I recently finished reading an absolutely fascinating book called In the Shadow of the Sword by Tom Holland. It's essentially a popular history book covering the late antiquity period and the rise of the great monotheistic faiths, but in particular it talks a great deal about the early history of Islam and how little we actually know about it. It's fascinating because unlike Christianity, which is well known to have been severely manipulated by imperial politics to the extent that what we now know as the New Testament is essentially just the culmination of factional infighting at the Council of Nicaea 325 years after the Birth of Jesus, the fact that a similar process almost certainly went on in Islam as well is something that I never see mentioned.
The story of Islam's early foundation is something that's supposedly well known and extensively documented. Setting aside whether Mohammed really did receive revelations from Allah (which I obviously don't believe personally), it's commenly held that the Prophet lived in Mecca until he fell foul of the ruling faction there and fled to Medina, from whence he eventually forged a mighty new nation based on adherance to the new faith of Islam which defeated the Khoresh and conquered Mecca, banishing the pagan idols from the Ka'ba and then going on to sweep through the rest of Arabia. Islamic sharia law is all derived from the Hadiths, which are direct quotations from the prophet during his lifetime lovingly preserved over the centuries and compiled by Islamic scholars into a complete body of work that gives guidance to the faithful on how to live their lives. The likelihood is that none of these accepted facts are actually true.
The most interesting revelation for me concerns the most basic thing about Islam that everybody knows, which is that their holy city is Mecca, Mohammed's birthplace and home of the most sacred shrine in the entire faith. What's interesting is that there's no real historical basis for believing this to have actually been the case. Mecca is mentioned only once in the Quran, and that only in passing. There are no contemporaneous sources which mention the city at all and certainly nothing which would suggest that Mohammed ever even visited the place, let alone that he was born there. What is mentioned is a place called 'Bakka', which is described as being the most sacred shrine in the faith that every muslim should make pilgrimage to. Nowadays this tends to just be taken as another name for Mecca, but again there are no contemporaneous sources for this assumption, it was just asserted centuries after Mohammed's death by Islamic scholars who were looking for a way to explain away the fact that the holy city doesn't even register in the sacred texts. What do exist however are a number of sources which suggest that in the early centuries of the faith muslims in Iraq would direct their prayers to the west and muslims in Palestine would direct their prayers to the east. This suggests that 'Bekka' actually lay somewhere on the Syrian border, a very long way from Mecca. The story that Mohammed originated in Mecca and the subsequent shifting of orientation for all of those muslim prayers to the south didn't occur until sometime during the Umayyad dynasty a couple of hundred years after the Islamic conquest of the Middle East, and appears to have been done for political reasons. There isn't actually any documentary evidence for it whatsoever.
Likewise with the Hadiths. There are thousands of these and there used to be many thousands more. Over the years Islamic scholars sought to systematically test them all to weed out the genuine sayings of the prophet from the fake until eventually a body of law could be established that authentically derived from Mohammed himself. The thing is though, the first Hadiths didn't start to appear until about 200 years after his death. The authentification process amounted to little more than establishing a long chain of chinese whispers all the way back to the disciple who first heard the words of the Prophet and passed them on exactly as spoken. Needless to say this is enormously improbable. The fact is that there are no contemporaneous sources to support any of them and in fact no real reason to suppose that any of the Hadiths are genuine. Many actually seem to contradict the Quran. In the Quran it says that muslims should pray 3 times a day not 5, and it says that adulterors will receive their punishment in the afterlife but doesn't prescribe that they should be stoned to death, which is what it says in the hadiths. Many also seem to show evidence of contamination by the teachings of the other faiths in the lands that the Arabs conquered, notably Zoroastrian, Jewish and Christian teachings. This is hardly surprising of course, but it does rather cast a new light on the whole concept of Islamic law.
We basically know othing at all about Mohammed. Where he was born, what he did during his life, what his teachings really were or whether in fact he ever existed at all. This is quite remarkable when you stop to think about it, since there are billions of people around the world who live by laws that are supposedly derived from his dictates. I'm surprised this doesn't get more coverage really.
The story of Islam's early foundation is something that's supposedly well known and extensively documented. Setting aside whether Mohammed really did receive revelations from Allah (which I obviously don't believe personally), it's commenly held that the Prophet lived in Mecca until he fell foul of the ruling faction there and fled to Medina, from whence he eventually forged a mighty new nation based on adherance to the new faith of Islam which defeated the Khoresh and conquered Mecca, banishing the pagan idols from the Ka'ba and then going on to sweep through the rest of Arabia. Islamic sharia law is all derived from the Hadiths, which are direct quotations from the prophet during his lifetime lovingly preserved over the centuries and compiled by Islamic scholars into a complete body of work that gives guidance to the faithful on how to live their lives. The likelihood is that none of these accepted facts are actually true.
The most interesting revelation for me concerns the most basic thing about Islam that everybody knows, which is that their holy city is Mecca, Mohammed's birthplace and home of the most sacred shrine in the entire faith. What's interesting is that there's no real historical basis for believing this to have actually been the case. Mecca is mentioned only once in the Quran, and that only in passing. There are no contemporaneous sources which mention the city at all and certainly nothing which would suggest that Mohammed ever even visited the place, let alone that he was born there. What is mentioned is a place called 'Bakka', which is described as being the most sacred shrine in the faith that every muslim should make pilgrimage to. Nowadays this tends to just be taken as another name for Mecca, but again there are no contemporaneous sources for this assumption, it was just asserted centuries after Mohammed's death by Islamic scholars who were looking for a way to explain away the fact that the holy city doesn't even register in the sacred texts. What do exist however are a number of sources which suggest that in the early centuries of the faith muslims in Iraq would direct their prayers to the west and muslims in Palestine would direct their prayers to the east. This suggests that 'Bekka' actually lay somewhere on the Syrian border, a very long way from Mecca. The story that Mohammed originated in Mecca and the subsequent shifting of orientation for all of those muslim prayers to the south didn't occur until sometime during the Umayyad dynasty a couple of hundred years after the Islamic conquest of the Middle East, and appears to have been done for political reasons. There isn't actually any documentary evidence for it whatsoever.
Likewise with the Hadiths. There are thousands of these and there used to be many thousands more. Over the years Islamic scholars sought to systematically test them all to weed out the genuine sayings of the prophet from the fake until eventually a body of law could be established that authentically derived from Mohammed himself. The thing is though, the first Hadiths didn't start to appear until about 200 years after his death. The authentification process amounted to little more than establishing a long chain of chinese whispers all the way back to the disciple who first heard the words of the Prophet and passed them on exactly as spoken. Needless to say this is enormously improbable. The fact is that there are no contemporaneous sources to support any of them and in fact no real reason to suppose that any of the Hadiths are genuine. Many actually seem to contradict the Quran. In the Quran it says that muslims should pray 3 times a day not 5, and it says that adulterors will receive their punishment in the afterlife but doesn't prescribe that they should be stoned to death, which is what it says in the hadiths. Many also seem to show evidence of contamination by the teachings of the other faiths in the lands that the Arabs conquered, notably Zoroastrian, Jewish and Christian teachings. This is hardly surprising of course, but it does rather cast a new light on the whole concept of Islamic law.
We basically know othing at all about Mohammed. Where he was born, what he did during his life, what his teachings really were or whether in fact he ever existed at all. This is quite remarkable when you stop to think about it, since there are billions of people around the world who live by laws that are supposedly derived from his dictates. I'm surprised this doesn't get more coverage really.