(February 5, 2015 at 5:11 pm)Rayaan Wrote: I get the impression that the difference between you and me is that you're just generally more distrustful of oral tradition (because you wrote: "with each retelling the ironic bits fell off and people started giving credence to the tale"}. That conveys to me that you assign a much less reliability to oral transmission than written transmission as an arbiter of what actually happened.
And, above that, I'm generally distrustful of supernatural claims.
So, if super-nature is unavailable, then a good part of the stories is... by necessity... made up.
How and who made it up? I don't know... But in that day-and-age, it seems everyone had some sort of belief in something beyond this world. So they were primed to believe in something. Like you, and the guys that are joining ISIS, and mormons, and all the christians, and every theist on this planet....
When a people is primed to believe and a a good story comes along... and is picked up by the ruling family and implanted as true, then how are the simple peasants going to distrust it... much less, discredit it?
People go along, like the egyptians had gone along with their pharaohs, and the jews go along with their rabis...
The same thing happened with christianity in the Roman Empire about 300 years before Abd Al-Malik... and the romans had already done it before when they implemented their own version of the greek mythology... so, implementing a new religion, empire-wide, was clearly not a problem!
Life goes on and half the population has an IQ below 100, so it's easy to keep it going on.
Back on track, Mehmet's story. We have tales of his wondrous claim of having a direct channel to the supernatural.
You put stock on the claims being trustworthy and, thus, true accounts of what the man himself claimed.
I couldn't care less, but the fact that those tales get recorded rather late, and some earlier tales present him, just in passing, and as a simple military leader, suggest that such a wonderful claim came later on.
That's all I'm saying.
It's a suggestion from absence of mention of a claim that came to become rather central to this novel religion that Abd Al-Malik disseminated throughout the caliphate.
If the only record we have of those times is what later became written in the Qur'an, and if (mighty "if" here, I'm aware) the Qur'an was written with an agenda in mind, then there is really nothing we can say about those times... it then becomes even possible to admit that the arab tribes were not as riddled with animosity as would later be written, maybe the caliphate was already established for a few centuries before Abd Al-Malik implemented the roman concept of empire and unified everything under one religion... maybe there was a tribal leader who knew his neighbors well and, through politics and trade, brought them together.
The tale that Abd Al-Malik spread throughout his empire could very well have been a cunning lie, at a time when no one alive would know better and most people just wouldn't care... but it would bring them together under a single nation and religion... and it clearly worked.
