labarum
Master of the Arts
Posts: 122
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Post by labarum on Apr 21, 2012 12:13:35 GMT
Just in case any Muslims were feeling left out by all the discussions by Carrier, Doherty, et al, I found this: www.amazon.com/Did-Muhammad-Exist-Inquiry-Obscure/dp/161017061XHere is the promo blurb: Are jihadists dying for a fiction? Everything you thought you knew about Islam is about to change.
Did Muhammad exist?
It is a question that few have thought—or dared—to ask. Virtually everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, takes for granted that the prophet of Islam lived and led in seventh-century Arabia.
But this widely accepted story begins to crumble on close examination, as Robert Spencer shows in his eye-opening new book.
In his blockbuster bestseller The Truth about Muhammad, Spencer revealed the shocking contents of the earliest Islamic biographical material about the prophet of Islam. Now, in Did Muhammad Exist?, he uncovers that material’s surprisingly shaky historical foundations. Spencer meticulously examines historical records, archaeological findings, and pioneering new scholarship to reconstruct what we can know about Muhammad, the Qur’an, and the early days of Islam. The evidence he presents challenges the most fundamental assumptions about Islam’s origins.
Did Muhammad Exist? reveals:
How the earliest biographical material about Muhammad dates from at least 125 years after his reported death
How six decades passed before the Arabian conquerors—or the people they conquered—even mentioned Muhammad, the Qur’an, or Islam
The startling evidence that the Qur’an was constructed from existing materials—including pre-Islamic Christian texts
How even Muslim scholars acknowledge that countless reports of Muhammad’s deeds were fabricated
Why a famous mosque inscription may refer not to Muhammad but, astonishingly, to Jesus
How the oldest records referring to a man named Muhammad bear little resemblance to the now-standard Islamic account of the life of the prophet
The many indications that Arabian leaders fashioned Islam for political reasons
Far from an anti-Islamic polemic, Did Muhammad Exist? is a sober but unflinching look at the origins of one of the world’s major religions. While Judaism and Christianity have been subjected to searching historical criticism for more than two centuries, Islam has never received the same treatment on any significant scale.
The real story of Muhammad and early Islam has long remained in the shadows. Robert Spencer brings it into the light at long last.
So is there a "Muhammad Mythicist" movement on the horizon? Well probably not in any Muslim country - at least vocally.
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Post by turoldus on Apr 21, 2012 13:07:52 GMT
Well, I guess it had to happen. Spencer is a well-known "islamophobe" as biased against Christianity as Carrier and Doherty are, which tends to prove that mythicism is largely (solely?) ideologically motivated.
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Post by sankari on Apr 21, 2012 13:24:51 GMT
How is this startling? Surely it's been common knowledge ever since Islam was founded. Shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
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Post by sandwiches on Apr 21, 2012 15:45:40 GMT
Yes there's a reaction from a Muslim below. I gather Spencer should not be taken too seriously, but the reaction below (in particular the corrections) shows how sensitive this kind of stuff is. www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/husseinrashid/5883/new_spencer_book_denies_existence_of_muhammad/#moreRobert Spencer, professional Islamophobe, has a new book coming out in which he attempts to show the historical problems with the historical record of Muhammad and Muslims. Unfortunately, the Islamophobia industry will likely get the book wide exposure.
A press release about the book, lays out several "questions" about Muhammad and the origins of Islam. I show below why the book is really a "so what" rather than a "oh wow."
How the earliest biographical material about Muhammad dates from at least 125 years after his reported death.
Yep. Any decent historian or scholar of religion will tell you this. It’s like asking why earliest biographical material* about Jesus dates from at least two generation after his life. Welcome to the wonderful world of pre-modern history. Literacy is not such a big deal. A good resource for learning about this is Monty Python’s “Holy Grail.” It’s probably a more accurate portrayal of Medieval English history than anything Spencer concocts.
How six decades passed before the Arabian conquerors—or the people they conquered—even mentioned Muhammad, the Qur’an, or Islam.
