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'muhammad ~ Why is Islam a religion ~ ~ 3 ~ ~ muhammad ali'

By: Stew Mayers

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The 20th century’s most universally venerable Islamic scholar is DrArthur Jeffery. He wrote: 'The briefest investigation suffices to reveal that the problem of Islamic sources is as respects simple, for most volumes represent little more than the working over (with fabulous and irrelevant additions and modifications) of perhaps half a handful Arabic texts of primary importance.”

“The earliest Life of Muhammad of which we have any wake was scribbled by Muhammad Ibn Ishaq, who died in 768 C.E. He headed the Department of Middle East Languages at Columbia University and taught linguistics at the School of Oriental Studies in Cairo. The Sirat Rasul Allah of Ibn Ishaq, however, has perished, and all we know of it is what is quoted from it (and these quotations are fortunately considerable) in the works of later writers, particularly Ibn Hisham and al-Tabari. i.e., 130 years subsequently the last breathN Condemnation of the prophet. Margoliouth’s review of Muhammad’s character from the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (Volume 8, p. This work of Ibn Ishaq, in reinforcement to being the earliest known attempt at a biography, has a further consideration in that, whether behind the scenes the writer was somewhat of a free thinker, or he had not come under the importance of later idealizing tendencies, his work contains very much enlightenment of a character that is distinctly unfavorable to Islam’s prophet.'

To validate his point, Jeffry quotes Dr. It begins: 'The character owing to to Muhammad in the biography of Ibn Ishaq is exceedingly unfavorable.' Moving on, Arthur Jeffry concludes his review of Islamic source material by confirming the validity of what we have read from others. 878) that I have shared with you repeatedly before. Al-Waqidi died 822 C.E. In his The Quest of the Historical Muhammad, he writes: 'The first important source that has in point of fact come down to us, therefore, is Waqidi’s Kitab al-Maghazi, or Book of the Raids. Waqidi’s work, however, has the serious limitation that it deals only with Muhammad’s campaigns.... and his libretto may best be consulted in the translation of the important parts of it given in Wellhausen’s Muhammad in Medina (Berlin, 1882). And even these works are not primary sources, as they are themselves based on two sources, Tradition and the Qur’an. Later Arabic biographies are of very secondary survey as compared with these. What assessN Measurement can be placed on the Traditions is questionable the dates of the Hadith collections are even later than those of the biographies.'

For a little more contemporary view, let’s review the sources used by F. The most important collections of Tradition are those of Bukhari (who died in 870 C.E.), and Muslim (who died in 874 C.E.). Peters, as he is considered to be one of today’s most learned scholars on the food for thought of being Islam. E. Recognizing that the process of defining the sources that comprise Islam is expensive than inspiring, Peters put his source evaluation in an appendix at the end of his, Muhammad and the Origins of Islam. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages, Literature and History at New York University and has authored tetragonal insightful books on Islam. 767). In it we read: 'The earliest integral example we occupy of a biography is the Life of the Apostle of Allah composed out of earlier materials [Hadith, or oral traditions] by the Muslim scholar Ibn Ishaq (d. Ibn Ishaq’s original, before a certain Ibn Hisham (d. In some ways this, by now standard Muslim Life, looks like a Gospel, but the lookout is deceptive. The story began with Creation, and Muhammad’s prophetic career was preceded by bill of all the prophets who had gone before him. 833) removed the ‘extraneous material’ from the work, was more in the nature of a ‘world history’ than a biography.

Speaking of the Qur’an’s deficient presentation of Muhammad, Peters said: 'We do not have material in the Qur’an to compose a biography of Muhammad the writing is a disjointed discourse, a pastiche [imitation, spoof, parody] of divine monologues that can be into a homily [lecture, sermon] or perhaps a catechism [snippets of dogma] but that reveals little or nothing about the life of Muhammad and his contemporaries.... This earlier, ‘discarded’ section of Ishaq’s work can to some extent be retrieved.' Ishaq’s discarded Hadith depicting Islamic Creation and Muhammad’s presentation of Biblical patriarchs was retained in Volumes I-V of The History of al-Tabari. There are no clues as to when or where or why these particular words were being uttered.... The Qur’an give us no assurance that its words and sentiments are likely to be authentic in the airy of the context they were delivered and in the manner of their transmission. The Qur’an is not terribly serviceable even for reconstructing the Meccan milieu much at a low ebb the life of the man who uttered its words; it is a text without context.'

