"Did Mohammad Exist?"

IMO, taqiyyah came first then the Koran and Mohammad.

Daniel Pipes writing at the NationalReview on Robert Spencer's bold and timely endeavor "Did Mohammad Exist?"  What I didn't like is that, according to the review, Spencer has premised that if Mohammad did exist he existed as "an anti-Trinitarian Christian rebel leader in Arabia". I can't deal with that. Will read the book in it's entirety for proper clarity.

...Now, however, two scholars have separately ended this secrecy: Tom Holland with In the Shadow of the Sword, and Robert Spencer with Did Muhammad Exist? As their titles suggest, Spencer is the bolder author, and so is my focus here.

In a well-written, sober, and clear account, he begins by demonstrating the inconsistencies and mysteries in the conventional account concerning Mohammed’s life, the Koran, and early Islam. For example, whereas the Koran insists that Mohammed did not perform miracles, the hadith ascribes him thaumaturgic powers — multiplying food, healing the injured, drawing water from the ground and sky, and even sending lightning from his pickax. Which is it? Hadith claim Mecca was a great trading city but, strangely, the historical record reveals it as no such thing.



The Christian quality of early Islam is no less strange, specifically “traces of a Christian text underlying the [Koran].” Properly understood, these traces elucidate otherwise incomprehensible passages. Conventionally read, verse 19:24 has Mary nonsensically hearing, as she gives birth to Jesus, “Do not be sad, your Lord has placed a rivulet beneath you.” Revisionists transform this into the sensible (and piously Christian) “Do not be sad, your Lord has made your delivery legitimate.” Puzzling verses about the “Night of Power” commemorating Mohammed’s first revelation make sense when understood as describing Christmas. Chapter 96 of the Koran, astonishingly, invites readers to a Eucharist.

Building on this Christian base, revisionists postulate a radically new account of early Islam. Noting that coins and inscriptions from the seventh century mention neither Mohammed, the Koran, nor Islam, they conclude that the new religion did not appear until about 70 years after Mohammed’s supposed death. Spencer finds that “the first decades of the Arab conquest show the conquerors holding not to Islam as we know it but to a vague creed [Hagarism, focused on Abraham and Ishmael] with ties to some form of Christianity and Judaism.” In very brief: “The Muhammad of Islamic tradition did not exist, or if he did, he was substantially different from how that tradition portrays him” — namely, as an anti-Trinitarian Christian rebel leader in Arabia......