Seems like an odd claim, since there's a whole academic sub-speciality that deals with non-Muslim accounts of the early Muslim period. Perhaps one of the most important of these works is written by St. John of Damascus, who writes about how his family served the Muslim empire from within 20 years of Muhammad's death. He uses the term "Ishmaelites" as opposed to "Muslim," so perhaps that is Spencer's technically correct claim, but St. John is clearly writing about Muslims.
The startling evidence that the Qur’an was constructed from existing materials—including pre-Islamic Christian texts.
Yup. The Qur’an says it is talking about and with earlier revelation, which it considers itself part of. In fact, the Qur'an even footnotes the Talmud (5:35). Amazingly, for scholars of other Abrahamic scriptures, they point to these scriptures borrowing from earlier sources, whether Gilgamesh or Mithra.
How even Muslim scholars acknowledge that countless reports of Muhammad’s deeds were fabricated.
Yup. It's part of the science of hadith collection. The Muslims who collected sayings of Muhammad knew that people were making things up and created checks and the best methodology that they could at the time to stop it. Modern scholars are revisiting the existing corpus with new tools and methods.
Why a famous mosque inscription may refer not to Muhammad but, astonishingly, to Jesus.
Stumped by this one. No idea what it refers to.
How the oldest records referring to a man named Muhammad bear little resemblance to the now-standard Islamic account of the life of the prophet.
But, but earlier Spencer says we don't have any early proof of Muhammad's existence. Which is it? Anyway, if you read the Gnostic Gospels** and look at the Gospels, there are very different versions of the life of Jesus. Talmudic stories are also very different from Torah studies. Is it really a surprise that people take stories and make them mean things to themselves?
The many indications that Arabian leaders fashioned Islam for political reasons.
Duh. Constantine, David, Solomon, etc.. Welcome to the wonderful world of reality.
What Spencer’s press release shows is that he is divorced from the academic field that he uses for his legitimacy. These are not new or provocative questions. They are the bread and butter of the field. There are truly challenging books that come out of the academia, including Steven Wasserstrom's Between Muslim and Jew and Fred Donner's Muhammad and the Believers, a recent book that deals with many of the questions Spencer raises, but that actually engages with primary material and that has been challenged by other experts in the field. My fear is that the new Islamphobic strategy is to simply edit solid scholarship like Donner's into fear-mongering drivel and repackage it as their own. It's the problem when you want money over truth or knowledge. And it works because Spencer is banking on the fact that his audience won't apply the same questions he asks to their own faith traditions.
Spencer's work may in fact be one of the best arguments for religious studies.
*A few readers point out that there is early historical record of Jesus' life. I am not denying that. There is also early historical evidence for Muhammad. I am attempting to draw a parallel between the sira (biographical) literature of Muhammad and the Gospels.
**My fingers went faster than my head and typed "Dead Sea Scrolls" instead of Gnostic Gospels. Thank you to @jeremiahbailey for tweeting this correction.
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Post by turoldus on Apr 21, 2012 18:52:54 GMT
How is this startling? Surely it's been common knowledge ever since Islam was founded. Shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Don't Muslims believe the Qu'ran to be divinely created?
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Post by sandwiches on Apr 21, 2012 19:16:20 GMT
Don't Muslims believe the Qu'ran to be divinely created?Supposedly the content conveyed from God to Mohammed by Gabriel? Does that sit with the idea of being built on existing beliefs (which apparently got things slightly wrong)? Alternatively Mohammed may have been simply a useful focal point for a form of Arab imperialism which allowed the latter to incorporate the "new" monotheism? No doubt, my copy of Tom Holland's "In The Shadow of The Sword", which arrived today, will reveal all
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Post by sankari on Apr 22, 2012 0:14:59 GMT
Don't Muslims believe the Qu'ran to be divinely created? Yes, but as far as I'm aware they don't deny a connection with older beliefs such as Judaism and Christianity. By the same token, Christians commonly believe the New Testament is divinely created, but we don't deny that it makes extensive use of the Old Testament.
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endrefodstad
Bachelor of the Arts
Sumer ys Icumen in!
