HOW DID ISLAM BEGIN? A POSSIBLE SCENARIO - Al Fadi & Jay Smith CIRA series We now come to the 6th and final episode on this series concerning How Islam Began, from what history tells. Because everything we know about Islam from Islamic sources was written 200 - 300 years after, the Western Historians are going back to the 7th century itself, to the century when it all happened. What they are finding is not only surprising, but confronts the classical Islamic account on many fronts, especially who Muhammad was, whether was even a city called Mecca during his century, and when the Qur'an was actually written down. In this episode Jay and Al Fadi attempt to put together a 'what if' scenario, using what we now know from the historical record. This is only an attempt in 2018 to understand what may have happened, and could easily be changed in the next year or the next depending on what new evidence comes to hand. What they have found is that almost all of Islam's creation came out of a desire by the Arab conquerors of the 7th century to create an Arab identity, in contradistinction, or rather in opposition to that of their Abraham cousins, the Jews and the Christians, who already had a prophetic line, and revelations which were given specifically to them. The Arabs didn't have any prophet and certainly not any Arab revelation, yet they were now the super-power of their day politically. It was Abd al Malik who began this push for such an Arab identity, introducing the name Muhammad on the Dome of the Rock, and on coins he minted in 691 AD, and on the Caliphal Protocols. Once they had the prophet, they then needed a revelation, and that is why all of the earliest Qur'anic manuscripts begin to appear in the early 8th century, but they aren't consistent, nor are the complete, nor do they completely match the Qur'an we have today. With the man and the book in place, then all they needed was a place to situate him, because Petra wasn't really Arab, but Nabatean, so they finally placed him in Mecca, though the mosques didn't begin to use Mecca for their Qibla (the direction of prayer) until 727 AD, a full century after they were suppose to. Now with a man, a book and a place, they then only needed to put that man into a historical frameword, and have many things for him to say, and that is why they weren't able to write down his story (the Sira, or his biography), and his sayings (the Hadith) until another hundred and more years later (833 AD and 870 AD). Finally with an Arab prophet (Muhammad), who was given an Arab revelation (the Qur'an), and now placed in an Arab city (Mecca), all supported with his own biography (the Sira) and his own sayings (the Hadith), Islam could now finally be proud, not only to have their own prophet and book, but their own religion, one which was not created in just 22 years in a place called Mecca, as Muslims like to tell us, but took anywhere from 100 - 200 years to create and final canonize. This scenario not only fits the historical record, but makes sense when looking at the political context of that time. © Pfander Centre for Apologetics, 2018 (14,000)
