Did Mohammad exist?

[Rayaan]

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I know this is hard for you, Rayaan, ( about as hard as it is for xtians to hear that their godboy never existed either ) but this is a story about power and the formation of empire. Muhammad, which is a title as well as a name, does not appear for 60 years after the beginnings of the conquest of the Arab empire. The peoples who were attacked never heard of the koran or islam or mohammed. They do record who was conquering them, calling them saracens or such.

The Byzantines and Persians bled each other white in battles in the late 6th century. The Arab tribes moved into the vacuum. There are coins minted by early Arab rulers which bear a cross. Spencer also spends a lot of time going through the hadiths and showing the political nature of those. They were used to inflate or deflate other power blocs.

Like xtianity in the 4th century the religion was a creation of powerful rulers who decided they needed a common religion to hold together a disparate empire.

The book is here.

http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7281809/R...i__epub%29

You'll need epub or mobi to read it although I understand that Caliber works as well.

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As for a lack of documents from Muhammad’s lifetime, again, I don’t see how disproves the existence of a man who lived over 1,400 years ago and belonged to a remote primitive tribe amongst the desert nomads of the Arabian Peninsula. And I doubt that those people would have left behind documents about Muhammad because the majority of them were probably illiterate. Even if such documents did exist, it would be pretty exceptional for them to have survived all this time. You run into a similar problem with artifacts because most of them would have been lost over the course of time.

I haven't read Spencer's book yet, but I'll try to read it some time later. As far as I've been reading about his arguments and research on this particular subject, what he basically does is try to show that there is complete "absence of proof" when it comes to the historicity of Muhammad, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he didn't exist. Likewise, what evidence do we have that Moses, Noah, Aaron, or Joshua existed? We don’t have any, but it would be logically wrong to conclude from this that they didn't exist.

We know that Muhammad existed because of the documented wars of succession for his growing empire fought shortly after his death. The result was the Shia-Sunni conflict that continues today. The Sunni branch believes that the first four caliphs - Muhammad’s successors - rightfully took his place as the leaders of Muslims. They recognize the heirs of the four caliphs as legitimate religious leaders and that a religious leader should be elected through a vote among the Islamic community’s people. They believe that Muhammad’s followers chose Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s close friend and advisor, as his successor. Shiites, in contrast, believe that only the heirs of the fourth caliph, Ali ibn Abu Talib, are the legitimate successors of Muhammad. Ali was the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad.

Lastly, your statement that Muhammad's name does not appear for "60 years" after the beginnings of the conquest of the Arab empire is not true because, from the listings of many of the dated texts, it is clear that the name of Prophet Muhammad appears very early even in the non-Muslim texts. The time period between the death of Muhammad (June, 632 CE) and the earliest mention of him (4th February, 634 CE) in the writings of Thomas the Presbyter (writing c. 640 CE / 19 AH) is slightly over a year and half. There are more such early documents which you can see at the link below:

Dated Texts Mentioning Prophet Muḥammad from 1-100 AH / 622-719 CE

Rayaan, I've always wondered... Isn't it in your best interest to defend what is being said about Jesus by us so that you can defend Mohammad's beliefs? I think it logically makes sense that if Jesus wasn't who Mohammad said (because of non-existence etc) then Mohammad stops being reliable/divinely inspired.

No, it is not in my interest at all to defend what you guys say about Jesus because I believe that he existed as well and that he was one of the many prophets of God. The only difference in the Islamic view of Jesus is that we believe that certain widely-held Christian beliefs such as the Trinity aspects of Jesus and the crucifixion of Jesus, for example, are associated not with the original words of scripture but with later alterations that crept in with the additions of human copyists and editors. When this happened, we believe that God sent another book (and a final one), i.e. the Quran, as as an updated version of the previous scriptures that were tampered with.

Even for the sake of argument, if [Jesus] didn't exist, then how did [Christianity] become a world religion and then dominate many parts of the world without a leader guiding its people? Who did the [Christians] learn from? Who or what caused the spread of [Christianity] in such a short amount of time which can be directly linked to [Christs] time and shortly after his death?

Fixed that for you.

Yes, but that is one of the reasons I believe that Jesus existed also.
There are more things that I said about Muhammad's existence in that same post as well as in this post.