Mohamed, To Be Or Not To Be, That’s the Question…….

Mohamed, the creater of the world’s worst religion
or the creation of those who created the world’s worst religion?

The Tundra Tabloids likes to mull over the different angles to the same subject, of what to do about the madman prophet Mohamed, and the miserable system attributed to him, Islam. Atlas Shrugs ran the post about Ali Sina’s article on Mohamed, which could be titled:

Then there is an interesting post I saw at Jihad Watch concerning whether Mohamed existed at all. I believe that this goes straight to the heart of the matter while the former addresses the inability of Islam to modernize itself enough to become no longer a danger to our modern liberal societies. The ramifications for Islam by this form of textual criticism is immense, for it reduces it to being nothing more than the compilation of ideas and stories created by later generations.

After a closer examination, the prophet of Islam comes to resemble the Easter Bunny, (albeit a more aggressive version) with all the pagan trimmings. The Hajj and Ka’ba, the stoning of the devil, Ramadan and more, even the name Allah is from the pagan moon god. So either way, whether Mohamed actually lived or was a creation of others, the world’s Muslims would be better off divesting themselves from their destructive ideology altogether and join the modern world. KGS

The picture of the life of Muhammad that one gets from Islamic sources is based on some very, very weak reeds from a historical standpoint. (I hope to be writing about this problem and its implications in much greater detail in the future.) But the historical criticism of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures that academics have engaged in for centuries has never been undertaken in an Islamic context, for reasons that should be obvious. The Qur’an is a book never to be doubted, never to be questioned:

when one Islamic scholar, Suliman Bashear, taught his students at An-Najah National University in Nablus that the Qur’an and Islam were the products of historical development rather than being delivered in perfect form to Muhammad, his students threw him out of the window of his classroom. Christoph Luxenberg, who has done groundbreaking work in this area, publishes under a pseudonym.

Of course, in this the stakes are very high for Muslims. There is no Liberal Islam or Reform Islam that distills moral precepts out of material that is not considered to be historically true and thus has no literal application. Maybe it could be created, at least by a faction, if it became widely known and accepted that the authoritative story of Muhammad and the Qur’an rests on such weak historical foundations, but we are very, very far from that today.

And that is what makes Muhammad Sven Kalisch all the more remarkable. Saying this could get him fired. It could get him killed. It could, and probably already has, interfered with his personal outlook on life. But this is the result of his researches, and he is sticking to it. Whether he is right or wrong, and there is a great deal to support his view, he is at very least uncompromisingly honest.

How refreshing it is to see an honest man, and that even rarer bird, an honest academic, and that rarity of rarities, an honest professor of Islamic studies.

“Professor Hired for Outreach to Muslims Delivers a Jolt,” by Andrew Higgins for the Wall Street Journal, November 15 (thanks to all who sent this in):

MÜNSTER, Germany — Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert and Germany’s first professor of Islamic theology, fasts during the Muslim holy month, doesn’t like to shake hands with Muslim women and has spent years studying Islamic scripture. Islam, he says, guides his life.

So it came as something of a surprise when Prof. Kalisch announced the fruit of his theological research. His conclusion: The Prophet Muhammad probably never existed.

Muslims, not surprisingly, are outraged. Even Danish cartoonists who triggered global protests a couple of years ago didn’t portray the Prophet as fictional. German police, worried about a violent backlash, told the professor to move his religious-studies center to more-secure premises.

“We had no idea he would have ideas like this,” says Thomas Bauer, a fellow academic at Münster University who sat on a committee that appointed Prof. Kalisch. “I’m a more orthodox Muslim than he is, and I’m not a Muslim.”

That’s nothing, Professor Bauer. There are so many non-Muslim professors like you, they can’t even be counted.