Islam: The Untold Story

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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I already proved using his own religion’s texts that his “prophet” forced a 6 year old girl to marry him and then raped her when she was 9. And he can’t even be honest about it, can’t even be proud of his own prophet’s pedophilia and sex slavery. Still lies and lies, more ‘taqiyya’ as usual.

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The full inscription was already linked to: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/C_1913-1213-1

Dismissing evidence because you do not read Arabic (perhaps?) is the logical fallacy of Appeal to Ignorance.

MHMD
MHMD2429×1241 591 KB

I have uploaded a translation of the script above according to my basic knowledge of Arabic, you can clearly make out the name MHMD (written left to right), though l’m uncertain which letter is the D.

Here is the name Muhammad gotten via Google / Wikipedia, the info was easily accessible: مُحَمَّدٌ ‎

By the way, the morphology of the H and M change a lot in Arabic script, even within the same sentence (e.g. on the coin, the first M resembles a seedling sprouting vertically upward, the second M resembles a bud on an horizontal branch - these are one of a handful of ways M is written) but nobody argues against the name MUHAMMAD being on that coin. Nobody.

I’m not going to digest a video to bolster a video [to bolster a video] especially for the same author who is already shown to be a prolific liar / masseuse of truth.

I’ve already countered the information about biographies. Moreover my response could apply to any number of pre-Caxton notables.

Deferring judgement of my omissions = Appeal to Ignorance logical fallacy.

In the passage you quote, we see Tom Holland at it again, focussing only on military triumph, flippantly dismissing Muslims as only worthy of fighting and being fought. In fact, the military conquests were only permitted as defensive wars in Islam, e.g. if preachers were attacked, or Muslims were attacked or allies of Muslims were attacked. Swathes of people converted to Islam because - and this will give Tom Holland a heart attack - they found Islam better than Christianity, theologically.

As for Tom Holland’s other sources, a west Syrian here, a bishop there - he is not going to the source, rather selecting opponent’s writings, especially opponents with vested interests (the Byzantine Church had long ago become a money-making enterprise, with, well, Byzantine over-complex bureaucracy - they didn’t like any new religion to appear, let alone Judaism).

Please give me more arguments. Also: please avoid logical fallacies. Very big list of fallacies here, right in at the deep end but you’ll get the hang of it: List of fallacies - Wikipedia
‎

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That would be the fallacy if I were dismissing it based on ignorance, whereas what I did was acknowledge it from the standpoint of ignorance. Indeed I don’t see the relevance of that coin to Holland’s case when he holds up a coin with Muhammad’s name on it that was minted 88 years earlier.

Well that’s what we’re arguing about, so if you refuse to look at and respond to the evidence presented, we may as well stop right here.

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What inspired me to start this thread was that Tom Holland’s video exposes Islam to the same kind of modern scholarly critical historical investigation that the person of Jesus and early Christianity has been undergoing for approximately 300 years since it began in the context of the European enlightenment. To my knowledge, the historical Muhammad and the inception of Islam has not undergone the same kind of academic historical investigation.

The reaction of Christians to historical critical scrutiny spawned Christian fundamentalism as it evolved in the 20th century. So I’m not surprised when Muslims react in a similar way. That doesn’t mean that I accept every argument, Holland or the other critical scholars in the video make. What I think is important is open critical dialogue on the issues as difficult as that can be to carry out when emotions run high.

Accusations of lying and other ad hominem responses are of course counterproductive to such dialogue. But at least I can say that your interest in the topic moved me to download Holland’s book and look into the matter further after letting it lie dormant for over six months. Thank you for that.

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Ok so what is Holland’s argument exactly, other than the gap between existence and written history? The Prophet - as l have explained - forbade the writing of hadith as he wanted the oral traditions to be passed from authority to authority, rather than a delocalised haze of ahadith compiled in multiple books (as eventually has now happened, we have 5 main codified compilations in book form plus many others). The reason is that it must be transmitted based on trust, with the narrators well known to each other at each stage of transmission, and well respected. Like the security chain (forget the official term) of Bitcoin. The entire appeal of Bitcoin is that it can’t be forged, whereas the world right now is HEAVING with forged gold and silver bullion and coins (gold’s properties can be very closely mimicked by tungsten or something, it’s a minefield, you could lose everything).

