Peace be upon the least deserving; and how he was created
Review essay of Muhammad: A Critical Biography
Author: Robert Spencer
Publisher: Bombardier Press
Date: 2024
Pages: 340
This is not the story of a man, but the man of a story.
Muhammad: A Critical Biography can be described as the capstone of a Muhammad trilogy, starting with Robert Spencer’s 2006 The Truth about Muhammad, written “to clarify the question of why so many violent jihadis look to Muhammad as their guiding light and inspiration, even as so many others see him as “a gentle man, sensitive, faithful, free from rancor and hatred,” in which Spencer confines himself to what “the great majority of Muslims” believe. The second, Did Muhammad Exist? (2012, revised and expanded edition 2021), examines the historical problems of the early traditions and why many cannot take them seriously.
Robert Spencer pulled off another masterpiece that will fortify many and unbalance many more, by asking the next logical question: if Muhammad did not exist, then why was he invented? By the forensic standards that Spencer’s readers have come to expect, he examines not only all available evidence, but all unavailable evidence, which, as it turns out, includes almost all available evidence that is not evidence at all, at least not for the existence of Muhammad. The question that follows hard upon would be: if it is not evidence for the existence of Muhammad, then what is it evidence for? The answer to this question constitutes the groundbreaking contribution of Muhammad: A Critical Biography, (MACB), the work under review in the present essay.
By rushing in where lesser scholars fear to tread, namely, the historicity of Muhammad, Robert Spencer will not endear himself either to over a billion Muslims, or to those scholars for whom loyalty supersedes truth. The structure of MACB attempts no clever philosophical acrobatics, for none is needed: sticking closely to the actual tradition is acrobatic enough. The Introduction, titled, “Who Is This Man? Is There Even Anyone Here at All?” opens with one sentence attributed to Muhammad and quoted from the renowned Muslim historian Tabari’s monumental The History of Al-Tabari, that both summarises and foreshadows all that is to follow: “I have fabricated things against God and have imputed to Him words which he has not spoken.” And so we’re off…
The first thirteen chapters of MACB traces Muhammad’s life chronologically, stopping at each hole in the narrative as a haunted caravan might call at every dried-up oasis on its journey across a sea of shifting sand. Each encounter is a demolition job that leaves nothing standing. The chapters are each grouped around identifiable major developments in the Muhammad story, such as “Creating Muhammad”, “Becoming a Prophet”, “The Hijra”, “Defeat, Revenge and Exile”, etc. Thereafter follow two thematic chapters, “Muhammad’s Character” and “Muhammad’s Wisdom” that drive home the corrosive consequences for the Islamic ideal of constantly having to abrogate perfect elements of “the perfect man” in order to preserve his perfection. The final chapter, “The Legend Continues,” is nothing less than a damning indictment of the entire Muhammad project.
On Spencer’s method
All that any author has to do to be ignored by a billion Muslims and their brave scholars, is to show eagerness to examine all evidence and to be meticulously and obviously fair with what may and what may not be deduced from such available evidence. An example of this approach comes in the first chapter, where Spencer examines what may confidently be gleaned from two late-antique sources, the Doctrina Jacobi and “A document that was written in the flyleaf of a copy of the gospels according to Matthew and Mark around the same time [the late 630s].” After a cautionary note that “the material in brackets was added by the translator to make the document, which is in an extremely fragmentary condition, more understandable,” Spencer quotes this flyleaf document:
“In January {the people of} Homs took the word for their lives and many villages were ravaged by the killing of {the Arabs of} Muhmd and many people were slain and {taken} prisoner from Galilee as far as Beth…” (p10)
He then proceeds as follows:
Here we have an actual mention of Muhammad, but there is no reason to assume, as so many do today, that this is a reference to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, as he appears in the ninth-century literature. Like the Muhammad of Islam, however, this Muhammad does seem to be both an Arab and a warrior, for his Arabs are killing people and ravaging villages, but there is no indication in this passage that he is a prophet. And in light of the fact that the phrase “the Arabs of” was added by the translator in order to help make sense of this fragmentary writing, we cannot even be completely certain that this was the correct addition or that the original document referred to Arabs at all. This warlord may have been the Arab prophet referred to in the Doctrina Jacobi, but he may also have been neither a warrior nor a prophet. In the final analysis, this is an indication that there may have been a warrior named Muhammad operating in Palestine in the 630s, but that was something that the Muhammad of Islam did not do. It may be that when the story of Muhammad was finally being formulated, the various traditions that both of these odd references represent were incorporated into it. (pp10-11)
Spencer’s own scrupulous standards notwithstanding, his treatment of those who do not observe such standards remains scholarly, for example:
Thomas [the Presbyter] writes in Syriac of “a battle between the Romans and the tayyaye d-Mhmt” in 634. The word tayyaye, or Taiyaye, means “nomads,” although other ancient writers use it in reference to the conquerors of the region. This led the historian Robert G. Hoyland to translate tayyaye d-Mhmt as “the Arabs of Muhammad,” but he was taking some liberties with the text, since Syriac has both a t and a d. Thus Mhmt may mean “Muhammad,” but it may not. If it is indeed a reference to Muhammad, we have here again Muhammad as a warlord, but there is no mention here of him being a prophet or having a new religion or holy book. (p11)
Such respect is not a one-off. It would have been very easy for Spencer to simply dismiss contemporary Islamic sources purporting to treat historical material, on the grounds that Shari’a prohibits all negative statements about anything pertaining to Islam, indeed, commands that only flattering things be said about it. Instead, he still goes to the trouble of treating contemporary Islamic sources with due scholarly regard. For example, “The Islamic Awareness website provides several examples of how these sparse early records are confidently, and misleadingly, presented as historical evidence for the Islamic Muhammad.” This is the method throughout, affording the author a “safe space” from the harassment and abuse that might otherwise be expected in response such a brave work.
The problematic
Muhammad: A Critical Biography sets out to, “evaluat[e] the material about Muhammad from the standpoint of historical reliability in search of the answer to the question of whether we can know anything at all with any degree of certainty about Muhammad and if so, what exactly we can know." (p4)
Paucity of material is one thing, scholarly timidity is another. The history of the Islamic prophet suffers from both, or, as Spencer puts it:
Whether for fear of incurring a death fatwa and a life-threatening attack like Rushdie or the opprobrium of their peers for being “Islamophobic,” however, Western academics have been far less eager to examine the historicity of Muhammad or the reliability of the Islamic accounts of Islam’s origins. This book stands, therefore, as one of the first, if not the first, critical biography of Muhammad. Like The Critical Qur’an, it is intended to make up for a gap in the study of Islam that compromised and groupthinking academics have not dared to close. (p5)
The rigour starts with the very name: Muhammad.
