The entire Islamic world believes that the Quran is infallible. This belief is so rooted in their psyche that when a Muslim friend of mine introduced me to Islam, he presented this as evidence of the divine origin of the Quran. He argued that because the Quran unlike all other holy books has not been changed it must be from God.
Whether the Quran is infallible or whether it has been corrupted or not are two different subjects.
As for the first question the answer is that the Quran is not infallible. It contains thousands of errors, absurdities, contradictions, inaccuracies and sheer nonsense. It contradicts logic, history, science, the Bible and even itself. It even contains grammatical errors that show its author was an illiterate man. Hardly can you find a book as absurd as this book. It is so poorly written that I cannot call it literature.
“Then woe to those who write the Book with their own hands and then say: ‘This is from Allah’.” (Sura Al-Baqarah 2:79)
As for the other question, we don’t know. The Quran we have is the one compiled by Othman. He burned all other versions of the Quran so there can be no disagreement among Muslims. It is clear that the other versions must have been different from the one chosen by him otherwise he would not have burned them. How did he determine his version is the correct one and the other versions are not? There was no way for him to know for certainty. It is very possible that his pick was not the right one. However, since all other versions are destroyed, it is impossible to say whether the one we have is the authentic one.
Just see what has happened to the hadiths. Various people have reported the same story is various ways. They defer in details. The verses of the Quran could have also suffered similar fate, although perhaps not to that extent, because they were memorized.
However, with a little rational thinking, we can assume since Othman had to burn the other versions to avoid discrepancy, this book must have been altered. It is also possible that many of the verses of the present Quran are not what Muhammad said. The original verses may have been the ones that were burned. Many verses may have been lost forever. It is also possible that some verses have been added to the Quran that were not originally said by Muhammad.
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2:106 We do not abolish a verse unless we provide a better verse.
Contradiction: 10:64 There is no change in the words of Allah.
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The Quran is well preserved ?
It was narrated that ‘Aishah said: “The Verse of stoning and of breastfeeding an adult ten times was revealed, and the paper was with me under my pillow. When the Messenger of Allah died, we were preoccupied with his death, and a tame sheep came in and ate it.” Sunan Ibn Majah1944
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The Quran was written twice. The first quran had to be burned because of the contradictions. Sahih Bukhari 4987
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A large part of the Qur’an has been lost
Sahih Bukhari 7191, Narrated by Zaid bin Thabit:
Abu Bakr sent for me because of the great number of casualties in the battle of Yamama, while `Umar was sitting with him. Abu Bakr said (to me): `Umar came to me and said: ‘A large number of men who recite the Holy Qur’an, who memorized it, were killed on the day of the battle of Yamama, as well as on other battlefields, so that a large part of the Qur’an may be lost.
Abu Bakr then said to me (Zaid): “You are a wise young man and we have no suspicions about you, and you have written the Divine Inspiration for the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him). So you should search for the fragmentary writings of the Qur’an and collect them (in one book).” So I started compiling the Qur’an by collecting it from the leafless stems of the date palm, from the pieces of leather and hides, from the stones and from the chests of men (who had memorized the Qur’an).
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Sunan Ibn Majah 1944
“The Verse of stoning and of breastfeeding an adult ten times was revealed1, and the paper was with me under my pillow. When the Messenger of Allah died, we were preoccupied with his death, and a tame sheep came in and ate it.”
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We, as Muslims, were taught that the Qur’an is the unaltered, perfectly preserved Word of God unchanged since the time of the Prophet. But that’s simply not true.
There are seven to ten canonized Qur’ans in circulation today, each with textual differences in Arabic. These aren’t just pronunciation differences. They include real differences in wording and meaning. That’s not even counting the earlier versions that Uthman ordered to be destroyed. The version most Muslims read today, Hafs ‘an ‘Asim, wasn’t even standardized until 1924. And now that the Qur’an is finally being studied critically and academically, major issues are being exposed that were hidden or ignored for centuries.
Compare that to the Bible. Yes, there are four canonized versions: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and Ethiopian. But this is openly acknowledged. The Bible is the most studied text in human history, with tens of thousands of manuscripts, some dating back nearly two thousand years. Scholars have debated its contents for centuries, and its history is well documented and transparent.
So ironically, one could argue that the Bible is actually better preserved than the Qur’an. Not because it’s perfect, but because it is historically transparent and open to scrutiny. The Qur’an, on the other hand, has been protected from criticism, curated through political enforcement, and falsely presented as unchanged. Once you look at the actual historical record, the myth of perfect Qur’anic preservation falls apart.===
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6:34 There is no change in God’s words.
Contradiction: 2:106 Whatever sign We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, for it We bring better or equal to it.
Contradiction: Every contradiction is a change of God’s word.
Contradiction : 16:101 God changes the Qur’an by abolishing and replacing it.
Aisha and Ubayy ibn Ka’b on the 100+ Verses Missing from Surah 33
Muslims claim that the Qur’an has been perfectly preserved. They can only make this claim, however, by employing their standard apologetic strategy–namely, rejecting their own sources and calling the early Muslim scholars “liars.” As I argued here, such an approach will ultimately lead to skepticism about Muhammad. But if this is how Muslims want to argue, so be it.
Indeed, I’d like to see my Muslim friends reject even more commentary from early Muslims, who were in a better position to know what really happened. Let’s consider two passages in which Ubayy ibn Ka’b (one of Muhammad’s most trusted reciters of the Qur’an) and Aisha (the “Mother of the Faithful”) declare that approximately two-thirds of Surah 33 is missing. Both passages are taken from Abu Ubaid’s Kitab Fada’il-al-Qur’an.
Ibn Abi Maryam related to us from Ibn Luhai’a from Abu’l-Aswad from Urwa b. az-Zubair from A’isha who said, “Surat al-Ahzab (xxxiii) used to be recited in the time of the Prophet with two hundred verses, but when Uthman wrote out the codices he was unable to procure more of it than there is in it today.”
Isma’il b. Ibrahim and Isma’i b. Ja’far related to us from al-Mubarak b. Fadala from Asim b. Abi’n-Nujud from Zirr b. Hubaish who said–Ubai b. Ka’b said to me, “O Zirr, how many verses did you count (or how many verses did you read) in Surat al-Ahzab?” “Seventy-two or seventy-three,” I answered. Said he, “Yet it used to be equal to Surat al-Baqara (ii), and we used to read in it the verse of Stoning.”
I brought up Aisha’s claim in a debate with Bassam, and Bassam, if I recall correctly, confidently proclaimed that the passage had been “fabricated.” I hereby ask my friend Bassam to provide evidence that the Muslims in the chains I’ve presented were inventing false claims about the Qur’an. I would also like Bassam to say that Abu Ubaid (who was called “the ocean of knowledge” by his fellow Muslims) was ignorant and sloppy in his investigation of these passages.
(Note: If you ever wondered what happened to the “Verse of Stoning,” which was supposed to be part of the Qur’an but instead came up missing, Ubayy ibn Ka’b says above that it fell out with the other 100+ missing verses of Surah 33).
Abu Ubaid al-Qasim bin Salam, author of Kitab Fada’il-al-Qur’an (The Excellent Qualities of the Holy Quran)
Born: 774 AD, Herat, Afghanistan
Died: 838 AD, Mecca, Saudi Arabia
SOURCE MATERIAL ISLAM’S DARK PAST
“The Quran escapes from people’s hearts faster than a runaway camel.”
Islam offers only one significant source of information about Muhammad and the formation of Islam, written within two centuries of his life and conception. Ishaq’s Sira, or biography, stands alone—a remarkable and slender thread connecting us to a very troubled man and time. Over the next two hundred years, other hadith collections were compiled by the likes of Tabari, Bukhari, and Muslim. Their collections of oral traditions, or Traditions, are said to be inspired by Allah. They claim to transmit Muhammad’s words and example. They also explain the Quran—a book so flawed in context and chronology that it can only be understood through the lens of the Sunnah writers.
Throughout Prophet of Doom, I’ve been less concerned about the validity of these sources than about what they have to say. Their message is all that Muslims have. Together, the Sunnah and the Quran constitute Islam. Therefore, I was willing to take them at face value. But you don’t have to dig very deeply to find the truth. Even a cursory reading of the Quran is enough to prove it’s a hoax. It’s impossible that the creator of the universe wrote a book without context, without chronology, or intelligent transitions. Such a creative mind wouldn’t need to plagiarize. He would have known history and science and therefore wouldn’t have made such a fool of himself.
The God who created humankind would not deceive them or lead them to hell as Allah does. Nor would he command men to terrorize, mutilate, rob, enslave, and slaughter the followers of other scriptures he claimed to have revealed, exterminating them to the last. One doesn’t need a scholastic revision of the Quranic text to refute its veracity. It destroys itself beautifully. While that remains true, I believe I owe it to readers, especially Muslims, to examine the textual evidence for the Sunnah and the Quran. I will begin with what the Hadith has to say about the origins of the Quran, but I will briefly dispense with the circular reasoning employed by Islamic scholars, namely that they all cite the Sunnah.
While there are hadiths that say Bakr attempted to compile the Quran, and others that credit Uthman, Muhammad’s third successor, it’s like using the results of carbon-14 dating to prove its validity. The source is the same. In Bukhari’s hadith collection alone, we find a sea of disturbing and contradictory claims about the compilation of Allah’s book. There were different versions, even in Muhammad’s time: “Ibn Abbas asked, ‘Which of the two readings of the Quran do you prefer?'” The Prophet replied, “The reading of Abdallah ibn Mas’ud.” Then Abdallah came to him, and he learned what had been changed and abrogated. This is quite clear. The hadith states that parts of the Quran were contradictory, changed, and abrogated.
Tradition tells us that Muhammad didn’t foresee his death and therefore made no preparations to collect his revelations. He left it to his followers to sift through the conflicting versions. This is astonishing. Islam’s only “prophet” left his Quran as vapor, sound waves that had long since faded. One day, the impostor boasted, calling his surahs a miracle:
Bukhari:V6B61N504 Muhammad said, “Every prophet was given miracles that made people believe. But what I have been given is Divine Inspiration that Allah has revealed to me. So I hope that my followers will outnumber the followers of the other prophets.”
If the Quran were his only “miracle,” why would he leave it in such a horrific state? I believe the answer is clear. Muhammad knew that his recitals were nothing more than a figment of his less-than-admirable imagination, situational writings meant to satisfy his desires. Keeping these recitals would only serve to incriminate him, as this hadith suggests.
Muslim: C24B20N4609 “The Messenger (peace be upon him) said, ‘Do not take this Qur’an with you on a journey, for I fear it may fall into the hands of the enemy.’ Ayyub, one of the narrators in the chain of transmitters, said, ‘The enemy may seize it and dispute with you about it.’”
Several Bukhari Hadith suggest that Muhammad’s companions tried to remember what they could of what he had said, but there was a problem. Just like today, those who knew the Quran were militants. So Abu Bakr feared that large portions would be forgotten. The best Muslims died on the battlefield while subduing fellow Arabs. In one battle alone, most of the most skilled reciters of the Quran were lost, and many Quranic passages along with them.
Bukhari:V6B60N201 Zaid bin Thabit, the Ansari, said, “Abu Bakr summoned me after the heavy losses among the warriors at Yamama (where a large number of Muhammad’s companions were killed). Umar was present with Bakr. “The people suffered heavy losses at Yamama, and I fear that there will be more casualties among those who can recite the Qur’an on other battlefields. Much of the Qur’an may be lost unless you gather it.”
I replied to Umar, “How can I do something that Allah’s Apostle has not done?” Umar kept insisting and tried to persuade me to accept his proposal. Zaid bin Thabit added, “Umar sat with Abu Bakr and spoke to me. ‘You are a wise young man and we do not suspect you of lying or forgetfulness. You wrote the Divine Inspiration for Allah’s Apostle. So, find the Qur’an and collect it (in one manuscript).” By Allah, if Abu Bakr had ordered me to move one of the mountains (from its place), it would have been easier for me than collecting the Qur’an. I said to both of them, “
How dare you do something that the Prophet did not do?”
Zayd declared that collecting the Quran’s surahs would be an impossible task. He said it would be easier to move mountains than to convert Muhammad’s series of oral recitals into a book. The reason for this rather disturbing statement is obvious: Zayd’s search for Quranic passages forced him to rely on carvings on the legs or thighbones of dead animals, as well as palm leaves, hides, mats, stones, and bark. But for the most part, he found nothing better than the fleeting memories of the Prophet’s companions, many of whom were dead or dying. In other words, the Quran, like the Hadith, is all hearsay.
There were no Muslims who had memorized the entire Quran; otherwise, collecting it would have been a simple task.
If there had been individuals who knew the Quran, Zayd would simply have had to write down what they dictated. Instead, Zayd was overwhelmed by the task and forced to “search” for passages from men who believed they had memorized certain sections and then compare what he heard with the memories of others. Therefore, even the official Islamic view of things, as recorded in their scriptures, is hardly reassuring. Worse still, the Muslim chosen for this impossible task was the one best placed to plagiarize the Torah and the Talmud. Moreover, it is clear that he did so. Remember:
Tabari VII:167
“In this year the Prophet Zayd bin Thabit ordered to study the Book of the Jews, saying: ‘I fear that they will change my Book.’”
As is typical of Islamic traditions, the more one digs, the worse it gets.
Bukhari:V6B61N511 Zaid bin Thabit said, “I began searching for the Qur’an until I found the last two verses of Surah At-Tauba with Abi, but I could not find them with anyone other than him. They were, ‘Indeed, there has come to you an Apostle from among yourselves.'” [9:128]
This is incriminating. The ninth sura was the second-to-last revealed. If only one person could remember it, there’s no chance that those revealed twenty-five years earlier would have survived. Moreover, this tradition contradicts the most prized Islamic mantra: most Muslims claim that Uthman, not Bakr, ordered the collection of the Quran ten years later. And who knows which version they ultimately committed to paper, if they ever did?
Bukhari:V6B61N513: “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘Gabriel [who Muhammad said had 600 wings] recited the Qur’an to me in one way. Then I requested him and kept asking him to recite it in other ways, and he recited it in different ways until he finally recited it seven different ways.’” So there were at least seven Qur’ans. That wasn’t the end of the confusion. In version two of the angelic recital, Muhammad was the reciter, not Gabriel.
THE DARK PAST OF ISLAM iii
Bukhari:V6B61N519: “In the month of Ramadan, Gabriel met Muhammad every evening of the month until it passed. Allah’s Apostle recited the Qur’an to him.”
Then we go from every evening to once a year.
Bukhari:V6B61N520: “Gabriel used to repeat the recitation of the Qur’an with the Prophet once a year, but he repeated it with him twice in the year he died.”
No wonder they couldn’t remember who said what to whom.
Bukhari:V6B61N549 Allah’s Apostle said, “The example of the person who has memorized the Qur’an is like the owner of tethered camels. If he keeps them tethered, he will control them, but if he lets them go, they will run away.”
To release something you’ve memorized, you should share it. So this hadith apparently tells Muslims not to recite surahs for fear of losing them. And speaking of losing them:
Bukhari:V6B61N550 “The Prophet said, ‘It is an evil thing that some of you say, “I have forgotten such and such a verse of the Qur’an.”
For indeed, I have been made to forget it. So you must keep reciting the Quran, for it escapes from people’s hearts faster than a runaway camel.
This frivolity is important because it exposes a lie at the heart of Islam. It is irrational to think that God would shift from relying on literate Jewish prophets to an illiterate Arab. The foundation of Islamic teaching is based on the idea that God chose Arabs because they had good memories. Therefore, they reason, the Quran would not be changed in the way the Bible was corrupted. All Islamic schools, from Alazahr to Pakistan, are centered on this blatant lie.
The Quran was forgotten; it was changed and recited by so many people that it was corrupted beyond belief before it ever reached paper. And since the Bible began as words on a page, it has remained true to its original inspiration. But it’s worse than that. Muslims insist on restricting the Quran to religious Arabic—a language so difficult to learn, with its complex grammar and outdated vocabulary, that linguists rank it second only to Chinese as the world’s least hospitable communication medium. Worse still, even in Arabic, much of the Quran cannot be understood because many words are missing and others are nonsensical.
It’s irrational to think that God would choose illiterate people and such a difficult language to convey his message to the entire world. It’s like using diesel to fuel a lamp and then hiding it in a swamp. But there’s a method to their madness. By restricting the Quran to religious Arabic, Islamic clerics and kings can say whatever they want—and they do. An Egyptian physician who edited Prophet of Doom wrote, “You’d be amazed how they can distort facts to mislead others.” In keeping with the camel theme, the divinely inspired messenger of Allah announced:
Bukhari:V6B61N552 “The Prophet said, ‘Continue reciting the Qur’an, for the Qur’an runs away (is forgotten) faster than camels let loose from their tethers.’”
In the interest of full disclosure, I present:
Bukhari:V6B61N559 “The Prophet said: ‘Why does anyone among the people say: ‘I have forgotten such and such verses (of the Qur’an)?’ I have in fact been caused (by Allah) to forget.’”
It’s a wonder anyone takes Islam seriously. He continues to cripple his own claim that the Quran was preserved as Allah’s pen wrote it:
iv PROPHET OF DOOM
Bukhari:V6B61N561 “Umar bin Khattab [the second caliph] said: ‘I heard Hisham bin Hakim bin Hizam reciting Surat Al-Furqan
“Al-Furqan,” the title of the 25th Surah, has no meaning in any language.] during the life of Allah’s Apostle. I listened to his recitation and noticed that he recited it in various ways that Allah’s Apostle had not taught me. So I was about to attack him during the prayer, but I waited until he finished, and then I grabbed him by the collar.
“Who taught you this surah that I heard you recite?” He replied, “Allah’s Apostle taught it to me.” I said, “You’re lying. Allah’s Apostle taught me this surah that I heard you recite in a different way.”
So I led him to Muhammad. “O Messenger of Allah! I heard this man reciting Surat al-Furqan in a way you did not teach me.”
The Prophet said, “Hisham, recite!” So he recited in the same manner as I had heard him recite earlier. Then Allah’s Apostle said, “It has been revealed to be recited in this manner.” Then the Prophet said, “Recite, Umar!”
So I recited it as he had taught me. Allah’s Apostle said, “It has also been revealed to be recited in this manner.” He added, “It has been revealed that the Quran can be recited in various ways, so recite what is easier for you.”
If Muhammad were alive today and made this statement, he would be branded an apostate, hunted down, and killed. As we will soon discover, he simply contradicted the Holy Grail of Islam. Upon examining this hadith, we discover that the first “manuscript” wasn’t even in Muhammad’s language, requiring it to be translated.
Bukhari:V4B56N709 “Uthman named Zayd, Abdallah, Said, and Abd-Rahman. They wrote the manuscripts of the Qur’an in the form of a book in multiple copies. Uthman said to the three Quraishi individuals, ‘If you disagree with Zayd bin Thabit on any point of the Qur’an, then write it in the language of the Qur’an, as the Qur’an was revealed in their language.’
So they acted accordingly.” Because there was so much confusion, Uthman ordered competing versions to be burned. But by destroying the evidence, he destroyed the Quran’s credibility. Now, all Muslims have is wishful thinking. Since “wishful thinking” isn’t enough, and since Islamic hadith are more contradictory than helpful, I’m going to turn to reason and facts to determine what’s true and what’s not.
Let’s first establish what Muslims believe, so we can focus on determining whether it’s correct or even reasonable. As evidenced by the official Islamic introduction to the Quran, Islamic scholars argue: “The Quran is one of two legs that forms the foundation of Islam.
The second leg is the Sunnah of the Prophet. What distinguishes the Quran from the Sunnah is its form. Unlike the Sunnah, the Quran is quite literally the Word of Allah, while the Sunnah is inspired by Allah, but its words and deeds are those of the Prophet. The Quran is not expressed in human words.
Its wording is fixed letter by letter by Allah. The Prophet Muhammad was the final Messenger of Allah to humanity, and therefore the Quran is the final Message that Allah sent us. Its predecessors, such as the Torah, Psalms, and Gospels, are all outdated. The funny thing, however, is that the Allah-inspired Sunnah has just confirmed that the Quran used “human words” and that it was not “fixed letter by letter by Allah.”
THE DARK PAST OF ISLAM v
Muslims should read their own scriptures. Despite all evidence to the contrary, including their own, Islamic scholars maintain that today’s Quran is an identical copy of Allah’s eternal tablets, even in terms of punctuation, chapter headings, and divisions. Maududi, one of the most esteemed Quranic scholars, said: “The Quran exists in its original text, without a word, syllable, or even a letter being changed.” (Towards Understanding Islam, Maududi) Abu Dhabi, another prominent Muslim, said: “No other book in the world can equal the Quran.
The astonishing fact about this Book of Allah is that it has remained unchanged for the past fourteen hundred years, even down to the smallest detail. There is no textual variation in it. That is, in fact, not true, every word of it. The Quran says of itself:
“Nay, this is a Glorious Qur’an, (inscribed) on a preserved tablet.” (85:21)
“A Book of the Bible, its verses explained in detail; a Qur’an in Arabic.” (41:3)
“We have devised for mankind in this Qur’an. (It is) a Qur’an in Arabic, without any crookedness (in it).” (39:27)
Richard Nixon tried that line too. It worked no better for him than it did for Allah. Over the course of these pages, you’ll discover why. This appendix follows twenty-five chapters of Islamic scripture, all punctuated by my analysis, so I thought you would be best served if this section were guided by the most qualified Islamic scholars. While their findings are shocking, don’t say you weren’t warned. I devoted the opening of the chapter “Heart of Darkness” (pages 115-118) to this problem.