For forged ahadith to find their way into books, and those booiks to become revered as an adjunct to the Qur’an, was rightly deemed by our Prophet to be very dangerous. Many false things may be legitimised that way, and evil characters foretold in prophecy may even be called good guys and so many many people may end up in hell for eternity for following an apocalyptic evil character e.g. we have a prophecy about a very evil character due within a century or two (so some think) whom many assert is actually a very good character, and we have seen traditions go either way. Very bad. I love ahadith but l agree it’s dangerous to commit them to writing.

I’ve already explained this.

Apologies if that logical fallacy call was in error, but at best it’s a very fine line what you wrote. It’s better to say youi’re undecided and perhaps ask for clarity.

I’m happy to continue but please, summarise the arguments. I’m sorry if my earlier response seemed grumpy but Holland is clearly driving a narrative excising huge amounts of flesh and l’m feeling it keenly, he’s taken the life out of our history via his own red editing pen, and presenting the skeletal fragments of what thus appears to be this, only this:

A group of swarthy road warriors dressed in tattered clothing, waving swords, have taken fair-skinned christendom for themselves. Lo! The sound of a heavy chain clanks. Darkness has descended. A sexy female voice sings for her lost church oh my! And what will these dark thin men do with my daughter? They will surely capture her. We must fight them back, all they know is war.

Sure he doesn’t explicitly state this but it’s all in the innuendo. Tom Holland = argument from innuendo. Low on actual discourse.

Please DO feed me more actual arguments from Tom Holland, but please look at my rebuttals and know also that he is NOT a mainstream academic, it’d be better to try mainstream anti-islamic academic authors. Also l’d likle your takedown of the phi ratio argument and the sana’a mosque meridian argument for Makkah, which underlines that the sacred heart of Islam was indeed Makkah, not Tom’s Petra, Jerusalem, whatevs.

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I am not making ad hominem in the sense of a logical fallacy. It’s not a logical fallacy if l have examined his work first, before declaring him weak. As l have done.

As for Christian historicity, that is the fallacy of whattaboutery. A Muslim may be already evinced of the falsehood of Pauline Xtianity and its sacred history, yet still believe in the reality of Muhammad.

Moreover, Islam does teach a true history of Jesus, significantly similar, significantly different. You’ll have to go case by case, faith by faith. But as l’ve stated earlier on: historcism is a counter-movement already decried in the Qur’an, with people always dismissing new revelations from new prophets, as mere “tales of the ancients”

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A post was split to a new topic: Muhammad and Aisha

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I’ll agree to look at that claim if you agree to look at the evidence that I’ve presented. That seems only fair.

The claim that the center of their religion is the axis mundior center of the Earth is A traditional claim of tribal religions since the beginning of time. Literal minded Jews thoughtthat Jerusalem Temple is the center. They call it Zion. Early Christians spiritualize the claim, and looked toward the coming of the new Jerusalem out of heaven.

Here’s a list sites for which that distinction is claimed according to Wikipedia:

Shall we compare the relative merits of the various claims? I prefer to think of God as one whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. To do less is to identify one’s religious faith with the finite ego. History shows that that leads to conflict like we see rampant in the Middle East which is the antithesis of religion worthy of the name.

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Hi there, l only said Axis Mundi by way of swagger, we don’t actually have a geocentric belief system and l was only aware of Jerusalem having the claim of Axis Mundi - the Mir Mine in Sakha does indeed look like a belly button so for argument’s sake let’s agree that it very much the “innie” belly button of the earth, but in the same breath the Ka’aba would be an “outie”. But the main point was: the geometry of it places it at a Phi Ratio point, specifically the upper phi ratio point, equivalent to the navel point.

The claims as elaborated on the thread itself, is that no other sacred shrine shares this distinction. Moreover, the Ka’aba was always claimed by the Muslims to be the Noble Sanctuary, The House, the first house, l think it means the first house of worship, but possibly even the first house per se, if it’s true that Prophet Adam started it - Allah knows best.