The philologist Christoph Luxenberg points out that since the word muhammad means “praising” or “being praised,” and hence also “the one who is being praised,” the inscription, the phrase “Muhammad is the servant of God and His messenger” is more correctly translated as “Praised be the servant of God and His messenger.” Luxenberg explains: “Therefore, by using this gerundive, the text here is not speaking of a person named Muhammad, which was made only later metaphorically into a personal name attributed analogically to the prophet of Islam. (p22)
Spencer is confident enough in his scholarship to acknowledge Muhammad as “one of the most consequential figures in history,” yet does not shy away from pointing out:
His teachings have not brought the peace, tolerance, and kindness to the world that one might have expected from the words of Ramadan, Emerick, Watt, and others. That will also be part of our investigations here. (p5)
Muhammad: A Critical Biography starting by dismantling the “absurd and anachronistic” claims by Islamic apologists that validation for their Muhammad story is already present in the Bible. Spencer guides the reader through the myth of Muhammad as it is historically laid down, layer by layer. For example, in the first chapter, “The Prophet Armed with the Sword,” we read:
It is possible, however, that this Arabian prophet did end up becoming part of the story of Muhammad as it has come down to us. That is, the legends of a sword-bearing prophet arising among the Arabs became an element of the myth of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, as it was being formed. It is possible that the Doctrina Jacobi is based on accounts of a warrior prophet that were circulating at the time that the legend of Muhammad was being formulated, and were eventually incorporated into that legend. (p10)
Copiously footnoted and referencing a wealth of original sources, one would expect scrutiny of this kind brought to bear on centuries of baked-in Muslim traditions to drop more than a few faith-shattering bombshells, and Spencer does not disappoint. Here is but one:
What’s more, contrary to the idea that the Qur’an was finalized long before the traditions about Muhammad were committed to writing, there is evidence that at least some elements of the holy book of Islam were still in flux even two hundred years after Muhammad was supposed to have lived. (p25)
And then, of course, he presents that evidence. Nothing in Muhammad: A Critical Biography is too “unwise” for the masses to know.
A history as spurious as that claimed for Islam naturally lends itself to ridicule and mirth. Spencer does well to resist the ubiquitous opportunities to mock, only occasionally giving a glimpse into the enjoyment he largely manages to keep off the page, such as when commenting on Muhammad’s child-bride Aisha recounting her husband being reminded of Qur’an verses his followers had memorised from his teachings, but that he had since forgotten about. She quotes him as saying: “He has reminded me of such-and-such Verses of such-and-such Suras, which I was caused to forget.” To this gem Spencer adds:
The Muslim need not worry: Allah guided even the forgetting (or discarding?) of passages of the Qur’an. In another hadith, Muhammad says: “Why does anyone of the people say, ‘I have forgotten such-and-such Verses (of the Qur’an)?’ He, in fact, is caused (by Allah) to forget. (p26)
It would be easy for the ordinary reader to lose their way through the morass that is the Islamic traditions. Spencer mitigates this risk with helpful navigation aids, the first one we encounter being:
And so, at the close of the seventh century, there are increasing mentions, emanating primarily from the caliph of the Arab empire, of Muhammad as a prophet of Allah. We also have testimony of his being a warrior and some indication that something momentous happened around the year 622, such that the followers of this prophet calculate the date from that event. We know he is an Arab prophet who taught that there is only one God and who rejected the divinity of Christ while professing to hold to the faith of Abraham. (p26)
Having said that, some of the referencing can be streamlined a bit more, especially referring to the same work interchangeably by its author and its editor, while a bibliography would also help.
Spencer’s Muslim detractors who might want to debunk this book would therefore find little they could wilfully misconstrue to mean something other than the author intends. Their other favourite tactic of dismissing their own sources as inauthentic when it suits them, merely promises to wake other sleeping dogs. This, for example:
It would be unwise to take for granted the proposition that these are actually and definitively manuscripts of the Qur’an, rather than of source material that was used to construct the Qur’an. One reason for this caution is encapsulated in a curious Islamic tradition that Malik ibn Anas, a jurist who died in 796, records: “Reading from the mushaf”—that is, a copy of the Qur’an—“at the Mosque was not done by people in the past. It was Hajjaj b. Yusuf [the Umayyad governor of Iraq from 694 to 714] who first instituted it.” Those who accept the traditional Islamic account of Muhammad’s life and the Qur’an’s origins simply dismiss this as an inauthentic tradition, but that presents a new problem: why was it [the story] invented? (pp27-28)
Spencer suggests: “It is much more plausible that the Qur’an did indeed only begin to be read in mosques in the time of Hajjaj and was projected back into the past to give it a patina of authenticity.” This is not to suggest, of course, that the Qur’an that might have been read in mosques in Hajjaj’s time is the same Qur’an we know today. Spencer says of the turn of the eighth century: “We seem to have mosques but no Islamic holy book and no prophet, or at least very little of either one.” (p29)
There is, however, also the question of Muslim reception of MACB, to which, in the present reviewer’s opinion, Spencer gives too little attention. To deny that Muhammad existed is of course, to deny the prophethood of Muhammad. Yet, a Muslim will have great difficulty in taking on MACB for critique, not because Spencer cannot be shown to be wrong, but because the very idea of the Qur’an only coming into existence in the eighth or ninth century draws the existence of Muhammad, the messenger of Allah delivering the Qur’an, into question. Shari'a mandates that anyone who challenges anything about Muhammad, Muslim or not, must be executed, “no repentance is sought from him.”
For a Muslim to read such a text is to place himself at the mercy of it. This is only the most extreme of the great many moral perversions resulting from the Shari’a elevation of allegiance over truth. To critique a text, then, at the very least, the Muslim will have to quote the text. To faithfully copy a text that runs foul of Shari’a is to run foul of Shari’a, because the copier is knowingly repeating such “lies,” rather than complying with the Shari’a doctrine of commanding the right and forbidding the wrong, i.e., correcting the “errors” in the original text.
