The biggest literary fraud in the history of mankind

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Mar 14, 2009 at 07:46

Ronnie wrote

>Since Saudi Arabia is now "Judenrein," (an example of racism to the purest degree), no one can go and look for ancient Mikvahs and synagogues and artifacts to prove the former existence of the Jewish tribes. But Mecca is the area in which the Jewish tribes lived. Bernard Lewis can tell it a lot better than I can.

Let me repeat what I wrote: if we examine the extant (prior or 632CE or after 632CE) literary sources extenal to the islamic tradtion be it the rabbinical sources or Greek or Syriac or Coptic souces you will find that these sources are silent about such communities (see hoyland survey). There are no papyri, ostraca, cions, monuments, epigraphy that could attest to the existence to these communities. Yes argument from silence is not a strong argument as sources can be lost or are there in a cave (as in the case of the Qumran library or the Nag Hammadi Library) and they are waiting to be discovered

But what is most amazing about such communities is that no one in the civilized Middle East remembered anything about such communities after the Arab invasion of the Middle East starting in 633CE or 1 year after the death of Muhammad and I do believe that the silence of the sources here is important as these communities never existed and the only logical way to understand why does the Qur'an talk about the Jews is that those Jews in the Qur'an are the Jews in Mesopotamia, Iran and Palsetine but this would get us to move the origin of Islam from the late antique Hijaz to the late antique Middle East which many historians of early islam now believe

Now if you turn to the islamic traditon you would really have serious historiographical issues including the facts that these are only literary sources (again there are no papyri or ostraca or coins or epigraphy even monuments that could attest to the history as transmitted by the tradition (see hoyland's islam from the bronze age). Even the house of Muhammad in Mecca was neglected until al-Khayzuran the mother of Harun al-Rasheed fixed it and converted it to a mosque some 200 years after the death of Muhammad) and these literary sources are late, tendentious and can only be regarded as salvation history and not real history as in what really happened. And Bernard Lewis knows that. This does not mean that you cannot reconstruct some history based on the islamic sources but in this case there are far superior historians than he is that truly understand the nature of the souces about early islam

And by the way the tradition tells us that the jews in the Hijaz were residing in Medina and not mecca

I hope that I helped

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