Islam: The Untold Story

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
41

I have answered the matter of the tine delay in biography many times now, including initially.

The Prophet’s biography 100% comes from the Sunnah. We were commanded not to write the Sunnah down. [by the way, in that post l made reference to Bitcoin as analogous to a secure chain of transmission - that is not a promotion of Bitcoin, which l think is a dangerous investment as it can be wiped out, just as narrators of hadith could all die in wars thus losing the lore]

It’s clear now that this is all the argument you have.

The quotes from journals amount to nothing but Appeal to Emotion (it shocks 'em so maybe it’s true, l mean, just look at those Muslims gerrin angry!).

And Argument from Omission (l already answered all you have to say, you acknowledge zero).

There’s also some type of Red Herring / Whattaboutery Fallacy. The case for the Gospels is different, they are filled with lies and the true Gospels were NEVER eyewitness accounts anyway, the true Injeel / Evangelion was a sacred book directly revealed to Christ by Allah and as such would have been a FIRST PERSON lecture from Allah himself.

Peace :slight_smile:

42

So I take it that the answer is : No. the earliest extant biography comes more than 100 years after Muhammad allegedly died. That someone commanded that no biography be written doesn’t help. It begs the question.

As I understand it the earliest biography that we do have of Muhammad claims that it is referring to an earlier biography that is unavailable. Is that right?

By the way, by attacking the scriptures of other Faiths as lies is exactly what Holland says Muslims are doing in my previous post. It does nothing to help your case.

I’m not accusing anyone of lying. What I do point to is that in the cases of religious founders of the pre-modern era including Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad there are no eye witnessed biographical accounts. Now there is a difference. We don’t have alleged writings from the hand of Buddha or Jesus. But, we do have alleged document from the hand of Muhammad. It’s just that outside of the Qu’ran itself all we know about that hand comes nearly 200 years after the fact.

If that’s true, what do we really know about the authorship of the Qu’ran itself?

“One of the world’s leading Qur’anic scholars has gone so far as to speak of a “schism.” “The controversy about the Qur’an,” she has lamented—whether it is an authentic record of the Prophet’s utterances or an anthology, stitched together from various different sources—“ permeates the entire field of Qur’anic studies.” 67 ( Neuwirth, Angelika: “Qur’an and History—a Disputed Relationship: Some Reflections on Qur’anic History and History in the Qur’an” (Journal of Qur’anic Studies 5, 2003) Neuwirth, Angelika, Sinai, Nicolai and Marx, Michael (eds): The Qur’an in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qur’anic Milieu (Leiden, 2010) pg 1 )

“Yet, even to speak of “schism” may be overly optimistic. The reality, perhaps, is even messier. In truth, it can often seem—the fragmentary nature of the evidence being what it is, not to mention the complexity and sensitivity of the issues at stake—that there are as many different interpretations of Islam’s origins as there are experts writing about it. 68 (For a taster of the range of opinions on offer, the interested reader could try sampling the mind-boggling perspectives on isnad authenticity to be found in al-Azami (1985), Motzki (2002) and Cook (1981). For a survey of all three studies, and many more, see Berg (2000), whose analysis of the entire “isnad debate” was particularly helpful in the writing of this chapter.

“Although Berg does not actually use the word “schism,” he sees academic opinion on early Islam as being riven down the middle. “Whether motivated by the need for positive results or the desire for methodological and theoretical sophistication, we are left with two very different, mutually exclusive, and to the outsider, almost equally plausible models of Islamic origins,” he writes. “Any conclusion drawn therefore will be a product of these underlying assumptions” (p. 226).

43

For the 4th time: I have answered the objection.

For example here: Islam: The Untold Story - #27 by BeingMuslim

It is not that “somebody” commanded it not to be transcribed. It was the religion’s founder, and the reason was to avoid corruption being inserted anonymously - the transmission had to be verbally done from authority to authority with each authority being a specifically chosen heir of the last. I have also explained how this is like the blockchain system of Bitcoin, vs. the fallibility of trading gold, where fake gold can be inserted into a load of bars, and within bars, tungsten can be found. A certain country (won’t name it) is known to have now reached a standard of fake gold that can even fool the most expensive Sigma gold testers.

You know this rebuttal, l have gone to pains to elaborate it.

You ignore it and post more of the same.

