What Mohammed? What Koran? What Mecca?

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The following video is an excellent introduction by Dr. Jay Smith to the deconstruction by Western scholars of the Koran, Mohammed, and Islam itself. Using hermeneutics, textual analysis, archaeology, and other modern disciplines, he demonstrates that the three principal elements of Islam could not possibly be factually true in the way they are traditionally expounded:

1.   Mohammed                                                            
2.   The Koran
3.   Mecca
 

The archaeology and relevant historical documents simply do not support the traditions of Islam. Something happened in Arabia between the 7th and 10th centuries, but it certainly wasn’t what is described in the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sira.

A large part of Dr. Smith’s analysis focuses on the qiblas in the oldest mosques, which did not point to Mecca, but to Petra, in what is now Jordan. He explains the likely significance of the switch from Petra to Mecca, which was prompted by the conflict between the Abbasid and Umayyad dynasties in the late first millennium. He also explains the political necessities that likely motivated Abd al-Malik to invent and backdate Mohammed, the Koran, and Islam itself:

Hat tip: acuara.

19 thoughts on “What Mohammed? What Koran? What Mecca?”

  1. I am fascinated by Dr. Jay Smith’ s presentations since viewing the posted link over at Vlad Tepes’ blog yesterday. A more recent video-lecture opens with the claims of perfect unison in text comparisons of all existing Korans by a sequence of recognized Muslim scholars , posted on YouTube in March of this year…
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x128QHIKZbE
    Dr. Smith’s recognizes the lack of archeological evidence to support the Islamic narrative…reminiscent of Emmet Scott’s work. Dr. Smith also runs down the list of linguistic and Islamic scholars who recently examine several ancient copies of Koranic archives, each admit in conclusion that there exist many alterations evidenced directly on these archives, ranging from missing vowels, erasures and over-written text.
    One wonders if the archives are the same archives being examined by these scholars mentioned in the January 2008 Wall Street Journal article The Lost Quran archive in Germany
    Missing for a half century, a cache of photos spurs sensitive research on Islam’s holy text.

    I’m looking forward to following the commentary to this post…

  2. I’ve seen the video, or one he gave covering the same topic, several times. Dr. Smith is better than excellent. He describes the Muslim sources he uses: they don’t like it, but they have no logical or historical way to dispute his usage.

    So, the chances are very high that the story of Islam and Muhammad were simply pulled out of whole cloth by a successful warlord emperor who wanted a philosophical glue to bind his empire together. Ali Sina, a very effective and knowledgeable opponent of Islam before he veered off into mysticism, brought up the very valid objection: if Muhammad was a made-up character, why would they make him such a loathsome human being, instead of giving him some real virtues?

    But, it seems to have worked. 1.5 billion zombies define morality by what Muhammad did, rather than Muhammad by what morality is.

    Speaking of zombies, I come to my next point. Whatever the real probabilities that Muhammad existed (probably about zero), the Muslims won’t care. Virtually no Muslim will leave Islam because the story of Muhammad doesn’t add up;
    Non-Muslim prospective victims won’t change their minds. There is already more than enough evidence of the malignancy and malevolence of Islam for anybody who cares to look. So, those who are inclined to take the threat seriously are already involved in some way; those who don’t look at anything outside of the TV and their own living room will have no idea such discussions are available and wouldn’t care if they knew.

  3. Also, I read (possibly on this site) that the Qur’an had its origins in texts that were common to the Gnostics in Egypt. The Apostles, especially John, warned the early Church about them, their heretical doctrine and their emphasis upon spiritual works for justification while giving in to the desires of the flesh since the spirit lived forever but the flesh would die. It would seem that the Qur’an continues in this aberration while looking for some historicity the would lend credence and justification for its belief system. Given how religion had become more of a tribal matter as per Ibn Warraq’s Christmas in the Koran, it wouldn’t surprise me to see that one of the spoils that went to the victors was the writing of the religion that the conquered peoples would be required to submit to.