Peters debunks the myth that 'the formation of Islam was played out in the clear sublimated of history.' He writes: 'For Muhammad, unlike Jesus, there is no Josephus to make provision a contemporary political context, no literary apocrypha for a spiritual context and no Qumran Scrolls to cast light upon a sectarian milieu. The Qur’an is of no use whatsoever as an independent source for reconstructing the life of Muhammad. The principle remains that amid the contemporary Greek and Roman sources about Arabia and the later Islamic Traditions about the same place, there is a total lack of continuity. From the era before Islam there is chiefly doggerel whose contemporary authenticity is suspect, but was nevertheless used as the main vehicle of Arab history in the pre-Islamic and being Islamic periods. Peters acknowledges, as do all serious scholars, that 'the earliest ‘biographers’ of the Prophet, whose work is preserved by Ibn Ishaq and Tabari, were little more than collectors of oral reports or Hadith on the raids conducted by or under Muhammad. Despite volumes of notification supplied by later [9th and 10th century] Muslim literary [and thus not historic] sources, we know pitifully little for sure about the political or economic history of Muhammad’s Mecca or of the religious culture from which he came.'

F.E. The Qur’an is regarded as deficient due to its lack of context and chronological order. Yet, despite these obvious and serious disabilities, Ibn Ishaq’s Biography of Allah’s Apostle, is on the face of it a coherent and convincing account and gives the historian something to work with, particularly if the latter closes his eyes to where the material came from.'

While I could share the source evaluations of another score of Islamic scholars with you, suffice it to say, nothing would change. Moreover, the Sira has been edited for political exhaustion so we are reliant on Tabari’s Ta’rikh. Ishaq’s Sira is the oldest and most reliable source, but sadly it’s composed only of oral reports a century removed from their authors. Bukhari and Muslim are additive but their lack of historical grounding, their late date, and their constant contradictions render them considerably below the mark valuable. It thus provides the oldest uncensored narrative of Muhammad’s words and deeds, his ambition, god, and religion.

Bemoaning the dearth of accurate and contemporaneous source material, Humphreys says: 'Muslims, we would suppose, would have taken considerable care to record their spectacular achievements, and the highly literate and urbanized societies which they subjugated could hardly avoid coming to grips with what had happened to them. But as bad as these are, they are the best Islam has to offer.

Schacht was ingenious. Yet all we find from this substantiality week are sources which are either fragmentary or represent very specific or even eccentric perspectives, altogether annulling any achievability of reconstructing Islam’s first century.' 'We have no reliable proof that any Hadith Tradition speaks of the life of Muhammad, or even of the Qur’an,' Joseph Schacht attests putting the Hadith through the most rigorous acquiesce investigation in history. There is no hazard men would have been convicted or exonerated in an Islamic court without referencing the most appropriate Hadith unless they didn’t exist at the time. He used the court records from the with the sunN Substantiality ninth century to show that neither protection nor prosecution used Hadiths that have since become the backbone of Islamic law. Not only did he find late dates for most Hadiths, he discovered something very sinister. Schacht, therefore, dates the creation of a Hadith to the time they were first used at trial.

Humphreys said: 'We are asked to that these documents scrawledADJ Writing hundreds of years later are accurate, though we are not presented with any premises for their veracity, outside of isnads, which are nothing more than lists purporting to give the names of those from whom the oral traditions were passed down. Hadith with the best isnads were the most suspect.

'Muslims maintain that the late dates of the primary sources can be due to to the existence that stenography was solely not used in such an isolated area or at that time. Yet even the isnads lack any supportive documentation with which to corroborate their authenticity.' Simply stated, insights into Islam’s formation, the Qur’an’s creation, and Muhammad’s life are as black as the message they proclaim. Paper was invented in the fourth century, and used degree throughout the civilized creation thereafter. This assumption is fully unfounded, however, as script on paper began a certain number before the seventh century. Thus, unlike Arabia, it was a sophisticated society which used secretaries in the Caliphal courts, proving that manuscript cursive was well developed. The Umayyad dynasty of Islam’s first one hundred years was headquartered in the former Byzantine area of Syria, not Arabia. Not a single Hadith or Qur’an fragment dates to this time or place. Yet nothing has been found to bearing the religion of Islam.

