Hagarism

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Clive
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Re: Hagarism

Post by Clive »

Fighting and civil war based on Damascus! Not much theology!
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
ghost
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Re: Hagarism

Post by ghost »

Isn't the story about the civil war an invention by the Abbasids? What sources are there about the civil war?
Clive
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Re: Hagarism

Post by Clive »

Many of the earlier posts in this thread have unfortunately been lost, so this thread has become a bit disjointed!

Before getting too far into specific matters, I would like to keep more to general points, for example the dependence of Islam on Samaritanism and thus the logic of the intermediary position proposed by Crone and Cooke of Hagarism.



Whence Islam?

closely associated with Abraham and his faith: by borrowing a word which meant 'pagan' in the vocabulary of the Fertile Crescent, and using it to designate an adherent of an unsophisticated Abrahamic monotheism, the Hagarenes contrived to make a religious virtue of the stigma of their pagan past.

At the same time we can discern in this trend the beginnings of the far-reaching reorientation whereby the origins of Islam came to be seen in an elaborate and organic relationship to a real or imagined pagan heritage.The religion of Abraham provided some sort of answer to the question how the Hagarenes could enter the monotheist world without losing their identity in either of its major traditions. But in itself it was too simple and threadbare a notion to generate the basic religious structures which such a will to independence required.

The faith which had most to offer the Hagarenes at this level was Samaritanism. The Samaritans had faced the problem of dissociation from Judaism before the Christians, and without ever being absorbed by them.They had also solved the problem in a style very different from that of the Christians, and a good deal more relevant to the immediate needs of the Hagarenes; where the Christians sublimated the Judaic categories into metaphor,the Samaritans replaced them with concrete alternatives.

Given this basic affinity, a Hagarene reception of Samaritan ideas was facilitated conceptually by the prominence of Moses in both Judeo-Hagarismn and Samaritanism, and politically by the very innocuousness of the Samaritan community.

The earliest Hagarene borrowing from the Samaritans of which we have evidence is their scriptural position. At one point in the disputation between the patriarch and the emir referred to above, the emir demands to be told how it is that, if the Gospel is one, the Christian sects differ among themselves in matters of belief. The patriarch replies:

Just as the Pentateuch is one and the same, and is accepted by us Christians and by you Mahgraye, and by the Jews and the Samaritans, and each community is divided in faith;so also with the faith of the Gospel, each heresy understands and interprets it differently.

Hagarism is thus classed as a Pentateuchal religion.

Later the discussion shifts to the divinity of Christ and his status as son of God, and the emir demands proof from the Pentateuch. The patriarch replies with a barrage of unspecified scriptural citations, the weight of which was clearly prophetic. It is the emir's reaction at this point that is crucial:

The illustrious emir did not accept these from the prophets, but demanded [that] Moses[be cited] to prove to him that the messiah was God.

To accept the Pentateuch and reject the prophets is the Samaritan scriptural position
http://www.scribd.com/doc/27096936/Haga ... amic-World

p14 Original has citations.
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
Clive
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Re: Hagarism

Post by Clive »

With regard to the manner of composition,there is some reason to suppose that the Koran was put together out of a plurality of earlier Hagarene religious works. In the first place, this early plurality is attested in a number of ways. On the Islamic side, the Koran itself gives obscure indications that the integrity of the scripture was problematic, and with this we may compare the allegation against 'Uthmn that the Koran had been many books of which he had left only one.

On the Christian side, the monk of BetHale distinguishes pointedly between the Koran and the ..... while Levond has the emperor Leo describe how Hajjj destroyed the old Hagarene 'writings'.

Secondly, there is the internal evidence of the literary character of the Koran. The book is strikingly lacking in overall structure,frequently obscure and inconsequential in both language and content, perfunctory in its linking of disparate materials, and given to the repetition of whole passages in variant versions. On this basis it can plausibly be argued that the book is the product of the belated and imperfect editing of materials from a plurality of traditions.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27096936/Haga ... amic-World p17 (faults in scan)
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
ghost
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Re: Hagarism

Post by ghost »

I doubt that Hagarism existed. I think the better explanation is that the Ummayads were Christians, because that's what the numismatic evidence discussed by Volker Popp, Karl Heinz Ohlig and other Inarah Institute (inarah.de) members shows. They also show there was no Mohammedanism in the Iberian Peninsula until the 840s. Granted, the Ummayads' Christianity must have been a particular variety of Christianity, but it still wasn't Mohammedanism the Abbasid way. It's the Abbasids who made stuff up about the Ummayads and who invented the full-fledged Mohammed legend, so as to say they are legitimate successors to imaginary/legendary Mohammed and the imaginary/legendary rashidun who supposedly preceded the Ummayads, and for the purpose of political legitimization/justification and propaganda of their Abbasid caliphate. The Ummayads were emirs (amir al-muminin = commander of the guardians; kind of like the present-day Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)) rather than caliphs and so the Ummayad empire was an Ummayad emirate rather than caliphate.
Clive
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Re: Hagarism