When l rebut you and you don’t answer, well, you don’t answer. You pretend it never happened. E.g. that Makkah is always focal to our religion, it was never retrofitted as the epicentre of our religion in terms of its own narrative, in terms of logica and reason, in fact it is arguable the epicentre of the world, in terms of objective mathematics: Two Mathematical Miracles of Mecca (only discovered via Modern Measurements) - #2 by BeingMuslim

44

“Even in the Qur’an itself, the word (Mecca) appears just once. “In the belly of Mecca, it was God who held their hands back from you” 14—an allusion that might as well be to a valley as to a city. Otherwise, in all the vast corpus of ancient literature, there is not a single reference to Mecca—not one. 15 Only in 741, more than a hundred years after the Prophet’s death, does it finally crop up on the pages of a foreign text—and even then the author locates it in Mesopotamia, “midway between Ur and Harran.” 16 Clearly, then, whatever else Mecca might have been in the early seventh century, it was no multicultural boom-town. So how is it, in a book supposedly composed there in Muhammad’s lifetime, that the monotheisms of the far-distant Fertile Crescent should have been given such a starring role? It is all very mysterious; and made even more so by the fact that Mecca is not alone in seeming to have had a spectrally low profile in the early decades of the Arab Empire. So too did the Qur’an itself. As with the reputed birthplace of the Prophet, so with the compendium of his revelations: there is not a single mention of it in writings of the period.“

45

Proving my point, you’re ignoring what l’ve already stated - you are locked in an outsider’s persective which means any contrary view is not a view, it didn’t happen, you didn’t see it. In your above post, you ignore that it is already translated as Valley of Makkah and disturbingly you state that apart from where Makkah is mentioned in the Qur’an, Makkah is otherwise not mentioned … what is wrong with you man?

Here’s a reminder of my earlier post which you’re just pretending didn’t happen:

46

@felix_dakat I hereby unequivocally declare you a liar, like your author Tom Holland. I have given you every opportunity to defend your thesis agaisnt my critique, and you reply by ignoring whatever l write. You are a liar, l swear to God.

47

I have made one error myself: The Ka’aba was not a stock exchange as far as l can tell. However, the Quraysh tribe had taken over Makkah itself and turned it into an economic powerbase, and Monotheism was an absolute kick in the shins to them. This is all by the by but l must correct myself. I have indulged you a lot @felix_dakat but you really are a liar, everybody tells casual lies by way of embellishment and it’s never good, but you? I’ve tried to like you but you tell very big lies and your lies need to be launched at Abrahmic faiths, by themselves your lies get lonely, have zero purpose (unlike genuine knowledge). Your lies were purely designed to attack Abrahamic Monotheism. I wash my hands of this scheme of yours. I go now.

48

Imagine living under Sharia. Ugh. Those poor people.

49

What I have mainly done here is to present what I consider to be Tom Holland’s main arguments in some detail as you repeatedly asked me to do. I will admit I find some (most?) of your arguments abstruse. So it’s possible that I am not **getting ** them.

One thing I do see you doing is making circular arguments for the historicity the Qu’ran from the Qu’ran, whereas from a historical it must be placed in the context of evidence from the period. The assertion of a commandment not to write anything down thus limiting early biographical facts to oral transmission is disastrous to a historical perspective.

A similar problem exists with historical Jesus project apparently due to the illiteracy of Jesus’s early disciples. A lot of effort has been put into the development of a science of oral history but it a blunt instrument at best. It allows for wide disagreement among scholars about the accuracy of what could be transmitted over a generation let alone a period of nearly 200 years.

Can we be sure that the alleged commandment not to write anything down was not a cover for the fact that such a history did not exist only to be fabricated later?

50

@felix_dakat Hello, l’m back for a quick stint before getting back to my real life.

I sincerely hope you are feigning innocence. I have deconstructed all of your arguments in meticulous detail.

It is ironic that you say my responses are “abstruse” when your OP presents a clumsy lie without any real basis. As such, it is frenzied and thus l created platform after platform to host each component of the lie under a spotlight and deconstruct it. You then handwave and call it all too complex, or “abstruse”.

Your entire argument is Argument from Omission i.e. damn all the facts.

