Muhammad Inspires Jihadis, But What If Muhammad Never Existed?

An imam in the Vancouver area, Adnan Abyat, recently preached a rousing sermon designed to get his congregation all fired up for jihad. As Muslim leaders all over the world speak of Hamas’ conflict with Israel as a jihad, it’s understandable that this kind of sermon would be common in the Islamic world these days. Abyat, like many others, attributed the jihad impulse to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Yet there is abundant reason to believe that Muhammad was not exactly what Adnan Abyat and so many others think he was.

Abyat declared: “I attest that Muhammad is Allah’s servant and His prophet who awakened the desire for Jihad and incited the believers, who made Jihad for the sake of Allah the pinnacle of Islam, and the one who said that Paradise is underneath the shades of the swords.”

To be sure, this was a statement of faith, but it was one that was rooted in history. Abyat believes that Muhammad was a real man who walked this earth and made statements that can be known today among his multitudes of followers. As the man whom Allah chose to deliver his eternal message to mankind and whom he designated as the “excellent example” for the believers (Qur’an 33:21), Muhammad’s words carry special weight for Muslims.

Indeed, Muhammad’s words are why jihadis take up the sword, as Abyat went on to explain: “His shari’a [law] elevated the status of the mujahideen [warriors of jihad] and he said that Jihad for the sake of Allah raises a man a hundred levels in Paradise and the distance between levels is like the distance between heaven and earth.”

Yet what if Muhammad really said none of this? What if the stories Islamic tradition tells us about what he said and did are more myth and legend than sober historical fact? Then Hamas and other jihadis all over the world are killing and dying for a fiction. It would be the cruelest of cruel jokes on the jihadis, but if this idea became widely known in the Islamic world, the result could be transformational.

A few years ago, I explored this question in a book titled Did Muhammad Exist? In it, I demonstrated that the earliest available biographical data about Muhammad dates from two centuries after the traditional date of his death. There are a few mentions of “Muhammad” here and there before then, but none of them match what we know, or think we know, about the prophet of Islam.

The standard Islamic response to the long gap between Muhammad’s life and the appearance of written records about that life is that this material was preserved as oral tradition in a time when memories were long and writing materials were scarce. That’s superficially plausible, but if the early Muslims were carrying around elaborately detailed accounts of Muhammad’s words and deeds in their minds for two centuries, they were remarkably reticent about doing so. The first six decades of the seventh-century Arab conquest contain no mention anywhere of the existence of the religion of Islam, or of the Qur’an, or of Muhammad as the prophet of Islam. The Arab conquerors had extensive contact with the people they conquered, many of whom wrote about these conquests. Yet Islam, the Qur’an, and Muhammad just don’t seem to come up.

Even more astounding, the Islamic traditions themselves are full of contradictions on even the most basic points. In a new book, Muhammad: A Critical Biography, I examine those stories in detail, and show all the contradictions and inconsistencies within what academics still present as sober, meticulously recorded history. Most Islamic traditions say that Muhammad was always the name of the prophet; others, however, assert that he was originally named Qutham and that his name was changed to Muhammad later. Most Islamic traditions state that the angel Gabriel appeared to Qutham/Muhammad and delivered the Qur’anic revelations to him; some, however, maintain that initially an angel named Saraphel visited the new prophet, and was only later replaced by Gabriel.

Defenders of the historical value of the early Islamic material may dismiss these as erroneous traditions and point to the preponderance of support for the mainstream versions, but this doesn’t answer the question of why such traditions began circulating in the first place. If Muhammad had always been known as Muhammad and the angel who appeared to him always as Gabriel, why would anyone make up stories renaming the central characters Qutham and Saraphel?

The existence of the variant traditions makes sense, however, if we see that Muhammad is a composite figure whose story is made up of many earlier traditions. It could be that stories of Qutham and Saraphel were incorporated into the Muhammad myth, as were traditions that were originally about others, as the figure of the prophet of Islam was being constructed.

There are many, many other strange and anomalous aspects of Islamic tradition regarding Muhammad. The fact that I am bringing them to light in Muhammad: A Critical Biography may be why a Pakistani Muslim leader just offered $10 billion for my head and that of Dutch parliamentarian and freedom fighter Geert Wilders. Whether or not jihadis get my head and strike it rich, however, the problems of this most problematic of prophets will remain. We can all hope, for the sake of the peace of the world, that one day the jihadis will realize that their whole enterprise has been a bizarre waste of time, and seek other pursuits.