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Defending Muhammad as a Prophet of God is basically impossible without throwing out the very history that Muslims have taken as fact or 1400 years.
Like the Bible and Old Testament the Qur’an (The Holy Book of Islam) relies on 3rd and 4thhand accounts; and from a few thoughts written on scraps of papers, palm leaves and stones. Like the Christian writings that were compiled 150/200 after the alleged existence of Jesus Christ and supposed crucifixion, the Qur’an was compiled 150 years after the death of Muhammad in 623AD. In the Mishtatu I Masabih, chapter 3, we are informed that by the command of the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, the text of the Qur’an was “collected” by the official scribe Zaid Ibn Thabit “from palm leaves and stones and from the breasts from those who had learnt by heart the various revelations.”
Therefore following the same path of the other two Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity, Islam and its Qur’an was made up supposedly from “memory” from those who supposedly committed to memory the words of Muhammad. This hearsay argument puts the Qur’an in the same pot as the Jewish Old Testament, The New and the Christian bibles as to credibility and historical accuracy.
Al Bukhari, a Muslim scholar of the 9th – 10th Century, and one of the most authoritative of the Muslim tradition compilers writes that whenever Muhammad fell into one of his unpredictable trances his revelations were written on whatever was handy at the time. The leg or thigh bone of dead animals were used, as well as palm leaves, parchments, papers, skins, mats, stones and bark. And when there was nothing at hand his disciples attempted to memorize his words as “closely as possible”. (Zaid b Thabit said: “The Prophet died and the Qur’an had not been assembled into a single place.” Page 118, Ahmad ben Ali ben Muhammad al Asqalani ibn Hajar, “Fath al Bari”, 13 volumes, Cairo 1939/1348, Volume 9, page 9).
The situation of credibility as to the truthfulness of the Qur’an is further aggravated by what Zhuri reports, “We have heard that many of the Qur’an passages were committed to memory by the disciples, but many of those who this memory fell in the fighting at Yemama. The Battle of Yamamawas fought in December AD 632 in the plain of Aqraba in the region of Yamama between the forces of Muslim Caliph Abu Bakr and Musaylimah, a self-proclaimed prophet. During the battle of Yamama 450 reciters of the Quran were killed in combat. Those passages memorized by them had not been written and therefore died with their owners, before the Caliph Abu Bakr had the time to get his scribes to commit them to paper. (Ref .Light of Life, Austria, page 47 citing Ibn Kathir’s Al-Bidaya wa al-Nibaya, chapter of the battle of Yamama).
Here it is evident that aside the credibility of the Qur’an we have also to deal with an incomplete account as to the “revelations” to the supposed Prophet Muhammad by God. And there is more incompletion as to the integrity and completeness of the Qur’an, as there were other losses that were caused by natural, but less brutal mishaps than war as we can see from:
What Muhammad child wife Aisha said after his death:
“The verse of the stoning and of suckling an adult ten times were, they were written on paper kept under my bed; when the messenger of Allah, my beloved husband passed away we were so preoccupied with the arrangements concerning his death, a goat entered the bedroom and ate the paper.” (What a Bummer! [References: Musnad Ahmad bin Hanbal, volume 6, page 629; Ibn Qutbah, Tawil Muhktalafi’l Hadith – Cairo: Maktaba al-Kulliyat al-Azhariyya, 1966, page 310; As-Suyuty ad Durru’l Manthur, Volume 2, page 13).
What is the Qur’an in effect?
It is a supposed collection of revelations that God made to Muhammad his Prophet, what today we would define a sort of PA to the CEO, Muslims believe that the Qur’an was revealed from God to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel (a sort of executive Vice-President) from 610 to 632 CE, the year of his death. Muhammad recited the Qur’an to his followers, numbering tens of thousands, who recited after him, until they had memorized it. He also dictated it to his scribes (Muhammad was illiterate) who wrote down its verses during his life, which has we have seen at the beginning used to most advanced means of recording data available in those days.
The text of the Qur’an consists of 114 chapters of varying lengths, each known as a sura. Chapters are classed as Meccan or Medinan, depending on when (before or after Hijra) the verses were revealed. Chapter titles are derived from a name or quality discussed in the text, or from the first letters or words of the sura. Muslims believe that Muhammad, on God's command, gave the chapters their names. Generally, longer chapters appear earlier in the Qur’an, while the shorter ones appear later. The chapter arrangement is thus not connected to the sequence of revelation. Each sura except the ninth starts with the Basmala, an Arabic phrase meaning (“In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful”). There are, however, still 114 occurrences of the Basmala in the Qur’an, due to its presence in verse 27:30 as the opening of Solomon's letter to the Queen of Sheba.
