Posted by
Always To The Right on Wednesday, November 19, 2008 3:53:51 PM
An attempt by German Academia to provide outreach to moderate Muslims
may have significantly backfired, with its leading light becoming an
apostate. Muhammed Sven Kalish has written a paper asserting that the prophet Mohammed never existed at all,
and that Islam started as a Christian heresy. Needless to say, the
same people who threatened death on editorial cartoonists merely for
depicting Mohammed are not pleased
Of course, Christians and Jews have dealt with critical research for
many years on the historical accuracy of their scriptures. Claims that
Jesus, Moses, and David didn’t exist have been made, debunked, and made
yet again so often that they no longer make news any more. Christians
and Jews express annoyance at times with these claims, but they don’t
react to them with violence and rage.
Neither should Muslims, Kalisch says, and the reluctance to even offer such a hypothetical amounts to bigotry
I agree with Kalisch’s response, but I think he misplaces the
blame. Western intellectuals have this reaction because of the massive
rage that comes not just from a few nutcases but millions of Muslims
when the Koran or the Hadiths receive any sort of critical scrutiny at
all. The Prophet Cartoon outrage was particularly instructive, as the
resultant demonstrations had millions of participants worldwide calling
for death to the editorial cartoonists — and they just drew pictures of
Mohammed. It’s that predictable rage that makes Western academics
place Muslims in general in the category of ill-tempered children.
However, I’d take his hypothesis with a large, Lot’s wife-sized
grain of salt. Modern academics show little respect to the value of
oral traditions in these revisionist theories. It’s certainly possible
that Mohammed never existed, but it strikes me as extremely unlikely.
Just because his story didn’t get written in a traditional paper medium
during his life doesn’t make him a fable. It could certainly impact
the veracity of his quotes and the stories told in the Koran, but his
existence? Especially given the disputes over his succession that
broke out after his death — all of which have fairly clear records and
resulted in the Sunni-Shi’ite split within a generation or two — I’d
call Kalisch’s theory a long shot.