Prashant: The question was not if Muhammad did or did not exist. The Question is what we know about the Historical Muhammad

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Mar 2, 2022 at 15:37

I wrote, and read with care:

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

You wrote:

>"I am sure that Muhammad did exist."

So, if your question is: Did Muhammad exit?

Well, the Islamic historical tradition provides us with narratives about the man who started the spark of what became Islam, and his name is Muhammad also Ahmad also Taha, and 99 names (google the 99 names of Muhammad) and his Kunya is Abul Qasim. This could very well be true. Patricia Crone believed that the Islamic historical Muhammad indeed existed.

However, Muhammad could also be a conduit for the ideas of others that could have ignited the spark of what was to become Islam. The likes of Arias of Alexandria, Warqa ibn Nawfal (he most likely was a Nestorian Christian or the elusive Nasara of the Qur'an and he was the cousin of his wife Khadija), it could also be Bahira the Monk, or it could be some unknown sophisticated Nestorian in 9th centry AD Baghdad, or even in a sectarian Judeo-Christian milieu in Mesopotamia. We will never know.

And to quote Patricia Crone: Religions do not spring fully fledged from the heads of prophets. In other words, the founder of the religion will ignite the spark and later generations will shape what this religion is all about.

If your question is: Where did the founder of Islam live? Less likely to have been Mecca and Medina and more likely he lived in either Mesopotamia or Southern Palestine.

How about all these stories that we find in the Sira or Muhammad?

It could very well be true but it most likely they are pious fiction and the Sira was used as a tool to explain (a form of Tafsir) the opaque revelation called the Qur'an.

I will give an example: Check Surat al-Tahreem or Q66 the first few verses. These verses, if read in isolation, do not make any sense. And if you read the Tafasir (pl of Tafsir) you will encounter the story of a certain Mariyya al-Qibtiyya (and this story generated tons of narratives and books), or Muhammad ate some bad honey and had bad breath and his wives complained and this is why his god revealed these verses.

So, it is either Mariyya al-Qibtiyya indeed existed, or he ate the bad honey----> et voila we have it recorded in the Qur'an. Or, more likely that it was the narratives in the Qur'an that generated such stories-----> the story of Mariyya al-Qibtiyya or the bad honey.

There is every reason to be a skeptic when dealing with the Islamic Historical Tradition

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