The most well-researched scholastic analysis of the validity of the Quran and the Sunnah was presented in 1995 by Jay Smith. In his debate at Cambridge University, he stated: “Most Westerners have accepted Islamic claims without question. They have never had the opportunity to challenge their veracity, because the claims could neither be proven nor disproven, since their authority was derived solely from the Quran itself. There has also been a reluctance to question the Quran and the Prophet because of the negative reaction to those who were brave enough to try in the past. [Muslims kill their critics.]
Westerners are thus content to assume that Muslims have some evidence to support their beliefs. We are about to discover that they have no such data. And the little that does exist only serves to destroy the credibility of Islam.
According to Wansbrough, Schacht, Rippin, Crone, and Humphreys: “Almost universally, independent scholars who have studied the Qur’an and the hadith have concluded that the Islamic scriptures were not revealed to just one man, but were a compilation of later redactions and editions formulated by a group of men over the course of several hundred years. The Qur’an we read today is not the one that existed in the mid-seventh century, but is a product of the eighth and ninth centuries. It was not conceived in Mecca or Medina, but in Baghdad. It was then and there that Islam took on its identity and became a religion. Consequently, the formative phase of Islam did not occur during Muhammad’s lifetime, but evolved over a period of 300 years.”
vi PROPHET OF DOOM
While these are strong words, rest assured: the scholars prove their case. What’s interesting here is that, aside from the Islamic hadith, virtually nothing is known about the formation of Islam and the creation of the Quran. Scholars agree: “Source material for this period is scarce. The only manuscripts historians have are Muslim sources. Moreover, outside of the Quran, the sources are all late. Before 750 CE, the manuscript was lost, so we have to rely on those who wrote fifty to a hundred years later. And there is no independent secular document to corroborate a hadith,” says Smith, speaking on behalf of Crone, Humphreys, Schacht, and Wansbrough. “During the ninth century, Muslim sages in Baghdad attempted to describe the beginnings of Islam from their perspective. But like an adult writing about their childhood, the account is biased and biased.”
“The picture of Islam being fully developed religiously, politically, and legally by an illiterate man in one of the most primitive places on earth is not feasible,” Smith argued in his Cambridge debate. Certainly, Muhammad’s writings were weak—equal parts delusional, idiotic, and insane, regurgitated, plagiarized, and distorted—but there was too much of it to contain and retain in the vacuum of the Hijaz. Central Arabia was not part of, or even known to, the civilized world at the time. And the Islamic traditions themselves refer to this period as Jahiliyyah, or the Period of Ignorance, implying its backwardness. “Arabia had no urbanized culture, nor could it boast the sophisticated infrastructure necessary to create, let alone maintain, the scenario sketched by the later traditions.
There is no historical precedence for such a scenario.” Fortunately, historical experts have recently reached a consensus on Islam. Among them are Dr. John Wansbrough of the University of London, Michael Cook, Patricia Crone of Oxford, who now teaches at Cambridge, Yehuda Nevo of the University of Jerusalem, Andrew Rippin of Canada, and others, including Joseph Schacht. They sought, examined, and scoured every source related to the Qur’an and the Sunnah for clues to their origins. In his debate, Smith said: “To criticize the Qur’an, we must go back to its beginnings, to the earliest sources we have at our disposal, to pick up clues about its authenticity.
One would assume that this should be quite simple, since it is a relatively new piece of literature, which, according to Muslims, only appeared on the scene ‘1,400 years ago.’ However, the first century of Islam is dark, a veritable black hole from which nothing emerges.
THE DARK PAST OF ISLAM vii
“The primary sources we have date from 150 to 300 years after the events they describe, and are therefore quite far removed from those times and characters,” say Nevo, Wansbrough, and Crone. “For that reason, they are, for all practical purposes, secondary sources, since they rely on hearsay material. The first and largest of these sources is what is called the ‘Islamic traditions’ or ‘Hadith.'” Jay Smith kindly published his research ahead of his Cambridge debate. To avoid making this appendix a book, I have chosen to summarize his findings. While I have reached the same conclusions, the words that follow are either his own or quoted from cited sources.
Islamic traditions consist of writings compiled by Muslims in the late eighth to early tenth centuries concerning what the Prophet Muhammad said and did in the early seventh century. There is also an early commentary on the Qur’an. These comprise the only material we have on the formation of Islam. The Qur’an itself is difficult to follow because it confuses readers as it jumps from story to story, with little background narration or explanation. Thus, the traditions are crucial because they provide the context of place, circumstance, and time that would otherwise be lost. In some cases, the hadith prevails over the Qur’an. For example, the Qur’an refers to three daily prayers (Suras 11:114, 17:78, 30:17). The hadith requires five. Muslims prostrate in accordance with Muhammad’s Sunnah commands rather than Allah’s Qur’anic command. Within Islamic traditions, a number of genres exist. Their authors were not writers themselves, but compilers and editors who gathered the information passed on to them.
There were many compilers, but the four considered by Muslims to be the most authoritative in any genre lived and compiled their material between 750 and 923 CE (or 120–290 years after Muhammad’s death). Here is a list of their works, along with their dates: The Sira (Arabic for “Biography”) is an account of the Prophet’s life, including his thoughts. The earliest and most comprehensive Sira was composed by Ibn Ishaq, who died in 765 CE. His manuscript has been lost. Consequently, we must rely on the Sira of Ibn Hisham, who died in 833. He edited Ishaq, and by his own account, omitted hadith he considered objectionable.
While Smith cited Crone as his source, I’d like you to read what Hisham wrote. Ishaq:691: “For the sake of brevity, I have confined myself to the biography of the Prophet and omitted some things which Ishaq recorded in this book in which the apostle is not mentioned and about which the Qur’an says nothing. I have omitted things that are shameful to discuss, things that would upset certain people, and reports which al-Bakkai [Bukhari?] told me he could not accept as reliable—all these things I have omitted.” Since the character, actions, and words of Muhammad presented in Hisham’s retellings of Ishaq are abhorrent, I can’t imagine what would be too “shameful to discuss.” And in case you’re wondering, the phrase “things that would upset certain people” speaks volumes. Hisham tells us that Wansbrough, Cook, Crone, Humphries, Rippin, Margoliouth, and Muir are correct.
viii PROPHET OF DOOM
The hadith that comprise the Sunnah were compiled in a highly politicized environment 200 years after Muhammad’s death. The compiler’s very existence depended on not offending the clergy. While the Sira is nothing more than a collection of hadith arranged chronologically, the most “official” Islamic hadith collection was compiled by al-Bukhari, who died in 870 CE.
These include two thousand short reports or narratives (akhbar [news]) about the Prophet’s sayings and deeds. Of the six most famous collections of Hadith, those of al-Bukhari and Muslim are considered the most authoritative. The Ta’rikh (meaning “History” in Arabic) offers chronologies of the Prophet’s life and the formation of Islam. The earliest and best-known was written by al-Tabari, who died in 923 AD. Some portions of Ishaq’s original manuscript, discarded by Hisham, were preserved by Tabari. Of particular significance is Ishaq’s inclusion of Muhammad’s Islamic accounts of creation and his entanglement in the bargain of the Quraysh and the Satanic Verses. As such, the Ta’rikh, or History of al-Tabari, is the oldest extant uncensored account of Muhammad and Islam. According to Islamic scholars, the Tafsir [meaning explanation or interpretation in Arabic] constitute the fourth most reliable Islamic source documents.
They are commentaries and exegeses on the Quran. The earliest, most widely respected, and best-known was also written by Tabari.” As an aside, I am routinely threatened by Muslims who attack my character in colorful ways. They claim I know nothing about Islam and that my words are insulting, repugnant, shameful, intolerant, hateful, bigoted, vile. But little do they know; they are not my words. All I have done is report what Islam has to say about itself. Aside from the Sira-Ta’rikh-Hadith collections of Ishaq, Tabari, Bukhari, and Muslim, nothing is known about Muhammad or Islam.
Without them, the Quran literally falls apart, for without context and chronology, it is gibberish. This places Muslims in a hellish predicament. If the hadith compilations of Ishaq, Tabari, Bukhari, and Muslim are true, their prophet was the worst man who ever lived—a bloodthirsty pirate, a ruthless terrorist, and a sexual pervert. His Islam was nothing more than the Plan of the Profitable Prophet. Allah was merely one of many moonstones. That’s not good. But if the hadith compilations of Ishaq, Tabari, Bukhari, and Muslim are not true, Islam evaporates. Returning to Smith’s debate paper, we find: “The first question we must ask, of course, is why these traditions were written so late, 150 to 300 years later? We simply have no record of the Muslim community for the first 150 years or so.
THE DARK PAST OF ISLAM
Not a single document has been found that can be traced to the period between the first Arab conquests of the early seventh century and the appearance of the Sira-Ta’rikh Hadith collections of Ishaq, Tabari, and Bukhari in the late eighth and ninth centuries. “As historians and scholars, we would expect to find at least remnants of evidence for the development of Islam in the intervening two centuries; yet we find none,” say Nevo, Crone, and Wansbrough. And that means the entirety of the Muslim conquests from Spain to India was completed before the first verse of the Islamic scriptures was written or preserved. A few Muslims disagree, claiming evidence of an earlier tradition called the Muwatta by Malik ibn Anas. He died in 795 CE.
But even a cursory review reveals that this collection consisted of “educated texts,” transmitted and developed over several generations. Even more damning, they adhere to the “Shafi’i law,” which requires that all hadith be traced back to Muhammad through isnad. Yet, the law and its enforcement were not enforced until after 820 CE. Shafi’i was one of the four Muslim imams credited, along with Malik ibn Anas, Abu Hanefa, and Ibn Hanbul, with creating Islamic law, or Feqh. Each had his own interpretation of the Quran and hadith. The most extreme, militant, and radical was Ibn Hanbul, nicknamed Hunbali.
In the Middle East, his name is used to describe a highly religious or obsessive person. The Hunbali school, similar to that of Ibn Taymea, forms the basis of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism. Martin Lings, a devout Muslim and accredited curator of ancient Islamic manuscripts for the British Museum, confirmed in his book “Mohammed,” a life based on the earliest sources, that Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah was the earliest and most reliable account of Muhammad’s life in Islam. His “Key References” lists the books on which “The Prophet of Doom” was based: “The Qur’an, the Ta’rikh of al-Tabari, and the topical Hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim.”
Lings does acknowledge two additional sources. The first is Waqidi’s Kitab al-Maghazi, a compilation of Muhammad’s incursions. While interesting, Waqidi doesn’t help explain Islam, as he focused on battles and invasions. He doesn’t even honor Muhammad as a prophet. Lings also referred to Ibn Sa’d’s Kitab at-Tabaqat al-Kabgir, even though its portrayal of the Prophet of Islam was particularly vulgar. Sir John Glubb wrote eleven books on Islam and lived most of his life among Muslims. Under the heading “Sources” in his The Life and Times of Muhammad, he wrote: “There are three sources for the life of Muhammad: the Qur’an, the biographies, and the traditions.” Glubb said: ”
The value of the Qur’an as a source is limited, for it was not intended as a narrative of events. Glubb’s following statement is also widely accepted: “The second source we have are the biographies and histories of the early Arab writers. The earliest of these is Muhammad ibn Ishaq, who wrote his Life of Allah’s Apostle, the Sirat Rasul Allah, about 120 years after the Prophet’s death. The only edition of Ibn Ishaq that has survived is that of Ibn Hisham, who died about 200 years after Muhammad. Another early account is the Al Mughazi of Waqidi, who died 197 years after the Prophet.”
DOOM PROPHET
A “mughazi” is an Islamic raid or invasion inspired by Muhammad, so Waqidi’s work is only valuable if one wants to assess Muhammad’s skill as a warrior, not as a prophet. “The third source of information about Muhammad’s life is the traditions, called Hadith in Arabic. This word actually means a conversation or oral account. After Muhammad’s death, his companions took great pleasure in describing him, recounting his sayings, and sharing their experiences in his company. New converts listened to these stories and passed them on, until a vast quantity of such anecdotes was in circulation. The two most reliable and famous tradition collectors are Bukhari and Muslim. Bukhari compiled his massive work, The True Traditions, which consists of ninety-five books or sections, some 220 years after Muhammad’s death. Muslim published his Hadith collection some five or six years later.”
The most respected Islamic scholar of the 20th century is Dr. Arthur Jeffery. He headed the Department of Middle Eastern Languages at Columbia University and taught linguistics at the School of Oriental Studies in Cairo. He wrote: “The briefest examination is enough to reveal that the problem of Islamic sources is relatively simple, for most volumes represent little more than the reworking (with fantastic and irrelevant additions and alterations) of perhaps a half-dozen Arabic texts of primary importance. The earliest life of Muhammad of which we have any trace was written by Muhammad Ibn Ishaq, who died in 768 AD, i.e., 130 years after the Prophet’s death.”
Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, however, has perished, and all we know of it is what has been quoted (and these quotations are fortunately considerable) in the works of later writers, particularly Ibn Hisham and al-Tabari. This work by Ibn Ishaq is not only the earliest known attempt at a biography but also has another importance, either because the writer was somewhat of a freethinker or because he was unaffected by later idealizing tendencies. His work contains a great deal of information of a character clearly unfavorable to the Prophet of Islam.” To emphasize his point, Jeffry quotes Dr. Margoliouth’s review of Muhammad’s character from the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (Vol. 8, p. 878), which I have shared with you twice before. It begins: “The character attributed to Muhammad in Ibn Ishaq’s biography is extremely unfavorable.”
Further on, Arthur Jeffry concludes his review of Islamic source material by confirming the validity of what we have read from others. In his *The Quest of the Historical Muhammad*, he writes: “The first important source that has come down to us is therefore Waqidi’s Kitab al-Maghazi, or Book of the Raids. Al-Waqidi died in 822 CE, and his book is best consulted in the translation of its important portions given in Wellhausen’s *Muhammad in Medina* (Berlin, 1882). However, Waqidi’s work has the serious limitation of dealing only with Muhammad’s campaigns…. Compared to this, later Arabic biographies are of very minor value.”
THE DARK PAST OF ISLAM
And even these works are not primary sources, since they themselves are based on two sources, the Tradition and the Qur’an. The most important collections of the Tradition are those of Bukhari (who died in 870 CE) and Muslim (who died in 874 CE). What value can be attached to the Traditions is doubtful, since the dates of the Hadith collections are even later than those of the biographies. For a more contemporary perspective, let us consider the sources used by F.E. Peters, considered one of the most learned scholars on early Islam today. He is professor and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages, Literatures and History at New York University and has written four illuminating books on Islam.
Peters acknowledged that the process of defining the sources that constitute Islam is uninspiring, and placed his source evaluation in an appendix at the end of his book, Muhammad and the Origins of Islam. There we read: “The earliest complete example we possess of a biography is the life of Allah’s Apostle, compiled from earlier material [Hadith, or oral traditions] by the Muslim scholar Ibn Ishaq (d. 767). In a sense, this now-standard Muslim life resembles a gospel, but appearances are deceptive.
Ibn Ishaq’s original, before a certain Ibn Hisham (d. 833) removed the ‘extraneous material’ from the work, had more the character of a ‘world history’ than a biography. The narrative began with the creation, and Muhammad’s prophetic career was preceded by accounts of all the prophets who had preceded him. This earlier, ‘discarded’ portion of Ishaq’s work can be recovered to some extent.” Ishaq’s discarded hadith depicting Islamic creation and Muhammad’s presentation of the biblical patriarchs were preserved in Volume IV of The History of al-Tabari. Speaking about the Quran’s flawed presentation of Muhammad, Peters said, “We have no material in the Quran with which to compile a biography of Muhammad, because the book is a disjointed treatise, a pastiche [imitation, spoof, parody] of divine monologues that could be pieced together into a homily [lecture, sermon] or perhaps a catechism [fragments of dogma] but which reveal little or nothing about the lives of Muhammad and his contemporaries….
The Qur’an gives us no guarantee that his words and sentiments are likely to be authentic in light of the context in which they were spoken and the manner in which they were conveyed. There are no clues as to when or where or why these particular words were spoken…. The Qur’an is of no use whatsoever as an independent source for reconstructing the life of Muhammad. The Qur’an is not very useful even for reconstructing the Meccan milieu, let alone the life of the man who uttered the words; it is a text without context.” Peters debunks the myth that “the formation of Islam took place in the clear light of history.” He writes: “For Muhammad, unlike Jesus, there is no Josephus to provide a contemporary political context, no literary apocrypha for a spiritual context, and no Qumran Scrolls to illuminate a sectarian milieu.
PROPHET OF DOOM
The pre-Islamic era consists largely of poetry whose contemporary authenticity is suspect, but which nevertheless served as the primary vehicle of Arab history in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods. The fact remains that there is a complete lack of continuity between contemporary Greek and Roman sources on Arabia and later Islamic traditions about the same place. Despite vast amounts of information provided by later [9th- and 10th-century] Islamic literary [and therefore not historical] sources, we know depressingly little for certain about the political or economic history of Muhammad’s Mecca, or of the religious culture from which he emerged. F.E. Peters acknowledges, as do all serious scholars, that “the earliest ‘biographers’ of the Prophet, whose work has been preserved by Ibn Ishaq and Tabari, were little more than collectors of oral accounts or hadith about the raids carried out by or under Muhammad. But despite these obvious and serious handicaps, Ibn Ishaq’s Biography of Allah’s Apostle is, on the face of it, a coherent and convincing account, and gives the historian something to work with, especially if the latter closes his eyes to where the material came from.”
While I could share with you the source evaluations of another twenty or so Islamic scholars, suffice it to say that nothing would change. The Quran is considered flawed due to its lack of context and chronological order. Ishaq’s Sira is the oldest and most reliable source, but unfortunately, it consists only of oral reports a century removed from their authors. Moreover, the Sira has been edited for political consumption, so we are dependent on Tabari’s Ta’rikh. It thus offers the oldest uncensored account of Muhammad’s words and deeds, his ambition, God, and religion.
Bukhari and Muslim are supplementary, but their lack of historical substantiation, their late dating, and their constant contradictions make them considerably less valuable. But as bad as these are, they are the best that Islam has to offer. Humphreys laments the lack of accurate, contemporary source material, stating: “Muslims, we would assume, would have recorded their spectacular achievements with great care, and the highly literate and urbanized societies they subjugated could hardly have avoided coming to grips with what had happened to them. But all we find from this early period are sources that are either fragmentary or represent highly specific, even eccentric, perspectives, thus completely destroying any possibility of reconstructing the first century of Islam.”
“We have no reliable evidence that any hadith tradition actually speaks of Muhammad’s life, or even of the Quran,” testifies Joseph Schacht after subjecting the hadith to the most rigorous scholastic examination in history. Schacht was ingenious. He used court records from the early ninth century to demonstrate that neither the defense nor the prosecution used hadiths that have since become the backbone of Islamic law.
THE DARK PAST OF ISLAM
There’s no way men would have been convicted or acquitted in an Islamic court without referring to the most appropriate hadith, unless they simply didn’t exist at the time. Schacht therefore dates the creation of a hadith to the moment it was first used in the trial. He not only found late dates for most hadith, he also discovered something quite sinister. Hadith with the best isnads were the most suspect. Humphreys said: “We are asked to believe that these documents, written hundreds of years later, are accurate, even though we are given no evidence of their veracity, other than isnads, which are nothing more than lists purporting to give the names of those from whom the oral traditions were passed down. But even the isnads lack any supporting documentation to confirm their authenticity.” Simply put, insights into the formation of Islam, the creation of the Quran, and the life of Muhammad are as dark as the message they proclaim.
Muslims claim that the late dates of the primary sources can be attributed to the fact that writing was simply not used in such a remote area or at that time. However, this assumption is completely unfounded, as writing on paper began long before the seventh century. Paper was invented in the fourth century and then widely used throughout the civilized world. The Umayyad dynasty of the first hundred years of Islam was headquartered in the former Byzantine territory of Syria, not in Arabia. Thus, unlike Arabia, it was a sophisticated society that employed secretaries in the Caliphal courts, demonstrating that manuscript writing was well-developed.
Yet, nothing has been found to support the religion of Islam. Not a single hadith or Quranic fragment dates from this time or place. The Muslims who conquered and taxed much of the world during the first 100 years of Islam could not have written a single scroll, sura, sira, or sunnah during those same 100 years. So we must ask: How did we acquire the Quran if no Muslim scribe, cleric, or scholar could put pen to paper before the eighth century? Muslims claim the existence of several codices of the Quran shortly after Muhammad’s death. The Uthmanic text, for example, had to have been written; otherwise, it wouldn’t be a text, would it? Writing was available, but for some reason, no written record was produced before 750 AD.
As you undoubtedly know, these are very serious accusations. And ultimately, they will lead us to a unique, undeniable, and very dire conclusion. Muslim scholars claim that the lack of early documentation can be attributed to age. They believe that the material on which the primary sources were written either decomposed over time, leaving us without examples, or wore out and was thus destroyed. But this argument is dubious. In the British Library, we have ample examples of documents written by individuals in communities near Arabia. And they predate Islam by centuries. There are New Testament manuscripts on display, such as the Codex Syniaticus and the Codex Alexandrinus, both written in the fourth century, 400 years before the period in question! Why haven’t they decomposed over time?
