What do we know about the historical Muhammad? The short answer: Not much

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Feb 28, 2022 at 09:42

Our dear Dave is dishing out some unsubstantiated historical claims.

>Modern historical research based on documents from the seventh century establishes some marked variances with canonical Islam. Among these are some very positive observations about Muhammad, mainly involving his religious inclusiveness and tolerance.

No one can reconstruct the life of Muhammad by reading the Qur'an only in isolation.

The Islamic Historical Tradition is very late (late second and early 3rd century of Islam) and as expected tendentious. Ibn Ishaq's Sira (the author of Muhammad's biography) is not extant and what we have is a redaction by Ibn Hisham who lived in Egypt, more than 200 years after the death of Muhammad, and he did not live in al-Hijaz and he admitted that he is editing Ibn Ishaq's Sira in-order to remove "embarrassing" reports about Muhammad.

However, on close inspection of the Sira by Henri Lammens he came to the conclusion that Ibn Ishaq's Sira is no more than another way to explain what the opaque revelation called the Qur'an might be saying.

More recently, John Wansbrough came to the conclusion that Ibn Ishaq's Sira is "Salvation History" or pious fiction and we will never know much about the true life of Muhammad, and it is even a waste of time to pontificate about the life of Muhammad.

Does al-Ahadith literature help in reconstructing what really happened with regard to the founder of Islam? The answer is: No. al-Ahadith are the product of an evolving Islam in the 2nd and 3rd century of Islam but do not tell us much about Muhammad and his life

Clearly the Muhammad of Ibn Ishaq's Sira is not a nice guy. And al-Waqidi's Sira called al-Maghazi or the Invasions (al-Waqidi wrote about the last 10 years of the life of Muhammad) and what emerges is a warlord and caravan raider. Just a nasty character.

Muhammad's "Farewell Address" is anachronistic and you can clearly see the finger prints of the Persian Mufasereen that realized that the Qur'an says that Islam is the religion of the Hijazi Arabs only (Q14:4) so why not make such an address where Muhammad talks about "monotheists" and Islam is the religion for all of humanity, which is not what the Qur'an says.

Did you get this much our dear Dave?

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