It wasn't Mohammed who founded Islam.

[Minimalist]

And it ignores the earliest references to Muhammad which are recorded even in non-Muslim sources, as I mentioned here with a link.

Not even close to being somewhat historically accurate.

I had started to answer the other thread and then, when going to get another link, lost the whole damn thing. I may get back to it.

But seriously, Rayaan. You aren't going to trot out the Doctrina Jocobi, are you?

See what you can do with an article which does not mention Spencer...since you seem to have decided that he is your personal enemy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/02/arts/s...koran.html

Scholars Are Quietly Offering New Theories of the Koran

Christoph Luxenberg, however, is a pseudonym, and his scholarly tome ''''The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran'' had trouble finding a publisher, although it is considered a major new work by several leading scholars in the field. Verlag Das Arabische Buch in Berlin ultimately published the book.

The caution is not surprising. Salman Rushdie's ''Satanic Verses'' received a fatwa because it appeared to mock Muhammad. The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed because one of his books was thought to be irreligious. And when the Arab scholar Suliman Bashear argued that Islam developed as a religion gradually rather than emerging fully formed from the mouth of the Prophet, he was injured after being thrown from a second-story window by his students at the University of Nablus in the West Bank. Even many broad-minded liberal Muslims become upset when the historical veracity and authenticity of the Koran is questioned.

BTW, Rayaan, can you show me the part of the koran which allows you to critically examine your faith? I have no doubt you can show me plenty which forbid it. So, the very idea of an islamic 'scholar' being capable of historical criticsm seems not only quite impossible but given the fanaticism of believers, highly dangerous.