51

You are also twisting what l say, as part of your Argument from Omission, in that l show that Makkah is mentioned in the Qur’an. You then go on to say “but it’s mentioned as a VALLEY which therefore somehow places it in Jerusalem bla bla”, when Makkah is in a valley and the translation of your cited verse often states “Valley” in English. [See your Post 44 and my reply in Post 45]

You then cop out by saying l’m using the Qur’an to prove the Qur’an. It was YOUR argument that brought the Qur’an into it, by saying it / its mention of Makkah was somehow retrofitted into Islam, which invokes an edifice of evidence to the contrary, which you then handwave and call “abstruse”.

Makkah has always been mentioned in the Qur’an, and the earliest manuscripts date back to the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him) or the companions of his who ruled immediately after him (see the Birmingham Qur’an manuscript). The Qur’an has always been in Arabic. The Qur’an even mentions that it is in Arabic, in its own verses it mentions the word “Arabic”. Makkah was the city of the Quraysh tribe who were Arabs and also they had a chapter named after them in the Qur’an.

Your revisionist claims are baseless and impossible. To show an impossible thing is impossible is perhaps best done by ignoring the person. I at least tried to reason here.

52

I think you mean argument from ignorance. That would apply if I were arguing that Muhammad didn’t exist, or didn’t write the Qu’ran or that some traditionally recounted facts of his life were conclusively erroneous. I’m not. What I’m pointing to are the lack of evidence to confirm the traditional story that Islamists tell. And I am pointing to how that parallels the historical situation of the founders of other religions such as Buddhism and Christianity. Basing one’s belief on the factual validity of pre-modern history is a shaky proposition because history is almost always a matter of probability not certainty. Existence makes absolute demands. Religion is existential. A firm basis for belief must be based on the first person spiritual experience. The value of traditional teachings is in their efficacy in evoking and supporting that experience and it’s ethical expression in the world.

53

Your contention is that Islam was invented 200 years after the Prophet died (oh come on you can do better, how about 200 years ago, i.e. from the 1800s).

You say Islam was invented in somewhere in or near Jerusalem or Petra, and one of these was the real Makkah, as it was in a valley as the Qur’an describes (even though Makkah was in a valley). You / Tom Holland seem to imply that nomadic Arab road warriors overran Jerusalem, suddenly got quite jealous of the promise of a land of Milk and Honey, and so they left the Christians in peace, and took over the Jewish temple mount and let the Jews back in (because shrugs l dunno) and got more and more jealous and somehow osmosed the idea of a promised land from the Jews and shrugs l dunno.

You admit the Qur’an itself mentions Makkah, but you say:
1. It doesn’t mention Makkah enough (even though the Qur’an is as it itself claims, a book for all mankind, not the locals of Arabia Felix)
2. It has Makkah in a valley, like oh noooo. A valley. Wow. A valley. Stop what you’re doing. A valley. This somehow disproves Islam.
3. Nothing when it’s explained to you twice that Makkah is indeed in a valley and the Qur’an translations variously explain this.

You say that coins minted by Mu’awiya, whom you say was the real creator of Islam after the Arab road warriors settled down in Syria, were only minted on one side. Ignoring that one doesn’t make coins appear just like that, people stamp over old coins as they’re made of precious silver (dirhams) or gold (dinars).

You ignore that there are Saxon (dating to around 160 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, bear in mind that there would have been about 100 years for a Caliphate to establish well enough to begin minting its own coins and for those coins to drift into the Saxon kingdom of Mercia to then be stamped over with “Offa Rex” by King Offa’s Mint) and Scandinavian coins (the latter in vast hoards) that bear the Islamic testimony of faith, that there is No God but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, except when pressed, you say:

  1. You cannot trust the evidence
  2. You cannot read Arabic hence cannot read the name Muhammad on the coin (as if there’s such thing as an inscribed Islamic testament of faith without mentioning Muhammad!)
  3. You post a video of the original fibber Tom Holland discussing these coins which as far as you’re concerned don’t need to be discussed anyway. However the video cannot be viewed.

You ignore that Makkah and Madina in the Hejaz region of Arabia Felix is full of landmarks well known to all Muslims and has always been thus. Nobody in the area has ever discovered what Tom Holland claims, that these cities were retrofitted with a fake Islamic history 200 years later after the Prophet died.

Your response is unclear as to whether you think the Prophet Muhammad ever existed.

Your response to the charter of protection to the St Catherine Monastery in the Sinai bearing the Prophet Muhammad’s handprint, is unclear.