PROPHET OF DOOM
However, this argument is particularly weak when applied to the Quran itself. The “Uthmanic text,” the final canon supposedly compiled by Zaid ibn Thabit under the guidance of the third caliph, is considered by all Muslims to be the most important piece of literature ever written. According to Sura 43:2, it is the “Mother of All Books.” It is considered an exact replica of the “Eternal Tablets” that exist in heaven (Sura 85:22). Muslim traditions claim that all other competing codices and manuscripts were destroyed after 650 CE. Even the Hafsah copy, from which the final recension was taken, was burned. If this Uthmanic text was so important, why wasn’t it written on paper, or on other materials that would have lasted?
And if the earliest manuscripts had worn down through use, why weren’t they replaced by others written on the skin, like so many other older documents that have survived? “’We have absolutely no evidence of the original Qur’an,’ say Schimmel, Gilchrist, Ling, and Safadi. ‘Nor do we have a surviving fragment of the four copies made of this recension and sent to Mecca, Medina, Basra, and Damascus.’ Even if these copies had somehow fallen apart over time, there would surely be some fragments to which we could refer. By the end of the seventh century, Islam had spread across North Africa and up to Spain, and eastward as far as India. The Qur’an was (according to tradition) the center of their faith. Within that vast sphere of influence, there should have been some Qur’anic documents or manuscripts that have survived. Yet, not even a fragment from that period exists. There is literally nothing from the first three generations of Islam to suggest that the Qur’an existed.”
While Christianity can claim over 5,500 known Greek New Testament fragments and manuscripts, 10,000 Latin Vulgates, and at least 9,500 other early versions, amounting to 25,000 extant New Testament sources (McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict), most of which were written between 25 and 350 years after Christ’s death and resurrection (or between the 1st and 4th centuries), Islam can only produce a single manuscript in the eighth century (Lings, Safadi, Schimmel). If Christians could preserve so many thousands of ancient documents, all written centuries earlier, at a time when paper had not yet been introduced, forcing them to rely on papyrus, which decomposed more quickly, one wonders why Muslims were unable to preserve a single manuscript from this much later period?
This makes the argument that all the earliest Qur’ans simply decomposed with age absurd to the extreme. The evidence, or lack thereof, leads us to a solitary rational conclusion. The reason no one has found a single surviving Quranic or hadith fragment, manuscript, or scroll dated less than a hundred years after the time they were allegedly revealed is that they never existed. The Quran and the hadith, and thus Islam, were born in Baghdad, not in Mecca or Medina in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, not on the eve of the seventh. If you waited to read this appendix until you had finished much or all of Prophet of Doom, you might be shocked to know that what you have read from the Quran and Sunnah was fabricated. While that is true, it has always been my contention that it doesn’t matter. First, something happened that turned good men into bad men. For the first 3,000 years of recorded history, the Bedouin of Arabia were self-sufficient, peace-loving, and freedom-loving peoples.
They conquered no one. Then, at the beginning of the seventh century, everything changed. These Arabs, now Muslims, became the most ruthless militants on the planet. They conquered the civilized world, plundering and taxing it for loot. They left oceans of blood and dictatorial tyrannies in their wake. Someone and something changed them. If not this man and these words, who and what? Secondly, it doesn’t matter what actually happened in the scorching sands of the Arabian Desert. What matters is what Muslims believe happened. That’s why they terrorize us by shouting, “Allahu Akbar!” Although neither the Quran nor the Sunnah are accurate reflections of Muhammad, Allah, and Islam, they are the only reflections. The faith of a billion people is based on them.
If we want to understand why they kill, if we want to stop them, we must understand what they believe. And to their shame, the characters, actions, and words in the hadith and Quran of Islam provide a credible and realistic representation of what made good men evil. Therefore, I have taken the Quran and the Sunnah at their face value and shared the hadith as if they were an accurate record of Muhammad’s words and actions. I have exposed the Quran as if Muhammad actually recited it. I did this for many reasons. First, it is the only tool we have to understand the motivation for terror. Second, the words in these books are sufficient in themselves to demonstrate the deceitful, hateful, intolerant, immoral, and evil nature of Muhammad, Allah, and Islam. So, by reviewing them, we have killed three birds with one stone. I have proven that Islam is without merit, rotten to the core.
The motivation for Islamic terror has been exposed. We know why good Muslims are 2,000% more violent than the rest of us. And by comparing Islamic scriptures to Mein Kampf, we are warned: we ignore Islam at our peril. Returning to the Cambridge debate, Smith said: “In response, Muslims claim to still possess some of the Uthmanic Qurans, original copies from the seventh century. I have heard Muslims claim that there are originals in Mecca, in Cairo, and in almost every ancient Islamic settlement. I have often asked them to provide me with the data that would prove their antiquity; a task that no one has yet managed.” Smith’s experience is typical. Islam has bread—a community of liars. “There are, however, two documents that have some credibility and to which many Muslims refer.
These are the Samarkand Manuscript, which is located in the State Library in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (in the southern part of the Russian Federation), and the Topkapi Manuscript, which is located in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, Turkey.
These two documents are old, and sufficient etymological and paleographic analysis has been conducted by scriptologists, as well as experts in Arabic calligraphy, to warrant discussion. The Samarkand manuscript is not a complete document. Of the 114 surahs found in the Quran today, only parts of surahs 2 through 43 are included. Much of the text is missing from these. The actual inscription of the text in the Samarkand Codex poses a real problem, as it is highly irregular. According to Gilchrist’s research: “Some pages are neatly and uniformly copied, while others are quite sloppy and uneven. On some pages the text is extensive, on others it is very cramped and compressed.
Sometimes the Arabic letter KAF is omitted, while on other pages it is the dominant letter on the page. Because so many pages differ so much from one another, the assumption is that we have a composite text, pieced together from several manuscripts. Also within the text, one finds artistic illuminations between the surahs, usually consisting of colored bands of red, green, blue, and orange medallions. “These illuminations have forced scriptologists to assign a ninth-century origin to the codex, since it is unlikely that such embellishments would have accompanied a seventh-century Uthman manuscript sent to the various provinces,” say Lings, Safadi, and Gilchrist. “The Topkapı Manuscript in Istanbul is also written on vellum.
It lacks the diacritical marks necessary for vocalization and word distinction. Like the Samarkand text, it is supplemented with decorative medallions indicating a later date. Some Muslims claim it must be one of the original copies, if not the original compiled by Zaid ibn Thabit. Yet, one need only compare it with the Samarkand Codex to realize that they certainly cannot both be Uthmanic originals. The Istanbul Topkapi Codex, for example, has 18 lines per page, while the Tashkent Samarkand Codex has only half that number; the Istanbul Codex is inscribed in a very formal manner throughout, while the text of the Samarkand Codex is often haphazard and significantly distorted. One cannot believe that both were copied by the same scribes. Manuscript analysis experts use three tests to determine age. They test the age of the paper on which the manuscript was written, using chemical processes such as carbon-14 dating. Accurate dating of approximately 20 years is possible. However, there has been reluctance to use it, even though a refined form of carbon-14, known as accelerator mass spectrometry, requires only 0.5 mg of material for testing. To date, none of these manuscripts have been tested by either method.
Experts also study ink, analyzing its composition, determining its origins, and whether it has been erased or copied. But the inaccessibility of these manuscripts for detailed examination has made this impossible.
Those who guard them fear what the tests will reveal. Specialists must therefore examine the script itself to determine whether the manuscript is recent or ancient. This study is known as paleography. “Letter-formation styles change over time. These changes are usually uniform, since manuscripts are written by professional scribes. Thus, handwriting tends to follow easily delineated conventions, with only gradual adjustments,” says Vanderkam, an expert in this field. “By examining handwriting in texts with a known date and noting its development over time, a paleographer can compare them with other undated texts and thus determine to which time period they belong.”
When experts apply the paleographic test to the Samarkand and Topkapi manuscripts, they reach some interesting conclusions. The evidence proves that neither manuscript can date from the time of Uthman. What most Muslims don’t realize is that both manuscripts are written in Kufic script, a script that, according to modern Quranic scholars such as Martin Lings and Yasin Hamid Safadi, didn’t appear until the late eighth century (790s or later). It wasn’t used at all in Mecca or Medina in the seventh century.
The reasons for this are quite simple. The Kufic script, better known as al-Khatt al-Kufi, takes its name from the city of Kufa in Iraq. It would be rather odd for this to be the official script of an Arabic Quran, since it takes its name from a city recently conquered by Muslims. Arabic was a foreign language to the Persians. Furthermore, for most of the first century of Islam, the new empire was ruled from Syria, where written Arabic had recently evolved from Aramaic via Syriac.
Baghdad and Damascus were vying for power, and at that point, the Syrians were in charge. “We know, in fact, that Kufic script reached its perfection at the end of the eighth century, a hundred and fifty years after Muhammad’s death. After that, it was widely used throughout the Muslim world. This makes sense, since the Abbasids dominated Islam after 750 CE and, due to their Persian background, moved the Islamic capital to Kufa and then to Baghdad. They would have wanted their script to dominate, since they themselves were dominated by the Umayyads, who had been based in Damascus for a hundred years. It would be quite understandable that an Arabic script originating in their sphere of influence, like Kufic, would evolve into what we find in these two documents mentioned here. (Kufa, Najaf, and Karbala remain the most important cities for Shiite Muslims even today.)
Another factor pointing to the late dates of these manuscripts is the format in which they are written. Because of the elongated style of Kufic script, they both use sheets that are wider than they are tall. This ‘landscape’ format is borrowed from Syriac and Iraqi Christian documents from the eighth and ninth centuries. “Earlier Arabic manuscripts were all written upright,” explains Dr. Hugh Goodacre of the Oriental and India Office of Collections.
“Because the Topkapī and Samarkand manuscripts are written in Kufic script and because they use a horizontal format, they could not have been written earlier than 150 years after Uthman’s Recension was supposedly composed,” Gilchrist confirmed. “So which script would have been used in Central Arabia at that time? ‘
The first Arabic scripts in Mecca and Medina were al-Ma’il and Mashq,’ say Lings and Safadi. ‘Ma’il script came into use at the end of the seventh century and is easily recognizable because it is written at a slight angle.’ The word al-Ma’il means ‘slanted.’ The Mashq script emerged at the same time. It is more horizontal and is distinguished by its cursive and relaxed style. If a Qur’an had been composed in Mecca or Medina in the seventh century, it would have had to be written in either Ma’il or Mashq script.”
Interestingly, we have a Quran written in Ma’il script, and many consider it the earliest Quran in our possession. Yet, it is neither in Istanbul nor Tashkent, but, ironically, in the British Library in London. It has been dated to the late eighth century by Martin Lings, the former Curator of Manuscripts at the British Library, who is himself a practicing Muslim. Therefore, using script analysis, scholars are certain that there is no known manuscript of the Quran that can be dated within a century of its supposed revelation.
Moreover, none of the earliest Quranic fragments can be dated earlier than 100 years after the time of Muhammad. In her book Calligraphy and Islamic Culture, Annemarie Schimmel underscores this point when discussing the recently discovered Sana’a Qurans. “The earliest datable fragments date back to the first quarter of the eighth century.” The Sana’a Qurans remain a mystery, as the Yemeni government has not allowed the Germans, who were called to investigate them, to publish their findings. There have been suggestions that the actual words in these early eighth-century Qurans do not correspond to those we have today. We are still waiting for the full truth.” I will discuss the Sana’a fragments and, later in this appendix, address the most recent findings surrounding them. Jay Smith’s intuition proved correct. There is considerable debate among secular historians and Islamic clerics about the credibility of the Hadith compilations.
“It now seems clear that the legal schools of the early ninth century furthered their own agenda by claiming that their doctrines originated first with the Prophet’s Companions and then with the Prophet himself,” Joseph Schacht reported. Schacht claims that the inspiration for his research was the Islamic scholar al-Shafi’i, who died in 820 CE. Schacht explains: “A large number of legal traditions invoking the authority of the Prophet arose in the Shafi’i era and later. Consequently, they all express Iraqi doctrines, and not those of early Arabia or even Syria.”
The Iraqi legal and political agenda imposed by each school shows that most Hadith were created in the ninth and tenth centuries, thus invalidating the authenticity of the Sunnah.”
In his debate, Smith mentioned something that Prophet of Doom readers already know. “Certain compilers wrote reports that contradict other reports they had collected themselves. Tabari, for example, often gives contradictory accounts of the same incidents. Ishaq informs us that Muhammad stepped into a political vacuum when he entered Yathrib, but later tells us that he had wrested the authority of an established ruler. He says that the Jews in Medina supported their Arab neighbors and were still harassed by them. Which one are we to believe?”
Crone notes: “The stories are told with complete disregard for what the actual situation in Medina may have been.” “Conflicting accounts are also given by different compilers. Many are variations on a common theme. For example, there are fifteen different versions of Muhammad being blessed by a representative of a non-Muslim religion who ‘recognized’ him as a future prophet. Some place this encounter during his childhood, others when he was nine; some say he was twenty-five at the time. One tradition claims he was recognized by Ethiopian Christians, several by a Syrian monk, many by Yathrib Jews, one by a local Hanif, while others claim it was a magician.
Some even suggest it was the belly of a dead animal. Crone concludes: “What we have here are no more than fifteen equally fictional versions of an event that never happened.” “To make matters worse, the later the hadith, the more detailed it is. Take, for example, the death of Abdallah, Muhammad’s father. Ishaq and Tabari agreed that Abdallah died young enough to leave Muhammad an orphan; but as for the specifics of his death, ‘Allah knows best.'” Waqidi, writing half a century later, tells us not only when Abdallah died, but also how he died, where he died, his age, and the exact place of his burial. According to Michael Cook: “This evolution over the course of fifty years from uncertainty to a profusion of precise details suggests that a significant portion of what Waqidi knew was not knowledge.
This is quite typical of Waqidi. He was always willing to provide precise dates, locations, and names where Ishaq had none. But since all of this information was previously unknown to Ishaq, its value is highly questionable. And if false information accumulated at this rate in the three generations between Ishaq and Waqidi, then it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that even more must have accumulated in the four generations between Muhammad and Ishaq.’ A healthy dose of skepticism is warranted. Bukhari claims that by 850 CE, there were 600,000 hadith concerning the Prophet. They were so numerous that the ruling caliph asked him to select the “true” sayings of the Prophet from the sea of false ones.
Bukhari never explained the criteria that guided his selection, other than vague pronouncements about “unreliability” or “unsuitability.” Ultimately, he retained only 2,602 hadith (9,082 with repetition)—a mere 0.5%! Of the 600,000 hadith, 597,398 were false and had to be deleted. Thus, by the time they were compiled, 99.5% of the oral traditions upon which Islam was based were considered false. Muslim scholars argue that the primary means of distinguishing between authentic and false Hadith was a process of oral transmission called an isnad. This, Muslims argue, was the science used by Bukhari, Tabari, and other compilers of the ninth and tenth centuries to authenticate their compilations.
The compilers provided a list of names, which, through time, could trace authorship back to the Prophet himself. For early Muslims, an isnad was considered essential because it was considered the signature of those who originated the document. “Unfortunately, we have no evidence that isnads are legitimate. Rather, it seems that isnads were simply applied to Hadith that approved or prohibited matters of importance to the Iraqi community in the generations following Muhammad’s death.” These isnads, and the hadith they supposedly confirm, merely testify to what the exegetes chose to implement rather than what can be considered historical fact.
Isnads weaken what they sought to establish. We are left with the realization that without any continuous transmission between the seventh and eighth centuries, the traditions can only be considered a snapshot of the later ninth and tenth centuries and nothing more. Humphreys asserts: ‘The “science” of isnad began in the tenth century with the authentication of isnads, long after the isnads in question had already been compiled, and have little relevance. Consequently, the longer the list, which includes the best-known historical names, the more its authenticity is suspected.'” Therefore, from a credibility perspective, Islamic hadith is no better than the Quran. There is not a single glimmer of light from the first 150 years of Islam.
Archaeologists haven’t found a single scrap of paper, papyrus, parchment, or even a rock carving to suggest that a single Hadith was coined within a century of Muhammad’s death. Then, suddenly, two hundred and fifty years later, 600,000 appear out of nowhere. Once again, there’s a single, rational explanation. They didn’t exist before. The Islamic Sunnah upon which Islam is based, upon which the Five Pillars are founded, upon which suicide bombers slog their way to infamy, is a farce. Like the Quran, the Sunnah originated in Baghdad. But that doesn’t mean they’re entirely untrue.
I believe that much of what has come down to us in the Sunnah and the Quran is a somewhat accurate representation of what Muhammad said and did. First, it’s inconceivable that Islamic clerics simply made all this up. Someone conquered them, and something converted them into Muslims. Second, someone and something motivated the Arabs to pour out of Arabia with swords. The depiction of Muhammad in the Hadith provides a perfect explanation of what caused the former.
Muslims behave so badly. While the glove was woven in Mecca and decorated in Baghdad, the hand that fits it belongs to the real Muhammad. Third, it is unimaginable, if not true, to attribute rape, incest, pedophilia, deception, theft, kidnapping, ransom, slave trading, torture, and terrorist raids to a religious prophet in a country subjected to his doctrine. If you were to invent a “prophet” out of thin air, you might think of the Quraysh bargain, the Satanic Verses, the promise of war in Aqaba, the Naklah attack, the real motivation for Badr, the Qurayza genocide, the Khaybar rape, or Bakr’s pan-Arab war over taxes.
The Persians were far too clever for that. What happened, in my opinion, was embellishment. The Quran was religiously deficient, so eighth-century scholars polished it. You’ll soon discover where they got their material.
The Hadith provided fables, miracles, exaggerations, laws, religious rituals, and dogmas—the kind of material the ruling elite in Baghdad needed to control and curse those now under their spell. After demonstrating that there isn’t a shred of credible evidence (beyond Islamic behavior) to support the validity of the Quran and Hadith—historically, scientifically, archaeologically, or rationally—Smith turned his attention to their content. He began by positioning the Islamic claims so that his refutation would be on target. He said: “Muslims claim that the superiority of the Quran over all other revelations is due to its refined structure and eloquent literary style.
They quote from Surahs 10:37-8, 2:23, or 17:88, which say, “Will they say that Muhammad forged it? Answer: So produce a Surah like it, and call upon whomever you wish besides Allah, if you are truthful.” This book is unparalleled in the world, according to the unanimous decision of learned men, in its diction, style, rhetoric, thought, and soundness of laws and regulations for shaping the destiny of humanity.
Muslims conclude that since there is no literary equivalent, this proves that the Quran is a miracle sent down by God and not simply written by a human being. It is this inimitability, or uniqueness, called i’jaz in Arabic, that Muslims believe proves its divine authorship and thus its status as a miracle. It confirms Muhammad’s prophetic claims, as well as the complete veracity of Islam. Yet, by any standard, the Quran is an abominable book. It promotes terrorism. It condones rape, incest, theft, kidnapping for ransom, the slave trade, mass murder, and, worst of all, world conquest by the sword. It is nauseatingly repetitive, foolishly plagiarized, contradictory, and scientifically and historically inaccurate.
And it’s a literary disaster, riddled with grammatical errors, missing words, and meaningless phrases. One in five verses is meaningless. The speaker dips in and out of the first, second, and third person, unsure whether he’s one or more. He doesn’t even know his name. There are no intelligent transitions.
And it’s haphazardly thrown together, without any semblance of sensible organization by topic, context, or chronology. It’s little more than a childish tirade that reveals the author’s demented, decadent, and delusional nature. It’s flawed in every respect. Pfander reports: “It is by no means the general opinion of unbiased Arab scholars that the literary style of the Quran is superior to that of other books in the Arabic language. Many doubt whether it surpasses in eloquence and poetry the Mu’allaqat of Imraul-Quais or the Maqamat of Hariri, although few in Muslim countries have the courage to express such an opinion.”
Pfander explains by comparing the Quran with the Bible. “When we read the Old Testament in its original Hebrew, scholars believe that the eloquence of, for example, Isaiah and the Psalms is far greater than that of any part of the Quran. Almost no one but a Muslim would deny this.” However, that doesn’t say much; all coherent writing is superior to the Quran. A comparison with the Bible reveals other problems. When someone familiar with it begins to read the Qur’an, it immediately becomes clear that the Qur’an is a very different kind of literature, regardless of its poetic merits. While the Bible provides historical context for everything, the Qur’an offers almost none.
While the Bible goes out of its way to explain unfamiliar terminology or territory, the Qur’an remains silent. In fact, the structure of the Bible, consisting of a library of 66 books written over a period of 1,500 years, reveals that it is arranged chronologically, subject-matter, and thematically. The Qur’an, on the other hand, reads more like a confused and jumbled collection of statements and ideas, many of which bear little connection to previous chapters and verses. Scholars admit that the Qur’an is so haphazardly compiled that anyone plowing through it needs the utmost sense of duty.
The German secular scholar Salomon Reinach argues: “From a literary standpoint, the Quran has little merit. Declamation, repetition, childishness, a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader again and again. It is humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of countless commentaries, and that millions of people still waste time absorbing it.” I, too, have wrestled with this thought. Muhammad and his writings are so moronic and repulsive that I feel like I’m wasting my time. Then I think of the billions of people who are victims of Islam. Without a voice willing to speak the truth, however disgusting, they will never be freed from its clutches. Then I think of the victims of Islamic terror, and my soul cries out, hoping to limit the future carnage.