Volumes of sayings of Muhammad, hadiths, material necessary for writing biographies, appear a century after these biographies, offering vastly more, and vastly more specific, detail of what Muhammad said and did. Any scholar concerned about the two-hundred year gap between these writing and the events to which they purport to refer need not fret. It was all collected on the basis of so-and-so heard from so-and-so, who heard from so-and-so..., every one a good Muslim, back past the biographies all they way to Muhammad himself. By the ninth century, a veritable Muhammad-making machine is in place, and it has been put to good use for centuries. Muslims quaintly refer to the workings of this machine as the “science of hadith”, a “science” that any real scholar would approach with caution. Spencer points out to his readers that:
Once all this material was published, the amount of information we have about Muhammad is truly breathtaking. Few figures of history from any time or place have been so extensively and meticulously documented. It is because of the sheer abundance of this material that Renan issued his famous assessment that Islam “was born in the full light of history.” And while the abundance of material is impressive indeed, there are good reasons to approach it with a certain reserve, at least if one is trying to determine what Muhammad actually did say and do. (p36)
Those who rely on the hadith as part of their validation of Muhammad, point out the extraordinary feats of memory that people are capable of. Spencer acknowledges this, but also points out the rather obvious problem of the inevitability of corruption in oral transmission. Leaving aside fading memory, Muslims deny that the “authentic hadiths” could be made up or forgeries, because of the 600,000 hadiths Muhammad Ibn Ismail al-Bukhari (810–870) managed to collect, he rejected 593,000 (98.8 percent) as fake. The criteria for distinguishing authentic from fake included such things as whether the chain of hearsay is broken or unbroken, how many people believed it, and whether those who believed it were good Muslims. The creation of the Muhammad backstory involved a large number of major “scholars”, all contemporaries, all centred on Iraq, in what was a major ninth-century undertaking. Whereas Stalin’s propaganda operation removed people from history, Hajjaj’s filled them in.
Try boarding a flight when the name in your passport differs by one letter from the name on your boarding pass, and you will be barred from the flight. Now imagine what will happen if none of the following corresponded: name; date of birth (both day and year) and place of birth, yet you insisted that you really are whom you say you are and demand to be let on board. In the place where you are likely to end up instead, the trained personnel who will resume your questioning will find your entire life story falling apart: name of the first school you attended; what subjects you studied; what grades you attained; what certificates you attained; your first job; date of your marriage, etc., etc. This is exactly what Chapter Three: “Becoming a Prophet”, reads like.
The subheadings resemble an interrogator’s checklist: Where was Muhammad Born?; On What Day was Muhammad Born?; In What Year was Muhammad Born?; What was the Name of the Prophet of Islam?; ... When was the First Revelation?; How Old was Muhammad When He Received His First Revelation?; Who Brought Muhammad His First Revelation?; What Did the First Revelation Say?; How Did Muhammad React to Receiving Revelations?; How Did Muhammad React to Receiving His First Revelation?; and finally, to ram the point home, Every Detail Controverted. Muhammad did not have to make it onto a plane, but he did have to make it into history, and in Spencer’s book, he doesn’t make it, because his story just won’t fly.
Concerning the character of the Muhammad that emerges from the traditions, Spencer says:
The answer to the question of why such traditions would have circulated and been considered to be authentic in at least some Islamic circles is the same as for other problematic hadiths, both those considered authentic in mainstream Islam and those that are rejected: stories of Muhammad circulated because those who fabricated and distributed them benefited from them in some way. The words they put in Muhammad’s mouth, or the deeds they attributed to him, were positions on controverted issues for which they wanted to show the support of the highest authority of all in Islam. If a hadith depicts Muhammad as doing something, some of the early Muslims wanted to do it as well and to justify the practice by wrapping it in Muhammad’s mantle. (p307) (My emphasis)
The present reviewer is certain that many Muslims can attest to the continuation of this practise from their own experience in the form of all and sundry, whether a religious authority or not, boldly asserting that the prophet did this and the prophet said that, without anyone—none of them being “people of knowledge”—questioning it, or able to challenge the context, or point out that he had also said or done the exact opposite elsewhere.
The perils of seeing only religion
For Muhammad to be so widely and consistently invoked as “the highest authority of all in Islam,” he must already have been established as the gold standard for Muslims, and the religious imperative to emulate him, likewise, universally established before such consistent invocation began. The relationship between establishing Muhammad and invoking Muhammad is a consequential omission in MACB. Such a relationship does not suggest itself, in our opinion, because Spencer examines the establishment of Muhammad as purely a matter of religion. As the book draws to a close, Spencer observes:
Whether he was an actual man who did the things that are ascribed to him or a legend constructed in order to justify and sanctify such behavior, the effect is the same: man or legend, Muhammad is one of the most consequential figures of world history. (p339) (My emphasis)
Clearly, the legend was constructed, but it could not have been constructed in order to “justify and sanctify such behavior.” The range of behaviours, as well as the places and times in which they were added, are too diverse and widespread for the degree of consistency they demonstrate. Spencer ascribes this consistency to a possible “kernel of historical accuracy” (p77). What Spencer then says is true, but also highlights the limitations of seeing Muhammad as purely a religious figure.
It cannot be stated with any certainty that these accounts even originally referred to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, or to some other individual who was claiming prophetic status, the stories of whom were subsumed into the Muhammad myth. Nevertheless, there may have been a person about whom at least some of these stories were originally told, and these stories may even have their roots in what this person actually said and did. By the time they become the words and deeds of Muhammad, however, it is impossible to determine which parts of these tales are historically accurate and which are not. (p77)
The consistency of all these diverse stories becoming, “the words and deeds of Muhammad,” in our view, could just as plausibly suggest an orchestrated, centralised effort over a relatively short period to create a Muhammad out an early tranche of these diverse stories, as a universal gold standard for diverse peoples scattered over a vast area; a kind of unifying, archetypical warlord who embodied all the ideals of barbarian nomadic society, insofar as such an abstraction could be constructed to appeal to diverse peoples while they were accreting to the far-flung empire. Spencer sees the problem more narrowly:
The hadith and Sira literature is indeed full of contradictions, clearly demonstrating that factions within the early Muslim community felt free to fabricate sayings of Muhammad to boost themselves and support their point of view on various issues. Then, the rival party would do the same, and the prophet of Islam would end up on both sides of an issue. (p44)
The problem with the abstract Muhammad was that it had to appeal to barbarian peoples in literal detail that made sense to them each in their own barbarian way. The present reviewer advances such a process as a more plausible explanation for Muhammad accumulating such seemingly incongruous character traits as the Sira and hadiths piled up over time. Where the various tribes had hitherto had little day-to-day contact with one another, they were now united into one great jihad raiding army in which their different Muhammads sooner or later had to clash, triggering strife that at the largest scale led to Sunni and Shi’a fabricating hadiths to discredit each other’s Muhammad, (p43).