Your response to Makkah being at the upper the Phi ratio point between North and South poles, and thus the Navel of the Earth and thus the Axis Mundi, has been to list a load of other cities that were considered the Axis Mundi, NONE OF WHICH ARE AT THE UPPER PHI RATIO POINT BETWEEN NORTH AND SOUTH POLES NOR AT THE LOWER PHI RATIO POINT.

When for the umpteenth time l refute you by showing you that Makkah is mentioned in the Qur’an as is the Ka’aba shrine and the pagan Quraysh tribe who ruled over Makkah have a chapter named after them exhorting them to monotheism … your response is to say l’m using the Qur’an to prove the Qur’an - hahahaha! I’m clearly answering your allegations and l’m clearing using the Qur’an to refute your allegations.

Moreover, the earliest Qur’ans can easily be dated to within the lifetime of the Prophet to about within 80 years of his death and these earliest Qur’ans all the same as the modern ones, except for minor syntax variants e.g. (just as an example, not saying these were the actual variants but they were exactly like this) a word ending “—anil” leading directly into the next word, versus a variant having the words separated as “----ani il----” and so forth.

Your / Tom Holland’s argument is puerile, and rests 100% on people not knowing Islam to begin with. You feed on this by saying the refutation of this puerile theory is itself “abstruse”, not that your theory is a ridiculous simpleminded revisionist whitewashing of history. The theory rests on this:

Racism and pearl-clutching. Showing decent nomadic Arabs (the people of Makkah were not nomads, nor was the Prophet Muhammad), presenting them as having decent views but they’re a bit rough looking, a bit savage looking, wearing tattered clothes and oh so dark skinned and having biiiig red eyes, and then there’s the sound effects: a sweet seductive female singing about her church, contrasted with a heavy clainging chain thumbing sound when Islam is mentioned, the sound of evil taking over, the sound of unjust slavery. There’s also the language Tom Holland uses, using epithets of darkness and a black hole, when mentioning Islam. He even describes the era of the rise of Islam and the ending of the Dark Ages and the transition into enlightened civilisation, as “darkness falling” (paraphrase). No irony that it’s the END of the Dark Ages.

Now to continue:

I have already explained your fallacy of Omission as meaning, damning all the facts, you continue.

From Google: “This is an attempt to win an argument by dismissing all counterarguments and focusing on facts that favor only one viewpoint. It’s a fallacy because someone is intentionally ignoring evidence that goes against their claim to help them make their point.”

That is basically your entire “shtick”, apart from the occasional Red Herring and Appeal to Emotion (racist pearl clutching).

You’re NOW, eerily, attempting a False Dichotomy: it’s either Tom Holland, or Islamism, Islamism these days - as you know - meaning “political Islam” which is the basis of terrorist extremist movements. Oh what filth you spew. Tom Holland isn’t even a real academic in Islamic studies or history for that matter, he’s a “Pop Historian”, i.e. a history caricaturist. If that’s too abstruse for you, there’s a colloquial expression they’d use in Britain, “a ____ Artist” and l won’t explain the blank word but if you’re British you’d know and l’d rather not dirty myself with bad words.

I have refuted you soundly and it’s immoral for a decent person to interact with you so much so l’ll end it there. Here you go, you can have your arse back on a silver plate. Byes.

54

That’s fine, L&N. If I thought like you I’d be a Muslim. If you are trying to persuade me I’m wrong, as a first step, stop condemning everyone who disagrees with you. Then, you wouldn’t fit what you claim is merely Tom Holland’s stereotype.

There are many paths to the top of a mountain. If the climbers stop hating and killing each other, they can help each other get there quicker.

55

Just in case anyone else gets taken in by this conman’s replies:

He’s rightly called out the Bible for its unspeakable horrors on another thread. Yet he reveals his true intent across multiple other threads: to show all Abrahamic faiths were made up, and even their prophets were made up. This culminates in the present invective against Islam’s hostoricity.

In his most recent reply he poses a Red Herring (?) logical fallacy (always with the fallacies, this is intellectual dishonesty) - that l am trying to convince him of a faith, that this is a matter of faith, and that l am trying to force him to believe. When in fact it’s plainly that he’s pushing a blatantly false, impossible history that was only recently made up and sneakily designed for people that know nothing about Islam, and it’s clear Tom Holland doesn’t know much about Islam either. His degree is in English language not History. Moreover, his career path here is as a “Pop Historian” i.e. a Historical Caricaturist, i.e. a pulp fiction. This fake history is patently a joke and disproven in myriad ways at the expense of my precious time.

