Quote:If Muhammad being mythical rather than actual has any veracity, then I should be able to find it for myself.
Do you speak and read Syriac, Arabic and Greek? Are you familiar with 2,000 years of history/archaeology in the ANE? Lacking those skills will seriously impede any such inquiry. Like myself, you are then reliant on the work of other scholars. Dismissing the propaganda of believers who, just like xtians, insist that their bullshit is true and for evidence point to their holy horseshit in an endless circle jerk, you find a small circle of scholars who are willing to risk the fanaticism of the muslims to question their fantasies. Spencer seems to give a consistent reading of the general trend of such scholarship.
One suggestion he made has to do with the late Roman practice of driving out heretical xtian groups if they couldn't kill them. The region at the time was split between the xtian Roman empire and the Zoroastrian Persians. One of the few places to get away from either was the Arabian peninsula. His suggestion is that heretical xtians sought refuge there and suddenly found themselves two centuries later with an opportunity after the Byzantines and Persians had bled each other white in a series of wars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine%E...anian_wars
Quote:The devastating impact of this last war, added to the cumulative effects of a century of almost continuous conflict, left both empires crippled. When Kavadh II died only months after coming to the throne, Persia was plunged into several years of dynastic turmoil and civil war. The Sassanids were further weakened by economic decline, heavy taxation from Khosrau II's campaigns, religious unrest, rigid social stratification, and the increasing power of the provincial landholders. The Roman Empire was even more severely affected, with its financial reserves exhausted by the war, the Balkans now largely in the hands of the Slavs, Anatolia devastated by repeated Persian invasions, and the empire's hold on Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Egypt loosened by many years of Persian occupation. Neither empire was given any chance to recover, as within a few years they were struck by the onslaught of the Arabs, newly united by Islam.
It is that last phrase that is in question.