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My point was: Makkah in latter day Saudi Arabia, was IT, and always was IT, it was never Tom Holland’s Petra or Jerusalem, lost from cultural memory. We always knew our faith came from Makkah and Madinah and we always knew where that Makkah was, it was the city that is presently called Makkah, and we always knew the time our Prophet was born and the time he died.

Tom Holland only has a weak argument about time delay in oral traditions being transcribed (when vast numbers of Muslims from distant lands were converting and networking with each other, setting up centres of trade and learning etc., and so there was a dire need to convey the traditions to them, so we disobeyed our Prophet and codified them i.e. wrote them down, and made copies and distributed the copies and deposited them in libraries etc.).

That an some Foley sound FX of chains clanking, exotic female singing, you can almost smell the Frankincense. Blah. That seems to be the entirety of his “schtick”.

Let me remind though: in our faith, we were only permitted to make war defensively, or if an allied group is attacked, or if our preachers are attacked / blocked.

READ THIS IF NOTHING ELSE:---- We were not marauders, conquistadores, as Holland so badly needs us to be, and this is irrelevant even to his core thesis of historicity (saying Islam arrived 200 years after the Prophet, in Palestine / Jordan not Makkah), it just goes to show, he’s just out to discredit us any which way.-------

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By the way, l don’t suppose any of those towns are at the uppermost Phi Ratio point along the lines of longitude. The point was, the navel is the uppermost Phi Ratio point along the human body.

Hence Makkah has the right to be called the navel of the earth.

As the navel is physical centre of the body, then Makkah can validly be called the Axis Mundi (and that is clearly what l always meant).

You output a list of towns, but none of them are at a Phi Ratio point of longitude. Are they? So why list them? I’m genuinely curious. I didn’t want to berate you any more hence l didn’t say this at the time plus l was hoping you’d provide more Tom Holland for me. As it’s gone quiet, let’s come back to your handlist and how it relates to the two mathematical miracles of Makkah / the Ka’aba, Islam’s holiest place.

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Just as Eusebius, five hundred years previously, had sought answers to very similar questions in the life of a Roman emperor, so now did Ibn Hisham—a scholar originally from Iraq who by the early ninth century had settled in Egypt—likewise turn to biography in order to fathom the purposes of heaven. “Sira,” he termed his chosen genre: “exemplary behaviour.” It was less what his subject had done that concerned Ibn Hisham than how he had done it. There was an urgent reason for this. The hero of Ibn Hisham’s biography, so Muslims believed, offered the ultimate in role models. God had chosen him to serve as His mouthpiece. It was through him that the All Merciful had revealed His wishes to the Arabs, and graced them with those same revelations that had then inspired them, two centuries before the time of Ibn Hisham, to erupt from their deserts and tear the world’s superpowers to pieces. “We are God’s helpers and the assistants of His prophet, and will fight men until they believe in God; and he who believes in God and His prophet has protected his life and property from us; and he who disbelieves we will fight in God unceasingly, and killing him will be a small matter to us.” 8 (Ibn Hisham, p. 629 )

This, according to Ibn Hisham, was the swaggering manifesto promoted by Arab warriors on the eve of their conquest of the world. But who, precisely, was this “prophet?” Ibn Hisham’s aim was to provide the answer. Sitting in Egypt, surrounded by the ruins of forgotten and superseded civilisations, he regarded his sira not merely as a biography but as a record of the most momentous revolution in history. Its subject was a man who had died only two years before the dismemberment of the Roman and Persian empires had begun: an Arab by the name of Muhammad. Aged forty, and with a moderate career as a merchant behind him, he had experienced—if Ibn Hisham were to be believed—history’s most epochal mid-life crisis. Restless and dissatisfied, he had begun to roam the wilderness which stretched beyond his home town, “and not a stone or tree that he passed by but would say, ‘Peace be unto you, O prophet of God.’ (Ibid., p. 105.)

