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The Roots of Islam and al-khulafa' al-rashiduun part twoReader comment on item: Friendless in the Middle East Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jan 3, 2012 at 14:53 Hi BB In part one I hope I made it clear that there is nothing historical about the story of the letters from Muhammad to al-Muqawqas. So the question is why would the islamic historical tradition comes up with such story that is full of holes Well the way i see 1. It is either the Muslim historians got the outline of a story about letters but all the detalis were all made up to amuse those listening to those stories but even the outline of such story if full of holes 2. Or, and this is my guess, is that the Qur'an provides us with what i call Quranic allusions that have no clear meaning and that the Ulama had to make up a story to explain these unclear allusions and that it was the Quranic logias and pericopes that generated such stories and non of it is for real (see Henri Lamens) and I do happen to believe that this is indeed what really happened but once the story is made up no one had a clue about what really happened and therefore the story spun more stories I happen to agree with Wansbrough and Henri Lamens that the islamic historical tradition is the biggest literary fraud in the history of man/woman kind So much for the letters sent by Muhammad >Did the early Caliphs such as Abu Bakr and Umar invent the prophet of Islam? The question should be did al-khulafa' al-rashiduun exit or not? Well if they existed then we do not have any extant evidence that they existed: no papyri or epigraphy and no texts or monuments that would attest to the existence of the 4 khulafa' not a single word about them for about 150-200 years when we start to hear about them from the ulama that wrote the islamic literary sources in distant Mesopotamia Mecca? there is no extant evidence to support what the islamic tradition about being a hub of trade and all and about the so called Meccan trade And yes sources can be lost and the so called argument from silence can be a weak argument but in this case we do have extant literary sources and even monuments and epigrapghy but all of these sources are silent about them and why is that? My guess is that they never existed but they had to be created in-order to portray an ideal start for islam but they also tell us that 3 out of four of them were killed by other Muslims! Which I suspect that it was also made up to get rid of characters that never existed Oh Omar al-Faruq? Or the third khalifa? well his name is suspicious (see Crone) as the word al-Faruq must be translated as the redeemer or Omar the redeemer (read this as the Christ) and that he entered the city of Aelia/Jerusalem through one of the gates and riding his donkey (and not a camel as the arabs did) and headed to the site of al-masjid al-aqsa which did not exist at the time he was supposed to have visited Jerusalem and that this story is not more than re-arranging and Islamizing the story of the arrival of the Messiah to Jerusalem so you know that such story is not more than salvation history (read this as pious fiction) So much for the little fable of Omar al-Faruq Oh the Uthmanic codex? as we are told that Uthman is the one (at least this is what the tradition settled on) that collected the Qur'an. Again the collection of the Qur'an is the most confused and confusing story in Islam that one can only be suspicious of Uthman and his codex Wansbrough provides a very intersesting opinion about such story: If you read the Qur'an the basic layer is called al-rasm which is the words of Allah but this rasm does not have any short vowels of long vowels like the alif at times and it lacks the shadda or doubel consonants and the hamza consonant. here is the problem take the case of the rasm of the word MLK is surat al-fatiha and if you read the Cairo Qur'an it is read as MaaLiKi or the owner of and if you read the Tunisian Qur'an it is read as MaLiKi or the king of and the Qur'an is also full of words that no one has a clue about what they mean as in the case of kalala and Ilaf This really means one of two things (see Cook) 1. That the Quranic material pre-dates Muhammad and by 632CE when he died no one had a clue what this material really means but this would detach the Qur'an from Muhammad 2. Or that the Quranic logias and pericopes were circulating but not canonized and by the 3rd century of Islam when the Muslim masorites started to work on the Islamic masora in distant Mesopotamia no one had a clue about what the Qur'an also says but this will detach Islam from al-Hijaz but it would place islam where it really must have started in distant Mesopotamia in the time of the early Abbassids So much for the story of the collection of the Qur'an and Uthman and his codex So who was really the first real historical character in the saga of early islam? the answer here is: Mu3awiyya of the Umayyads clan But what is most amazing about Mu3awiyya is that his name is not an Arabic name but a Syriac name as the word mu3awiyya in Syriac means he who howels which in Arabic would have been al-3Awi and this is more reason that one cannot understand early islam without being able to read the literary sources available in Syriac So why would the first character in islam have a Syriac name and not an Arabic name and why would he have a cross engraved before his name on the monument al al-ghadra bath (circa 660CE)? My guess is because he was a Christian Arab and islam did not exist that early and was not to exist until the early Abbassids Oh al-masjid al-aqsa inscriptions circa 692CE? As was explained by Luxenberg they must be read as intra-Christian polemics and that Abd al-Malik who built it was a follower of the non Trinitarian Syrian/Arab early Christianity Oh the Arab tribes in the Levants and Mesopotamia? they were Christains and they were forced to convert to islam after the Abbassids revolution in 750CE I hope i helped There will be more
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