For Plato and his bogus history part deux

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Feb 18, 2007 at 14:53

Mt deal Plato I was reading this little old gem of yours and I came across the following:

>the so called jahiliya period their own history shows women taking part in business Khadija Abu Sufyan's wife Hind successful international business women

You must be kidding. Those of us that study history of early islam will find such a comment to be funny. And why do you use an Arabic word (jahiliya) when you do not know any Arabic? What are you trying to prove?

Now let me help you in a few words or less.

1. Historians aim at answering the following question: "What really happened/"

Now let me help you here: There is no extant literary sources or otherwise that can help us in answering such question that were transmitted to us from places like Mecca that date between 570CE when Muhammad was born and 632CE when he died. Nothing not a thing.

Now do you really understand what i just wrote? The only inforamtion we get from Muslim sources is from the 3rd century of Islam and afterwards and not from al-Hijaz but from Mesopotamia and Iran.

As a matter of fact the link of trade and the rise of Islam has been refuted by Crone in her book "Meccan trade and the Rise of Islam." And the conclusions are Mecca was a poor place and if Meccans indeed were involved in trade it was in cheap goods and food and it was only local trade.

The final nail in the nail in the coffin of Meccan Trade is Crone's review of the exegesis of Quran Surat Quraish and in particular the word; Ilaf. And what she says: no one had a clue what this sura really means not back then and not now. But this begs the question and why is that? The answer here is very painful to muslims: It is either that the Quranic logias and pericopes predate muhammad, or that the Qur'an was indeed cannonized in the 3rd century (see QS) and by then no one had a clue about what the Qur'an is really saying. Now do you get it? And which one do you think happened our dear plato?

If you examine the extant sources external to the Muslim tradition in the 6th and 7th century there is nothing about Meccan Trade, and when al-Muhajiruun (Mihgaraye in Syriac and Moagaritai in Greek) and this is the name that the invading Arabs called themselves, as they did not call themselves neither Muslims nor Arabs, so when al-Muhajiruun invaded the Middle East the sources in Syriac, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Hebrew were not able to tell us: "Oh these are the Meccans that we traded with" and do you know why? Could it be because the Meccan Trade is just a bogus thing and it never existed? What do you think ya ayuha al-faylasoof al-kabeer?

More interesting: How do you exaplain that we do not hear about Muhammad or his name from the extant Muslim sources for 72 years after his death? How do you explain that?

Most interesting is in Egypt where literary sources were kept from time immemorial no one was able to recognize the invading Arabs (see John of Nikiu's diary) and say: Ah those are the arabs and their leader is Muhammad who once sent a letter to al-Muqawqas (Cyrus the Melkite leader in Alexandria) and in response Cyrus sent him one of his concubines mariya al-Qibtiya. But the Egyptian sources are silent and why is that our dear plato?

And why did the Greeks and the persians wrote so much about South Arabia and its trade? But nothing about Mecca? Why is that? The only answer is: There was no such thing as Meccan international trade! And even if this is true why did it just disapear upon the rise of Islam? After all Meccans would have more markets. So much for the bogus Islamic history

So how do we explain all this bogus stuff about Meccan trade that never existed?

2. Heilsgeschichte or salvation history: Or the history that was transmitted to us by Muslims about the history of early islam. And it is what the pious in the 3rd century of islam believed happened and it is not what really happened. And Meccan Trade was nothing but more bogus history. Now do you get it?

The only explanation is that non of this ever happened and it was all made up by the 3Ulama that were trying to explain what the Qur'an is really saying and in the case of trade the source was Surat Quraish.

Now do you understand what is really Occam's razor? Your fatal mistake is that you believed the Muslims sources without any critical examination of the sources internal as well as external to the tradition.

Now you can see why I told you before the Sira, the hadith and the rest of the tradition is nothing but bogus history.

Then you wrote:

>asma bint Marawan (the poet) is just another example.

Well here is your history lesson for today: The Sira tells us that there was an Asma Bint Marawan that was killed by one of Muhammad's minions while suckling here baby becuase she was critical of him. You believe such a story.

My appraoch is different and remember Occam's razor: The source of the story is the Sira. The Sira that we have as a literary source is a redaction (editing) of Ibn Ishaq's sira by Ibn Hisham that was edited in distant Egypt by a man Ibn Hisham that is who has never lived outside of Egypt. And who died in 832CE (I stand corrected here about the exact date) or about 200 years after the death of Muhammad. Imagine you or I are trying to reconstruct the life of let us say George Washington without any written sources! There is no reason for you or I to believe that the sira is a real independent historical document. The Sira as was suggested by Henri Lammens is another form of Quranic exegesis.

Henri Lammens takes another view which makes some sense: he believes that if soemthing puts Muhammad in a bad light in the sira it must be true so the likes of this little story might be true. I happen to disagree.

Now do you see what happens when you get yourself in something that is far above your head?...

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