Finally, I read the prophecies of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and John. If I interpret them correctly, a quarter of the world’s population will die within a quarter of a century as a result of Islam. That’s motivation enough. The McClintock and Strong Encyclopedia states: “The Qur’an is extremely incoherent and sentimental; the book contains no logical sequence of thought either as a whole or in its parts.
This is consistent with the disjointed and haphazard manner in which it was supposedly delivered. Even the Muslim scholar Dashti laments its literary flaws: “Unfortunately, the Qur’an is poorly edited and its contents are very clumsily arranged. All students of the Qur’an wonder why the editors did not use the natural and logical method of arranging them by date of revelation.” Fortunately, you know the answer. By arranging the Qur’an in the order in which it was revealed and by infusing it with the context of the Sira, the message becomes very dark and sinister. A properly ordered Qur’an proves that Muhammad’s entire recitation was composed to serve a greedy, immoral, criminal, and murderous agenda. “Another problem is that the reader of the Qur’an has to endure endless repetitions of the same material.” The stories of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Lot, Moses, Pharaoh, Jesus, and Mary are retold a hundred times. “The frequency with which we find alternative versions of the same passage in different Surahs is troubling.”
The Quran has other literary problems. “The subject matter in surahs jumps from one topic to another, with overlaps and inconsistencies in grammar, law, and theology,” Rippin suggests. “The language is semi-poetic, while the grammar, due to omission, is so elliptical as to be obscure and ambiguous. There are grammatical disagreements, such as the use of plural verbs with singular subjects, and variations in the treatment of gender nouns (2:177; 3:59; 4:162; 5:69; 7:160; & 63:10). Sentences often omit verbs. The Quran is full of dangling modifiers. It has few explanations. Consequently, the Quran is difficult to read and impossible to understand.” For example, in Quran 3:60, the words “This is” are omitted. The verse begins with: “The truth from your Lord; do not be of those who doubt.”
But it gets worse. The Arabic “word” used for “doubt” is “momtreen.” It’s used nowhere else in the Arabic language except in this verse. Islamic imams have no idea what momtreen means, so the translators simply guessed “doubt.” In Quran 7:160, “Fanbagesat” is also a non-existent, and therefore meaningless, word. Likewise, in Quran 5:69, “al Sa’boon” is not a word. The only place it’s used in the entire Arabic language is in this one verse. No one knows what al Sa’boon means. And there are a hundred other mysterious “words” like this. The oft-quoted and superficially tolerant verse: 005.069, “Indeed, those who believe, and those who are Jews, Sabians, and Christians—whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day and does righteous deeds—on them there will be no fear, nor will they grieve,” has been abolished. The Noble Quran states: “This verse must not be misinterpreted. It was abrogated by 3:85 [which is impossible since the third Surah was revealed before the fifth Surah]. After the coming of the Prophet Muhammad, no other religion except Islam will be accepted by anyone.” An example of a grammatical error can be found in Quran 63:11.
“Ethny Asher Asbatan,” according to Arabic grammar rules, should be “Ethny Asher Sebtan,” not “Asbatan.” As it is written, it says: “Allah will not delay when it is time to take a soul.” He meant to say: “when it dies.” These are not the only problems. Patricia Crone points out: “Within blocks of verse, trivial dislocations are surprisingly common. Allah can appear in the first and third person in the same sentence. There are omissions that, if not corrected by interpretation, render the meaning incomprehensible.” In response to these accusations, the theologian-grammarian al-Rummani argued that the ellipses and grammatical irregularities were positive rhetorical devices rather than evidence of hasty or sloppy writing.
It’s another Islamic first: the Quran is so poorly written that only God could have messed it up. Muir discovered: “Al-Kindi, a Christian polemicist serving in the Caliph’s court, was talking to Muslims as early as 830 CE, immediately after the Quran had been canonized based on the historical evidence. He seemed to understand the agenda and the problem. Anticipating the claim that the Quran itself was evidence of his divine inspiration, he responded by saying, ‘The upshot of all this process by which the Quran has come into being is that it is abundantly clear to those who have read these scriptures that your histories are all jumbled and mixed up.'”
It is evidence that many different hands have been at work, causing discrepancies by adding or omitting whatever they liked or disliked. As such, the conditions are right for a new revelation to be sent down from heaven.’” Interestingly, AlKindi’s statement, already in the ninth century, aligns with Wansbrough’s conclusion over eleven hundred years later; both claimed that the Qur’an was the result of a haphazard compilation by later editors a century or more after its alleged revelation. “Another difficulty with the Qur’an is its scope. Some verses state that it is a book for Arabs alone (Sura 14:4; 42:7; 43:3 & 46:12), while others suggest that it is a revelation for all mankind (34:28; 33:40).
This also speaks to the problem of choosing Arabic. If God wanted to communicate with humanity in the seventh century, Greek or Latin would have been far better choices. According to Dr. Crone, “There were other people living nearby at that time who have left us material that we can use to evaluate the Quran.
The non-Islamic evidence is found in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Coptic literature from the time of the conquests in the seventh century,” Nevo shares, “We also have a large number of Arabic inscriptions, which pre-date Islamic traditions. Yet these materials all contradict Islamic hadith and the Quran.” This evidence is deeply troubling. If Muslims want to save Islam, they will have to mount a ready defense. Attacking the messenger and burying one’s head in the sand is not enough. Patricia Crone discovered: “A papyrus from 643 AD…
with the year of the Hijra according to Islamic traditions.” But in reality, the papyrus only undermined Islam. It demonstrated that written Arabic existed in 643, eleven years after Muhammad’s death. And it proves that a fragment from that period might have survived. So, since we have this meaningless fragment, why don’t we have a single document that refers to the supposedly meaningful Quran or Hadith? At Cambridge, Smith revealed: “Crone finds interesting support for a Hijra outside Arabia. She documents 57 testimonies, both from within and outside the Muslim tradition, that point to a Hijra, or exodus, not from Mecca to Medina, but from more prominent places to garrison towns in the north.”
This is interesting indeed, as much of what we will learn from now on parallels and corroborates her findings.” What we will discover is that the Sunnah and the Qur’an are not the only things that have disappeared over time. There is also no evidence of Mecca. “According to archaeological research conducted by Creswell and Fehervari, the floor plans of the Umayyad mosques in Iraq, one built by the governor Hajjaj at Wasit (the oldest surviving mosque), and another attributed to about the same period near Baghdad, have qiblahs (the direction in which the mosques face to facilitate prayer) that do not point towards Mecca, but rather towards the north.
The mosques of Wasit and Baghdad are inclined 33 and 30 degrees respectively. As an aside, Hajjaj (Al Hajjaj Ibn Yoseef Althaqafi) was one of the most ruthless Islamic governors, even according to Muslims. He ruled during the time of Omar Ibn Abd Al Azez and appointed Kora Ibn Shoreek Alasady as his correspondent in Egypt. They seized the money used to build the Dome of the Rock. To “encourage” Christians to pay “their fair share,” they murdered anyone they deemed stingy. Al Hajjaj’s speeches still resonate throughout the Islamic world.
They remain as famous and menacing as Hitler’s maniacal tirades in Nazi Germany. Returning to the misaligned qiblahs, Baladhuri testifies: “The qiblah of the first mosque in Kufa, Iraq, supposedly built in 670 AD, was due west, when it should have pointed almost directly south. The original plan of the Fustat Mosque of Amr b. al-As, outside Cairo, shows a qiblah pointing too far north. If you pick up a map, you’ll quickly see where all these mosques pointed. The qiblah wasn’t in the direction of Mecca, but in the direction of Jerusalem.” Yet Muslims, always ready with an excuse, argue that these findings shouldn’t be taken too seriously, since many mosques have misplaced the qiblahs. But if Muslims were so incapable of determining directions, why would they all point to a single location: Jerusalem? We find further confirmation for this direction of prayer from the Christian traveler Jacob of Edessa, who wrote in Syriac until 705 CE and was a contemporary eyewitness in Egypt.
In a letter found in the British Museum, he refers to the Mahgraye [the name applied to Muslims before the creation of the Qur’an and hadith in the eighth century], saying: ‘It is evident that it is not towards the south that the Jews and Mahgraye pray here in the regions of Syria, but towards Jerusalem their Ka’aba, the patriarchal places of their races.’ At that time, usually in market towns.
It was profitable to build a Kaaba in trading centers so that people coming to the market could also make their pilgrimage or offer penance to the idols located there.) (The patriarchal places of the races.) Both Jews and Muslims (Mahgraye) maintain a common descent from Abraham, who was known to have lived and died just outside Jerusalem, as has been confirmed by recent archaeological discoveries. Therefore, according to Jacob of Edessa, even in 705 the direction of prayer to Mecca had not yet been established.
Instead, it was to Jerusalem. If this is correct, as all the archaeological evidence seems to indicate, there is no chance the Quran was canonized before 705 CE. This is disastrous for Islam. If there is no historical or archaeological evidence for the existence of a seventh-century Quran decreeing Mecca, or even a seventh-century Mecca, what is left of Muhammad and Islam but blood, taxes, fables, and folklore?
New research conducted by Patricia Carlier on the Umayyad Caliphal summer palaces notes that the mosques at these palaces also had qiblahs pointing toward Jerusalem. According to Dr. Hawting, who lectures on Islam at the University of London, no mosques dating from the seventh century have been found that faced Mecca. Yet, the Quran devotes some twenty verses to the importance of Mecca as the only acceptable qiblah; it’s called a test for Muslims. And the second sura is said to have been revealed in 623 AD.
According to Crone, Cook, Carlier, and Hawting, the combination of archaeological evidence from Iraq, along with literary evidence from Syria and Egypt, points unequivocally to a shrine in Jerusalem, not Mecca. So why is there such a glaring discrepancy between the Quran and what archaeology has revealed, especially as late as 705 CE? asks Smit. “Muslims argue that the early Muslims may not have known where Mecca was headed. Yet these were desert traders, caravaners! Their livelihoods depended on traveling through the desert, which has few landmarks and, because of the sandstorms, no roads.”
Above all, they knew how to follow the stars. Their lives depended on it. They certainly knew the difference between north and south. Moreover, the mosques in Iraq and Egypt were built by civilized and refined people who were adept at finding directions.
If they had miscalculated their qiblahs by so many degrees, they could not have performed the
obligatory Hajj. And why are all the earliest mosques oriented toward Jerusalem? Muslims claim that Mecca is the center of Islam and the center of history.
“It is Allah’s House on earth.” According to Quran 3:96: “The first sanctuary appointed for mankind was in Mecca, a place of Blessing, a Guidance for the nations.” In Surahs 6:92 and 42:5, we find that Mecca is the “Mother of all settlements.” The Hadith claims that Adam placed the Black Stone in the original Ka’bah, while according to the Qur’an (2:125), it was Abraham and Ishmael who built/rebuilt the Ka’bah. Thus, implicitly, Muslims consider Mecca the first and most important holy city in the world. However, there is no documentary or archaeological evidence that Abraham ever went to Mecca. In fact, there is no evidence that the city existed before the creation of the Islamic scriptures in Baghdad in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries CE.
According to research conducted by Crone and Cook, the first and only pre-Islamic allusion to a city mistakenly thought by some to be Mecca is a reference to a city called Makoraba by the Greco-Egyptian geographer Ptolemy in the mid-2nd century AD. However, it appears that this quotation from Ptolemy was not actually referring to Mecca, as the three Arabic root letters for Mecca (MKK) do not correspond to the three Arabic root letters for Makoraba (KRB), since the letters ‘ma’ preceding ‘koraba’ mean ‘the place of.’ Discrediting that report, there is absolutely no other mention of Mecca or its Kaaba in any authenticated ancient document prior to the eighth century. In fact, say Crone and Cook, ‘The earliest references are those found in one Syriac version of the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius.’ Although the Apocalypse itself dates from the late seventh century, references to Mecca are only found in much more recent copies.
They are not present in European or older Syriac traditions, and they do not appear in the Vatican Codex, which etymologists consider the earliest text. “The next allusion to Mecca appears in the Continuatio Byzantia Arabica. It dates from the reign of the Caliph Hisham, who ruled 724-743 AD. If it were such an important city, someone would have mentioned it somewhere; yet we find nothing from before the eighth century.” How is it possible that three of the four most enduring symbols of Islam—Mecca, the Quran, and the Sunnah—give no indication that they existed at the time they are supposed to have existed? The trail simply disappears the closer you get—like a mirage. For Muslims, the dilemma only increases. Their “scriptures” fall apart if Mecca were not a thriving trading center.
Otherwise, Muhammad and Allah would not have been justified in rebuking the Quraysh for their greed. If the people of Mecca didn’t become wealthy while neglecting the needy, the first 90 surahs of the Quran would be meaningless.
If Mecca weren’t on a major trade route, if the Quraysh weren’t powerful merchants, if Allah’s
Ka’bah weren’t something special, then the Quran and the Sunnah are stories about a pirate and a terrorist, nothing more. In an attempt to salvage their illusion, Muslims around the world steadfastly maintain that Mecca was a large and prosperous city, a thriving trading center at the crossroads of global trade—a place on par with Jerusalem. But according to all historical and archaeological research, none of this is true.
Bulliet, an expert on the history of trade in the ancient Middle East, argues that Mecca was not on a trade route. He explains this: “Mecca is tucked away on the edge of the peninsula.
Only the most painstaking map-reading can describe it as a natural crossroads for any north-south traffic, and it could never have been used for east-west travel.’” His findings are corroborated by the research of Groom and Muller, who argue that Mecca simply could not have been on a trade route, as it would have meant a detour from the natural course. In fact, they maintain that the trade route must have bypassed Mecca by some one hundred miles. A vast distance over jagged mountains and scorching desert sands. Patricia Crone, in her book Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, adds a practical reason that is all too often overlooked. “Mecca was an arid place, and arid places make no natural halt.
This is especially true when there are famously green spaces nearby. Why would caravans have made a steep descent into the barren valley of Mecca when they could have stopped at Ta’if? Mecca may have had a modest well and a modest shrine, but Ta’if not only had far better ones, but also a ready-made food supply. “Moreover,” says Crone, “there was no product available in Arabia that could be transported over such a distance, through such an inhospitable environment, and still be sold at a profit large enough to support the growth of a city in a peripheral location devoid of natural resources.”
Dr. Crone points out, “Some Muslims claim it was camel herding; yet that can’t be in a barren environment.” Jay Smith agreed: “According to the latest research by Kister and Sprenger, the Arabs were engaged in the leather and cloth trade; hardly items that could have established a commercial empire of international dimensions. Moreover, Mecca could not have been a center for either, as there was insufficient pasture and water for animals or crops. But the real problem with Mecca is that there simply was no international trade in Arabia, let alone Mecca, in the centuries preceding Muhammad’s birth.” Greek and Roman trade between India and the Mediterranean after the first century AD was entirely maritime.
You only need to look at a map to understand why. There was no point in transporting goods over such distances by land if a waterway was nearby. Patricia Crone explains: “In Diocletian’s Rome, it was cheaper to ship wheat 2,000 kilometers by sea than 80 kilometers by land. The distance from Najran, Yemen in the south, to Gaza in the north was about 2,000 kilometers.
Why would the merchants ship their goods from India by sea, and unload them in Aden, where they would be put on the backs of much slower and more expensive camels to trudge across the inhospitable Arabian desert to Gaza, when they could have simply left them on the ships and followed the Red Sea route along the western coast of Arabia? There were other problems as well. Greco-Roman trade collapsed by the third century CE. More importantly, the Romans and Greeks to whom the trade was going had never heard of a place called Mecca. If Mecca were so important, according to Islamic hadith, those to whom the trade was going would surely have noticed its existence. Yet we find nothing at all.
Crone says: “Greek commercial documents refer to the cities of Ta’if (near modern-day Mecca), and to Yathrib (later Medina), as well as to Khaybar in the north, but Mecca is never mentioned. Even the Persian Sassanids, who invaded Arabia between 300 and 570 AD, mentioned the cities of Yathrib and Tihama, but not Mecca. This is indeed worrying.
The fact is that the overland route was abandoned after the first century CE. We are in a quandary. If Mecca was not the great commercial center Muslim traditions would have us believe, if it was unknown to the people who lived and wrote during that period, and if it could not even be considered a city in Muhammad’s time, then it certainly could not have been the center of the Muslim world, let alone the world of Allah. So, which city was it? The answer is not difficult to guess. It seems that Jerusalem, not Mecca, was the center and sanctuary of the Maghribs until about 700 CE. The sanctuary is not a mosque, because it has no qiblah (direction of prayer).
It is built as an octagon with eight pillars, suggesting it was intended for circumambulation. Therefore, it was built as a shrine—a Ka’bah. Today, it is considered the third holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina. Muslims claim it was built to commemorate the night Muhammad ascended to heaven to discuss with Moses, Abraham, Jesus, and Allah the number of prayers required of believers. This turbulent journey is known as the Mi’raj. But according to the research Van Berchem and Nevo conducted on the inscriptions, the earliest dated writings in the building say nothing about the Mi’raj, but merely refer to polemical quotations that are somewhat Quranic and primarily aimed at Christians. In their defense, Muslims are quick to point out that both Surah 17:1 and 2:143, which speak of the “inviolable place” and the “change of Qiblah,” can be found in the inscriptions on the drum of the dome and the south-facing doorway. But they would do well to read the history of these inscriptions. What they will discover is that they are neither original nor ancient.
The entire dome was rebuilt by al-Zaher Li-L’zaz in 1022 CE by Abdul Hamid II. The current doors (where Sura 2:144 is found) were not built until 1545. The southern portico, where Sura 2:143 is written, was not built until 1817 by Sultan Mahmud. Van Berchem and Nevo attest: “The earliest inscriptions speak of Jesus’ messianic status, his acceptance by the prophets, Muhammad’s reception of revelations, and the use of the terms ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim.’ However, it should be noted that even their early dates are questionable due to a different design attributed to the supporting pillars from a report by the Persian Nasir Khusran in 1047 CE. If the shrine was built to commemorate such an important event in the history of the Prophet’s life (the Mi’raj), why is it not referred to in any of the earliest inscriptions?”
They don’t mention the Night Journey, the Heavens, the Winged Buraq, nor Abraham, Moses, Gabriel, or Allah. There’s not even a mention of the required five prayers, which were the purpose of the event. How can this be rationalized? Jay Smith said: “The best explanation is that the story of the Mi’raj didn’t exist or wasn’t known at the time, but was redacted later during the Abbasid period. This becomes clear when one realizes that the idea of five prayers also originated from this time.
The only Quranic references to prayer occur in Suras 11:114; 17:78; 20:130; and 30:17, and they require three, not five, prayers.
If the Quran is from Allah, why doesn’t He know how many prayers a Muslim must perform? And why, if the Dome of the Rock was built to commemorate that momentous event, is nothing mentioned until 1,000 years later? It is clear that this building was originally constructed for purposes other than commemorating the Mi’raj. The fact that such an imposing structure was built so early suggests that it was considered the house of Allah, and therefore the center of the Islamic world, at least until the early eighth century. From what we read earlier about Muhammad’s intention to fulfill his and Ishmael’s birthright by reclaiming Abraham’s land—Israel—it makes sense that Abd al-Malik would build this structure as the center of that fulfillment. Is it any wonder, then, that when Abd al-Malik built the dome proclaiming Muhammad’s prophetic mission, he placed it over the temple rock itself. [Actually, he built it on the foundation of the temple to Jupiter, the Roman sun god, but that is another story.]
According to Islamic tradition, the Caliph Suleyman the Great, who ruled until 717 AD, went to Mecca to inquire about the Hajj. Hadiths compiled in the ninth century claim that he was dissatisfied with the response he received there, and therefore chose to follow ‘Abd al-Malik’s ritual rite of circumambulating the Dome of the Rock.’ This fact, according to Dr. Muhammad, University of London, confirms: “There was considerable confusion as to the location of Allah’s Kaaba until the early eighth century.” Now that we have seen three of Islam’s four most enduring symbols disappear, we are about to lose the fourth. Aside from the Sunnah, Muhammad is another mirage. “The earliest Islamic documents,” says Dr. John Wansbrough, “say nothing about Muhammad’s prophethood. The Maghazi, accounts of his battles and campaigns, are the earliest Islamic documents we possess. Yet they tell us little about Muhammad’s life or teachings.”
In fact, nowhere in these documents is there any veneration of Muhammad as a prophet!” The earliest comprehensive history of Muhammad’s life, Ishaq’s Sira steadfastly refrains from calling Muhammad a “prophet” either. “To know who Muhammad was and what he did, therefore, we must go back to the time when he lived and look at the evidence that existed then and still exists today, to see what it can tell us about this infamous figure. The most prolific artifacts are Arabic rock inscriptions scattered across the Syro-Jordanian deserts and the peninsula, especially in the Negev. The man who has done the most research on these rock inscriptions is Yehuda Nevo. In his Towards a Prehistory of Islam, he explains that the Arabic religious carvings from this period present a monotheistic profession of faith. However, he claims that this profession of faith ‘is demonstrably not Islam, but a dogma from which Islam could have developed.’” Sounds like Qusayy’s religious scam. Nevo found: “In the Arab religious documents of the Sufyani period [661-684], there is a complete absence of any reference to Muhammad. Neither the name Muhammad nor any Mohammedan formula (that he is the prophet of Allah) appears in any inscription dating from before the Dome of the Rock—and even those are dubious. This is true regardless of whether the purpose of the inscription is religious or whether it was used as a commemorative carving.”