Posts: 54
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Post by endrefodstad on Apr 22, 2012 6:01:53 GMT
No doubt, my copy of Tom Holland's "In The Shadow of The Sword", which arrived today, will reveal all It will at least reveal the point of view Holland subscribes to That being said, no serious scholary examination of any religious text can assume that it is divinely inspired. This is more a problem for contemporary Islam than contemporary Christianity, but to a large part only because the textual criticism of the bible in the 19th century has rounded the edges of biblical literalism except amongst the most ignorant King James Bible-thumping Yahoos in the western world.
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Post by himself on May 3, 2012 0:32:53 GMT
a) Christians believe the Bible was inspired; muslims believe the Holy Qur'an was dictated word-for-word. Ijtihad is more tied to the letter of the text than is exegesis; but even there qiyas (analogy) is permitted. Islam is orthoprax; Christianity is orthodox. That is, the former takes their text as a set of prescriptions or rules to be followed; the latter takes it as a set of principles that form a basis for reasoning. b) Hadith are generally tied to a "chain of custody" and the reliability of the quote or anecdote is proportional to the reliability of its transmitters. A hadith from an unreliable narrator is discounted by the mujtahid. c) There is a tradition that an apostate Arab muslim, who had reverted to his former Christianity claimed to have helped Muhammed write Holy Qur'an but God struck him dead, and when they buried him the earth refused to keep the body and it popped back out. d) Undoubtedly, this Spencer dude will next go after the myth of Hannibal. www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Is-Jesus-Christ-a-Myth-Part-4-James-Hannam.html
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Post by penguinfan on May 8, 2012 2:34:26 GMT
Yes there's a reaction from a Muslim below. I gather Spencer should not be taken too seriously, but the reaction below (in particular the corrections) shows how sensitive this kind of stuff is. www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/husseinrashid/5883/new_spencer_book_denies_existence_of_muhammad/#moreRobert Spencer, professional Islamophobe, has a new book coming out in which he attempts to show the historical problems with the historical record of Muhammad and Muslims. Unfortunately, the Islamophobia industry will likely get the book wide exposure.
A press release about the book, lays out several "questions" about Muhammad and the origins of Islam. I show below why the book is really a "so what" rather than a "oh wow."
How the earliest biographical material about Muhammad dates from at least 125 years after his reported death.
Yep. Any decent historian or scholar of religion will tell you this. It’s like asking why earliest biographical material* about Jesus dates from at least two generation after his life. Welcome to the wonderful world of pre-modern history. Literacy is not such a big deal. A good resource for learning about this is Monty Python’s “Holy Grail.” It’s probably a more accurate portrayal of Medieval English history than anything Spencer concocts.
How six decades passed before the Arabian conquerors—or the people they conquered—even mentioned Muhammad, the Qur’an, or Islam.
Seems like an odd claim, since there's a whole academic sub-speciality that deals with non-Muslim accounts of the early Muslim period. Perhaps one of the most important of these works is written by St. John of Damascus, who writes about how his family served the Muslim empire from within 20 years of Muhammad's death. He uses the term "Ishmaelites" as opposed to "Muslim," so perhaps that is Spencer's technically correct claim, but St. John is clearly writing about Muslims.
The startling evidence that the Qur’an was constructed from existing materials—including pre-Islamic Christian texts.
Yup. The Qur’an says it is talking about and with earlier revelation, which it considers itself part of. In fact, the Qur'an even footnotes the Talmud (5:35). Amazingly, for scholars of other Abrahamic scriptures, they point to these scriptures borrowing from earlier sources, whether Gilgamesh or Mithra.
How even Muslim scholars acknowledge that countless reports of Muhammad’s deeds were fabricated.
Yup. It's part of the science of hadith collection. The Muslims who collected sayings of Muhammad knew that people were making things up and created checks and the best methodology that they could at the time to stop it. Modern scholars are revisiting the existing corpus with new tools and methods.
Why a famous mosque inscription may refer not to Muhammad but, astonishingly, to Jesus.
Stumped by this one. No idea what it refers to.
How the oldest records referring to a man named Muhammad bear little resemblance to the now-standard Islamic account of the life of the prophet.