Each sura is formed from several ayat(verses), which originally means a sign or portent sent by God. The number of verses differs from chapter to chapter. An individual verse may be just a few letters or several lines. The verses are unlike the highly refined poetry of the pre-Islamic Arabs in their content and distinctive rhymes and rhythms, being more akin to the prophetic utterances marked by inspired discontinuities found in the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. The actual number of ayat has been a controversial issue among Muslim scholars since Islam's inception, some recognizing 6,000, some 6,204, some 6,219, and some 6,236, although the words in all cases are the same. The most popular edition of the Qur’an, which is based on the Kufa school tradition, contains 6,236 ayat.
There is a crosscutting division into 30 parts of roughly equal division, ajza, each containing two units called ahzab, each of which is divided into four parts (rub 'al-ahzab). The Qur’an is also divided into seven approximately equal parts, manazil, for it to be recited in a week.
The Qur’anic text seems to have no beginning, middle, or end, its nonlinear structure being akin to a web or net. The textual arrangement is sometimes considered to have lack of continuity, absence of any chronological or thematic order, and presence of repetition.
Fourteen different Arabic letters form 14 different sets of “Qur’anic Initials” (the "Muqatta'at", such as A.L.M. of 2:1) and prefix 29 suras in the Qur’an. The meaning and interpretation of these initials is considered unknown to most Muslims. In 1974, Egyptian biochemist Rashad Khalifa claimed to have discovered a mathematical code based on the number 19, which is mentioned in Sura 74:30 of the Qur’an.
Like all religions Islam (literal meaning: complete surrender to Him (God), is a brainwashing religion, the text of the Qur’an have to be memorized and repeated endless times, and like all religion the brainwashing begins when the individual is at its most vulnerable, childhood.
The oldest Qur’an available is from around 790 AD and is in the British Library.
As a book the Qur’an if studied closely has little or nothing to do with any God, but with the political, military and sexual ambitions of one man: Muhammad.
Who is Muhammad?
Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullāh was born in Mecca in 570 AD and died in 623AD, orphaned at an early he was brought up by an uncle, and worked as a merchant and a sheppard. He married at 25 and then one day tired of life in Mecca decided to retire into a cave and meditate as to the meaning of life. It is believed that at the age of 40 he received his first revelation from God, and according to Islamic Tradition after three years from this event he started preaching the word of God and that complete surrender to him (henceforth the term Islam), was the only acceptable to him, and no compromise could be possible.
It is difficult to know for certain what the life was like for this man in his youth, as like with the figure of Jesus Christ it is at times difficult to separate facts from legend and inventions. What is certain is that at one point he went Medina, and in fact according to Islamic Tradition his life is Muhammad's life is traditionally defined into two periods: pre-hijra (emigration) in Mecca (from 570 to 622), and post-hijra in Medina (from 622 until 632).
In Medina he managed to unite the tribes and after a bitter war with the tribes that rotated round Mecca he finally conquered Mecca in January 630 AD (10th day of Ramadan, 8 AH). It is called Fatah-e-Mubeen, The Glorious Victory.
During his life Muhammad led 27 military Campaigns, massacred thousands of innocent civilians, and attacked countless caravans. “I am the Prophet that laughs when killing my enemies.” (Hadith)
Muhammad was most certainly an epileptic; in fact the seizures that preceded his Revelations are typical of epilepsy. Now that aside, if one has to examine some of the things this man got up to then with the eyes of today, he’d be indicted of War Crimes, Murder, Torture, Rape and Pedophilia.
Just to give a few examples:
- In order to finance his military campaigns he attacked and pillaged countless caravans
- He was a true “stay behind” leader has he kept well away from the wars he sent other to fight.
- He beheaded 800 Jewish men who had been living for centuries in Mecca for the simple reason that they refused to accept him as their leader and a Prophet of God. Furthermore he traded the wives and daughters of these men for weapons and horses.
- He was completely intolerant of criticism, and sent an assassin to kill a woman who was nursing an infant, as she had written poems that he considered against him.
- He sentenced a woman to death by having her limbs attached to camels moving in the opposite directions pulling her apart, and beheaded her and paraded her severed head through the streets of Medina.
- He tortured to death a young Jewish tribal leader in order to get his money, then forced his 17 years old wife to marry him on the same night and raped her.
- He forced his own son to divorce his wife so that he could marry her.
- He was bestowed a 6 year old girl in marriage, and he consummated the marriage when she was nine and he 50, damaging her physically so that she could never get pregnant.