Muhammad’s name does not appear in any seventh-century inscriptions, not even in religious ones. Given that the Sira, Ta’rikh, and Hadith, which comprise the Sunnah, consist almost entirely of accounts of the Prophet’s life, making him the model for all Muslims to follow, why don’t we find the same emphasis in earlier Arabic inscriptions, which date closer to his time? Even more troubling, why isn’t he mentioned at all? His name is not found in Arabic inscriptions until the eighth century. Moreover, the first dated mention of the phrase “Muhammad Rasul Allah” (Muhammad is the prophet of Allah) was discovered on a Sassanian Xalid coin from 690 CE, which was minted in Damascus, not Arabia.
The first occurrence of what Nevo calls the “‘Triple Confession of Faith,’ which includes Tawhid (Allah is One), the expression Muhammad Rasul Allah, and the denial of the divinity of Christ (Rasul Allah Wa-Abduhu) occurs in Jerusalem, not Arabia. Before this inscription, the Islamic confession cannot be attested at all.” Thus, neither Muhammad, his prophetic status, his god, nor their creed are even mentioned in their country or century. Nevo explains: “Religious content on rock inscriptions is not pronounced until after 700 CE.
And while they bear religious messages, they make no mention of the prophet or his message. This means that official Arab religious practice made no mention of Muhammad or his claim to be a prophet within 100 years or more after his death. What they did contain was a monotheistic form of belief, belonging to a particular sectarian literature with developed Judeo-Christian views in a particular literary style, but one that lacked features specific to any known monotheistic religion, including Islam. “The Muhammadan formulas were not used on rock inscriptions from the Negev until around 740 CE. And even these,” Nevo notes, “although Muhammadan, are not Muslim. The Muslim texts do not appear until the beginning of the ninth century, around 820 CE.”
The terms “Muslim” and “Islam” are also puzzling. Although the Quran states in Surah 33:35 that the believers were Muslims and their religion Islam, neither term was used until the late seventh century. According to Crone and Cook: “Islam and Muslim in the sense of ‘submission’ and ‘one who submits’ is borrowed from the Samaritans. The verb aslama has cognates in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac, but while neither Jewish nor Christian literature provides a satisfactory precedent for the Islamic usage, we find precise parallels in the Memar Marqah, the most important Samaritan text of the pre-Islamic period. The sense of submission can easily be seen as intended to distinguish the Hagarene covenant from Judaism.”
While searching for archaeological inscriptions, Cook discovered: “The Qur’anic quotations on both the 690 coin and the Dome of the Rock differ from what we find in the Qur’an today.” Van Berchem and Grohmann are etymologists who have conducted extensive research on the Dome inscriptions. They argue: “The earliest contain variant verbal forms, extensive deviations, as well as omissions from the current Qur’anic text. If these inscriptions were derived from the Qur’an, the variants they contain prove that the Qur’an could not have been canonized before the end of the seventh century.” These sources also seem to suggest that the Qur’an was put together rather hastily.
Dr. John Wansbrough reports: “The book is noticeably lacking in structure, often obscure and unimportant in both language and content, superficial in linking disparate materials, and prone to repeating entire passages in different versions. On this basis, it must be argued that the book is the product of the belated and imperfect adaptation of material from a variety of traditions.”
I believe the reason is clear. Muhammad’s companions plundered the world on oral instructions. And the next two generations of Muslims were too busy wielding swords and gathering booty to bother with Scripture. But then everything settled down. The war capital of Islam moved to the more civilized city of Baghdad. There, the new caliphs were to control and flatter the conquerors. The best way to do that was through religion. So they invented one, complete with a prophet, a god, and scripture. They took the pirate who had inspired the conquests and dressed him in finer clothes. Crone and Cook say: “It was under Governor Hajjaj of Iraq in 705 AD that we have the most logical historical context for the formation of the Qur’an. In an account attributed by Levond to Leo, it is shown that the governor collected all the old Hagarenian scriptures and replaced them with others ‘according to his own taste, and widely disseminated them among his nation.'”
This is particularly provocative given Hajjaj’s ruthlessness. Some would say he was Hitleresque in his behavior and attitude. “All these findings give us good reason to question the authority of the Qur’an as the word of God. Archaeology, as well as documentary and manuscript evidence, indicate that much of what the Qur’an claims does not correspond with the factual data we have. From the material gathered from external sources in the seventh and eighth centuries, we can conclude: that the Qiblah initially pointed towards Jerusalem and only in the eighth century did it point towards Mecca; that the Dome of the Rock was the first Islamic shrine; that Muhammad was not classified as the prophet of Allah until the end of the seventh century; that the terms Muslim and Islam were not used until the end of the seventh century; that the five daily prayers and the Hajj were not standardized until the eighth century; that the earliest Qur’an did not appear until the middle of the eighth century; and that the earliest Qur’anic scriptures do not coincide with the present text.”
Besides, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the piece? “All the scientific, historical, and archaeological evidence contradicts the Qur’an. The implications of this assertion are indeed astonishing. Whichever way one chooses to interpret the facts, they leave no doubt that the Qur’an was the product of an evolving revelation, canonized during the early Abbasid period, in the mid- to late eighth century, in what is now Iraq.”
It offers a very different perspective on Revelation’s “Whore of Babylon.” “Wansbrough takes the position that the Qur’an was composed even later than the hadith, and was used as an authoritative stamp to authenticate later rituals and laws by those responsible for imposing Islam. If he is correct, one might wonder whether Muhammad would even recognize the Qur’an as we possess it today.” Jay Smith concluded by quoting Wansbrough: “Readers are confronted with many structural and literary difficulties that bode ill for a document that claims to be the final and perfect word of God.
We are presented with false biblical accounts, paralleled by well-known heretical Talmudic and apocryphal documents from the second century. And while we wonder how these very human documents found their way into a supposedly non-human scripture, we are introduced to scholarly oddities that have also found their way onto its pages. These problems all point away from divine authorship and toward a more plausible explanation: the Quran is simply a collection of disparate sources drawn from surrounding literature, folktales, and oral traditions from the seventh and eighth centuries, and accidentally grafted on by unsuspecting later compilers of the Abbasid period. The oldest surviving Quranic fragments were discovered accidentally in 1972 during the restoration of the mosque in Sana’a, Yemen. Workers found a paper tomb between the mosque’s interior and exterior roofs. Although it looked like an unappealing pile of ancient Arabic parchment, fused together over the millennia and gnawed by rats and insects, it was actually a cache of Qurans. Seven years later, the mosque’s curator managed to interest a German scholar in the discovery.
The best research study of the Sana’a find was conducted by Toby Lester. Writing for the Atlantic Monthly, he reports: “Some parchment pages from the paper tomb appear to date to the eighth century, making them the oldest extant Quran. What’s more, some of these fragments reveal intriguing deviations from the standard text—devastating because Muslims are told that the Quran, as it has reached us today, is the perfect and unchanging word of God—letter for letter, as he wrote it.” The first scholar to examine the Yemeni fragments was Gerd Puin, a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Quranic paleography. His inspection revealed unconventional verse orders, textual variations, and artistic embellishments.
The Scripture is written in a rare, early Hijaz Arabic script. And newer scripts were written very clearly over earlier, worn versions. Therefore, the text has evolved. It was not simply revealed in its entirety to the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century, as is claimed. More than 15,000 sheets of the Yemeni Quran have been flattened, cleaned, treated, sorted, and assembled. They await further examination at the House of Manuscripts in Yemen. Yet, the Islamic authorities appear unwilling to allow this. Puin suggests: “They want to keep this thing under wraps, just like we do, albeit for different reasons.” Puin and his colleague Graf von Bothmer, an Islamic historian, have published short essays on what they discovered. They remain confident that once the Yemeni authorities realize the implications of the discovery, they will deny further access. However, in 1997, von Bothmer made 35,000 microfilm images of the fragments and returned the images to Germany.
The texts will soon be closely examined, and the findings will be published freely—a prospect that pleases Puin. “So many Muslims believe that everything between the two covers of the Quran is the unaltered word of Allah. They like to cite the textual evidence that shows the Bible has a history and didn’t just appear out of thin air, but so far the Quran has remained outside this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Quran also has a history. The Sana’a fragments will help us do that.” In his article on the Yemeni fragments, Toby Lester cited many of the same scholars Jay Smith referenced in his Cambridge debate. A second perspective on their insights, and what this finding might mean for Islam, is important because we are navigating dangerous waters.
One of those experts was Andrew Rippin, a professor of religious studies at the University of Calgary and a leader in Quranic studies. He said: “The impact of the Yemeni manuscripts is still being felt. Their different readings and verse orders are all very important. Everyone agrees on that. These manuscripts tell us that the early history of the Quranic text is much more of an open question than most people suspected. The text was less stable, and therefore less authoritative, than is claimed.” Stephen Humphreys, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said: “Historizing the Quran would essentially delegitimize the entire experience of the Muslim community. The Quran is the charter for the community, the document that created it. If the Quran is a historical document, then the entire fourteen-century Islamic struggle is essentially pointless.” The Encyclopedia of Islam states: “The best analogy in the Christian faith for the role of the Quran in Islam is not the Bible, but Christ. If Christ is the Word of God incarnate, then the Quran is the word of God made into text.” Questioning its sanctity or authority is thus considered a direct attack on Islam. The prospect of a Muslim backlash has not entirely deterred critical and historical study of the Quran. In 1996, Quranic scholar Günter Lüling wrote in The Journal of Higher Criticism: “The great extent to which both the text of the Quran and the official Muslim account of its Islamic origins have been distorted has been unsuspectingly accepted by Western Islamists until now.” In 1994, the journal Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam published a study by Yehuda Nevo of Hebrew University describing seventh- and eighth-century religious inscriptions on stones found in the Negev Desert. Dr. Nevo said: “These pose significant problems for the traditional Islamic account of Islamic history.” That same year, and in the same diary entry, Patricia
Crone, a historian of early Islam currently at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, published an article arguing that clarifying problematic passages in the Quranic text is only possible through a “deconventional account of how the Quran was born.” Patricia Crone collaborated with Michael Cook on a book called Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. They argue that the Quran originated later than currently believed. “There is no hard evidence for the existence of a Quran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century, and that includes only inconsistent and sparse citations from the Dome of the Rock.” However, Hagarism was immediately attacked by Muslims for its heavy reliance on hostile, non-Muslim sources.
Gerd Puin says: “My idea is that the Quran is a kind of cocktail of texts that weren’t even understood in the time of Muhammad. Many are perhaps a hundred years older than Islam itself. Within Islamic traditions, there’s a huge amount of contradictory information.” Crone agrees: “The Quran is a scripture with a history like any other, except that we don’t know this history and tend to provoke howls of protest when we study it. No one would mind the howls if they came from Westerners, but Westerners feel reverence when the howls come from other people. Muslims cry out, ‘Who are you to mess with our legacy?’” Personally, I share William Muir’s perspective. Many consider Muir the most important scholar of Islam. He claims: “The Quran is the most stubborn enemy of civilization, freedom, and truth the world has ever known.”
But Muslims prefer to be indoctrinated rather than questioned. The truth frightens them, as do facts and rational thought. They routinely reject any non-Islamic study of the Quran. Unable to counter the attack on their holy books with facts, history, or reason, they simply attack the messengers with news they don’t want to hear. An Egyptian doctor who edited Prophet of Doom explained: “Their reaction is psychological. It’s what you’d expect from someone who’s been told their religion is a delusion. The revelation triggers a defense mechanism of anger. This is what I’ve encountered every time I’ve tried to discuss Islam with them. Our only hope is that Muslims learn to control their anger and then use their reason. But I fear that won’t be tolerated by those who profit from imposing Islam. If Islam were to suddenly disappear, Islamic clerics and kings, dictators and terrorists, would lose their power and funding.”
A million Islamic clerics, dictators, and terrorists would be instantly unemployed.” Here’s an example of how they react. In 1987, an Islamic apologist, Parvez Manzoor, wrote in the Muslim World Book Review: “The Western enterprise of Qur’anic studies is a project born of resentment, bred of frustration, and fueled by revenge.
The Westerner, coordinating the forces of state, church, and academia (now there’s a delusion), launched his most determined assault on the citadel of the Muslim faith with arrogance, reckless rationalism, and a world-dominating fantasy of sectarian fanaticism, in an unholy conspiracy to dislodge Islamic scripture
from its firmly entrenched position as the embodiment of authenticity and moral integrity. The ultimate trophy the Westerner sought in his daring undertaking was the Muslim spirit itself. [Yes, we’d like to open it.] To rid the West forever of the “problem” of Islam, the Muslim consciousness must be forced to despair of the cognitive certainty of the divine message revealed to the Prophet.
Only a Muslim confused about the historical authenticity or doctrinal autonomy of the Quranic revelation would abandon its universal mission and therefore pose no challenge to the West’s global dominance. That, at least, seems to have been the tacit, if not explicit, rationale for the attack on the Quran. These guys have vivid imaginations. Like their prophet and god, they see conspiratorial plots being hatched everywhere. And nowhere is there a reason to refute a negative claim. Muslims are so accustomed to lying and being lied to that they have become paranoid and delusional. It is part of their daily lives, the supposed cause of all their problems.
When Western doctors vaccinate Muslim children against diseases, imams preach that they are infecting them with HIV. When Americans deliver food to feed starving families, the clerics claim the food is drugged to make Muslims infertile. If it doesn’t rain, it’s a CIA plot. It’s pathetic.
But to believe a scheme as deceptive and delusional as Islam requires a mind to be corrupted, so it’s not surprising. But in a sense, Manzoor was right. The motivation for debunking the Quran (at least mine) was “resentment, bred in frustration and fueled by revenge.” The hateful and frustrated revenge of the 9/11 terrorists motivated me to find out why Muslims were killing us. And Manzoor was also right in revealing his panicky paranoia about the Quran. By showing it to be a fraud, the curse of Islam can be removed from the world. But then, unfortunately, Manzoor and clerics like him would have to get real jobs. Another Muslim scholar, Abu Zaid, protests: “The Quran is a literary text, and the only way to understand, explain, and analyze it is through a literary approach.”
This is essentially a theological issue.” While Zaid might not like Prophet of Doom, that was precisely the tactic I used: analyzing the Quran based on its theological content. But freedom of speech is not tolerated in Islam, nor are dissenting views. In 1995, Abu Zaid was officially declared an apostate, a ruling upheld by Egypt’s highest court. Yet Zaid steadfastly maintains that he is a devout Muslim. Abu Zaid tried to refute the accusations of apostasy, but faced with death threats and relentless public intimidation, he fled Cairo for the Netherlands, calling the affair “a macabre farce.” Sheikh Youssef Badri, the cleric whose preaching inspired much of the opposition to Zaid, was ecstatic. “We are not terrorists; we didn’t use bullets or machine guns, but we stopped an enemy of Islam from mocking our religion…”
No one will even dare to think of doing further harm to Islam.” Sorry sheikh, not everyone is so easily discouraged. “Abu Zaid seems right to have feared for his life and fled. In 1992, Egyptian journalist Farag Foda was assassinated by Islamists for criticizing the Egyptian [terrorist organization called the] Muslim Brotherhood. In 1994, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed for writing an allegorical novel structured like the Quran but with ‘heretical’ views on Allah and Muhammad. Algerian Mohammed Arkoun, emeritus professor of Islamic thought at the University of Paris, said: “Deviating from the orthodox interpretation of the Quran is a very sensitive matter with serious implications. Millions refer to the Quran to explain their actions and justify their aspirations.”
And therein lies the problem. I agree with Lester: “Despite repeated claims to the contrary, the Qur’an is extremely difficult for contemporary readers to understand—even highly educated speakers of Arabic. It makes dramatic shifts in style, voice, and subject matter from verse to verse. It presupposes a familiarity with language, stories, and events that seems lost even to the earliest Muslims, typical of a text that originated primarily through oral tradition. The inconsistencies are easy to spot: Allah is mentioned in the first and third person in the same sentence; differing versions of the same story are repeated at different points in the text; and divine pronouncements contradict each other. The Qur’an anticipates these criticisms and defends itself by claiming the right to abolish its own message: ‘Allah erases or confirms whatever He pleases.’”
Any independent scholastic review of the Quran fails to give Allah sufficient marks. Toby Lester further wrote: “When Muslims came into contact with literate peoples in the eighth century, the wars of conquest were accompanied by theological challenges, with Christians and others clinging to the Quran’s confusing literary state as evidence of its human origins. Thus, Muslim scholars found themselves fastidiously cataloging the problematic aspects of Allah’s Book. These included: incomprehensible vocabulary, omitted words, foreign words, grammatical inconsistencies, contradictions, historical inaccuracies, scholarly errors, and variant texts. But for complicated political reasons, the official Islamic doctrine became that of i’jaz, or the ‘inimitability’ of the Quran. As a result, ‘Allah’s Book’ is recited in religious Arabic by Muslims worldwide, the vast majority of whom do not understand any form of the language.” Instead of defending the Quran rationally and objectively, they hide under the guise of a mysterious language that virtually no one understands. After studying the Yemeni parchments, Gerd Puin disdains the traditional willingness of Muslim and Western scholars to accept the conventional view: if you simply look at them, you’ll see that about every fifth sentence simply doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims will, of course, tell you otherwise, but the fact is that a fifth of the Quranic text is simply incomprehensible.
This is what has caused the traditional fear of translation. If the Quran is incomprehensible, if it cannot even be understood in Arabic, then it is incomprehensible in any language. That is why Muslims are afraid. Since the Quran repeatedly claims to be clear but is not, there is a clear and serious contradiction. Something else must be going on. One would have to search long and hard for a better summary of the Quran from a more knowledgeable source. Stephen Humphreys, writing in Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry, succinctly presented the nature of the historical vacuum surrounding the formation of Islam. “If our goal is to understand how Muslims of the late 8th and 9th centuries understood the origins of their society, then we are very well off indeed. But if our goal is to find out what actually happened in terms of reliably documented answers about the first century of Islamic society, then we are in trouble.” In his Atlantic Monthly article, Toby Lester reported:
The person who, more than any other, has shaken up Qur’anic studies in recent decades is John Wansbrough, formerly of the University of London. Puin is “rereading it now” as he prepares to analyze the Yemeni fragments. Patricia Crone says that she and Michael Cook “didn’t say much about the Qur’an in Hagarism that wasn’t based on Wansbrough.” Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation and the Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History. “Wansbrough applied the full panoply of ‘tools and techniques of biblical scholarship—form, source, and redaction criticism—to the text.” He concluded: “The Qur’an evolved only gradually in the eighth century, during a long period of oral transmission when Jewish and Christian sects were feuding loudly well north of Mecca and Medina, in what are now parts of Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Iraq.
“The reason no Islamic source material from the first century of Islam has survived,” Wansbrough said, “is that it never existed.” Wansbrough’s theories were infectious in scholarly circles, but Muslims found them deeply offensive. Parvez Manzoor has described Wansbrough and others as “a naked outburst of psychopathic vandalism.” Another messenger lies wounded by the intolerant language of Islam while his facts remain unchallenged. The hostility experienced was not unique. One of his most famous predecessors was a prominent Egyptian minister and university professor, Taha Hussein. He is considered by many Muslims to be the dean of Arabic studies.
“Hussein devoted himself to understanding pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and ultimately concluded that much of it was fabricated long after the founding of Islam to provide external support for Qur’anic mythology.” This confirms that the vocabulary of the Qur’an was defined and its grammar established by fabricated sources. xl DOOM PROPHET Recently, in his Twenty Three Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Muhammad, Iranian journalist and diplomat Ali Dashti, in his “Twenty Three Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Muhammad,” took to task his fellow Muslims for not questioning the traditional accounts of Muhammad’s life, much of which he cited. “making myths and sowing miracles.”
Ali is right. Moreover, it’s clear. Lester explains: “Such work, however, has not come without cost: Taha Hussein, like Nasr Abu Zaid, was declared an apostate in Egypt; Ali Dashti died mysteriously just after the 1979 Iranian revolution. Muslims interested in challenging doctrines should tread carefully. ‘I would like to bring the Quran out of this prison,’ Abu Zaid said of the prevailing Islamic hostility, ‘so that it becomes productive for our culture, which is now being strangled.’ Yet the majority of Muslims are unlikely to question the orthodox approach to the Quran and Islamic history.” There’s something unsavory about being killed, I think.
The first thing Muslims would discover by subjecting the Quran to rational, historical, scientific, and linguistic scrutiny is that Arabic did not exist when the Quran was supposedly written by the pen on heavenly tablets. Scholars have established that written Arabic evolved relatively recently from Aramaic via Syriac. The earliest trace of Syriac becoming Arabic is found, quite fittingly, on a tombstone. The earliest document is the Quran itself. By way of background, Aramaic and Syriac languages had fewer consonants than Arabic; thus, in the 7th century, new letters were created by adding dots to existing letters to eliminate ambiguities.
Diacritics were introduced to indicate short vowels, but these are used only so the Quran can be recited. There are two types of written Arabic. Classical, or religious, Arabic is the language of the Quran. It differs from Modern Standard Arabic in style and vocabulary, much of which is archaic—incomprehensibly outdated. Arabic inscriptions were virtually unknown before the birth of Islam in the seventh century. The Nabataeans, who lived in modern-day Jordan, wrote with a strongly cursive Aramaic alphabet, which some believe eventually evolved into Classical Arabic. The first inscriptions in what might be called an Arabic alphabet have also been found in Jordan. They were carved by Syrian Christians. Scholars suggest that a series of inscriptions in northern Arabia, dating from the fifth century CE, may be English.