That such rivalry would be religious would not at all have been out of place in late-antiquity. This was, after all, an age in which eternal certainties were collapsing, and in the most cataclysmic ways, often precipitated by forces well beyond anyone’s control and most people’s comprehension. The classical world was coming to an end, and every natural disaster was imbued with heightened eschatological significance. Who would be so foolish or wicked as to deny that the end of all existence was at hand? “It seems as if the environment in the Islamic world of the ninth century was one in which false traditions of Muhammad could proliferate with little difficulty,” (p44). Indeed. To each of the very different superstitious peoples now making up the ummah, any deviation from their norm meant calamity. Inter-Muslim warfare, however, directly imperilled the fundamental raison d’être of the ummah: bandying together to raid and plunder others. This, in the present reviewer’s conjecture, might be why the different schools of jurisprudence had to be invented, a centralised attempt to arrest damaging fracturing by imposing decentralisation.
But then Spencer says: “For succeeding generations, this only compounds the difficulty of trying to determine what, if anything, we can know with historical certainty about the prophet of Islam,” except that those succeeding generations were never expected to “determine what… we can know with historical certainty about the prophet of Islam.” While acknowledging the challenges facing the historian trying to get to the bottom of what is essentially a morass of competing propaganda wars, those succeeding generations were only ever supposed to “hear and obey,” (Qur’an 24:51). Islam was not invented for the ease and convenience of historians, but to mould very diverse barbarian peoples into an effective and overwhelming fighting force that, despite constant expansion, could maintain its unity, and hence, fighting effectiveness. That effort continues to this day, with several complications since thrown into the mix, such as nation-states, Zionism, globalisation and Western Muslims.
On the page and on the ground
Islam needs to be studied and subjected to serious critical scrutiny, something Spencer does with alacrity. But Islam is also our in-your-face daily experience of very large numbers of parasitic peoples sucking our coffers dry and turning our generally peaceful, prosperous societies inside-out, reducing once-proud cities to dangerous, rubbish-strewn Muslim wastelands. This phenomenon is well-described by the 14th-century father of political economy, Muhammad ibn Khaldun. In his Muqaddimah, under the section, “Places that succumb to the Arabs are quickly ruined,” he writes:
It is noteworthy how civilisation always collapsed in places the Arabs took over and conquered, and how such settlements were depopulated and the (very) earth there turned into something that was no (longer) earth. The Yemen where (the Arabs) live is in ruins, except for a few cities. Persian civilisation in the Arab 'Iraq is likewise completely ruined. The same applies to contemporary Syria. When the Banu Hilal and the Banu Sulaym pushed through (from their homeland) to Ifrigiyah [North Africa] and the Maghrib [Morocco/Algeria] in (the beginning of) the fifth [eleventh] century and struggled there for three hundred and fifty years, they attached themselves to (the country), and the flat territory in (the Maghrib) was completely ruined. Formerly, the whole region between the Sudan and the Mediterranean had been settled. This (fact) is attested by the relics of civilisation there, such as monuments, architectural sculpture, and the visible remains of villages and hamlets. (Chapter 2.25)
Keeping these two encounters, the academic and the experiential, separate is desirable up to a point. But it would be misleading to go so far as to treat Islam as “just a set of ideas,” as many do. Whether Spencer consciously intended it or not, his occasional subtle slips of humanity remind the reader that there are other dimensions to the author’s relationship with his subject. Note, for example, the sarcasm in the following passage:
Allah is primarily concerned with how this incident has affected the state of mind of his beloved prophet, and the deity moves swiftly to make sure that Muhammad was not unduly affected, (p92).
Aspects of Islam to which Spencer gives only the most tenuous consideration are: the political economy of Islam (and the culture associated with that); and Shari’a (and the behaviours and habits that flow from that), both of which have significant bearing on any search for a historical Muhammad within the Islamic tradition. The first, political economy, affects what the tradition claims and how Muslims respond to the claims over time, while the second, Shari’a, determines how Muslims come to terms with the growing gap between the traditional claims about Muhammad and their evolving responses to those claims. While Spencer does examine, and very thoroughly so, both the content of the tradition and contemporary Muslim attempts to come to terms with their increasing “distress” with those traditions, he sees the question only in terms of Islam being established within a highly-contested religious field, albeit through to contemporary Muslims increasingly failing to preserve the integrity of their faith.
The reading of Islamic political economy through a religious lens detaches economic relations between Muslims and their surrounding peoples from the wider currents of political economy of which early Islam was a part. Spencer says, for example:
Rather than set up his followers in their new community as farmers or merchants, Muhammad, according to Ibn Hisham, began a series of raids on the Quraysh of Mecca. The Muslims would live off what they were able to seize from the polytheists of Mecca, who had dared to reject the prophetic claim of their kinsman. Ibn Hisham’s account of the raids was apparently designed to emphasize that the Muslims should expect, and require whenever possible, the unbelievers to pay for their upkeep, in accord with the Qur’an’s stipulation that the subjugated “people of the book” must submit to the Muslims and pay the jizya [9:29]. (pp159-160) (My emphasis)
“Dared to reject” suggests that “The Muslims should expect ...the unbelievers to pay for their upkeep, in accord with the Qur’an’s stipulation that the subjugated ...pay the jizya,” is retribution for rejection, codified into a general principle. While it is true that the Qur’an does describe it as such, “Are the people of the townships then secure from the coming of Our wrath upon them as a night-raid while they sleep?” (Qur’an 7:97), religion was the principal framework in which reality was understood at the time. Qur'anic stipulations of this kind appear in a number of chapters, especially in chapters 7 and 8. The Muslims expecting the unbelievers to pay for their upkeep is centred on raiding surrounding settled communities and passing caravans, later extended to extorting tribute from vassals, while land tax (kharaj) and poll tax (jizya) played a lesser role. The focus was on raiding and plundering outsiders.
The way the Islamic political economy developed was but a particular instance of late-antique barbarian nomadic plunder economy. The Bedouin Arabs, barbarian desert nomads, had been plundering the Fertile Crescent’s settled populations for centuries before they became Muslims, just as other Eurasian barbarian nomads, for instance, the Mongols, the Turkic tribes, the Huns, the Rourans, the Goths, etc., had been plundering settlements. The Sassanians constructed defensive walls and the Romans defensive ramparts against barbarian Arab raiders out of the open desert.
