For Plato and the problem of the sources

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Feb 26, 2007 at 20:44

Well, you have to be careful about the Muslim literary sources. Notice that our dear M&M does not provide us with the source of his quote/translation.

When I read the first paragraph it sounded like a hadith and like I say the hadith is sira and the sira is hadith and they are both tafseer and none of them is historical anyway. I also remember reading a similar tradition in Ignaz Goldziher's "Muslim Studies" about anachronism in the tradition.

Then when he wrote that this is Abul Qasim's last speech it did not make sense, so I Iooked up ibn Hisham's redaction of the sira and i could not find the first paragraph.

But this in itself does not mean very much as the Islamic tradition expands as time goes by and I mean by that: If Ibn Ishaq has written that Muhammad said: "Today I ate my breakfast." Later sources will tell us that he Muahmmad said: "Today I ate my breakfast and it was eggs and bread and honey." Still a later writer would be saying: Muhammad said: "Today I ate my breakfast and it was 2.5 eggs and three slices of bread and a glass of orange juice and 1/2 jar of honey." You get the idea here. So later Muslim authors are in the habit of seeming to know more than earlier authors which makes you realize that non of this is historical.

What is clear from the first paragrpah of the above tradition is that it is very much anachronistic . So I would like to know what is the souce of such tradition. My educated guess is that this tradition is from iran and it is pre-Shahnemah and for sure post masora (circa 9th century). And more likely than not the word non-Arab would be 3Ajami or Iranian.

I think that our dear M&M does not really know more than what they have told him in his madrassa, so you are not really dealing with someone who really undrestands the Muslim sources or literature for this matter.

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