Investigating the roots of western civilization (ye olde BC&H forum of IIDB lives on...)
https://earlywritings.com/forum/
Subjective and Objective Problems with the Canonical Biography known as the Sîra, with special reference to Q 9:37 and Q 44:54The academic establishment, the state media and the general public all accept the canonical biography of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, as the gospel truth. Nevertheless, the canonical biography largely consists of stories that have obvious parallels in the Biblical, Graeco-Roman, Near Eastern and Mediterranean world. Like Jesus, Muhammad feeds the multitudes, but Muhammad uses a handful of dates, not bread and fishes.
Johannes J.G. Jansen (Amsterdam) Otzenhausen, 4th Inârah Conference, 21 March 2014
And maybe Mohammed, like Moses, was not to see the promised land himself? But was a prophet for someone else? (Which is actually what prophets do! Islam is fascinating in how it confuses prophets and redeemers!
The Prophet like Moses
His answer is to present a revisionist history based almost exclusively on the work of a largely discredited group of orientalists.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/book ... eview.htmlThus we have Holland’s laughable treatment of the Quran. If it wasn’t revealed in Syria, as Crone once absurdly suggested, perhaps it was Palestine.
"To understand the origins of Islam,” writes Tom Holland, “and why it evolved in the way that it did, we must… explore the empires and religions of late antiquity”.
In the Shadow of the Sword works very precisely to this brief. Beating a path from the height of the Persian Empire established in AD 224 to the rise of the Abbasid caliphate in 750, Holland’s new book traces the process by which the world of the first millennium came to be dominated by one God, three religions and an innumerable succession of emperors.
In a book that challenges most of the first principles of Islamic exceptionalism, Holland portrays the vast Arab empire that was amassed between the River Oxus and the Pyrenees during the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries as “the last, the climactic and the most enduring” in a series of religious and political superstates that came to dominate the world of the Mediterranean and Middle East following the chaotic collapse of the western Roman Empire.
Islam, Holland argues, was not born fully formed with the Prophet as he received God’s revelation in a cave in 610, or when he fled Mecca for Medina around 622. In fact, the religion took nearly two centuries to assume its present form: a strict monotheism supremely loyal to the memory and teachings of its founder, Mohammed, governed by the words of its sacred text, the Koran, and overseen by an alliance of zealous princes and powerful priests....