Most spectacular and irrefutable sign of God’s favour, however, was the transformation of Muhammad, in no more than a decade, from refugee to effective master of Arabia. He led twenty-seven campaigns in all, according to Ibn Hisham; and if occasionally there was a defeat, and if the angels, by and large, chose not to fight as they had done at Badr, but rather to serve him as a reserve, then perhaps his ultimate triumph could be considered only the more extraordinary for it. By 632, the traditional date of his death, paganism in Arabia had everywhere been put in shadow. Sweetest moment of all had been the conquest, two years previously, of Mecca itself. Riding into his hometown, Muhammad had ordered the Ka’ba stripped of its gods. A great bonfire had been lit. The toppled idols had been consigned to its flames. The Devil, summoning his progeny around him, had cried out in woe: “Abandon all hope that the community of Muhammad will ever revert to shirk after this day of theirs!” 21 (Waqidi:Kitab al-Maghazi, quoted by Hawting (1999), p. 69. )

Well might he have yowled. The venerable sanctuary, that pre-eminent bastion of paganism, had been brought at last to a due submission: to “Islam.” This consecration of Mecca to the service of the One True God, however, was far from an innovation. What Muhammad had done, so he revealed to his followers, was restore the shrine to its primordial, pristine state. “God made Mecca holy the day He created heaven and earth. It is the holy of holies until the resurrection day.” 22 (Ibn Hisham, p. 629)

By the time that Ibn Hisham sat down to write his biography, it was not only Arabs who faced Mecca as they prayed. Strange peoples of whom the Prophet had possibly never even heard—Visigoths and Berbers, Sogdians and Parthians—could all be seen treading the sands of Arabia: pilgrims bound for the Ka’ba. Although Ibn Hisham himself did not touch upon this phenomenon in his sira, there was no shortage of other scholars eager to relate the extraordinary conquests, far beyond the limits of Arabia, that had followed the death of the Prophet. Such relish was hardly surprising. Back in the wild days of their paganism, nothing had delighted the Arabs more than a spot of loud-mouthed boasting, be it about some heroic feat of arms, some stirring deed of banditry, or some glorious humiliation forced upon a rival. Now, when they blew their own trumpets, it was all in the cause of God. From Badr to the ends of the world, the story of Islam had been one of storming military triumph. Cities infinitely greater than Mecca had been captured; peoples infinitely mightier than the Quraysh obliged to bow their necks. The scale of these victories, won in the teeth of ancient empires and venerable religions, surely furnished all the proof that anyone might need of the truth of the Prophet’s claims. “This is a sign that God loves us,” as one exultant Arab put it, “and is pleased with our faith, namely that He has given us dominion over all peoples and religions.” 23 (From a West Syrian Christian text which records a disputation between a monk and “a man of the Arabs.” Although the monk—hardly surprisingly, considering its authorship—ends up decisively winning the argument, the suggestion that God’s approval of Islam had manifested itself in the sheer scale of the Arab conquests was a difficult one for Christians to rebut.)

Ibn Hisham: The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, trans. A. Guillaume (Oxford, 1955)

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Assuming that’s Tom Holland, let’s get stuck in:

QUOTE: Just as Eusebius, five hundred years previously, had sought answers to very similar questions in the life of a Roman emperor, so now did Ibn Hisham—a scholar originally from Iraq who by the early ninth century had settled in Egypt—likewise turn to biography in order to fathom the purposes of heaven.
RESPONSE: Speculative, loaded stereotype of Ibn Hisham’s motivation.

QUOTE: “Sira,” he termed his chosen genre: “exemplary behaviour.” It was less what his subject had done that concerned Ibn Hisham than how he had done it. There was an urgent reason for this. The hero of Ibn Hisham’s biography, so Muslims believed, offered the ultimate in role models.
RESPONSE: No. Seerah means “Life”, “Path”, “Journey”. In other words, the story-arc of a person’s life. This is more or less an exact match with the word “Biography” which it almost always refers to as well.
But Tom Holland wastes no time in his defaming the Prophet. Tom Holland wrongly says seerah means exemplary behaviour and was a coinage of Ibn Hisham, and then dismisses our belief as speculative, that the Prophet’s life was exemplary. Let me guess. Tom will show us it wasn’t exemplary. DEAR TOM HOLLAND: PLEASE STAY ON TOPIC, YOU HAVE YOUR HANDS FULL TRYING TO PROVE THAT ISLAM WAS INVENTED 200 YEARS AFTER THE PROPHET, BY IBN HISHAM IN PETRA-JERUSALEM, USING INK MADE OF, EH, BLOOD & THE DEVIL’S BILE JUICES, AND A DEAD NUN’S EYEBALLS PICKLED IN A JAR RIGHT THERE NEXT TO HIM, YES? OH SO MORAL THESE ARABS WERE, OR WERE THEY? TOM INVESTIGATES FURTHER …

