Henri Lammens and the Sira

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), May 20, 2012 at 16:50

Dr. Pipes you wrote

born in 570 A.D., first revelation in 610, flight to Medina in 622, death in 632.

And even all of this has been proven with ease by Henri Lammens to be all made up and fraudulent and yes he had no like for islam but he indeed alerted the students of early islam to the nature of the sira that there is nothing historical about it and that it only serves one purpose and that is to explain all these opaque revelations in the book of Allah

Now i will explain to the readers how all these dates were made up by the ulama

What is most strange about islam is that the islamic calendar starts from 622CE or the year of the so called Hijra and not 610CE when we are told in the 3rd century by the Muslims ulama sitting in distant Mesopotamia and trying to tell us what this opaque revelation is really saying that the praiseworthy aka Muhammad started to receive his revelations from Allah

Well the extant literary sources be it internal or external to the islamic tradition are silent about this hijra and why is that? Well the reason is very clear that it was all made up later on by the historicizing Islamic historical tradition which was trying to explain the fact that the Qur'an is really a very heterogeneous text with the so called Meccan suras very different from the so called Medina suras.

So what really happened in 622CE if it is not this bogus hijra? The only real significant event in the Middle East was the defeat of the Persians by the Greeks in Upper Mesopotamia in the very long war that started in 616CE and exhausted the wealth and power of both empires and left areas of both empires with no more than the local native polity and indeed the Arabs of Mesopotamia and the Syrian desert took over the political power and very soon they were a threat to the very survival of both empires. So the Umayyads clan took over and it really explains why did they establish the capital of their empire not in al-Hijaz but in Damascus and this explains why did they build their Islamic monuments not in Mecca or Medina but in Aelia/Jerusalem and Damascus and for sure they were Christian Arabs

Oh islam? it did not exist this early on

So how did the Islamic tradition calculate such dates (see Lammens The age of Muhammad and the chronology of the sira and also see his master piece Fatima and the daughters of Muhammad and also see the great work by Conrad: Abraha and Muhammad and the literary topoi in the early islamic historical tradition)

The ulama had to work these dates backwards

So the starting point was 632CE when Muhammad is supposed to have died and the ulama had to work things backwards and as 3A'isha was quoted as saying if you need to know anything about Abul Qasim then you will find it in the Qur'an! and in the Qur'an they had to find it

The second point selected in this drama was the year 622CE or the year when the Arab polity took over power in the Middle East as explained and it was selected as the first year of the Islamic calendar as well as this so called hijra

Oh the hijra? if it really happened then we do not have any extant evidence be it coins or epigraphy or papyri or ostarca that will support such assertion but what we have in the extant literary sources from non Muslims is what they called the year of the Arab kings but nothing about hijra

What is most striking is that the Islamic historical tradition is silent about this hijra for 2-3 centuries and why is that? Unless it was all made up later on

Now the Islamic tradition is famous for looking for symmetry so if Muhammad lived for 10 years in Medina then he must have lived also 10 or may be 13 years in Mecca and as usual there were debates early on and the final number was 13 and this bring us to 610CE

Now the ulama had to go back and check the Qur'an and they found the verse where it says that I (Muhammad) lived among you for a 3umr and the Arabic word 3umr means life time which in the late antique Middle East was no more than the topos of 40, 400, 4000 etc... which really means a long time or many (you will find such topos in the Bible and the literary sources of the antique and late antique world) so Allah seems to be using a literary topos made by human beings

Well they did it and they told us that he must have been 40 years old in the year 610CE or may be 613CE and only Allah knows

Now they had to go back to the Qur'an and figure out when was he born and they found in the Quranic allusions of Q105 or surat al-feel so they tell us that the Abraham expedition took place in 3am al-feel which would be in 610CE-40 (the topos of 40)= 570CE et voila we have the year when he was born

So you can see that it is made up and bogus and what is most amazing is that as time went by the later ulama seemed to know more and even tell us not just the year but the day that he was born

The most interesting thing here is that recent evidence reveals that Abraham's expedition took place around 550CE! which means that if this is all true then Muhammad would have been around 60 years old in 610CE but the Islamic historical tradition tells us that he looked young and hardly had any grey hair when he died in 632CE! So some one is a liar her

The lesson to be learned here is that the Islamic historical tradition is the biggest literary fraud in the history of humanity

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