Did Muhammed actually exist?
I realize that I make considerable numbers of people upset when I question whether God exists, whether Jesus ever walked on earth or whether Jesus was Divine (three entirely separate questions).
Regarding those questions, I’ve long thought that most religious people don’t actually know many facts, but mostly rampant speculation supported mainly by internal feelings of certitude [1]and apocryphal ancient books. This makes it rather stunning (and a rich invitation for psychological study) that so many people would make such forceful and unquestioning claims that God obviously exists, that Jesus obviously walked the Earth and Jesus was obviously Divine. Here are some of the DI posts exploring these issues:
Has Earl Doherty proved that Jesus did not really walk on earth? [2]
Christians put on their Skeptic Hats to deal with the “Tomb of Jesus” [4]
Belief in Scripture and Belief in Alien Abductions – A Response to grumpypilgrim [5]
Who changed the Bible and why? Bart Ehrman’s startling answers. [6](I had to close this last post down because we were getting so many comments that it was making it difficult to load the post).
If God really exists, here’s how I envision that things would go down: God returns to set the record straight. [7]
Today, I found a WSJ article indicating that serious scholars studying Islam have their doubts too. One prominent scholar has concluded that Muhammad probably never existed. [8]
Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert and Germany’s first professor of Islamic theology, fasts during the Muslim holy month, doesn’t like to shake hands with Muslim women and has spent years studying Islamic scripture. Islam, he says, guides his life.
So it came as something of a surprise when Prof. Kalisch announced the fruit of his theological research. His conclusion: The Prophet Muhammad probably never existed . . .
Many scholars of Islam question the accuracy of ancient sources on Muhammad’s life. The earliest biography, of which no copies survive, dated from roughly a century after the generally accepted year of his death, 632, and is known only by references to it in much later texts. But only a few scholars have doubted Muhammad’s existence. Most say his life is better documented than that of Jesus . . .
He has doubts, too, about the Quran. “God doesn’t write books,” Prof. Kalisch says.
Wikipedia indicates some parallels with the lack of contemporaneous historical writings [9] regarding Muhammed:
The earliest surviving written sira (biographies of Muhammad and quotes attributed to him) is Ibn Ishaq’s Life of God’s Messenger written some 120 to 130 years after Muhammad’s death.
Given these many serious questions–questions of whether these great religous leaders even existed at all–I would think that we would all be better off to add the serious study of religion to the public school curriculum. But we shouldn’t preach religion in public school. Instead, we should seriously study it, even the inconvenient parts, like this. [10]
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