The Bedouin Arabs developed the nomadic plunder political economy to its highest form, with a complex legal system and religious infrastructure that took centuries to complete. Their system was so successful at securing the means of living for a nomadic barbarian society, that the barbarian nomads in closest proximity to the Arabs, the Turkic tribes, became eager early adopters of this new way. This is a rare instance where the Muslim claim of Islam’s peaceful spread is actually true, but only because it spread to similarly violent, barbaric peoples. Organised for permanent plunder as Muslims, the Arabs became the frontrunners in a late-antique ideological arms race.
Looking only through a religious lens obscures all this from Spencer, who sees codifying the dividing of spoils from a caravan raid solely in terms of God’s commandments, and punishment for transgression against them, rather than imposing order in the interest of social harmony and societal survival:
The Muslims killed one of the Quraysh; two others surrendered, and a third escaped. Abdullah and his companions brought the entire caravan and the two prisoners back to Medina, where Abdullah instructed the others that “a fifth of what we have taken belongs to the apostle.” Ibn Hisham states that “this was before God had appointed a fifth of the booty to him.” Soon, this rule would pass into the Qur’an, where, unlike the mandate to stone adulterers, it remains to this day: “And know that whatever you take as spoils of war, indeed, a fifth of it is for Allah, and for the messenger and for the relatives and orphans and the needy and the traveler.” (8:41) (My emphasis)
While the various nomadic Bedouin tribes were more or less evenly balanced in power, it was in everyone’s interest to respect the sacred months (bloodshed between tribes was prohibited), not primarily so that they may go on pilgrimage, which, of course they did, but more importantly, so that at least some of the time, their caravans would get through safely, else they would be plundering one another to mutual destruction. Spencer’s treatment of the Islamic story of the Muslims violating the sacred months well illustrates the limits of his approach. For that, it warrants a closer look.
Explaining the infamous caravan raid
On pages 160-162, Spencer recounts a caravan raid by a band of Muslims that Muhammad had sent on an ostensible reconnaissance mission. The Muslims spied a heavily-laden Quraysh caravan, “ripe for raiding” on the last day of a sacred month. Spencer describes the Muslims’ dilemma thus:
The Muslims realized that if they refrained from attacking, the Quraysh caravan would make it safely back to Mecca before the end of the sacred month, but if they attacked, they would violate the sacred month’s prohibition on fighting.
The present reviewer finds such scruples on the part of the Muslims highly implausible, and would advance that the Muslims were concerned that if they did not attack, an easy opportunity to plunder would go to waste. According to Spencer’s original source, Ibn Ishaq, the leader of this band, Abdullah bin Jahsh bin Ri’ab al-Asadi, had received his instructions from Muhammad in a letter that he was not to read until he was two days into the expedition. According to Ibn Ishaq, Bin Jahsh shared Muhammad’s instructions with his companions as follows:
“The apostle has commanded me to go to Nakhla to lie in wait there for Quraysh so as to bring him news of them. He has forbidden me to put pressure on any of you, so if anyone wishes for martyrdom let him go forward, and he who does not, let him go back; as for me I am going on as the prophet has ordered.” (My emphasis)
Spencer highlights that the purpose of the mission was not to reconnoitre, but to raid, as is clear from, “if anyone wishes for martyrdom let him go forward, and he who does not, let him go back.” But it is equally clear that Muhammad had sent them on this raiding mission during a sacred month, knowing that if they carried out his instructions, they would violate it. The key is in the passage in Ibn Ishaq that Spencer will have read, but passed over, along with another:
“The raiders took council among themselves, for this was the last day of Rajab, and they said, ‘If you leave them alone tonight, they will get into the sacred area and will be safe from you; and if you kill them, you will kill them in the sacred month,’ so they were hesitant and feared to attack them.” (My emphasis)
This can lend weight to Spencer’s interpretation of the raiders’ reluctance to attack the caravan as concerns over violating the sacred month. However, such an interpretation sits uncomfortably alongside, firstly, Ibn Ishaq’s preceding sentence: “’Ukkasha [one of the Muslims], who had shaved his head, looked down on them, and when they saw him they felt safe and said, ‘They are pilgrims, you have nothing to fear from them.’” That ’Ukkasha had shaved his head was clearly a deception, which seemed to have worked. It makes no sense that only after such successful deception and the prize finally within reach, they would suddenly be stymied by concerns over the sacred month. They will have resolved themselves on this matter a lot earlier, being familiar with Muhammad’s instructions after the first two days on their journey of several hundred Kilometres.
Secondly, the raiders’ concern was not for the sacred month, but for where the caravan would be if they did not raid it then. “If you leave them alone tonight they will get into the sacred area and will be safe from you; and if you kill them [now], you will kill them in the sacred month.” The “sacred area” was out of bounds for violence at all times. That was the complication they had not anticipated, hence, “The raiders took council among themselves.”
Thirdly, and most crucially, Spencer quotes Ibn Ishaq as laying out the consequences for the Muslims for having violated the sacred month thus:
For their part, the Quraysh made the most of the situation, charging that “Muhammad and his companions have violated the sacred month, shed blood therein, taken booty, and captured men.” The Jews “turned this raid into an omen against the apostle.”
What Ibn Ishaq had written, though, was a bit more:
“The Quraysh said ‘Muhammad and his companions have violated the sacred month, shed blood therein, taken booty, and captured men.’ The Muslims in Mecca who opposed them said that they had done it in Sha'ban. The Jews turned this raid into an omen against the apostle.” (My emphasis)
Spencer passes over the critical sentence, “The Muslims in Mecca who opposed them [the Quraysh] said that they [Muhammad’s raiders] had done it in Sha'ban.” The Muslims had come across the caravan on the last day of Rajab, a sacred month. The debate the Muslims had amongst themselves was about whether to wait until “tonight,” i.e., after sunset, the start of the next day, namely 1 Sha’ban, by which time they would be out of the sacred month, but the caravan will that night have reached the sacred area. The legality or illegality of their action, therefore, hinged on whether the raid took place before or after sunset.