The dialects of pre-Islamic South Arabia are a separate language within the Semitic family and are in no way ancestral to the Quranic language. As evidence that written Arabic was unknown in Mecca during Muhammad’s lifetime, Ishaq, the first to write on behalf of Islam, relates: Ishaq:85 “The Dark Past of Islam xli Quraysh found in the corner [of the Ka’bah’s foundation] writing in Syriac. They could not understand it until a Jew read it to them. It read: ‘I am Allah, the Lord of Mecca. I created it on the day I created heaven and earth and formed the sun and the moon.’”
This was “discovered” when the crumbling Kaaba stones were re-stacked. The Tradition is the final Sunnah event preceding Muhammad’s battle with the cave-dwelling spirit that became the first revelation of the Quran. Yet, no Arab could read the script from which written Arabic was derived and Allah’s “Book” was supposedly written. As always, Islamic scripture is more capable of destroying Islam than any scholar. Here’s the thing: Arabic, especially in its written form, is linguistically a recent phenomenon. Not only was it not one of the earliest human languages, it was also derived from a language that predated it by 3,000 years. There is no evidence that written Arabic existed in Mecca when the Quran was transmitted. Therefore, it could not be the language of Allah if, as the Quran and the Hadith confirm, written scrolls were given to Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus before written Arabic was invented. And that would make Allah a liar and the Quran a deceiver. There is more you should know about the difference between the Classical Arabic of the Quran and the language spoken by Arabs today.
First, there is a large gulf between written Arabic and all varieties of the spoken language. Spoken dialects are not used in writing. Modern colloquial dialects are not mutually intelligible. In countries where Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is used, speakers must learn a local colloquial Arabic dialect to communicate as their native language and then acquire a more or less fluency in MSA as an educated and commercial language. Second, there are significant differences between Modern Standard Arabic and religious Arabic. Classical Arabic survives only in questionable poetry and the Quran. A degree in MSA does not prepare a student to understand the Quran, as the form of Arabic differs substantially from MSA and differs enormously from spoken dialects.
For example, Muslims are required to take classes called Tagweed every year for ten years just to learn how to recite the Quran. But even then, they don’t know what the words mean. The situation is similar to modern Italian and Latin. Being literate in one doesn’t mean one is literate in the other. The main differences between Religious and Standard Arabic are word order, grammar, and vocabulary. Classical Arabic is always verb-subject-object, rather than the more familiar subject-verb-object. If someone wants to learn Arabic, they must learn MSA, Classical, and at least one local dialect. To make matters worse, Arabic has a negative characteristic—diglossia—a phenomenon in which two forms of the same language are used side by side. One variety is formal; the other is usually oral. This brings us to a shocking conclusion. Less than three percent of
This brings us to a shocking conclusion. Less than three percent of the world’s population speaks Arabic, and almost all of them must have the Quran translated into Arabic before they can understand it. So the Islamic apologists who shout that the Quran must remain in religious Arabic are saying they only want an infinitesimal fraction of three percent of the world’s population to understand it. Fortunately, you know why. The Quranic headache is getting worse, not better. During the first century of the Quran, the emerging Arabic alphabet had no diacritics, and letters were omitted. The text that Uthman canonized, if this actually happened, was a bare consonantal text with no markings to indicate verse breaks or to distinguish consonants or vowels. Without them, it is impossible to understand the intended meaning of the text. In the introduction to his translation of the Qur’an, Dawood said: “Due to the fact that the Kufic script in which the eighth- and ninth-century Qur’ans were originally written contained no indication of vowels or diacritics, variant readings are recognized by Muslims as being of equal authority.”
Without diacritics, the following words, for example, would be indistinguishable: convert, plant, house, girl, and remain, just like rich and stupid. There are thousands of such Arabic words, the meaning of which changes depending on the placement of diacritics. Yet, the Quran was not revealed or initially written with these markings. Therefore, people had to guess at what Allah was trying to say. The Quran cannot be letter-by-letter as Allah revealed it, because without diacritics and vowels, the identity of most letters is lost. The principles of sound Arabic require that words have diacritics and that their letters be written in their complete form. It is inconceivable that God would have revealed a book in such an inferior state.
To demonstrate the magnitude of the problem, try to determine the meaning of the following sentences, taken from this page with the vowels removed, along with one in five consonants and punctuation: ltrs r ssng h smlst pncpls snd rc lngg mnd tt wrd hv dctcl pts nd hr ltrs shd be wttn n mmplt fm ts nmprhnbl th gd wl hv rvd bk n ch n nrr cndn t. Now imagine trying to do this without any comprehensible text right before your eyes. Then, to make this challenge similar to deciphering the Quran, delete every fifth word and replace any remaining words with unfamiliar vocabulary. This is what you would have left behind: r ssng h HKNO snd rc lngg tt wrd hv dctcl nd hr ltrs shd be n mplt fm @$%&*! th wl hv rvd bk n ch n nrr cndn. Just try to understand that. Our Muslim brothers claim that the eloquence of the Qur’an, the supremacy of its language, and the beauty of its expression are the decisive proof that it was revealed by Allah. “Forget the content,” they say. “The inimitability of the Qur’an lies in the stylistic use of the Arabic language.” But how can this be when there are so many omissions and errors regarding acceptable principles of style, literary expression, and grammatical rules? We even find many words that have no meaning and do not occur in any language.
Simply put, much of the vocabulary is unintelligible, and much of the text is oblique, obscure, and meaningless. Yet, the eloquence of any book cannot be proof of the greatness of Scripture or evidence that it was revealed by God. What should be important to God in communicating with humanity is manifested not in style, but in content: the power, truth, clarity, and usefulness of revelation. And this is where the Qur’an fails so miserably. Speaking of style over substance, E.M. Wherry wrote in his Comprehensive Commentary on the Qur’an: “Although written in prose, the sentences of the Qur’an generally end in a long, sustained rhyme. And for the sake of rhyme, the sense of what is being communicated is often interrupted.
Unnecessary repetitions, made too often, seem even more ridiculous in a translation where the ornamentation, such as it is, for the sake of which they were created, cannot be perceived. The Arabs, however, are so utterly delighted with this tinkling that they use it in their most elaborate compositions, which they also embellish with frequent passages from and allusions to the Quran. It is likely that the harmony of expression the Arabs find in the Quran contributes significantly to their enjoyment of its teaching and the effectiveness of the argument, which, had it been presented openly without this rhetorical garb, would not have prevailed so easily. He says that Muhammad’s militants, like Hitler’s henchmen, were astonished. Seduced by a pun, they were unable to see the base and vile nature of the words themselves.
The Quran is the Islamic equivalent of rap music. Wherry takes a page from Mein Kampf and concludes: “Very extraordinary effects depend on the power of well-chosen and artfully placed words, the force of which can enchant or astonish. Therefore, much has been attributed to the best orators. He must have had a very poor ear, who is often moved by the cadence of a well-turned phrase; and Muhammad seems not to have been unaware of the enthusiastic effect of rhetoric on the minds of men. For this reason, he used his utmost skill in reciting his supposed revelations. The exalted style may seem worthy of the majesty of the being he claimed to be its author when he attempted to imitate the prophetic style of the Old Testament.”
Yet it was only in the art of oratory that he succeeded, captivating the minds of his listeners in a strange way. Some thought it was the result of witchcraft and enchantment, as the Quran itself so often laments. Wherry’s conclusion dovetails nicely with Muhammad’s confessions: Bukhari:V6B60N662 “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘Some eloquent speech is as effective as magic.’” Bukhari:V9B87N127 “The Prophet said, ‘I have been given the keys of eloquent speech and given victory; with fear I have been given the treasures of the earth.’” The Quran is like a Christmas tree. Decorated in its festive finery, it appears beautiful, but the tree is dead. Worse, everything it represents is pagan, even satanic. The festival, the date, the tree, the ornaments, and the exchange of gifts all date back to when they were used to celebrate Lucifer’s birthday. Trimmings can be deceiving. (The Messiah was born on the Feast of Tabernacles, in September.) The winter solstice was the birthday of Tammuz, the Babylonian sun god—and all sun gods after that.
Lucifer was not called the Morning Star for nothing. But the Quran’s adornment was only superficial. The document is seriously flawed. Jalal al-Suyuti devoted a hundred pages of his Itqan to explaining the difficult vocabulary. Under the title “Strange Words of the Quran,” he suggests that religious Arabic is incomprehensible. “No one can have a comprehensive knowledge of the language except the Prophet.” (Itqan II: p. 106) Jalal al-Suyuti states: “Muhammad’s companions, in whose dialect the Quran was given, could not understand the meaning of many words, so they said nothing about them. When Bakr was asked about the Quranic saying ‘and fruit and food,’ he said: ‘Which heaven would cover me or which land would support me if I say what I do not know about the Book of Allah?'”
Umar read the same text from the podium and then said, “We know this fruit, but what is its sustenance?” He was then asked about the Quranic text in chapter 13 that Mary discussed, and he had no answer.
Ibn Abbas [the most prolific source of Islamic hadith] said that he did not know the meaning of Quranic verses such as 69:36, 9:114, and 18:9.” Suyuti suggests that only Muhammad knew what they meant. Ibn Warraq, in his scholastic anthologies of Islam, collected thick volumes of linguistic analysis of the hopelessly incoherent state of the Quran. We then learn that the Arabic in the Quran was not as sound as Muslims assume. In the Itqan, Suyuti explicitly addresses things that no one expected to find in the Quran—defects that should not be found in any Arabic book. For example: “The word ‘na’ was used twice in the Quran to mean ‘before.’ As in this saying: ‘We have written in the Psalms after the remembrance’ (Quran 21:105) when He meant ‘before.’” Also in this saying: ‘The earth then He spread out for it’ (Quran 79:30) while Allah meant ‘before’” Suyuti wrote: “The Quran means: believe “know” that if Allah had willed, He could have guided all of mankind,” but Allah said, “Do not despair of those who believe instead of writing “know” as He meant. The Quran says in chapter 2:23: ‘… your martyrs,’ but it means ‘… your partners.’
The martyr is supposed to be the person being killed, but here it means “your partners.” In chapter 20 on Joseph, the word “bakhs” (too little) is meant to mean “haram” (forbidden or sacred). In Surah 46, Mariam, the phrase “I will surely stone you” is interpreted as “I will surely curse you,” not “I will kill you,” as the literal meaning suggests. In another illustration from Itqan, Jalal al-Suyuti claims, “In the Rahman chapter, the Qur’an says, ‘The “nagm” stars and the trees bow down.’ Here, by ‘the stars,’ the Qur’an does not mean the plants that have no stems. This is the far-fetched meaning.” There are hundreds of similar examples, but there is no need to belabor the point. As you have read, the Qur’an claims it is purely Arabic.
But this is not TRUE. First, the false statement: 046.002 “And before that was the Book of Moses a guide; and this [Quran] is a Book which verifies (it) in the Arabic language.” 039.027 “We have devised for mankind in this Quran every kind of illustration, that they may be reminded. (It is) a Quran in Arabic, without any crookedness (in it).” 041.003 “A Book whose Verses are explained in detail; a Quran in Arabic for a people who know.” Then…041.044 “If We had sent it as a Quran (in a language) other than Arabic, they would have said, ‘Why are its Verses not explained in detail? What! (a foreign language, a Book) not in Arabic, and (a Messenger) an Arab?’ Say (to them, Muhammad): ‘It is a Guide for those who believe; and as for those who disbelieve, there is deafness in their ears and blindness in their (eyes)!’” While the purpose of these Quranic quotations was to confirm Allah’s Arabic claims, consider the number of words the translators had to add in brackets to make Allah’s message meaningful.
The Qur’an’s claim of Arabic is untrue. Many foreign words or expressions are used in the Qur’an. Arthur Jeffrey devoted 300 pages to this study in his book “Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’an.” One must wonder why so many foreign words were borrowed, as they refute the Arabic claim and cast doubt on whether “Allah’s language” was sufficient to explain what Muhammad meant. According to Alphonse Mingana in his “Syriac Influence on the Style of the Qur’an,” almost all religious terms in Allah’s book are derived from Christian Syriac.
These include the words Muhammad used for: priest, Christ, judgment, scribes, parable, salvation, unbeliever, sacrifice, resurrection, heaven, garden, angel, Holy Spirit, soul, sign, verse, proof, God, prayer, fasting, sin, pagan, Hanif, Muslim, idolatry, Quran, faith, creation, grace, and even the zakat tax. The proper names of biblical characters appearing in the Quran are used in their Syriac form rather than in Hebrew or Arabic. These include: Solomon, Pharaoh, Isaac, Ishmael, Israel, Jacob, Noah, Zechariah, Mary, John, Jonah, and Isa for Yahshua. The words for demons, the path, disciple, and Muhammad’s first “god,” Ar-Rahman, are Persian. Rahman is derived from the Persian name for the devil. Adam and Eden are Akkadian words from Mesopotamia. A more correct term for “Adam” in Arabic would be basharan, or madman, meaning “humanity.” “Eden” in Arabic should have been janna, meaning “garden.” Yet, the foreign words were repeated more than twenty times. Abraham, sometimes recorded as Ibrahim, comes from the Assyrian language. The correct Arabic equivalent is Abu Raheem. Harut and Marut are Persian names for angels. The Persian “sirat,” meaning “the path,” was repeated thirty times, but it has an Arabic equivalent, altareeq, which was not used. The Persian “hoor,” meaning “student,” has its Arabic equivalent, tilmeeth. Guess which one Allah chose? The Persian word “jinn,” meaning “demon,” is used consistently throughout the Quran. Entire surahs are dedicated to Satan’s allies.
Yet, there is an Arabic equivalent, Ruh. In the other direction, the decadent heaven of Islam is
called by the Persian word “firdaus,” meaning “the highest or seventh heaven,” rather than its Arabic equivalent, jannah. Some of the Hebrew words are: heber, sakinah for the presence of Yahweh, maoon, taurat, jehannim, and tufan, meaning flood. The Greek word “injil,” meaning “gospel,” was borrowed, although there is an Arabic equivalent, bisharah. Iblis, the Quranic name for Lucifer or Satan, is not Arabic. It is a corruption of the Greek word Diabolos. Muhammad said that belief in the “Day of Resurrection” was one-third of his message, but he chose a Christian-Syriac derivative of an Aramaic word, Qiyama, for resurrection instead of the Arabic.
The Quran is fixated on stripping the Messiah of his divinity and the sacrifice he made to save humanity. You’d think Allah would at least get his name right. But the Quranic name for Christ, “Isa,” is being misapplied. Isa is the Arabic equivalent of Esau, the name for Jacob’s twin brother. The correct Arabic name for Yahshua would be Yesuwa, but the “omniscient” Allah doesn’t mention it. And this error is different from the mistranslations of the Bible. God gets his name right in Hebrew; the English translators were mistaken. Even Arabic-speaking Christians in the Middle East use the name Yesuwa for “Jesus.” Only Muslims use Isa. In summary, we’ve learned that the Quran was not, as Allah claims, a book commemorated on heavenly tablets, but instead consisted of an evolving text.
The oldest Qurans differ from each other and from the current version. We discovered that the original written copies lacked diacritics, so most words were chosen based on educated guesses. Their meanings were interpreted two centuries after the Quran was revealed orally. It is not purely Arabic, as Allah claims, for there is an abundance of foreign words. There are also missing words, incorrect words, and meaningless words.
And most importantly, the leading authority on the original script of the Quran, who studies the oldest fragments, says: “One in five verses is indecipherable—meaningless in any language.” Let us examine further whether what remains is historically and scientifically sound. Allah’s claim, “This Quran must be the word of Allah, otherwise they would have found a mistake in it,” is torn apart if it contains obvious factual errors. A number of online websites have been kind enough to document a plethora of errors, so I have chosen to present some of their findings. Let us begin with the historical blunders. The Quran claims that the Samaritans tricked Israel into making a golden calf when Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. Yet, the term “Samaritan” had not yet been coined when the events of Exodus unfolded.
The Samaritan people could not have existed during Moses’ lifetime, as they did not become a nation until 800 years later.
The city of Samaria was founded in 875 B.C.E. by King Omri, and the Samaritans became a “nation” shortly after the tribes of Israel were dispersed by the Assyrians in the
seventh century B.C.E. Thus, Quran 20:85-7 and 95-7 are inaccurate. In Sura 7:124 and 26:49, we see Pharaoh rebuking his magicians for believing in the superiority of Moses’ power over them. Pharaoh threatens his magicians with the cutting off of their hands and feet on either side (Quran 5:33), and then declares that they will all die on the cross by crucifixion. However, there were no crosses at that time. Crucifixion was first practiced by the Assyrians in 519 B.C.E. under the rule of Darius I. Encyclopedia Britannica reports: “Crucifixion did not exist until about 500 B.C.” Muslim scholar Malik Farid says in his translation of the Quran in footnote 1033: “Incidentally, the verse shows that even in the time of Moses, the death penalty by crucifixion was in use.” The Quran contained a historical blunder; a Muslim rewrote history to save his god.
Another interesting historical glitch occurs when Allah mistakenly calls Mary the sister of Aaron in Sura 19:28 and the daughter of Imran (the Biblical Amran) in 66:12. Although Miriam and Mary have the same name, the first, Miriam, sister of Aaron and daughter of Amran, died 1,500 years before Mary, the mother of Yahshua, was born. (18:28; 66:12; 20:25-30) Hearing Muslims explain away the spectacular coincidence that both Mary and Miriam had a brother named Aaron and a father named Amran sounds identical to the way Catholics perform etymological gymnastics to explain away the fourteen Biblical passages that clearly state that Mary had other children.
Another difficult passage concerns Haman. In the Quran, he is a servant of Pharaoh and built a high tower to ascend to the God of Moses (Sura 28:38; 29:38; 40:25, 38). Yet, the Tower of Babel dates back 750 years and is Babylonian, not Egyptian. The name Haman was brought to us by Esther. She writes about what became Persia 1,100 years after Pharaoh. While Muslim apologists say it’s just another Haman, the name is not Egyptian, but uniquely Babylonian. Sura 17:1 claims that Muhammad went to the “farthest mosque” during his Night Journey. Muslims believe, in accordance with the Hadith, that this was either the Jewish Temple or the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. But neither existed in 620 CE. Numerous other chronological discrepancies exist.
One of my favorites is Allah’s insistence that Nimrod was a contemporary of Abraham. This ignorance of history and earlier Scripture speaks of a certain isolationism, which one would expect if the stories had been passed down orally in an environment far removed from the one in which they originated. While Muslims try to avoid calling Mary Aaron’s brother, the misplaced and mistimed Tower of Babel, and Samaritans in the time of Moses, they throw in the towel without a fight and declare that world history is wrong when it comes to crucifixion.
As impossible as it is to reconcile this Quranic mumbling with the historical record, the “place of the sun” and the stories of Alexander the Great are even more challenging. Surah 18:86 states: “Until, when he reached the setting sun, it set in a spring of muddy water: he found a people nearby: We said, O Dhu al-Qarnayn…” The sun does not set in a muddy spring. No aliens live where the sun sets, and no human—including Alexander the Great—has ever visited such beings. In the continuing narrative of the Islamic version of the Greek conqueror, we learn that Alexander’s power was given to him by Allah. Muslims claim, as the hadith confirms, that he was a Muslim prophet.
He was even credited with building a massive wall of iron and copper between two mountains, high and wide enough to hold an entire army at bay. Muhammad claimed that a breach was made in the wall during his lifetime. Yet, it’s easy to test these claims, because Alexander lived in the full light of history. We know he was a great general whose debauchery and drunkenness contributed to his untimely death. He was an idolater and, in fact, claimed to be the son of the Egyptian god Amun. The temple painting depicting Alexander worshipping the sun god Amun still exists in Egypt. To say that he was an Islamic prophet and that Allah was the representative of his power is historically inaccurate.
And why is there no evidence anywhere that Alexander built a wall of iron and copper between two mountains, a feat that would have proven him to be one of the greatest builders and engineers in history? It’s one thing that the Quran contains no prophecies—predictions of things to come—but it can’t even get the past right. Moving from history to science, Sura 16:15; 21:31; 31:10; 78:6; and 88:19 tell us that Allah threw down mountains like tent pegs to prevent the earth from shaking. To uneducated men, this would seem logical, since mountains are large, and therefore their weight seems to have a stabilizing effect. Yet, the opposite is true. Mountains were built up, not torn down. Instead of creating stability, they are the result of instability. Colliding tectonic plates push up the Earth’s surface, forming all non-volcanic mountains. Surah 16:66 says that cow’s milk comes from between the feces and the blood of the cow’s belly.
That doesn’t make sense, and it’s not true. In Surah 16:69, we’re told that honey comes from a bee’s belly. That’s also not true. Then, Surah 6:38 claims that all animals and flying creatures form communities like humans. While some do, most don’t. Take spiders, for example, where in some species the female eats the male after mating. That’s not exactly a community like ours. Quran 25:45 claims that the sun moves to create shadows. In other surahs, it’s shown orbiting and swimming.
Even the moon is said to have been blotted out and is racing against the sun. Other statements make no sense at all. Surah 4:59 states: “More certain than the creation of man is the creation of the heavens and the earth; but most men do not know.”
