Hi Simon

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Aug 21, 2007 at 07:41

What on earth is "Historicity of religion"? Did he mean historiography? This guy is very interesting. Not a good start.

Historians are interested in answering the following question: "what really happened?" and nothing about "historicity of religion" what ever that is. Historians are not interested in proving that islam is for real or not and if Muhammad really spoke to God via an angel or not because non of this can be proven or disproven. So the historical reconstruction that we would have in the case of religion is what the pious (the 3Ulama) believed really happened. It does not mean that this is what really happened. Historians apply the tools of literary criticism to the extant sources available be it papyri, books, codices, coins, epigraphy, monuments etc... and try to reconstruct what really happened. The pious history is now called salvation history (see Wansbrough's SM) and it is not real history.

But the real problem for Muslaim is: All the EXTANT (look this word up in a dictionary) information that we have about islam come to us from the 3rd century of islam and not any earlier and I include here the hadith, the sira, tefseer/ta'weel, tarikh etc.. and all this huge literature come to us from Iran and Mesopotamia and not from the Hijaz.

Just imagine if you or I are trying to reconstruct the life of let us say George Washington with no written texts and with ony oral transmission of information and to add insult to injury we are writing such biography while living in let us say the Hijaz.

I'm sure you will agree with me that our little biography will be utter nonsense and it will be what you and I believed happened in the life of George Washington 200 years after his death but it is not what really happnened. This is a point that Muslims just do not get. It also means that the Sira is really bogus and that we cannot really reconstruct the life of Muhammad and we will never know what really happened. And you know what? we cannot even reconstruct the life of Muhammad by reading the Qur'an only without the help of the sira and the hadith and the tafseer but if all of this is bogus then we really do not know very much about the life of Muhammad.

Now the hadith is all very anachronistic and all of it is bogus. The Tarikh as was proven by Noth is also bogus. So what are we left with? Not much! It will be interesting to have a chat with your friend. Invite him here if it is OK with Dr. Pipes

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