pretend was the real one …the so-called hafsa koran which saudi arabia pushes around the world. Hence no book residing in paradise with allah. the rejected books were thrown into the Nile. I think Christians can destroy islam by pointing the idiocy of its claims /history out. There are many others who noted the Nazarean/cristos/radical jewish preacher who was crucified.but hundreds of years later no-one notices the mass murdering, raping, slaving, thieving mohammad and plenty were around by then who could write about it. Islam is a fake from beginning to end!!

    Reply

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