But, but earlier Spencer says we don't have any early proof of Muhammad's existence. Which is it? Anyway, if you read the Gnostic Gospels** and look at the Gospels, there are very different versions of the life of Jesus. Talmudic stories are also very different from Torah studies. Is it really a surprise that people take stories and make them mean things to themselves?
The many indications that Arabian leaders fashioned Islam for political reasons.
Duh. Constantine, David, Solomon, etc.. Welcome to the wonderful world of reality.
What Spencer’s press release shows is that he is divorced from the academic field that he uses for his legitimacy. These are not new or provocative questions. They are the bread and butter of the field. There are truly challenging books that come out of the academia, including Steven Wasserstrom's Between Muslim and Jew and Fred Donner's Muhammad and the Believers, a recent book that deals with many of the questions Spencer raises, but that actually engages with primary material and that has been challenged by other experts in the field. My fear is that the new Islamphobic strategy is to simply edit solid scholarship like Donner's into fear-mongering drivel and repackage it as their own. It's the problem when you want money over truth or knowledge. And it works because Spencer is banking on the fact that his audience won't apply the same questions he asks to their own faith traditions.
Spencer's work may in fact be one of the best arguments for religious studies.
*A few readers point out that there is early historical record of Jesus' life. I am not denying that. There is also early historical evidence for Muhammad. I am attempting to draw a parallel between the sira (biographical) literature of Muhammad and the Gospels.
**My fingers went faster than my head and typed "Dead Sea Scrolls" instead of Gnostic Gospels. Thank you to @jeremiahbailey for tweeting this correction.Uhm, the author of your article admits to not have read Spencer's book and Spencer responds to the "corrections", including pointing out the author's historical errors. www.jihadwatch.org/2012/04/-new-spencer-book-denies.htmlI have no idea why you would conclude Spencer's work is not to be taken seriously simply because a Muslim with an axe to grind has called Spencer an "Islamophobe".
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Post by sandwiches on May 8, 2012 13:17:25 GMT
I have no idea why you would conclude Spencer's work is not to be taken seriously simply because a Muslim with an axe to grind has called Spencer an "Islamophobe". Thank you I am interested to see Spencer's response to Hussein Rashid's comments. I was using Rashid's response to illustrate how sensitive these matters are. It does seem to go a little far to doubt Mohammed's existence. For example even revisionist historians like Patricia Crone who for example doubts the association of Mohammed with Medina seems to stop far short of denying Mohammed's existence: www.opendemocracy.net/faith-europe_islam/mohammed_3866.jspWhat do we actually know about Mohammed? Patricia Crone, 10 June 2008
There is no doubt that Mohammed existed, occasional attempts to deny it notwithstanding......The evidence that a prophet was active among the Arabs in the early decades of the 7th century, on the eve of the Arab conquest of the middle east, must be said to be exceptionally good. The only reviews I have seen so far of Spencer's book seem to be in right-wing publications or by right-wingers. It would be interesting to see what a scholar makes of his theory.
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Post by sandwiches on May 8, 2012 15:26:29 GMT
Professor Fred Donner, another revisionist, also thinks Mohammed existed: magazine.uchicago.edu/1108/investigations/islams-origins.shtmlIslam’s origins Historian Fred Donner offers a new reading of an old story.A professor of Near Eastern history at the Oriental Institute and head of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Donner instead believes Islam’s origins shared features with the genesis of Christianity.
Muhammad was a real person, says Donner, who has studied the documents surrounding Islam’s history for more than 25 years, from seventh-century papyri, inscriptions, and coins to later chronicles and books of collected traditions. In 1981 he wrote a history of the early Muslim conquests, and in Narratives of Islamic Origins (Darwin Press, 1998) he studied the development of traditional Muslim sources for Islam’s beginnings. I gather Spencer does not have much in the way of formal academic qualifications in the particular field of Islamic history?