This implies that greatness is measured solely by size. Yet, we have learned that the complexity of life far exceeds the simplicity of all the stars and dirt combined. Surah 65:12 states, “It is Allah who has created seven heavens and as many earths.” Where are the other six earths? If these refer to the planets in our solar system, they are two or three shorter, depending on how one views Pluto. Meteors and even stars are said to be projectiles fired at eavesdropping satans and jinn who attempt to listen to the Quran being read in the heavens (15:16-8; 37:6-10; 55:33-5; 67:5; 72:6-9 & 86:2-3). Are we to believe that Allah throws meteors (composed of carbon dioxide or iron-nickel) at immaterial devils who are listening to heavenly counsel? Are we supposed to believe there’s a Djinn convention every time there’s a meteor shower? I don’t think so.
Ad-libbing on the Bible, Allah stutters. He claims that King Solomon learned the speech of birds and the language of ants (27:16-9). Besides birds and ants, jinn were forced to work for Solomon, creating whatever he desired, such as palaces, statues, large bowls, and bronze fountains (34:11-3). One evil jinn was even commanded to bring the throne of the Queen of Sheba in the blink of an eye (27:38-44). Following Solomon’s example, Allah claims in the 105th sura that he used birds to drop clay pellets on Abraham’s army. But according to the historical account, his troops retreated after a smallpox outbreak, not because they were dirty. Quran 18:9-25 tells the story of “some youths and a dog who slept for 309 years with their eyes open and their ears closed,” which is a trick in itself.
The purpose was to demonstrate that Allah is capable of keeping humans and dogs without food or water for as long as he wishes. In reality, the entire story was stolen from a 6th-century Syriac Christian manuscript: The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. In Surahs 2:65-6 and 7:163-7, Allah transforms Sabbath-breaking humans into monkeys for their disobedience. Darwin must have been confused because he had it the other way around. In Quran 11:81 and 15:74, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are turned upside down with angel wings. There are as many errors in the bookkeeping as there are sentences. We know this because these cities have been excavated.
The biblical account is accurate. The Quran is not. Furthering theological errors, Quran 5:116 proposes that Christians worship Mary as the third member of the Trinity. The Quran states: “Allah will say, ‘O Jesus, son of Mary, did you say to the people: Make me and my mother idols besides Allah?’” Only in the seventeenth century—a thousand years after the Quranic revelation—did Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787) write his book, The Glories of Mary, in which he misled Catholics into promoting Mary to her current status. Interestingly, a minor and heretical sect called the Cholloridians held this view and were living in the Middle East at the time the Quran was composed in the eighth century. While this could be the source of such a gross error, an omniscient God should have been aware of a core tenet of the Christian faith.
But Allah misunderstood the entire message and mission of Christ. In an attempt to demonstrate the scientific accuracy of the Quran, Muslims are quick to claim that the embryology revealed in it surpasses what humans themselves had discovered. However, Muslims are completely unaware that all the information in the Quran regarding embryology was revealed many centuries earlier.
Moreover, it has all been shown to be scientifically inaccurate—as is the entirety of the Sunnah on the subject. The supposed “genius” of the Quran is found in its repetitive narratives about the stages of fetal formation (Suras 22:5; 23:12-4; 40:67; 75:37-9; and 96:1-2). According to these Surahs, it passes through four stages, beginning with torab, which means dust. With a bit of skepticism, Muslim scholars translate torab as sperm, simply to avoid making Allah look foolish. It becomes nutfah and alaqa. Although no one seems to know what the words “nutfah” or “alaqa” mean. Many have tried, claiming they are something that clings, a clot, an adhesion, an embryonic lump, and even chewed flesh.
The alaqa then creates motgha and uncreated motgha. But no one has a clue what motgha means. So, a brilliant scholar suggested: “bones finally covered with flesh.” The stage from alaqa to bone is also mentioned in Quran 23:13-4, where we are introduced to: “We made him nutfah (mixed drops of male and female sexual secretions) in the safe haven. Then We made the nutfah into alaqa (a lump of thick, clotted blood), then into a motgha (a small lump of bone covered with flesh).” A more accurate translation would be: “I have no idea.” But even the wishful interpretations of the translators are inaccurate. Neither sperm nor dust becomes a “clot or adhering.” There is no clotting phase during the formation of a fetus. “The thing that clings” does not stop clinging to become “chewed flesh,” but continues to cling for nine months.
And the skeleton is not formed independently of flesh. In fact, muscles form several weeks before calcified bones, rather than arriving later, as the Quran implies. It is therefore ironic to hear the above accounts cited by modern apologists as evidence of the divine authority of the Quran, when in fact, once the truth is known, it turns out to be precisely the science they hope to use for their cause—their downfall. Before leaving Professor Allah’s lecture on pregnancy, I want to reiterate what Muhammad had to say about such matters: Bukhari:V4B55N549, a person is gathered in his mother’s womb for the first forty days, and then becomes a clot for another forty days, and then a piece of meat for forty days. [Four months, not nine.] Then Allah sends an angel to write down four words: He writes his deeds, the time of his death, the means of his livelihood, and whether he will be miserable or blessed. Then the soul is breathed into his body. So a man may do deeds that are characteristic of the people of Hell… but he enters
Paradise. A person may perform deeds characteristic of Paradise… but he will enter Hell.’” It is easy to see where Allah got his material and why he was so confused. In Surah 16:4, one of Allah’s twenty-five variant creation accounts, it states, “He created man from a drop of seminal fluid,” but this was understood 2,000 years before Allah’s Book was revealed.
The Bible says, “Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground, so that he would not leave offspring for his brother.” (Genesis 38:9) Another Quranic claim, that “man was created from the dust of the ground,” was recorded in Genesis a few millennia before Muhammad ennobled his city’s rock idol. Muslim doctors like Ibn Qayyim were the first to blow the whistle when they saw the Quranic material reflected by a much earlier Greek doctor named Galen. He lived in the year 150 CE.
In other words, when it comes to embryology, the Quran merely reflects the scientific knowledge that man had already discovered 450 years earlier. The Quran is wrong when it says, “He is created from a drop expelled between the spine and the ribs.” This mirrors the error of Hippocrates, who believed that semen originated from all the fluids in the body, starting from the brain and traveling down the spinal cord before passing through the kidneys, testicles, and penis. While Hippocrates’ error is understandable, Allah’s is not. Besides factual errors, grammatical errors are common and frequent. And while that wouldn’t be a problem if we were talking about the Bible, it destroys the Quran. Yahweh never claimed the Bible was infallible. He knew better because he inspired men to write it with an imprecise tool called language. Allah wasn’t so clever. He claimed his Quran was perfect because he claims to have written it himself.
A single flaw in a book claiming to be written by God, dictated letter by letter as Muhammad commemorated it, is enough to destroy its credibility. But as you might expect, there are many grammatical errors. In Surah 2:177, the word sabireen should be sabiroon because of its position in the sentence. In 7:160, the phrase “We divided them into twelve tribes” is written in the feminine plural: “Uthnati ashrat asbaataan.” To be grammatically correct, it should have been written in the masculine plural: “Uthaiy ashara sibtaan,” since all human plurals are automatically masculine in Arabic. In Surah 4:162, the phrase “And (especially) those who pray regularly” is written as “al Muqiyhina al salaat,” which is again in the feminine plural, rather than the masculine plural. The following expressions, “(those who) practice regular zakat and believe in Allah,” are both correctly written in the masculine plural. So the first sentence is simply a grammatical error. Quran 5:69 uses the title al-Sabion, referring to the Sabians, but it should be al-Sabien.
And then we have schizophrenia. Allah refers to himself in the first and third persons, singular and plural, in the same surah. Subjects, verbs, and objects are routinely omitted from Allah’s sentences, and dangling modifiers abound. While there are numerous examples, copying Allah is hardly entertaining. So, for those who still doubt that the Quran is subject to grammatical errors, consider the insights of one of the last Muslim scholars who wrote before such revelations became a dead sentence. Dashti said: “The Quran contains sentences that are incomplete and incomprehensible; foreign words, unknown Arabic words, and words used with a meaning other than their normal meaning; adjectives and verbs inflected without regard to gender and number conventions; illogically and ungrammatically applied pronouns that sometimes have no referent [dangling modifiers]; and predicates that in rhyming passages are often far removed from the subjects…
In short, more than one hundred Qur’anic deviations from the normal rules and structure of Arabic have been noted. (Ali Dashti, Twenty Three Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Muhammad, p. 48) The Qur’an contains so many grammatical errors that Muslims defend it by finding similar errors in pre-Islamic poetry. What they do not know, however, is that this poetry was invented specifically to defend the Qur’an. The Egyptian scholar Taha Hussein said: “The vast amount of what is called pre-Islamic poetry has nothing to do with pre-Islamic literature, but was invented according to Islam. Our research will therefore lead us to a very strange conclusion: that this poetry cannot be used in interpreting the Qur’an.” (Fil-Adab al-Jaheli, Taha Hussein, Dar al-Ma’aref, pp. 65-7) When we were analyzing the Qur’an’s corruption of the Biblical patriarchs, I suggested that Muhammad obtained much of his errant material from Jewish oral traditions – the Talmud, Midrash, Targum, and other apocryphal works.
Here is the evidence as revealed by Abraham Geiger in 1833, and further documented by Jay Smith and Dr. Abraham Katsh of New York University (The Concise Dictionary of Islam, Katsh; The Bible and the Qur’an, Jomier; Studies, Sell; Islam, Guillaume). I begin with Smith’s analysis. “Perhaps the greatest confusion for Christians who pick up and read the Qur’an is the numerous biblical stories that bear little resemblance to the original accounts. The Qur’anic versions contain distortions, amendments, and some bizarre twists. So where did these stories come from, if not from the previous scriptures?” “Upon investigation, we discover that much of it came from Jewish apocryphal literature, particularly the Talmud. These books date from the second century CE, about seven hundred years before the Qur’an was canonized. By comparing stories, we dispel the myth that the Qur’an is inspired by God.” The similarities between these fables, or folktales, and the stories told in the Qur’an are astonishing.”
It’s ironic, in a sense. By plagiarizing fairy tales and claiming they were divinely inspired histories, Muslims effectively destroyed the credibility of the very book they were trying to bolster. And by writing such nonsense, the Jews loaded the gun Muslims use to kill them. The Talmudic writings were compiled in the second century from oral folklore. They evolved like the Islamic hadith. As the Jews became more numerous and urbanized, clerics and kings desired a more comprehensive set of laws and religious traditions to help them control their subjects. Jewish rabbis thus served as models for Islamic imams.
They created laws and traditions and artificially traced them back to Moses through the Torah. To make the medicine disappear, the rabbis then cloaked their new commandments in a viscous mass of fanciful stories. Very few Jews consider the Talmudic writings authoritative, and none consider them inspired. They are read only for the light they shed on the time in which they were created. So how did these uninspired Jewish Talmudic writings end up in the Quran? There are two equally likely ways. After being dragged into captivity by the Babylonians, many Jews chose to remain. In fact, when Israel became a state in 1948, the fourth-largest concentration of Jews was in Iraq. So the Persians who canonized the Quran in the eighth and ninth centuries would have had ample access to it.
And we know that Yathrib was primarily a Jewish community. According to the Quran and Sunnah, Muhammad purchased oral scriptures from the Jews before robbing, exiling, enslaving, and murdering them.
Some scholars believe that the Islamic compilers of the eighth to ninth centuries merely added this body of literature to the emerging Quranic material to supplement it and make it more like Scripture, as numerous Quranic stories originated in the second century. Jewish apocryphal literature. Since the devil is in the details, I ask for your patience as we review them. One of the Quranic stories about Cain and Abel is found in Sura 5:30. It begins much as in the biblical account, with Cain killing his brother Abel, although Allah doesn’t seem to remember their names in this interpretation.
But the moment one nameless brother kills the other, the story shifts and no longer follows the biblical path. The Quranic version is plagiarized from books composed centuries after the Old Testament was canonized, even after the New Testament was written: the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziah, the Jerusalem Targum, and the Pirke-Rabbi Eleazar. All three are Jewish myths compiled from oral traditions between 150 and 200 CE. “Woe is me!” he said. “Could I not have been like this raven and hidden my brother’s dead body?”
Then he was filled with remorse.” We find a striking parallel in Talmudic sources. The Targum of Jonathan-ben-Uzziah states: “Adam and Eve, sitting by the corpse, wept, not knowing what to do, for they knew nothing about burial. A raven came, took the corpse of its companion, scraped it on the ground, and buried it before their eyes. Adam said, ‘Let us follow the example of the raven,’ so he took up Abel’s body and buried it immediately.” Aside from the contrast between who buried whom, the two stories are otherwise eerily similar. We can only conclude that Muhammad, or a later compiler, obtained his “scripture” from here. A Jewish fable was repeated as historical fact in the Quran. Yet, that is not all. We find further evidence of plagiarism of apocryphal Jewish literature; this time in the Jewish Mishnah Sanhedrin.
The Quran states: 005.032 “Therefore: We have decreed for the Children of Israel that whoever kills a person, unless it is in retaliation for murder or for spreading mischief in the land, it is as if he killed all mankind; and whoever saves a life, it is as if he saves the life of all mankind.” The Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 says: “We find that it is said in the case of Cain who killed his brother, the voice of your brother’s blood cries out [this is a quote from Genesis 4:10, but not the rest…], and he says, it does not say that he has blood in the singular, but blood in the plural. It was a singular to show that whoever kills a single individual is to be considered as having killed all mankind. But whoever saves the life of a single individual is to be considered as having saved all mankind.”
There is no Quranic connection between the previous verse, 31, and what we find in verse 32. What does Cain’s murder of Abel have to do with killing or saving the entire nation, since there was no other nation? Yet, a rabbi’s commentary on the verse is repeated almost word for word in the Quran. The muses of an ordinary person become the holy scripture of the Quran and are attributed to God. That is very embarrassing. Speaking of embarrassing, I’d like to share something directly related to this Quranic passage.
The UK’s largest commercial radio station asked me to speak for two hours about the relationship between fundamentalist Islam and terrorism.
During the interview, the station received several hundred calls and emails from angry Muslims. One woman said toward the end of the program, “You’re typical of Americans who talk about things you know nothing about. You don’t understand Islam or the Quran. You’ve taken everything out of context and interpreted it too literally.” She further explained: “Islam is nonviolent because the Quran says, ‘If someone kills a person, it is as if he kills all of humanity, and if someone saves a life, it is as if he saves all of humanity.'” Briefly ignoring that the entire quote was literally stolen from Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5, proving that Quran 5:32 was plagiarized and uninspired, the Islamic apologist omitted the core of the verse and everything that follows.
She misquoted the Quran by omitting the verse’s exemption from murder: “except in retaliation or spreading mischief.” “Spreading mischief” is “un-Islamic behavior,” and a “mischief-maker” is anyone who does not “submit and obey Allah and His Apostle.” She then took the verse out of context by failing to complete the point Allah was making. The next verse follows on from the previous one. Quran 5:33 is violent, murderous, and intolerant: “The punishment for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and commit evil in the land is only that they will be killed, or crucified, or their hands and feet cut off from opposite sides, or they will be exiled.
That is their disgrace in this world, and a terrible torment is theirs in Hell.” Then: Quran 5:34 “Except those who (being Muslims) repented before they fell into your power.” In an attempt to defend Islam and the Quran, the Muslim woman quoted a verse inspired by Jewish folklore rather than the God of Muhammad. Then she did what she falsely accused me of: she misquoted the Quran and took it out of context. But worst of all, she attempted to mislead the millions who watched the show by making them believe that Islam, the Quran, and its God were peaceful, when in fact, the passage she selected demanded that Muslims “punish” and “disgrace” non-believers. Muslims with: murder, torture, mutilation, enslavement, or exile so that Allah would “torment them in hell.” It’s difficult to know whether the woman was deceived or if she intended to deceive. Both are equally bad, and both are symptomatic of Islam. And lest I forget, the next caller angrily told me, “I promise to kill you to save humanity from you.” Trying to save Muslims from the deception of Islam and non-Muslims from the terror it inspires requires patience and love. Continuing, we find in Surah 21:51-71 one of the Quran’s many stories about Abraham.
It says that Abraham confronted his people and his father about the idols they worshipped. After an argument between Abraham and the people, they leave, and Abraham breaks the smaller idols, leaving the larger one intact. When the people see this, they call Abraham and ask if he is responsible, to which he replies that it must have been the larger idol that killed the little boys. After challenging the mutilated idols to speak, the locals reply, “You know very well that these idols don’t speak!” To which Abraham taunts, and they throw him into the fire. Then, in verse 69, Allah commands the fire to be cool, making it safe for Abraham, and he miraculously walks out unharmed.
There are no parallels to this story in the Bible. But there is an equivalent in a second-century book of Jewish folklore called The Midrash Rabbah. In his account, Abraham breaks all the idols except the largest. His father and the others challenge him, and he claims that the larger idol destroyed the smaller one. The enraged father disbelieves his son’s account and takes him to a man named Nimrod, who throws him into the fire. But God made it cool, and he walks away unharmed. The similarity between these stories is undeniable. Second-century Jewish folklore and myth is repeated in the Quran as if it were a divinely inspired scripture.
The next example is even more damning. In the 27th sura, entitled “Ants,” the Quran spins a story along the lines of something you might expect in a children’s fairy tale. Look, that’s where it came from. “In 27:17-44, Allah tells a story about Solomon, a hoopoe bird, and the Queen of Sheba. Let’s compare this Quranic account with an account from Jewish folklore, the Second Targum of Esther, written almost five hundred years before the Quran’s creation. (Tisdall and Shorrosh) 027.017 “And before Solomon drew up his armies of jinn and men and birds, and they were all kept in order and ranks.
And he took a collection of the birds; and he said, ‘Why do I not see the hoopoe? Or is he of the absent? I will certainly punish him with a severe punishment, or execute him, unless he gives me a clear reason (for his absence).’ (Solomon) said, ‘You are not surrounded, and I have come to you from Sheba with true news. I found (there) a woman ruling over them and providing with all necessities; and she has a magnificent throne.’ (Solomon) said, ‘Soon we shall see whether you have told the truth or lied! Go, with this letter of mine, and deliver it to them: then withdraw from her, and (wait) to see what answer she sends back.’ (The queen) said, ‘You leaders! Here is delivered to me – a letter worthy of respect. It is from Solomon and reads: “In the name of Allah, Ar-Rahman, Ar-Rahim: Do not be arrogant towards me, but come to me in submission (Islam, the true religion).” She said: “You chiefs! Advise me in (this) my affair. I have not decided any affair except in your presence.”
They said: ‘We are endowed with strength, and prone to fierce wars: but the command is with you; so consider what you will command.’ She said: ‘But I am going to send him a present, and (wait) to see with what (answer) return (my) ambassadors.’ So when she arrived, she was asked to enter the high palace: but when she saw it, she thought it was a lake of water, and she (pulled up her skirts) uncovered her legs. He said: ‘This is but a palace smoothly paved with plates of glass.’” From: II Targum of Esther: “Solomon gave command: ‘I will raise against you king and armies (of) Genii [jinn] beasts of the land the birds of the air.” Just then the bird of the red cock, which was sporting, was not to be found; King Solomon said that they should seize it and bring it by force, and indeed he attempted to kill it.
But just then the rooster appeared in the king’s presence and said, “I have seen the whole world and know the city and kingdom of Sheba, which are not subject to you, my lord, O king. They are ruled by a woman called the Queen of Sheba. Then I found the fortified city in the Eastlands (of Sheba), and all around it are stones of gold and silver in the streets.” Coincidentally, the Queen of Sheba was out in the morning worshipping the sea. The scribes made a letter, which they placed under the bird’s wing, and away it flew, reaching the fortress of Sheba. Sheba saw the letter under its wing and opened it and read it.
“King Solomon sends you his salaams. If it pleases you to come and inquire about my welfare, I will place you above all others. But if it does not please you, I will send kings and armies against you.” When the Queen of Sheba heard this, she tore her clothes and sent her nobles to ask for advice. They did not know Solomon, but they advised her to send ships across the sea, filled with beautiful jewelry and precious stones… and also to send him a letter. When she finally arrived, Solomon sent a messenger to meet her… Solomon, hearing that she had come, arose and sat in the glass palace.
When the Queen of Sheba saw it, she thought the glass floor was water, so she lifted up her clothes as she crossed. When Solomon saw the hair around her legs, he cried out to her…’ There are only two rational options available to us. If Solomon really did set up devils, speak to birds, and have castles made of glass, then both the Quran and the Targum could be inspired scriptures. But if this is not historically or scientifically correct, then the Quran is a fake, a rotten work of plagiarism, nothing more. This falsification alone is sufficient to prove that the Quran is a colossal forgery.
If you’re a Muslim reading these words, wake up. One of the most documented and damaging facts about the Quran is that Muhammad used heretical Gnostic gospels and their fables to create his “scripture.” Encyclopedia Britannica notes: “The Gospel was known to him chiefly from apocryphal and heretical sources.” The strange accounts of “Jesus’s” early childhood in the Quran can be traced to a number of Christian apocryphal writings: the palm tree that causes Mary anxiety after Jesus’ birth (Sura 19:22-6) comes from The Lost Books of the Bible; while the account of the baby Jesus making birds out of clay (Sura 3:49) comes from the Gospel of Thomas.