    BTW, Jay Smith presented at my church and showed us a couple of slides of the UV photos of the Grand Qur’an in Ankara, Turkey the showed where the original words that were written on the sheepskin vellum had been bleached and then written over. Imagine your Authorative Manuscript being nothing more that a palimpsest. Now we will never know how and with what dogma Islam actually began. sniff

    • Islam has in common with the Gnostic sects that it prohibits questioning or interpretation of his doctrine. Islam shares the same trait with the political ideologies of modernity, which the political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901 – 1985) classified as essentially Gnostic. Dr. Smith’s scholarship impresses me powerfully, but given that Islam closes itself to dialogue, as did the ancient sects and as do their modern counterparts, it is difficult to see his arguments gaining any sway among Muslims. Those arguments might, however, sway Western attitudes towards Islam.

  4. I’m waiting also for news of what the German scholars are discovering, though they don’t seem to be in a hurry to talk about it. As I recall a few years back (reported in the media) German researchers recovered an ancient Koran from an old mosque being renovated in Yemen. Workers apparently broke through a wall or structure to find a old Koran sealed inside. This was not particularly surprising as worn out Korans had to be “buried” respectfully. But what was clear was this Koran was a very early version and had some significant differences to what is in the Koran today. That was explosive enough ( as why would the perfect word of Allah be changed?) and since then the potentially inflammatory document has disappeared into German academic circles. Perhaps never to emerge.

    • Conspiracy Warning: Perhaps after they think they have destroyed enough of Christianity by using Islam they plan on rolling out their historical evidence showing the Koran used to be different.

      • Or… maybe after the Islamic hordes wash up on the Judean hillsides and meet their demise the evidence will be released showing that the hordes were deluded into following a falsehood. The Globalists will then step forward with a religion that is an acceptable syncretic for those who remain with everyone singing Kumbaya in harmony with the new god who is ruling from Jerusalem.

  5. Excellent, will link [direct people over here rather than use it myself] and run a series using my old material too, stemming from this link.

  6. Jay Smith has some of his excellent “debates” with the Salafists at Speakers Corner. He eventually had to stop and leave England due to death threats. In his last debate, the muslims were left standing around and mocking him, and flexing their muscles. They really have no answers. His actual debates with Shabir Ally are quite good as well. There is no attempt made at a defense, only attack, attack, attack, by the muslims. You simply cannot defend the lack of archeological evidence at Mecca, and other historical inaccuracies.

  7. The book ‘Haragism: the making of modern Islam’ presents a theory of Islam as originating in jewish messianism applied to arab tribes, followed by a cultural rebellion by the arabs.

    After the first wave of conquest, arabs solified their culture into something monolithic, which allowed them to cut the gordian knot of cultural atomization and malaise in the later period of antiquity.

  8. Fascinating video. I didn’t care for Dr Smith’s dismissive attitude to atheists; doesn’t he know God loves us best because we never bother him?

    More seriously, I didn’t care for his smug, triumphalist attitude near the end, when demonstrating the more convincing evidence for the life and deeds of Jesus- almost the Christian equivalent of “Allahu akbar!” I suspect Jesus would expect more humility and compassion from his followers; should Dr Smith and his followers succeed in convincing many Muslims of the evidence he and other scholars have uncovered about early Islam (sadly unlikely), this destruction of all they literally hold sacred could be a considerable psychic shock.

    • MelaniePhillips: SECULARISM AND RELIGION: THE ONSLAUGHT AGAINST THE WEST’S MORAL CODES

      It has become the orthodoxy in the West that freedom, human rights and reason all derive from secularism and that the greatest threat to all these good things is religion.

      I want to suggest that the opposite is true. In the service of this orthodoxy, the West is undermining and destroying the very values which it holds most dear as the defining characteristics of a civilised society.

      War is being waged against Western culture from within which is in essence a war against Christianity and its moral origins in the Hebrew Bible. By attacking these Biblical foundations in the name of reason and human rights, the culture warriors of secularism are sawing off the branch on which they sit. The only way to defend Western civilisation is to reaffirm and restore its Biblical foundations. My argument is a development of ideas I first explored in my 2012 book The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power.

      We are living in an era which extols reason, science and human rights. These are said to be essential for progress, a civilised society and the betterment of humanity. Religion is said to be their antithesis, the source instead of superstitious mumbo-jumbo, oppression and backward-thinking.