The Muslims in Mecca who opposed the Quraysh were making the case that the raid had taken place “in Sha’ban,” which means after sunset. Since the Quraysh were charging the Muslim raiders with violating the sacred month and not the sacred area, they are asserting that the raid had taken place before sunset. The raiding party could well avoid both the sacred area and the sacred month by launching their raid as the sun was setting, whereupon the Muslims of Mecca could claim that the sacred month of Rajab had not been violated, because, regardless of whether the caravan was attacked or proceeded unhindered, it was never going to make it back to Mecca before the end of the sacred month anyway.
What such ambiguity in the unfolding story of Muhammad could have meant, unfortunately, we do not get Spencer’s insight on, since it seems, he did not attach enough significance to this sentence to include it in his quotation, perhaps because unlike the sentences before and after, this one has no explicit connection to religion.
In the event, the raiding party returned with the spoils to Medina. Spencer continues:
Muhammad, however, was not pleased with either the gift or the raid itself. “I did not order you to fight in the sacred month,” he said icily to Abdullah, and he “held the caravan and the two prisoners in suspense and refused to take anything from them.” (p161) (My emphasis)
By claiming “I did not order you to fight in the sacred month,” Muhammad was practising tawriyah on his own side, amounting to what we today call plausible deniability. The creators of Muhammad are clearly asserting a principle here: the Muslims’ right to raid whenever they want.
While this passage above illustrates the centrality of religion in late-antique apprehension of reality, and Spencer gently mocks the Muslim apprehension of reality, he does not escape that apprehension himself. His subtle ridicule of Islam is not as religion, but as Islam. The problems he sees in the story of Muhammad are not problems for the religious mind, only for the Muslim mind. This is why we can read a passage such as the one below, that holds much truth, but does not entirely satisfy, unless the reader, too, is religious.
As so often happens in these accounts, it was Allah who had the last word, siding with Abdullah and his companions in a new revelation: “They ask you about warfare in the sacred month. Say, Warfare during it is an awesome sin, but to turn people away from the way of Allah, and to disbelieve in him and expelling his people from the sacred mosque, is more serious with Allah, for persecution is worse than slaughter” (Qur’an 2:217). The Quraysh had turned people away from following Muhammad and expelled the Muslims from the mosque in Mecca (which, at this time, was full of the idols of the various Arab tribes). In doing this, they had forfeited the protection of the sacred month. (p161)
We hope to have shown that the Muslims no longer needed the sacred months, that by then were simply getting in their way. The Muslims carried out several attacks during sacred months: once before the infamous caravan raid, and at least sixteen times thereafter during Muhammad's lifetime. To this day, Muslims stick to the principle of ignoring international law while their target countries continue to observe such law, but contrary to Spencer’s suggestion, this is not “to strike back at the enemies of religion,” but to defeat those enemies by deceit and terror the better to plunder them. As Spencer himself points out:
Ibn Hisham notes that this revelation peacefully resolved the tensions among the Muslims: “And when the Quran came down about that and God relieved the Muslims of their anxiety in the matter, the apostle took the caravan and the prisoners.” (pp162) (My emphasis. Confusingly, Spencer refers to the same work sometimes by its author, Ibn Ishaq, and at other time by its editor, Ibn Hisham).
This whole story seems to the present reviewer as far more likely a post-rationalisation by a power that has grown sufficiently strong to come out on top in a plunder free-for-all, but still wanting to show that its prowess was a favour from God. Allahu-akbar! Our God is greater than yours! According to Muhammad, "God will keep you safe and grant you booty... Honest property is good for an honest man," (Mishkat al-Masabih 3756). So join us and plunder with us, or be plundered! "Accept Islam; you will be safe," (Sunan Abi Dawud 3003). Muhammad saying of apostates, "Whoever changes his religion, kill him," (Sunan an-Nasa'i 4059), without the delicacy means, whoever deserts jihad, kill him.
Spencer’s thesis that Muhammad received Qur’anic revelations as expediency demanded is a strong one, but it is not watertight in the sense that verses line up chronologically with events in Muhammad’s life. Notwithstanding the chronological order of the Qur’an remaining an issue for hefty debate—so much for, “This is the book of which there is no doubt”—when Abdullah bin Jahsh in Ibn Ishaq’s story mutters, “To hear is to obey,” he is “quoting” Qur’an 24:51, a Meccan surah, suggesting that the creators of Muhammad wrote the Qur’an, the Sira, and the hadith all at the same time, dropping in whatever was needed wherever it was needed.
As Spencer handles the story, he places the revelation of Chapter 8 before that of Chapter 2, guided by the unfolding of events. This sequencing contradicts both the Islamic and the accepted Western chronologies of the Qur’an, where they appear as: 2, 8 (Islamic); and 2, 98, 64, 62, 8 (Nöldeke-Schwally). The present reviewer believes Spencer’s placement, 8, 2, to be correct, but not for the reasons Spencer advances. He is correct because Chapter 8 preceding Chapter 2 is borne out by the Arabs raiding to plunder long before they became Muslims.
Why Muhammad is a problem for contemporary Muslims
Spencer seems to have enjoyed bringing to light the web of contradictions that the architects of Islam got their new prophet ensnared in, as they tried to respond to ever-changing contradictory pressures. The demands put on the character and exploits of the purported founder of this new religion (and ideology) while he was being created are not the same as the demands put on him today. And unfortunately for Muslims, because Muhammad was created perfect, to change him in any way is to diminish him. If he can be improved, then by that very fact, he could not have been perfect before. This conundrum bedevils the entire religion and ideology, pun not intended, with serious implications for contemporary Muslims.
One of the copious hadiths Robert Spencer quotes in uncovering the Muhammad story is Sunan ibn Majah 2517 (Sahih), that neatly encapsulates the most powerful leitmotif of MACB:
“We used to sell our slave women and the mothers of our children (Umahat Awaldina) when the Prophet was still living among us, and we did not see anything wrong with that.”
The inescapable problem for Islam, claiming as it does to be the perfect and final religion, hence “good for all time,” and putting Muhammad forward as the exemplar of probity, to be emulated by all, is that humans, including Muslims, despite Islam, are subject to social and ethical evolution. “We did not see anything wrong with that” at the time, but we do now. And whenever a large enough gap had emerged between what we saw as wrong then and what we see as wrong now, a revision of the entire tradition was required in quest of an ever-illusive inner consistency to Islam. Islam might be perfect for humans as Muslims, but is antithetical to Muslims as humans, an antithesis that manifests as the ever-changing character of the perfect man, one who can never quite make up his mind about what is good and what is bad.