All this is nothing but the tip of a very big iceberg on what kind of man was Muhammad, Prophet of God. A live broadcast in 2008 on Al-Hayat TV lasting 90 minutes Father Zakariya Boutros discussed publicly dozens of stories that Muhammad “stole” from the Old and New Testaments as well as from the Midrash and other ancient Jewish documents, and inserted them in the Qur’an as revelations from Allah. Father Zakariya makes a very clear distinction between plagiarism, which is the Arabic word “iqtibas” and theft. He demonstrates that Muhammad didn’t merely copy and paste into the Qur’an these stories but actually changed them in their essential meaning so that Muhammad would appear not merely similar but essentially superior to individuals such as Moses, Adam, and Abraham whose alleged stories he stole.
Muhammad had 13 wives; his youngest Aisha was 9 years old a fact that in this day an age would land him in a register for sex offenders and pedophiles; and on top that his life was a circus of sexual escapades with concubines and slaves.
It is funny to see how in the West Muslims follow a different approach when obliged to defend the unsavory facts on the life of their Prophet, they simply present the information about Muhammad in a way that ignores the reality of his actions.
Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed author, in his book “No God but God”, describes the raids led by Muhammad and his followers on unarmed villages and caravans as a type of “spring games” engaged by everyone in that era, this is tantamount to defining the Charge of the Light Brigade as an innocuous military exercise involving innocent Russian bystanders.
Dr. T Ramadan, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Geneva, with whom I crossed “intellectual swords” personally because of my activity as an associate professor of Ancient History accredited in various Universities, including Switzerland during a public debate on the History of Religion and the theological and historical differences between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in his book “The Footsteps of the Prophet” acknowledges that Muhammad was “engaged” to Aisha when she was 6 and goes on saying that he married her “several years later”, which I suppose is better than saying that he consummated the marriage when she was 9. He further admits that Muhammad allows men “to beat their wives” in the Qur’an but claims that Muhammad himself “never struck a woman”, and that therefore according to my illustrious colleague, he is a true “role model” for men in their relationship to women. When I challenged him on that issue and quoted a on the passage in the Hadith, that are narrations concerning the deeds and actions of the Prophet Muhammad, and actually a book of great relevance in Islamic Jurisprudence, where Aisha herself says that: “ Muhammad, my husband struck me on the chest so hard that it hurt me” when she followed him outside; or when I raised the issue of Sofiah, the 17 year Jewish girl forced to lay with Muhammad on the same day he had tortured and killed her husband in front of her, or the forced seduction of the young Christian Copt slave Mary, in the house of one of his wives Hafsah, or the many forced sexual intercourses on female slaves and prisoners of war by himself and his followers, and asked him to justify what kind of role model to other men can Muhammad be with such a pedigree, considering that Islam is a Patriarchal society where women are totally subjugated to men; he immediately stated that I was being disrespectful and offensive to his religion and furthermore I was even attacked by some other non Muslim members of the panel has being offensive and politically incorrect.
So one lesson that can certainly learnt from this is that the same way as “Gunny Highway” played by Clint Eastwood, in the film Heartbreak Ridge, after firing a few rounds of an AK-47 said to his men: “Ladies this is the AK-47 Assault rifle, the preferred weapon of your enemies, it makes a distinctive sound, so remember it.” Political Correctness has become the preferred weapon of all religious fanatics whatever the denomination, as an effective means of avoiding criticisms and challenges to their supposed versions of the truth. And it works because most people are afraid to challenge them.
I really do not have that problem.
What is the Legacy left by Mohammad?
Aside his “role model” for all men in their relationship to women and the saying: “When you get home beat your wife, you don’t know why but she does”, he has left us with a Religion that declares itself a Religion of Peace, but this peace is extended only to the Muslim communities. Regarding the rest of us non-Muslims the Qur’an is quite specific:
Surah 48:29 - Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah those who follow him are merciful to one another, but ruthless to unbelivers.
Surah 9:5-Kill the Mushrikun (Unbelievers) wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush…..
Surah 9:29- Fight against those of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) as believe they not in Allah nor the Last Day, and forbid not that Allah hath forbidden by His Messenger, and allow not their religion of untruth, till they pay tribute………………………
Surah 47:4- Therefore when you meet the unbelievers, smite at their necks, till you have totally subdued them, bind a bond firmly (on them); thereafter it is time for either generosity or ransom: until war lays down its burdens. Thus (are ye commanded); as it is Allah’s will he could have certainly exacted retribution from them (Himself) but he lets you fight, so as to test you and the others. But (for) those who are slain in the Way (Name) of Allah, He (The Prophet) will make sure that their deeds will never be lost.
Suras 6:34, 6-115, 10:64, 50:28 and 50:29 clearly Sais to Muslims, “No change can there be in the words of Allah, and that Allah cannot alter (or abrogate) his words.
Though as I said, all religions are based on the principle of indoctrination and brainwashing, all believers in the three religions derived from Abraham, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity manifest a blind faith in something that has no real standing in the facts of history nor in the facts of science, of the three the most dangerous one is Islam.