The story of the speaking baby “Jesus” (Sura 19:29-33) can be traced to an Arabic apocryphal fable from Egypt called The First Gospel of the Infancy of Christ. The source of Sura 3:35 is the book called The Protevangelion’s James the Lesser. From it, Allah has Moses’ father conceive Mary and then express his disappointment at having a girl. The source of Sura 87:19’s fictional “Books of Abraham” comes from the apocryphal Testament of Abraham. The fantastic story in Sura 2:259 that God caused a man to “die for a hundred years” without harming his food, drink, or donkey came from The Jewish Fable.
The false idea in Surahs 2:55-6 and 67 that Moses was resurrected came from the Talmud. The erroneous account of Abraham’s deliverance from Nimrod (Suras 21:51-71; 29:16; 37:97) came from the Midrash Rabbah. In Surah 17:1, we have the account of Muhammad’s “night journey from the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque.” From later traditions, we know that this verse refers to him ascending to the seventh heaven after a miraculous night journey (the Mi’raj) from Mecca to Jerusalem on a “donkey” named Buraq. Yet, we can trace the story back to The Testament of Abraham, written around 200 BCE in Egypt and translated centuries later into Greek and Arabic.
The source of the devilish encounter in the Jewish courtroom depicted in the second sura is found in chapter 44 of the Midrash Yalkut. The Quranic myth in 18th Prophecy of Doom 7:171, of God lifting Mount Sinai and holding it over the heads of the Jews as a threat to crush them if they rejected the law, came from the apocryphal book of Abodah Sarah.
The making of the golden calf in the wilderness, where the fully formed image sprang from the fire and actually roared (7:148; 20:88), came from Pirke Rabbi Eleazer. The seven heavens and seven hells described in the Quran came from the Zohar and the Haggai. Muhammad used the apocryphal Testament of Abraham to teach that on Judgment Day, a scale or balance will be used to weigh good and bad deeds to determine whether a person goes to heaven or hell (42:17; 101:6-9).
Neither the Jewish nor the Christian apocryphal material is canonical or inspired. They have always been considered heretical by believers and literate people worldwide. For this reason, scholars find it suspicious that the apocryphal accounts would have found their way into a book claiming to be the final revelation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Another analogous account is that of The Secrets of Enoch (chapters 1:4-10 and 2:1), which predates the Quran by four centuries. What Allah did not steal from Jewish fable, he borrowed from an ancient Persian book entitled Arta-i Viraf Namak. It recounts how a pious young Zoroaster ascended to heaven and, upon his return, recounted what he had seen or claimed to have seen. The description of hell in the Qur’an resembles the illustrations in the homilies of Ephraim, a Nestorian preacher of the sixth century,’ says Sir John Glubb, although I am convinced that most of the torments in hell arose from the abuse Muhammad suffered in the desert as a youth.
The description of Paradise in Surahs 55:56, 56:22, and 35:7, which speak of the righteous being rewarded with houris, or large-eyed virgins, whose eyes are like pearls, has interesting parallels in the Zoroastrian religion of Persia, where the virgins are quite similar. The rivers in Persian Paradise also flow with wine. Bukhari:V4B54N469 Allah’s Apostle said: “The first group to enter Paradise will be like a full moon; and those who enter after that will be like the brightest star. Their hearts will be like the heart of a single man, for each of them will have two wives from the houris, each of whom will be so beautiful, pure, and transparent that the marrow of their bones will be visible through the flesh.”
They will never get sick, and they will neither blow their noses nor spit. Their utensils will be of silver, their combs of gold, the fuel used in their kernels will be aloes, and their sweat will smell of musk. Muhammad, or whoever compiled the Qur’an, incorporated elements of the Sabaean religion, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism into Islam. He adopted pagan rituals such as worshipping at the Ka’bah, praying five times a day facing Mecca, the zakat tax, and fasting during Ramadan. This caustic concoction of uninspired ingredients is perhaps why Clair Tisdall wrote in her Original Sources of the Qur’an: “Islam is not an invention, but a fabrication; there is nothing new in it, except that Muhammad mixes old ingredients into a new panacea for human ills and forces it down by the sword.”
She continued: “The scriptures of Islam came to reflect the carnal and sensual nature of its founder. Islam can therefore be aptly compared to ‘that bituminous lake where Sodom burned,’ which receives in its bosom the waters of many streams that unite in a basin, transforming them into one vast sea of death, from whose banks, pestilential exhalations destructively exhale all life within the reach of their malign influence. Such is Islam.”
Originating from many different sources, it has taken its form through the character and disposition of Muhammad; and thus the good in it only serves to recommend and perpetuate the evil, making it a false and deceptive faith, a curse to men and not a blessing. Muhammad’s fabrication has turned many of the fairest regions of the earth into deserts, deluged many a land with innocent blood, and struck with a moral, intellectual, and spiritual plague every nation of men that lies beneath its iron yoke and groans beneath its merciless swing. It is difficult to imagine a better description of the poison that oozed from Muhammad’s soul, or a better summary of the legacy of Islam.
Tisdall further wrote: “While the devout Muslim believes that the rituals and doctrines of Islam are entirely heavenly in origin and therefore cannot have earthly sources, scholars have conclusively demonstrated that every ritual and belief in Islam can be traced back to pre-Islamic Arabian culture. In other words, Muhammad preached nothing new. Everything he taught was believed and practiced in Arabia long before he was born. Even the idea of ‘only one God’ is borrowed from the Jews and Christians.”
Carlyle’s statement about the Quran was also illuminating: “It is as laborious a reading as I have ever done, a weary, confused jumble, coarse, incomprehensible. Nothing but a sense of duty can carry a European through it.” Samuel Zwemer wrote in The Influence of Animism on Islam: “In no monotheistic religion are magic and sorcery so firmly established as in Islam; for in the case of that religion they are based on the teaching of the Quran and the practice of the Prophet.”
In other words, it is Satan’s book. Islamic dictionaries, websites, and commentaries are consistent in describing the nature of the elements that comprise Islam. The scholastic summation proclaims: “As Islam consolidated as a religious and political entity, a vast body of exegetical and historical literature developed to explain the Qur’an and the rise of the empire. Its most important elements are Hadith, or the collected sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad; Sunnah, or the body of Islamic social and legal practices; Sira, or biographies of the Prophet; and Tafsir, or Qur’anic commentary and explanation.”
It is from these Traditions—compiled in written form in the eighth to tenth centuries—that all
accounts of the revelation of the Qur’an and the early years of Islam are ultimately derived.” You’ve seen this clerical proclamation before, but it’s worth repeating: “The Qur’an is one of two legs that form the basis of Islam. The second leg is the Sunnah of the Prophet. What distinguishes the Qur’an from the Sunnah is its form. Unlike the Sunnah, the Qur’an is quite literally the Word of Allah, while the Sunnah is inspired by Allah, but its words and deeds are those of the Prophet. The Qur’an is not expressed in human words. Its wording is established letter by letter by Allah. The Prophet Muhammad was the final Messenger of Allah to humanity, and therefore the Qur’an is the final Message that Allah has sent us.”
This is what Islamic clerics and scholars had to say about Bukhari’s hadith collection: “Sahih Bukhari is a collection of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), also known as the Sunnah. The reports of the Prophet’s sayings and deeds are called hadith. Bukhari lived several centuries after the Prophet’s death and worked extremely hard to collect his hadith. Every report in his collection was checked for compatibility with the Quran, and the veracity of the chain of reporters had to be meticulously established.
Bukhari’s collection is recognized by the vast majority of the Muslim world as one of the most authentic collections of the Sunnah of the Prophet (peace be upon him). Bukhari Abu Abdallah Muhammad bin Ismail bin Ibrahim bin al-Mughira al-Ja’fai was born in 194 AH and died in 256 AH. His collection of hadith is considered unparalleled. He spent sixteen years compiling it, ending with 2,602 hadith (9,082 with repetition). His criteria for inclusion in the collection were among the strictest of all scholars of hadith. While there is no doubt that Bukhari’s collection is religiously sound, its complete lack of chronology limits its usefulness.
If you’re interested in a topic like taxes or jihad, you can go to the appropriate chapter and read what Muhammad had to say about such things. But without the foundation of time, circumstances, elements, and place, you would be forced to take everything you read out of context. Therefore, any accurate and unbiased presentation of Muhammad of Islam must be based on the biographical and historical hadith collections compiled by Ishaq and Tabari. They, and they alone, enable one to speak authoritatively about Islam without taking Muhammad’s example and the scriptures out of context. Recently, however, a new movement has emerged in the Islamic world. The clergy and the king acknowledge they have a problem.
The Quran and the Sunnah are abhorrent, as are their prophet, god, and religion. They cannot withstand scrutiny. While they have managed to fool politicians and the media by repeating that Islam is a peaceful religion, and to threaten religious leaders by threatening them, it hasn’t worked for everyone. Enough Americans have learned the truth to put the Islamic rulers in a terrible situation. So those who profit from Islam have deployed a new strategy.
They proclaim that the Quran shouldn’t be translated from the mysterious language only
0.0003% understand. Imagine that; they want 99.9997% of those listening to the recited surahs to have no earthly idea of what’s being said. In Classical Arabic, the verses have a good beat and the rhyme sounds heavenly. And if the only people authorized to interpret them all benefit from Islam, who’s going to admit that the words are hellish? In this respect, the Quran is no different from rap music. The cadence and rhyme are seductive, while the lyrics are often corrupted.
And the Quran works the same way. Those who listen are cursed. While disguising the Quran’s evil intentions through a language few understand solves one problem, the Islamic establishment still has to deal with the Sunnah’s vile message. It’s one thing to say that Allah’s chime is too majestic to be translated, but Muhammad’s words are written in prose. To solve this problem, Islamic officials revealed a different strategy during my initial discussions with them. They claimed they were “unaware” of the history of Tabari. When that didn’t work, they protested, saying: Tabari isn’t “approved.” Then they claimed it was merely a “history book, not a collection of hadith.” Some even said it contained “unauthorized material.” While that’s not true, it created confusion and served their interests.
Their rejection of Tabari is flawed for several reasons. First, Ishaq’s original manuscripts have been lost, so Tabari is the oldest unedited account of Muhammad’s life and the formation of Islam. Second, Tabari is nothing more than a collection of hadiths. Everything I quoted came complete with a chain of transmissions.
In fact, Tabari’s isnads are more complete than Bukhari’s. And third, the compiled hadiths Tabari compiled are no different from those arranged a century earlier by Ishaq or his contemporary Bukhari. They all drew from the same well, dug from the same well. So why do you think Islamic officials gathered their best source? Because it was translated into English and available, while the others were not; that’s why. In every debate, I urged listeners to go to the SUNY Press website and buy Tabari and then read it for themselves. That was easy enough. If what I quoted was accurate, then everything Muslims said about their religion was a lie. America would know the truth. And if I misrepresented Tabari’s message, I promised to leave, never to be heard from again. The Islamic apologists knew that what I said was not only true, but also devastating.
They stopped debating with me and began discrediting Tabari because they knew what I had discovered: the only English translation of Ishaq’s Sira was out of print and nearly impossible to find. I searched for a year, ordering from major booksellers, the publisher, and even used bookstores. I also searched in libraries, but to no avail. Muslims checked Ishaq and burned it. Fortunately, a Christian couple who had listened to one of my debates found a copy in a university library. They copied the Sira—all 900 pages—and sent it to me.
The reason this is important is because those who benefit from Islam know that without a chronological record of Muhammad’s words and deeds, they can literally get away with murder. They can say whatever they want, and they do. Without Ishaq or Tabari, the Quran is meaningless. Muslims can claim that the God of the Quran is the same as the God of the Bible when they are polar opposites. They can say that Islam is peaceful, even though it condemns peace and promotes war. They can claim that Muhammad only fought defensive battles, while his writings say he was a terrorist. They can believe that Islam has made the Bedouin better, when in fact it has turned them into bloodthirsty pirates and immoral parasites.
They can claim that the Quran is Allah’s perfect book, when by any rational standard it is abhorrent. To put this in perspective: being a Muslim without the information contained in the only chronological presentations of Muhammad’s words and deeds would be like being a Christian without the Gospels. It would be impossible to resemble Christ without knowing Christ, his message, and his example. It would be like being a Jew without the Torah. All you would have are prophets and psalms, and that simply isn’t enough, not even remotely. As you have discovered, the Quran is not like an intelligent book. It is jumbled together without context or chronology, rendering it nothing more than a petty rant, a delusional, delusional, and foolish tirade.
Without the chronological Hadith collections of Ishaq and Tabari, Islam becomes what Islamic clerics and kings want it to be. So, in their fiefdoms, it’s all about jihad. In the free world, it’s all about peace. To prove my point, I’d like to review the Five Pillars of Islam to see if they hold water without the Hadith collections found in the Sunnah. But before we begin, Islam offers an important clue. To find the Pillars, we must turn to the Hadith, not the Quran. And while I’ll conduct this analysis using the “approved” version of the Five Pillars of Islam, there are competing scenarios to consider. As you might expect, Muhammad himself couldn’t decide what his priorities were, let alone those of Allah.
The most famous Islamic proclamations reflect the Quran’s unwavering command to wage jihad for the cause of Allah. Muhammad established the superiority of jihad and asserted that fighting was the foundation upon which the other pillars of Islam must stand. Under the title “Fighting for the Cause of Allah—Jihad,” we read: “Jihad is a holy struggle in the cause of Allah with full force of numbers and weapons. It is given the utmost importance in Islam and is one of its pillars. Through jihad, Islam is established, the word of Allah is made superior (meaning that only Allah has the right to be worshipped), and Islam is propagated. By abandoning jihad, Islam is destroyed, and Muslims are reduced to a subordinate position; their honor is lost, their land is stolen, their rule and authority vanish. Jihad is a mandatory duty in Islam for every Muslim.”
He who tries to escape from this duty, or does not fulfill this duty, dies with one of the characteristics of a hypocrite.” The reason Jihad replaces the other pillars is because: Bukhari:V4B52N44 “A man came to Allah’s Apostle and said, ‘Instruct me about an action equal to Jihad in reward.’ He replied, ‘I cannot find such an action.
Can you, while the Muslim fighter has gone on jihad, enter a mosque to pray continuously and fast forever?’ The man said, ‘No one can.'” Jihad is therefore superior to endless prayer and fasting. But there was more:
Bukhari:V4B52N46 I heard Allah’s Apostle say, “The example of a mujahid [Muslim fighter] in Allah’s Cause—and Allah knows best who truly strives in His Cause—is like a person who fasts and prays without ceasing. Allah guarantees that He will admit the mujahid in His Cause into Paradise if he is killed, otherwise He will return him safely to his home with rewards and spoils.”
It’s the devil’s interpretation of the win-win scenario. And that leads us to the capper, the line that confirmed that jihad was better than all five pillars combined:
Bukhari:V4B52N50 “The Prophet said, ‘A single effort to fight in Allah’s Cause is better than the world and whatever is in it.’”
From the very beginning there has always been a direct causal link between the religion of Islam and Islamic terror:
Bukhari:V4B52N63 A man whose face was covered with an iron mask came to the Prophet (peace be upon him) and said, “Allah’s Apostle! Should I fight Islam first, or embrace it?” The Prophet (peace be upon him) said, “First embrace Islam, then fight.” So he embraced Islam and was martyred. Allah’s Apostle (peace be upon him) said, “A little work, but a great reward.”
In accordance with this message,
Bukhari:V1B2N25 Allah’s Apostle was asked, ‘What is the best deed?’
He replied, “To believe in Allah and His Apostle Muhammad.” The questioner then asked, “What is next (in goodness)?” He replied, “To engage in Jihad (religious strife) in Allah’s Cause.” The questioner then asked, “What is next (in goodness)?” He replied, “To perform Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca in accordance with the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad).
This is important because it establishes three pillars, with Jihad as the second most important. The next rendition of Pillars eliminates the Hajj, which was number three above, and replaces it with the Khumus—Muhammad’s share of the stolen booty.
Bukhari:V1B2N50 “They said, ‘O Messenger of Allah, order us to perform some religious deeds so that we may enter Paradise.’
The Prophet commanded them to believe in Allah alone and asked them, “Do you know what is meant by believing in Allah alone?” They replied, “Allah and His Apostle know better.” The Prophet said, “It means:
1. To testify that none has the right to be worshipped except Allah and that Muhammad is Allah’s Apostle.
2. To maintain perfect prayer.
3. To pay the obligatory zakat tax.
4. To fast during Ramadan.
5. And to pay the Khumus (a fifth of the plunder to Allah’s Cause) to Allah’s Apostle.
Contradictions and confused priorities aside, I promised to resolve Islam’s absolute reliance on the Sunnah by analyzing its “officially recognized” pillars. Beginning:
Bukhari:V1B2N7 Allah’s Apostle said: ‘Islam is based on (the following) five (principles):
1. Bearing witness that none has the right to be worshipped except Allah and that Muhammad is Allah’s Apostle.
Let’s address them one by one. In its current order, the initial sura of the Quran, the second (the first is an invocation, not a revelation, as it speaks to God and not to man), transitions from Ar-Rahman to Allah.
But as we read further, this changes. The Quranic God becomes Ar-Rahman again, and then a nameless Lord. Without the chronology provided by the Hadith of Sira, Muslims don’t know who God is or how many there are. Moreover, they know nothing about the “Apostle.” Without the Sunnah, acknowledging him in the profession of faith is like a recording device demanding credit for performing your favorite artist’s songs. But it gets worse. The Quran commands Muslims to obey the Messenger. If you don’t know what he ordered, that’s impossible. The Quran claims it is composed entirely of Allah’s commands, not Muhammad’s, so you’d be out of luck. The Quran also tells Muslims to follow the Messenger’s example, but the only place that example is established is in the Sunnah. Therefore, the first pillar of Islam is completely meaningless and impossible to implement without Ishaq and Tabari. The second pillar is:
“2. To perform the (obligatory congregational) prayers faithfully and perfectly.”
Again, that’s not feasible. The “obligatory congregational prayer” isn’t described in the Quran. There aren’t even any indications. In fact, the Quran says there should be three prayers, none of which are depicted, and the hadith demands five. The only explanation for the obligatory prostration is found in the Sunnah—and even then, it’s never described by the Prophet himself. Muslims perform a ritual without Quranic precedence. As such, the Second Pillar is ruined. Let’s see if the Third Pillar survives without the Sunnah. To find out, we turn to the Hadith: Bukhari:V1B2N7
“3. Paying zakat.”
How is that possible if the conditions for zakat are omitted from the Quran? The first to put them on paper was Ishaq.
A century later, Tabari referred to the Hadith of Ishaq. The only reason Muslims can pay zakat is because Ishaq explained it to them. The Profitable Prophet Plan is bankrupt without the Sira. The Fourth Pillar will certainly do better:
4. To perform Hajj.”
No. That’s also impossible. The only explanation of Hajj is in the Sunnah. No aspect of the pilgrimage can be performed without referring to the Hadith. Without it, Muslims would be lost. Do you think Allah will redeem Himself and explain the final pillar in His “perfect, detailed, and final revelation to humanity?”
Bukhari: V1B2N7
5. Fasting during the month of Ramadan.”
Guess what? Allah forgot to explain the nature of fasting. Without the Hadith, Muslims would be expected to abstain from food for the entire month of Ramadan. But that’s not how they fast, because it’s not how it’s explained in the Sunnah. In fact, without the Hadith, Muslims wouldn’t know why Ramadan was special. The only record of the first revelation is in their narrations—initially recorded by Ishaq and subsequently copied by Bukhari, Muslim, and Tabari. Without Ibn Ishaq and those who copied and edited his arrangement of Hadith concerning Muhammad’s words and deeds, there would be no Islam.
THE DARK PAST OF ISLAM lxv
The Quran is meaningless and the Five Pillars are meaningless. Faith is foolishness. This is especially true because the only person responsible for Islam, Allah and the Quran, preached:
Bukhari:V9B88N174 “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘Far removed from mercy will be those who change the religion of Islam after me! Islam cannot be changed!’” The punishment for escaping Muhammad’s clutches has always been severe.
Bukhari:V4B52N260 “The Prophet said, ‘If a Muslim rejects his religion, kill him.’” This was no ordinary prophet or religion. No, Muhammad was special. He was a terrorist and a pirate, and you don’t find many of those in religious circles.
Bukhari:V4B52N220 “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘I am victorious with terror. The treasures of the world have been brought to me and placed in my hand.’” Yes, Islam was the Plan of the Profitable Prophet. It was all about Muhammad, and he knew it. That’s why he demanded that his Sunnah, or example, be adopted as law.
Tabari IX:82 “The Messenger sent [assassin] Khalid to collect taxes with an army of 400 men, ordering him to invite people to Islam before fighting them. If they responded and submitted, he was to teach them the Book of Allah, the Sunnah of His Prophet, and the requirements of Islam. If they refused, he was to fight them.” His Sunnah became the basis for Islamic law—the most repressive law in the world. And Muslims follow his example; that is why they are the most violent people on earth. So it all boils down to this: If the Hadith collections of Ishaq, Tabari, Bukhari, and Muslim are true, then Muhammad was the worst man who ever lived, Allah was the most insane god ever conceived, and Islam was the most contemptible doctrine ever imposed on humanity. However, if the Hadith collections are untrue, then nothing is known about Muhammad, his conception of his god, or his formation of Islam. There is no rational reason to believe it, observe it, suffer it, or die for it.
Bukhari 5917:
”The Prophet used to copy the people of the Scriptures in matters in which there was no order from Allah.”