QUOTE: God had chosen him to serve as His mouthpiece. It was through him that the All Merciful had revealed His wishes to the Arabs, and graced them with those same revelations that had then inspired them, two centuries before the time of Ibn Hisham, to erupt from their deserts and tear the world’s superpowers to pieces.
RESPONSE: Here we go again. Thin swarthy nomads with red eyes (as seen in the documentary, courtest of Tom) tore (don’t worry, we can get them with hi-tech laser weapons) the good Christian and Pagan superpower empires to pieces. That’s all it was for Tom. In fact, Muslims only fought defensive wars for 3 reasons that l know of: 1. If preachers were blocked / attacked / killed 2. If Muslims were attacked (including diplomatic missions being killed, which is forbidden in Islam) 3. If people allied to Muslims were attacked.

Mass conversion happened in an s-curve / bell curve (depending on your axes) distribution from what l recall. I think in the Levant and Arabia the conversion was more rapid than say, Persia and Central Asia. In the Levant for example, an entire Talmud academy would convert to Islam overnight and so the rest of the Jewish community would rapidly follow. The Jews and Christians in the Levant knew their scriptures very well and understood a very taboo subject: that there was one more Prophet to come, aka “the Comforter”, or “That Prophet”, and so forth. It’s all been dumbed down now but there was a significant buzz of anticipation way back then. The clergy more often than not hated it, they were out of a job.

The bottom line is that Islam was better, uncorrupted, more sound.

But no, to Tom:

  1. The Muslims were desert locusts (even though l think they were mostly from towns and cities)
  2. Hell, they weren’t even Muslims, that came 200 years later, remember? Right Tom?
  3. So ner ner, Muslim Arabs did nothing good! Certain facts be damned of course. And now Tom can put his red editing pen away. Ok let’s backtrack and see what else Tom edited out of the annals of history.

QUOTE: “We are God’s helpers and the assistants of His prophet, and will fight men until they believe in God; and he who believes in God and His prophet has protected his life and property from us; and he who disbelieves we will fight in God unceasingly, and killing him will be a small matter to us.” 8 (Ibn Hisham, p. 629 )
RESPONSE: This is very poor referencing. Which edition of Ibn Hisham is the page numbering from?
Also, has the author considered how this might be the correct thing to say, before rebutting it, i.e. has the author taken a balanced approach via looking for context?
Example: “We are God’s Helpers” is from Qur’an 3:52 and the POSSIBLE ORIGIN OF THE TOWN NAME “NAZARETH” and “NAZARENE” as meaning “CHRISTIAN” - because this verse describes how Jesus’s (peace be upon him) disciples declared themselves to be loyal to God and his Messiah Prophet Jesus (peace be upon him). They were thus known as the Helpers, aka THE NASARA. Their town became the town of The Helpers, a stronghold against Jewish and Pagan Roman persecution.

For a Muslim to utter this, they would be taking after the apostles of Christ, and thus assuming the mantle of Christianity, accepting the baton so to speak.
As for talk of surrender and protection, or failing that: war - that sounds like a standard declaration of war but as l say: war in Islam is only defensive - when preachers are blocked / attacked / killed, or the Muslim state is attacked, or allied states of the Muslim state are attacked.

Still, it would be nice to know the context.