He then ignores the zillion things that can be said to the contrary, or calls them abstruse, rather than that his theory about Islam being invented 200 years after, erm, Islam - being a simpleminded trolling spree.

In fact, making repeated negative assertions without integrating feedback = TROLLING. He is trolling, and thus blameworthy and it’s fair to rebuke him after a lengthy epoch of reasoning, because he is just a timewaster pushing a negative view to poison the minds of those who don’t know, the minds of people that fear stranger danger, etc. This is thus a threat to disenfranchise a minority group (Muslims) in societies where the majority are unfamiliar with Islam. This is dangerous.

He does not integrate feedback = he commits the fallacy of Omission - arguing whilst omitting anything to the contrary.

A trenchant illustration of his ill intent: He appeals to racist pearl clutching emotions - his video resting on a bedrock of tongue in cheek demeaning camera shots and heavy chain clanking sound effects when Islam and Arabs are mentioned, as well as choice loaded words about black holes, darkness, shadow etc. in contrast to sweet forlorn female singing when a church is mentioned. The racism becomes pretty overt when he quotes Tom Holland or some supporting author as saying: "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.” "

56

Such has been the boast of conquerors since the beginning of recorded history. “God is on our side” they say. Their success depends, in part, on persuading people to believe them. With the advent of the Internet and the progress in AI the power of propaganda is greater than ever. The battle for hearts and minds as spiritual warfare is the context in which the flesh and blood violence is waged. In the new paradigm, progress is measured not by victory of one ideology over another, but by the reduction in violence itself. Peace to you, LampandNightingale. May you progress on your spiritual path to the Ultimate One who is greater than the human mind can conceive. :pray:

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57

How interesting. FD, that is the kind of response I would expect to hear from a Sufi. :smile:

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58

Peace to you too. We are each as little ants. Too much religious argumentation causes deity complexes in people.

59

The Islamic religion is huge today and it has some very fascinating features, it is a very exclusive religion and nobody from the outside is allowed in. If there are pilgrimages to Mecca only those of the Islamic faith are allowed to go to these pilgrimages. This religion has full control of the entire territory which it controls and evangelism in islamic countries is totally forbidden.

So who and what is Islam.

Millions of people make the pilgrimages to Mecca where they worship at the shrine of Muhammad.

There is another religion which also propagates pilgrimages and that is Catholicism, with its pilgrimages to Lourdes and pilgrimages are a symbol of the great pagan religions of the past.

So who is Muhammad?

Muhammad Mustaf was born in 670 a.d. and he died in 632 a.d. He married Kadida when he was 25 years and she was 40. She was super rich and she employed young Muhammad whom she married. The Quran was compiled in 650 a.d and Muhammad who could not write himself had a scribe to write down what he saw and what he heard. The Quran is different apparently from all other religious writing because it was a directly dictated book.

So it is not just transcribed by a prophet so they teach, but is the very word of god and therefore it must remain in the original Arabic language, that is what I think is taught in the Islamic religion.

The symbol of Islam is the sickle moon and the star within the sickle moon, and the symbol that Catholicism uses is the star and the sickle moon and by the way is exactly the same star as is used in Islam and which other religion has the priesthood just for men. The Roman Catholic Church. You have the same position in the Islamic world. You have the Islamic all seeing eye and it is used in Catholicism as well.

The Quran says Christ was altogether saved from the indignity of the cross, he never died on the cross, someone else of the same features was crucified by the Jews, says the Quran Verse 157, they killed him not, Jesus did not die for you.

This is Satanic Occult teaching, the Quran is directly against Jesus.

Mohammedanism has its converts in many lands and its advocates deny the divinity of Christ.

"In ancient Arabia, the sun-god was viewed as a female goddess and the moon as the male god. As has been pointed out by many scholars as Alfred Guillaume, (The Complete history of the life of Prophet Muhammad) the moon god was called by various names, one of which was Allah.

According to the Encyclopedia of Religion, Allah corresponded to the Babylonian god Baal, and Arabs knew of him long before Mohammed worshipped him as the supreme God. Before Islam, the Arabs recognized many gods and goddesses, and each tribe had its own deity.

60

You are too easy to argue against. You think your own children are going to hell so l suggest you go talk to them rather than … mmm … a plate of copy-pasta! Shlurp. Bye bye liar.