Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry Into Islam's Obscure Origins by Robert Spencer, ISI Books

Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry Into Islam's Obscure Origins by Robert Spencer, ISI Books
   
“Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins”.

Imagine if the entire premise that a comprehensive religious, legal, political, social, cultural, and dietary system was based was completely and utterly false.

Robert Spencer’s groundbreaking blockbuster book, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins is a game-changer of incomprehensible proportions. It shatters every conventional and accepted myth on the history of Muhammad and Islam. Is it any wonder that Islamic supremacists want to squash it?

The Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) already succeeded in getting his talk on the book in New York canceled, but it was held last Tuesday in another location, with four times the audience that it was projected to have before CAIR protested. It was a good sign: people are tired of CAIR’s attempts to shut down free speech and quash the truth about Islam and enforce the blasphemy laws under Sharia.

They fear Spencer’s new book. This is the first popular book to show all the many holes and inconsistencies and contradictions in the standard story of the life of Muhammad, the development of the Qur’an, and the early years of Islam. Did Muhammad Exist? is going to surprise a lot of people, including non-Muslims who assume that there must have been a man named Muhammad who claimed that he was a prophet of Allah, even if they don’t accept his claim. But Spencer shows here that even though Muhammad is supposed to have died in 632, and the Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa started shortly after that – supposedly inspired by Muhammad and the Qur’an – we don’t start hearing about either one, or anything about Islam at all, until much later, in the 690s. No one, not the people the Arabs conquered nor the Arabs themselves, ever mentions Muhammad or the Qur’an, or even calls the conquerors Muslims, for six decades after the conquests began.


Think about that. That would be like the Nazis overrunning Europe in the early days of World War II, but the Poles and French and the Germans themselves never mentioning Nazism or Hitler or the swastika or Jew-hatred. Or the Islamic jihadists destroying the World Trade Center towers and committing almost 20,000 jihad attacks around the world after that, and no one ever saying a word about Islam or jihad — oh, wait, that is what’s happening.

But when it happened with Muhammad, it was many centuries before political correctness or anything else had put a straitjacket on the freedom of speech. Spencer shows that the best explanation for the total absence of references to Islam, Muhammad or the Qur’an in the first sixty years of what are supposed to be the early days of Islam is simply that those weren’t really the early days of Islam at all: in fact, Spencer shows how Islam was invented later. He explains how the Qur’an, which was supposed to have been complete in 632 and collected together and codified in 653, actually wasn’t in its final form even at the beginning of the eighth century – and that it shows signs of having been put together by a committee that did, in many cases, a very poor editing job of the existing Jewish and Christian materials they were using to fashion a new Arabic “holy book.”

The big question then becomes why Muhammad was invented and the Qur’an put together. Spencer’s answer is that it was all done in the days when religion was the unifying force for empires that were made up of numerous races and ethnicities and nationalities. The Arabs, finding themselves by the end of the seventh century the masters of a new empire, put Islam together out of Jewish and Christian and some pagan materials in order to strengthen and unify the new multinational empire that the Arabs had amassed. What better way to motivate a conquering army than by telling them their murder, mayhem, raping and pillaging is righteous, a religious mandate? It puts a whole new spin on wholesale slaughter.

It’s a provocative thesis with many serious implications. For one thing, it proves that Islam’s political aspects are primary, giving the lie to those in the U.S. and Europe today who assume that Muslims in our countries can easily jettison the political and supremacist aspects of Islam and easily separate the mosque from the state. It shows that anti-Sharia initiatives in the various states are much needed, for they assert the primacy of the U.S. Constitution over what was from its very beginnings a political and supremacist ideology that denies many freedoms we take for granted.

This book could and should be decisive for our national ongoing debate about how to deal with political Islam. If the religious elements of Islam were invented in order to support and strengthen a political agenda, Americans deserve to know that, and should be pressuring our politicians to take proper note of the political and supremacist aspects of Islam.

Did Muhammad Exist? is brilliant, surprising, enlightening, engrossing, and eye-opening. It’s also essential reading for any human being defending freedom.