QUOTE: This, according to Ibn Hisham, was the swaggering manifesto promoted by Arab warriors on the eve of their conquest of the world.
RESPONSE: AHHHH, here’s the context according to Tom: It’s not about defensive war, no, it’s about Muslims, specifically, thin wiry desert Arabs (don’t they know they will be attacked by hi-tech lasers? tee hee), having a vendetta against THE WORLD, NO MATTER WHAT THE WORLD HAS DONE, because if it’s against the WORLD it’s against people those desert Arabs HAVEN’T EVEN MET YET!

So, as you can see, Tom’s real purpose is to present the early Muslims, and thus Islam per se, as evil, violent, rapacious.

QUOTE: But who, precisely, was this “prophet?” Ibn Hisham’s aim was to provide the answer. Sitting in Egypt, surrounded by the ruins of forgotten and superseded civilisations, he regarded his sira not merely as a biography but as a record of the most momentous revolution in history. Its subject was a man who had died only two years before the dismemberment of the Roman and Persian empires had begun: an Arab by the name of Muhammad.
RESPONSE: The RUINS of Egypt. The DISMEMBERMENT of the Roman and Persian empires. Note Tom’s choice of words.

QUOTE: Aged forty, and with a moderate career as a merchant behind him, he had experienced—if Ibn Hisham were to be believed—history’s most epochal mid-life crisis.
RESPONSE: The Prophet Muhammad is NO WAY EVER going to be introduced as a Prophet by Tom. I can easily talk of Mormon prophets as a Muslim even though Mormonism is to me abhorrent and madeup. The fact is, to the Mormons, their prophets were prophets, so l shall refer to them as such.

The Prophet’s past as a merchant is reduced to “moderate” when in fact, he was a HIGHLY REGARDED merchant, known as “Al Amin” (The Trustworthy) due to his honesty and fair-dealing, in a world before police and credit-card chargebacks, a world rife with dishonesty like today, only back then, there was less you could do if you were cheated. So Muhammad was greatly appreciated by those who dealt with him. He threw all that away when he dared to declare Monotheism, he ended up in a lifetime of poverty and many years of persecution and turmoil - and STILL rejected a long-delayed compromise / fabulous power sharing deal offered by the pagans who tried to have Allah as a partner of their intercessor-idols. The Prophet told them “where to go” so to speak.

QUOTE: Restless and dissatisfied, he had begun to roam the wilderness which stretched beyond his home town, “and not a stone or tree that he passed by but would say, ‘Peace be unto you, O prophet of God.’ (Ibid., p. 105.)
RESPONSE: See? I wasn’t being oversensitive about Tom saying the Prophet’s career had been “moderate” in success. Tom builds on it to say that the Prophet was thus restless and annoyed and thus turned manic-depressive, and started hearing stuff, right?

QUOTE:
Most spectacular and irrefutable sign of God’s favour, however, was the transformation of Muhammad, in no more than a decade, from refugee to effective master of Arabia. He led twenty-seven campaigns in all, according to Ibn Hisham; and if occasionally there was a defeat, and if the angels, by and large, chose not to fight as they had done at Badr, but rather to serve him as a reserve, then perhaps his ultimate triumph could be considered only the more extraordinary for it. By 632, the traditional date of his death, paganism in Arabia had everywhere been put in shadow. Sweetest moment of all had been the conquest, two years previously, of Mecca itself. Riding into his hometown, Muhammad had ordered the Ka’ba stripped of its gods. A great bonfire had been lit. The toppled idols had been consigned to its flames. The Devil, summoning his progeny around him, had cried out in woe: “Abandon all hope that the community of Muhammad will ever revert to shirk after this day of theirs!” 21 (Waqidi:Kitab al-Maghazi, quoted by Hawting (1999), p. 69. )

Well might he have yowled. The venerable sanctuary, that pre-eminent bastion of paganism, had been brought at last to a due submission: to “Islam.” This consecration of Mecca to the service of the One True God, however, was far from an innovation. What Muhammad had done, so he revealed to his followers, was restore the shrine to its primordial, pristine state. “God made Mecca holy the day He created heaven and earth. It is the holy of holies until the resurrection day.” 22 (Ibn Hisham, p. 629)

By the time that Ibn Hisham sat down to write his biography, it was not only Arabs who faced Mecca as they prayed. Strange peoples of whom the Prophet had possibly never even heard—Visigoths and Berbers, Sogdians and Parthians—could all be seen treading the sands of Arabia: pilgrims bound for the Ka’ba. Although Ibn Hisham himself did not touch upon this phenomenon in his sira, there was no shortage of other scholars eager to relate the extraordinary conquests, far beyond the limits of Arabia, that had followed the death of the Prophet.