The barbarian tribal ethics, with plagiarised accretions from surrounding religions, upon which the imperial ethics of Islam are constructed, offered mitigation of the unavoidable tension that would emerge between Islam, fixed at a point from which Muslim ethics would inevitably come to depart, and its own ethically evolving adherents. The mitigation is the equation of humanity with Muslims. Muslims may be, "The best of people raised up from mankind," (Qur'an 3:111) but the unbelievers are, "the worst of creatures," (Qur'an 98:6). All who are not Muslim are simply not human, underlying the glee and pride with which Muslims can sling living babies into ovens and cut open the chest of a living man, tear out his heart and eat it, as well as the Muslim impulse to reject all that is not Muslim, especially criticism and critique.
But a mitigation is not a solution, and with time, the gap between the mitigation and the solution would grow, precisely because ethics evolves. How the creators of Islam tried to keep up with this gap through the sayings and doings of Muhammad, an effort that continues to this day, is the “critical” in “critical biography”.
Spencer says that Ibn Hisham “admits” that he omitted from his version of Ibn Ishaq’s biography of Muhammad, “things which it is disgraceful to discuss; matters which would distress certain people; and such reports as al-Bakka’i told me he could not accept as trustworthy.” It will have been no admission, but a claim to validation in an honour-shame culture, and applies to this day. This “correcting” of “things which it is disgraceful to discuss; matters which would distress certain people,” is a never-ending process in which the perfect religion, good for all time, is trapped, given that its standard of perfection is that of late-antique barbarism, and thus increasingly a moral affront to societies civilising around it. The insular and self-reinforcing nature of caliphates entrench such standards amongst Muslims, thereby helping to preserve the respectability of the traditions and continuing to elevate, rather than “distress certain people” with matters that have become “disgraceful to discuss”.
Up till the twentieth century, for example, Muslims the world over admired, and countless numbers emulated, Muhammad’s excellent example of marrying and having sex with a little child, and defended with pride the Qur’anic commandment that a man beat his wife if he fears she might disobey him. While most still do, the West’s civilising influence on Muslims turns ever-increasing Shari’a provisions into “things which it is disgraceful to discuss; matters which would distress certain people,” for significantly large numbers of Muslims. One of the wrongs that Shari’a forbids is a Muslim speaking ill of Islam or anything to do with Islam, including another Muslim, while speaking ill of Muhammad earns an unconditional death penalty.
To many Western women, a perfect man is a feminist, and it comes as no surprise, then, that to the Muslim women amongst them, the perfect man, Muhammad, was a feminist—what else? While “beat them” can become “beat them (with a feather),” how do you “interpret” the perfect man’s pronouncement on divorce into something more feminist?
When Ibn 'Umar was asked about a person who had given three divorces, he said, “Would that you gave one or two divorces*, for the Prophet ordered me to do so. If you give three divorces then she cannot be lawful for you until she has married another husband (and is divorced by him).” (Sahih al-Bukhari 5264) (*to “give three divorces” means to say to your wife three times: “You are divorced.”)
Amongst Western Muslims in particular, most are mortally shamed by the Shari’a requirement that if a divorced couple wishes to remarry—in truth, if the husband wants to take her back (she is not considered)—then another man must first marry her and have sex with her, then she must seek divorce from him (only a husband may initiate divorce) and once she is again divorced, may her former husband take her back. The law of Muhammad, the lawgiver, the barbarian’s barbarian, stipulates:
When a free man has pronounced a threefold divorce, the divorced wife is unlawful for him to remarry until she has married another husband in a valid marriage and the new husband has copulated with her, which at minimum means that the head of his erect penis fully enters her vagina. (Reliance of the Traveller, Book N7.7)
At that time in the ummah’s history, such was the ideal man. “To this day,” writes Spencer, “the information about Muhammad that forms the basis of the canonical Islamic understanding of who he was and what he did comes from the ninth-century biographical material about him,” material already sanitised to ninth-century standards of barbarism from the seventh-century barbarian setting of Muhammad.
Uncannily, the title of Chapter Two, “Creating Muhammad,” evokes a chilling foreshadowing of the creation of the “Palestinians,” a key concern in one of Robert Spencer’s other great books, The Palestinian Delusion, and also of the creation of “Socialist Man,” an infallible hero in the present. Vladimir Lenin, in setting up the Political Bureau, made communists communists. That politburo, together with the Muslim Brotherhood, made Palestinians Palestinians, thus bringing us full circle back to Hajjaj bin Yusuf, formerly the caliphate’s head of internal security, effectively the one who initiated the long process of making Muslims Muslims.
Muhammad: A Critical Biography, the author’s obvious depth of scholarship notwithstanding, is written as a fatiha, an opening of the legend of Muhammad, together with its ancillary components, the Qur’an, Islam and the demonym Muslims, through an extensive series of manageable cycles of openings, rather than structured to prove a single thesis over a vast canvas, thereby remaining both eloquent and eminently readable throughout. It is a captivating window on a sleuth scouring through forbidden knowledge.
Note that Spencer is not only saying that there is scant historical evidence for the existence of the Muhammad of Islamic tradition, he is also saying, and more importantly, that the Muhammad of Islamic tradition has been deliberately fabricated over some period in the past, retro-fitted into a period preceding that and continuously patched up ever since, as his barbarism falls behind even the loathsome civilising of Muslims, though not in so many words. This is where Spencer is at his most creative and a joy to see his mind at work.
Yet, it has to be said, armed with a more powerful explanatory concept than a religious tussle, the present reviewer believes that Spencer might find himself going down an unfamiliar road, but it is a road that promises both broader connections and deeper insights. Having said that, what Spencer does accomplish with the tools he has equipped himself with is nothing short of extraordinary.
Egyptian journalist Khaled Montaser once observed about Muslims:
We are a people incapable of comprehending sarcasm, since it requires a bit of thinking and intellectualising. And we read with great speed and a hopeful eye, not an eye for truth or reality. Some of us are struck with blindness when we read things that go against our hopes.
Montaser’s observation draws attention to another aspect of the Muhammad story that could receive more explicit treatment in MACB, that of the place of Muhammad in the increasingly embattled Muslim psyche. Since non-Muslims are neither cognitively impaired from a Muslim upbringing, nor compelled only ever to praise Muhammad, it bears warning them directly that these stories are never about historical accuracy. They are always propaganda, always about engineering advantage, whether at a social or personal level. Only the most naïve non-Muslim would ever think that they have anything to do with anything else.
