It wasn't Mohammed who founded Islam.

[pocaracas]

It also depends on when these claims were made. If they were made tens of years after Abd-Al-Malik's introduction of the madrassas and spreading of the religion, then... yeah... it is expected that many people will have the same basis, the same belief.

The claims were made both during and after Muhammad's death. These claims (about his Prophethood) were preserved in peoples' memories at first, and then were eventually written down about a hundred years later, starting from Ibn Ishaq's biographies. Many other corroborating information about Muhammad are recorded in Bukhari's hadiths which were compiled another hundred years later.

Nevertheless, the claims about it are abundant and they all unanimously refer to one and the same thing: the Prophetic role of Muhammad.

Indeed, there are abundant equal claims well after the implementation of the madrassas...
The "when" is not lending any credence to those claims. But if the claims are not credible, than why would they be made?
Develop the religion further? increase the basis for the belief? incorporate local notions into the religion?...
I keep having to guess these things, because nothing could be written about them, or the claims would be immediately debunked... as they weren't...

Errr... territory, land. That's the main usual suspect.
I'll just go ahead and take one more guess: maybe the land where his tribe was established became very poor and lacking in fauna and flora, perhaps the desert was creeping in... I don't know, I'd have to look it up. And they decided to take land from some other people who had decent land, decent food, decent animals.

Yeah, good job, keep the guesses coming. I find them absolutely enthralling.

I try, I try!

Here's something interesting, albeit permeated by muslim bias: http://www.al-islam.org/restatement-hist...abia-islam

Since Arabia did not have a government, and since the Arabs were anarchists by instinct, they were locked up in ceaseless warfare. War was a permanent institution of the Arabian society. The desert could support only a limited number of people, and the state of inter-tribal war maintained a rigid control over the growth of population. But the Arabs themselves did not see war in this light.

To them, war was a pastime or rather a dangerous sport, or a species of tribal drama, waged by professionals, according to old and gallant codes, while the “audience” cheered. Eternal peace held no appeal for them, and war provided an escape from drudgery and from the monotony of life in the desert.

They, therefore, courted the excitement of the clash of arms. War gave them an opportunity to display their skills at archery, fencing and horsemanship, and also, in war, they could distinguish themselves by their heroism and at the same time win glory and honor for their tribes. In many cases, the Arabs fought for the sake of fighting, whether or not there was a cause belli.
[...]
All Arabs were notorious for certain characteristics such as arrogance, conceit, boastfulness, vindictiveness and excessive love of plunder. Their arrogance was partly responsible for their failure to establish a state of their own. They lacked political discipline, and until the rise of Islam, never acknowledged any authority as paramount in Arabia.

So, you (muslims) expect the rest of the world to accept that a people filled with such righteous characteristics as " arrogance, conceit, boastfulness, vindictiveness and excessive love of plunder" to bring up unbiased perfect memories of what someone long-dead said, and we should accept those memories as trustworthy...

My new guess is that many of the muslim sayings (qur'an, hadiths) were initially fabricated for the purpose of bringing all these people into some form of lawfulness. Around the time of Abd-Al-Malik... remember, the when is important.
Later on, other hadiths surfaced... not quite fabricated with a purpose, but rather, like today's believers in their personal relationship with their favorite divinity, they were convinced of their own delusions, probably fed by their parents and other tribesfolk.
It is for these hadiths that the science of the hadith seems to become important, in discerning the ones compatible with the initial fabrication, from the rest... even so, it seems some inconsistencies crept up: http://www.answering-islam.org/Quran/Contra/...weird

Why do I think number 3 is more likely? Because, the earliest evidence of such a claim comes many years... decades, even... after his "agreed upon date of" death.

But at least the earliest evidences did arrive many years later. Better late than never, right? The evidence for your claim, on the other hand, that someone else attached Prophethood to Muhammad, doesn't came later, earlier, nor ever. You have no problem accepting that someone (totally unknown to you) falsely added a Prophetic role to Muhammad, while there are no writings at all to support that, let alone contemporary writings. And yet you have a problem believing that Muhammad claimed himself to be a Prophet, even though there are writings about such a claim being made, albeit many years later. I strongly find that to be more of an intellectual dishonesty than mere fallacious reasoning.

I highlighted the two parts of your quote for a reason. Why?

Because if you're going to judge what is more likely by the availability of evidence, then you have automatically refuted your own argument, since you, admittedly, have no evidence at all.

Way to be consistent.

I see your point.
And you're right... I guess... There is no evidence for my guess that prophethood was a later addition. And there are claims that the man himself was a prophet and claimed to be so.
Trouble is, the earliest mentions of Muhamad present him solely as a tribal or army leader, no prophethood whatsoever is present there... and this is from the link you gave earlier.
Absence of evidence hinting to absence of prophethood soon after Mo's death. That's why I'm leaning towards the later addition of prophethood to the legendary hero/leader.

Arabs seem to have had a history of untrustworthiness... do you think it's expectable that they became trustworthy within a hundred years of Mo's appearance in the scene?
Or is it more likely that they remained equally untrustworthy and, in particular, these new leaders with their own agendas, took it to a new height by copying part of what the romans did with christianity in their empire?