RESPONSE: I’ve already answered this tract in an earlier post my friend.
Note that Visigoths themselves may have been strangers, but the Prophet saw the future and thus likely knew of all people on earth in broad terms and in specific terms as regard their role in eschatology.

Note also that Europoid races were known to the early Arabs e.g. a red haired male was actually the first ruler of Islam after the Prophet - Suhayb the Roman (Allah be pleased with him), a temporary placeholder while they elected the next Caliph, eventually settling on Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him) - the longest-standing friend of the Prophet. He wasn’t a Roman directly - the Byzantines weren’t blonde as Sam Shamoun, himself claiming to be Syrian, claims. Suhayb was from Basra in Iraq, he was enslaved by the Romans. I’d guess his origins were from northern Europe, many northern tribes attacked the Middle East, many were captured in the progress, many even settled there. I digress.

QUOTE: Such relish was hardly surprising. Back in the wild days of their paganism, nothing had delighted the Arabs more than a spot of loud-mouthed boasting, be it about some heroic feat of arms, some stirring deed of banditry, or some glorious humiliation forced upon a rival. Now, when they blew their own trumpets, it was all in the cause of God. From Badr to the ends of the world, the story of Islam had been one of storming military triumph. Cities infinitely greater than Mecca had been captured; peoples infinitely mightier than the Quraysh obliged to bow their necks. The scale of these victories, won in the teeth of ancient empires and venerable religions, surely furnished all the proof that anyone might need of the truth of the Prophet’s claims. “This is a sign that God loves us,” as one exultant Arab put it,

RESPONSE: HOOTERS SOUND. TOM IN FULL-ON BEAST MODE. TOM IN FULL-ON BEAST MODE. TOM IN FULL-ON BEAST MODE. TOM IN FULL-ON BEAST MODE. HOOTERS SOUND.
Confidentially whispers: l don’t think Tom Holland likes Muslims much.

QUOTE: Ibn Hisham: The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, trans. A. Guillaume (Oxford, 1955)
RESPONSE: Oh maybe this was the book reference. Good good.

Okay so l’ve made one edit to correct the name of Suhayb the Roman but it wasn’t important anyway. The main thing l want to say, at this point, is that Tom Holland is execrable as a scholar of anything, let alone Islam. In the OP video, he briefly chats with Syed Hossein Nasr, University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University. Tom chops up the interview to give a soundbite: he asks if a non-Muslim can truly understand Islam. Professor Nasr replies “No”. I seriously doubt the exchange was so linear. I’d say in principle “Yes” but as Islam is in my opinion a true religion, it will go against the grain of the world. So, unless a person genuinely wants to hear Islam’s side, he will not hear Islam’s side. He won’t want to be associated with wiry desert nomads with red eyes and tatty clothing (as Tom Holland portrays in his docu-farces). He won’t want to be poor. He will want to fornicate endlessly, he will want intoxicants - weed, beer - and processed foods, etc etc. My point is: If you want to look at Islam you should NOT start with Tom Holland. You should avoid Tom Holland until you are familiar enough with Islam that you see Tom as light humour on a grey day. I said try other anti-Islamic scholars but coming to think of it, they’re all much like Tom Holland. Shoddy, smoke n mirrors, low blows. I don’t think God wants to be found so people like him will certainly not help you understand Islam. Try genuine Islamic sources. Backtracking slightly let me say also: I am Sunni, Prof. Syed Hossein Nasr is Shiah. However, l consider him to be the greatest Islamic scholar alive today, in terms of prolific scholarship and academic esteem. Him or William Chittick, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University. I’ve also briefly looked at the late Henry Corbin, he’s well regarded, but his writings were impenetrable to me but what little l understood, influenced me hugely re: revelation of divine image on finite humanity. I’ve heard only good about Annemarie Schimmel too. If you want to look at a biography of the Prophet, try Martin Lings . The only biography l’ve read so far is Mubarakpuri’s “The Sealed Nectar” but it is very hard going, the English translation isn’t very good and the style is very Salafi-oriented, but paradoxically, reading that book still helped me to decide that the Prophet Muhammad was the greatest man that ever lived. There’s also Abu Amina Elias’s site here, which has brilliant info on Islam and even answers key polemical attacks, but sadly this too is Salafi (Ibn Taymiyyah) oriented. But l’m not snob, l refer to the site occasionally for the good stuff there. Don’t wade through filth, ditch the Islamophobic authors if you want to appreciate Islam.