'So we must ask how we came by the Qur’an if there was no Muslim scribe, cleric, or scholar capable of putting pen to paper before the eighth century? Muslims claim the existence of a number of codices of the Qur’an briefly consecutively the departure of Muhammad. The Muslims who had managed to conquer and tax much of the macrocosm during Islam’s first 100 years couldn’t manage to scrawl a single scroll, surah, Sira, or Sunnah during those same 100 years. And ultimately they will lead us to a singular, undeniable, and very dire conclusion. The Uthmanic text, for example, had to have been written, contrast with it wouldn’t be a text, right? Writing was available, but for some reason, no record was scribbled preceding to 750 A.D.' As I am sure you’re aware, these are very serious accusations. They give faith to that the material upon which the primary sources were scribbled either disintegrated over time, leaving us with no examples, or wore out and so were destroyed.

'Muslim scholars maintain that the nonresidence of hypostasis documentation can be blamed on old age. In the British Library we have ample examples of documents in writing by individuals in communities close at hand Arabia. But this argument is dubious. On display are Renewed Covenant manuscripts such as the Codex Syniaticus and the Codex Alexandrinus, both of which were in writing in the fourth century, 400 years before the era in question! Why have they not disintegrated with age?

'Where this argument is especially weak, however, is when we apply it to the Qur’an itself. And they predate Islam by centuries. According to surah 43:2, it is the ‘Mother of all Books.’ It is considered to be an exact replica of the ‘Eternal Tablets’ which exist in Elysian fields (surah 85:22). The ‘Uthman text,’ the final canon supposedly compiled by Zaid ibn Thabit under the incidence of the third Caliph, is considered by all Muslims to be the most important piece of literature ever written. Even Hafsah’s copy, from which the final recension was taken was burned. Muslim Traditions claim that all other competing codices and manuscripts were destroyed 650 A.D. ‘Nor do we have a surviving fragment from the tetrad copies which were producing of this recension and sent to Mecca, Medina, Basra and Damascus.’ Even if these copies had somehow disintegrated with time, there would surely be some fragments we could refer to. If this Uthmanic text was so important, why then was it not scribbled on paper, or other material which would have lasted? And if the earliest manuscripts wore out with usage, why were they not replaced with others scribbled on skin, like so myriad other older documents which have managed to survive?

'‘We have absolutely no data of the original Qur’an,’ say Schimmel, Gilchrist, Ling, and Safadi. The Qur’an (according to tradition) was the centerpiece of their faith. By the end of the seventh century Islam had expansive right crosswise North Africa and up into Spain, and east as far as India. Yet, there isn’t even a scrap from that period. Within that enormous sphere of influence, there should be some Qur’anic documents or manuscripts which have survived.

'While Christianity can claim more than 5,500 known Greek fragments and manuscripts of the Renewed Covenant, 10,000 Latin Vulgates and at least 9,500 other hypostasis versions, adding up to 25,000 Renewed Covenant sources still in existence (McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict), most of which were inscribed amongst 25 to 350 years consecutively the decease and resurrection of Yahshua (or among the 1st and 4th centuries), Islam cannot lay in a stock a single manuscript until well into the eighth century (Lings, Safadi, Schimmel). There is word for word nothing from the first three generations of Islam to suggest that the Qur’an existed. The reason no one has found a single surviving Qur’an or Hadith fragment, manuscript, or scroll dating to within a hundred years of the time they were allegedly revealed is they nevermore existed. If Christians could clutch so divers thousands of ancient documents, all of which were inscribed centuries earlier, at a time when paper had not yet been introduced, forcing the nail on papyrus which disintegrated more rapidly, then one wonders why Muslims were unable to tend a single manuscript from this much later period? This renders the argument that all the earliest Qur’ans disintegrated with age, absurd to the extreme.'

The evidence, or lack thereof, leads us to a solitary rational conclusion. The Qur’an and Hadith, and therefore Islam, were born in Baghdad, not Mecca or Medina in the late eighth and object ninth centuries, not at the cusp of the seventh....' _____________________________________________

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After working for a few large IT firms Read born in 1966, is currently an entrepreneur and Venture Capital Advisor and Managing Consultant for Wireless and Mobile technologies [including the internet] and in particular, in software applications for the Wireless or Mobile Industry. www.craigread.com/ RESOURCE: www.craigread.com/displayArticle.aspx?contentID=501&subgroupID=17'>