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Post by david2011 on May 13, 2012 18:15:59 GMT
Robert Spencer is nothing more than an Islamophobic idiot, who's main "career" seems to be searching the internet for articles that paint Islam/Muslims in a bad light. For example, he'll probably delight when he comes across a case of a Muslim father/husband/boyfriend/other family relative beats and kills their daughter/partner/relative for some BS reason in the name of "honour", and use it to show how "evil" the Islamic world, and Muslims, are, while forgetting to add that "honour" killings are part of "honour-shame" cultures, which existed as far back as ancient Greece (and, no doubt, even before them), and all around the Mediterranean (and non -Mediterranean cultures as well, for example, Northern Europe among the Germanic tribes, and no doubt the Celtic ones as well, and India too). Spencer will, quietly, ignore the fact that, even in the modern world, Muslims are just one among many cultures that still perpetuate "honour" killings, for example, it still goes on in India (and not just among Indian Muslims either), in modern Greece, and I'm sure you'll find examples elsewhere, like from Japan.
He has no expertise in Islamic history, I think I've read his MA is in early Christian Studies (and, I'm pretty sure, even early Christian Studies has moved on from the time he studied it).
In short, he's just one among many bigots in the West who've arisen since 9/11 to spew their hatred against Islam/Muslims in book format, and on paid tours to lecture at different venues, most of whom probably share their Islamophobic ideology. Quite frankly, Spencer, and others like him, probably sure a 9/11, and the anger and other emotions that resulted from that dark day, as a great cash cow to milk for all its worth, which is quite disgusting really.
That doesn't mean I'm against criticising various aspects of Islam/the Islamic world/Muslim cultures, being gay and non-Muslim, I am critical of certain issues, I just believe true criticism should be intelligent, and also it shouldn't lead to a polarised view of things (e.g. making all Muslims or all of the Islamic world or Islam out to be "completely evil" or even an "evil ideology", as Nick "the fascist" Griffin likes to believe). It's how you should approach most things in life.
Spencer, in my view, is just essentially the same as some of the more vocal Christ Mythicers, whose sole intention is to discredit Christianity, and see Christianity/Christians/the Church as "evil incarnate" or being responsible "for bringing darkness to the Earth", it's essentially the same polarised outlook, just different actors are used to play the role of "the good" and "the bad".
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Post by himself on May 13, 2012 20:43:15 GMT
It would be informative to consider the struggle within the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to control honor killings as to who lines up on each side.
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labarum
Master of the Arts
Posts: 122
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Post by labarum on May 14, 2012 18:54:59 GMT
I decided I couldn't resist and got the Kindle version of the book. On the question of Spencer being an Islamophobe, I cannot really answer as this is the first thing by him I have ever read. But if he is, he took a different tact in this book. There was nothing in it that was inflammatory except of course that some Muslims think any critical examination of Islam is so by nature.
I read the book and remain unconvinced by Spencer's argument that Muhammad did not exist. However, I think he did come up with very good evidence that the history of Islam is not what appears in the standard Islamic version of the story and that the traditions surrounding Mohammed were written much later for specific battles between warring parties within Islam.
The origins of the Qur'an are also not likely what appears in the standard account and it is likely that much was drawn from the material of heretical Christian groups. There are also interesting archaeological details with crosses appearing on coins and other artifacts issued by early Islamic leaders long before there is any remaining evidence of the Qur'an.
One problem I have with Spencer's arguments is that he often tries to have it both ways. He will argue that a certain reference to an unnamed prophet early in Islam's history could not possibly be Mohammed because the description sounds nothing like that in the Hadith traditions. However, since he has already argued those traditions are unreliable, why would that matter? Which is it, Mr. Spencer??
The other issue is the state of Islamic scholarship itself. In Islamic countries, there is little to no critical scholarship and among Westerners it is either politically incorrect or personally suicidal to raise issues that could undermine the tenets of Islam. Because of this, there is not the free exchange of ideas one finds elsewhere and the few exceptions such as the book written under the pseudonym "Christoph Luxemburg" to stand both unchallenged and unverified. Such books are almost printed in a vacuum where no scholar feels safe to do any follow up either supportive or critical. If there is critical research going on, it is probably done as far away from public scutiny as possible.
This, of course, leaves the field wide open for amateurs like Spencer to step in and run with the ball. Unlike in the case of Christianity or Judaism, there is not a whole body of critical scholardship that can ring the bs alarm. I'm just waiting for Islam to get its own Acharya S.
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