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@felix_dakat Thank you very much for going to the trouble of typing up these extracts by the way.

May l add: I intend to leave this forum soon, it’s too addictive, l need to get back into my daily affairs. I’ll wait for your response but l can’t stay much longer (despite earlier indications, sadly l’ve lost a lot of valuable time this week)

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It was mostly cutting and pasting. Let me know if you want to continue and I’ll post more of Holland’s argument.

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Sure okay, if there’s something not already discussed then paste some more. I’m trying to get away from the forum to do some work but don’t mind returning for another hee-haw. Or two. But after that l’ll go. Paste a distilled chunk of his views, showing the full range of what he says.

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I can only stay for one more exchange tbh.
Beyond that, you really ought to consult Muslim sources. There are plenty of downloadable books on “Seerah” or “Biography of Prophet / Muhammad” on archive.org, and there will surely be many classical Islamic authors in translation too. Also there are Islamic websites dealing with the matter. It’s already clear that Tom Holland is misportraying and unfairly denigrating Arabs and Muslims, so you already know there’s no point reading his views on Arabs and Muslims.

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How should a true believer respond when the sources of his faith are subject to critical historical examination by persons outside the faith?

Can you produce a biography of Muhammad’s life that was written less than a century after he is said to have died?

“As a result, inevitably but regrettably, questioning the traditional narrative of Islam’s origins remains largely what it has always been: the preserve of Western scholars. Some of these, it is true, are themselves Muslim—and one of them, a professor at the University of Münster, has proved himself such a chip off the old Teutonic scholarly block that he too, like some of his more radical infidel colleagues, has gone on record as claiming Muhammad to be a figure of myth. 62 (Muhammad Sven Kalisch. See http:// www.qantara.de/ webcom/ show_article.php/_c-478/_nr-812/ i.html)

“None of which, unhappily, has done much to allay the suspicions of other Muslims that the probing of their most sacred traditions is not all some sinister conspiracy, most likely cooked up by Mossad, or perhaps the Vatican, or else American evangelicals. That the methods currently being deployed by Western scholars to place the Qur’an in its historical context were first honed upon the Bible has dented this conviction not a whit. One appalled Muslim scholar has argued that “even the crusaders’ fury pales to nothing” in comparison with modern academics’ “iconoclastic attack.” 63
(Manzoor, Pervez S.: “Method Against Truth: Orientalism and Qur’anic Studies” (Muslim World Book Review 7, 1987)Pg 34)

“Implicit in this bellow of indignation is the presumption that non-believers have no business poking their noses into Islam’s origins. As one Saudi professor “Only the writings of a practising Muslim are worthy of our attention.” 64(al-Azami, Mohammad Mustafa: On Schacht’s Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Riyadh, 1985)——The History of the Qur’anic Text, from Revelation to Compilation: A Comparative Study with the Old and New Testaments (Leicester, 2003) pg 341 al-Azami (2003), p. 341. Interestingly, when it is the Bible which finds itself in the sights of revisionist scholars, the good professor suddenly becomes a great enthusiast for sceptical enquiry. He certainly never doubts the right of Muslims to deconstruct Jewish and Christian writings.” Holland pg. 451

As I have pointed out before, this is representative of secular critical historical discourse such as the Jesus of Nazareth of the New Testament has been undergoing for approximately 300 years. When I first encountered it as a “born again” Christian some 50 years ago, it challenged my faith to say the least. So I think I understand your reaction.