Post by Clive »

The Battle of Tours (October 732),[27] also called the Battle of Poitiers
Wiki

I would argue that this army and many similar was actually with people with Hagaric beliefs, not a xian sect. The point is there were other groups apart from Jews and Christians. Samaritans make a lot of sense as the source of this set of beliefs.
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
ghost
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Joined: Wed Oct 30, 2013 9:12 am

Re: Hagarism

Post by ghost »

I would agree with you that the people who battled the Franconians weren't Mohammedans proper, because that's also what Johannes Thomas says here in German about the chronicles about the battle of Tours:

http://www.inarah.de/cms/fruehe-spanisc ... note148anc
http://www.inarah.de/cms/fruehe-spanisc ... note148sym

However, here's what I've also seen… For example, Pressburg on his website (islamfacts.info) shows a photo of a coin with a Jesus with flaming sword (German: Jesus mit dem Flammenschwert) that is apparently from the time of Ummayad ruler Malik:

http://islamfacts.info/Islamfacts/Stand ... hwFrei.jpg

The image is embedded in this webpage in German about other numismatic evidence:

http://islamfacts.info/Islamfacts/Standing_Caliph.html

Muslims will say the character on those other coins is a "standing caliph" (that's what they call him), but apparently it's a Christian character/person instead.

And as far as I know there is other such evidence on islamfacts.info and inarah.de that shows the Ummayads were Christians, instead of Mohammedans as the conventional view says.
Clive
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Re: Hagarism

Post by Clive »

I agree Mohammed means praised and some coins alleged to be Islamic are probably xian, but we are talking about an unformed era - of course there were xian elements, but that does not stop a primary root being Samaritan - the rejection of the prophets is precisely from that. Syncretism! A major issue is that a very significant source of beliefs and traditions is being ignored. I think we can work out a real history of Islam - this was a very literate era and area - but it will be very different from the authorised version!
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
ghost
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Re: Hagarism

Post by ghost »

Could you please explain what you mean by "the rejection of the prophets" and how it's Samaritan?

Sure the Arabs were literate, but that does not necessarily mean they used their literacy for literature proper. For example, this article gives to me the opposite impression, that they only used their literacy for trade and other simple things, particularly section 1:

http://www.inarah.de/cms/from-syriac-to-pahlavi.html
1. The aversion and contempt for writing of the northern Arabs at the time of the J?hiliyyah
Now if the southern Arabs were different, how do you know, and how do you know they played a role in the development of Islam?
Clive
Posts: 1197
Joined: Sun Aug 17, 2014 2:20 pm

Re: Hagarism

Post by Clive »

From Hagarism
52. In another rather suggestive passage, Leo remarks on the Hagarene disparagement of the Gospels andprophets on the ground that they are falsified, and proceeds to base his argument on a series of scripturalcitations which, he stresses, are from the Pentateuch (
ibid
., tr. Patkanian, pp. 45f = tr. Jeffery, pp. 299f).Note also the Samaritan ring of the Hagarene insinuation detected by Leo that Ezra falsified the scriptures(
ibid
., tr. Patkanian, p. 38 = tr. Jeffery, p.289).
165

Notes to pp. 15-17
53. Compare also the absence of mention of the prophets in the statement of a 1ate Syriac sourcethat Muhammad 'accepted Moses and his book, and accepted the Gospel ... .' (J.-B. Chabot (ed.and tr.),
Chronicon ad annum Christi
1234
pertinens
(= CSCO. Scriptores Syri. vols. xxxvif,lvi). Louvain 1916 etc., pp. 229 = 179; contrast the parallel version of Michael the Syrian,
Chronique,
vol. iv, p. 406 = vol. ii, p. 404. where the prophets are duly included).54. Samaritanism also suggested concrete alternatives which will be considered in Chapter 4.55. It is not clear whether we are to think of the Torah which 'Abdallh b. 'Amr b: al·'•s readalongside the
Furq•n
(Kister, 'Haddith', p. 231), and the
twrb
(
sic
. not
Orayta
) which the monkof Bet Hale cites alongside the Koran and other works as a source of law (see below. p. 167, n.14), as some sort of Arabic targum. There is no trace of one in the disputation between thepatriarch and the emir (Nau. 'Colloque'. especially pp. 25
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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