      Some of this hostility is being driven by the perceived threat from Islamic terrorism and the Islamisation of Western culture. However, this animus against religion has far deeper roots and can be traced back to what is considered the birthplace of Western reason, the 18th-century Enlightenment.

      Actually, it goes back specifically to the French Enlightenment. In England and Scotland, the Enlightenment developed reason and political liberty within the framework of Biblical belief. In France, by contrast, anti-clericalism morphed into fundamental hostility to Christianity and to religion itself.

      “Ecrasez l’infame,” said Voltaire (crush infamy) — the infamy to which he referred being not just the Church but Christianity, which he wanted to replace with the religion of reason, virtue and liberty, “drawn from the bosom of nature”.

      Perfecting society

      But this Enlightenment did not remove religion so much as pervert it. It took millenarian fantasies, the idea that the perfection of the world was at hand, and it secularised them. Instead of God producing heaven on earth, it would be mankind which would bring that about. Reason would create the perfect society and “progress” was the process by which utopia would be attained.

      Far from utopia, however, this thinking resulted in something more akin to hell on earth. For the worship of man through reason led straight to totalitarianism. It was reason that would redeem religious superstition and bring about the kingdom of Man on earth. And just like medieval apocalyptic Christian belief, this secular doctrine would also be unchallengeable and heretics would be punished. This kind of fanaticism infused the three great tyrannical movements that were spun out of Enlightenment thinking: the French Revolution, Communism and Fascism.

      Professor Richard Landes, a scholar of apocalyptic movements, notes that for the French revolutionaries the millennial hope lay not in scripture but in Rousseau’s theories of freedom and the general will which would be expressed by the liberated voice of the people. The world would be perfected through egalitarianism. On November 10, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety abolished the worship of God and substituted for it the “Cult of Reason”. At the same time, this same committee of 12 men summarily executed thousands of people in the Terror which only ended with the execution of its two masterminds, Robespierre and Saint-Just, in 1794.

      Kant and Hegel developed the notion that historical process drove towards collective salvation defined in secular terms; and Marx offered a further variant of such a process that inexorably drove towards collective salvation through Communism. “History,” Marx wrote, “is but a continuous transformation of human nature.”

      Richard Landes observes that the “scientific” reading of history — the historical dialectic — resembled in some important ways the view of the Bible promoted by the 13th-century monk Joachim of Fiore, who viewed history as a process that promised collective salvation.

      Both Communism and Fascism attempted to transform the world to create a perfected society. Both ideologies were deprived of their power with the defeat of Nazi Germany and the discrediting of Stalinism and subsequent fall of the Soviet Union. But the secular belief that man could perfect the world in his own image, and in ways that would brook no dissent, merely mutated in the latter half of the 20th century into what J.E. Talmon termed “cultural totalitarianism”.

      read the rest at the link

      • Here is the link to Melanie Phillips’ book:

        https://amzn.to/2wktKOW

        Here is the link to J.L. Talmon’s ideas:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Talmon

        He famously compared (and has been quoted many times) various kinds of totalitarianisms. From the wiki:

        He studied the genealogy of totalitarianism, arguing that political Messianism stemmed from the French Revolution, and stressed the similarities between Jacobinism and Stalinism. He coined the terms “totalitarian democracy” and “political Messianism”.

        We had a used copy of “The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy” but I think I gave it to Fjordman…maybe.

      • BTW, your comment is far too long. Readers tend to have fits of MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) when faced with loong quotes. Please check our comment guidelines again.

      • .
        Our Engagement with Islam (JAY SMITH)

        Encounter Church
        Publicerades den 22 juli 2018

        This Sunday, we’re excited to welcome guest speaker, Dr. Jay Smith, to hear about his engagement with and heart for Muslim people. Due to a growing Islamic Radicalism around the world, and the increase of Muslims coming as refugees to the Palmyra/Lancaster area, there may be a sense of fear and timidity in the Church when engaging publicly with Muslims. Yet, Muslims can and must be saved, and Christians are uniquely equipped to do it–since we begin with similar paradigms, and more importantly we have intimate knowledge of Jesus Christ and His gospel. The One Mission of God seeks to reach ALL people.

        https://youtu.be/KcU1cWn5VEA

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