Historical accuracy has a further level of irrelevance: even though, “hundreds of millions of Muslims regard it as absolute fact and as instructions for how they should live today,” they have no choice but to, at the same time, both insist on historical accuracy and ignore historical accuracy, because the further Muslims get in time from the historicity they cling to, the more counter-productive that historicity becomes, forcing Muslims to repeatedly “interpret” and “re-interpret” the supposedly historical and authentic aspects of their faith. In fact, the present illustrates very well the historical process that Spencer describes. Were it not for our modern preservation of records and global access to the same information, now would be exactly the time when a new corpus of hadiths would have appeared, all sahih, of course.
Spencer does very well at tracking contemporary Muslim responses to their mounting crisis of confidence in the final prophet. Unfortunately for them, this crisis cannot be resolved through the introduction of another madhhab, which is, in effect, what “reformist/modernist/progressive/...” Muslims have been trying to do. But Muslims know about Muhammad and how wonderful he was almost before they know anything else about Islam. They know to say “Sallallahu-alayhi-wa-sallam” (peace be upon him), before they can speak properly. So when a historian, such as Robert Spencer, goes about the scholarly business of uncovering the historical Muhammad, he is, wittingly or unwittingly, doing nothing less than escalating a long-running psychological war on the Muslims. Neither he, nor anyone else, can do anything about the fact that Muslims will take it that way. A conscious counter campaign to the centuries-long Muslim psychological war on infidels, aka da'wah, starts with material such as MACB.
Spencer critiques not only Muhammad as held forth in the Islamic traditions, but also those doing their level best to shield the Muhammad of the traditions and their own sense of self, to fend off all critical exposures and to repair all damage to the exalted status of their prophet. It is a steep, uphill battle that they can only lose. The ferocity of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo jihad mass-murder in Paris attests to the damage the Muslim psyche had suffered in the public ridicule of Muhammad up to that point, and the depth of Muslim frustration at the relentless onslaught of “lies” about their prophet. Spencer says:
...contemporary Muslims are far more concerned for the honor of Muhammad than they are for that of Allah himself: in this, they are simply imitating the divinity himself, who was deeply anxious to secure Muhammad’s happiness and well-being. (p79)
This is a missed opportunity. Robert Spencer’s case is solid. There is no dispute over that. Yet, the implications of the sentence, “contemporary Muslims are far more concerned for the honor of Muhammad than they are for that of Allah himself,” if teased out further than, “they are simply imitating the divinity himself,” could have opened the door to the Muslim psyche. This would throw light on Muslims’ greater regard for Muhammad than for Allah and the centrality of hadiths to their lives, as opposed to the Qur’an, the perfect, permanent and immutable words of a distant and perfect Allah that had existed since before creation. In a culture that runs on lies and deceit, there isn’t much you can do with a figure such as Allah, yet exactly such a figure was needed as the severe and arbitrary judge in the Hereafter. The Muslim psyche demonstrates mastery of a delicate balance between reverence for Muhammad, reverence for Allah and reverence for the two as one. Hints for another book, perhaps?
The architects of Islam “needed an explanation for contradictions that would allow them to make the revisions they needed to adapt their new religion to changing circumstances.” (p97) The story of the Satanic verses perhaps best illustrates the nightmare that the editorial process must have been. Robert Spencer sums up the complex problems facing the editors at this point: the oneness of God, the perfection of the Qur’an and the infallibility of Muhammad are all, at this point, untenable and very obviously so. The Satanic verses damage-control measure turned into an ever-deepening hole that has offered much mirth to critics of Islam and much anguish to Islamic apologists, especially the Muslims amongst them, for they know exactly how embarrassing this all is, while the interfaith idealists perforce cannot acknowledge this mess, for they need to cherrypick their way through verses and hadiths to construct their ideal Muhammad that they can hold up to Muslims as their bona fides.
Throughout, the main ideological problem confronting the architects of Islam has been fortifying the concept of one god and maintaining it in the face of considerable countervailing forces, but at the same time clearly differentiating their one God from Judaism. The safest way to accomplish the latter without damaging the one God of Judaism was to separate Jews from Judaism and by declaring Judaism originally Islam, and the Jews people of irredeemable evil for turning Islam into what is now Judaism. Islam, as brought by the final prophet, would rescue the one God from the clutches of the Jews, restore it from the corruption of the Christians and shield it from the polytheism of the Arabs.
The biography under construction for this new prophet had to keep all these balls in the air in an age of oral predominance and constant self-interest-driven embellishment, contradiction and confounding of stories (the Muslim remedy for this being the laughable chain-of-narration principle). The Satanic verses incident very well illustrates just how intertwined the creation of the Qur’an, Muhammad, the Sira (his biography) and the hadith were and remain. Unfortunately for the architects of Islam, the contradiction that came to be know as the “Satanic verses incident” first came to light after that perfect word of Allah had been published. It was also the most critical failure in the editorial process. To this very day, Muslims remain bedevilled by it. They don’t take too kindly to anyone picking at that scab.
This review describes Robert Spencer’s three books on Muhammad as suggesting a trilogy. Such a relationship is more accidental than planned. In his first book, the 2006 The Truth about Muhammad, Spencer confines himself to what “the great majority of Muslims” believe, a fair-enough scope. By the third book in a conscious trilogy, the author might have broadened his scope to include what “the great majority of Muslims” are. This is only a tangential aspect of MACB, yet, in the present reviewer’s opinion, it already turns Muhammad: A Critical Biography into more than a great and well-written historical treatise; it is also a weapon of war.
Picture credits:
Library of Congress - http://www.wdl.org/en/item/58/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27023733
Charlie Hebdo
Comments:
On 22 March 2025 at 22:43, Rafael Castro wrote:
Dear Anjuli
Thanks! I enjoyed reading the review.
Do you think it makes sense to canvas Jaleel to translate Spencer's books and to then make them freely available online?
Personally, I am skeptical about challenges to the historicity of religious founders. Historians have also claimed that Jesus or Moses are mythical figures and this doesn't dent the faith and fanaticism of believers. What does dent this faith are three things:
1) Scientific falsehoods in religious texts.
2) Logical inconsistencies in these texts.
3) Evidence of the toxic effects of religion and religiosity on economic and social development.
I think that wikiislam does a good job at highlighting the first two areas. However, the third sphere remains underexplored.
For example, I posited to a Pakistani friend that the Muslim habit of rarely following up words with actions is a consequence of Muslim doctrine that the most degenerate Muslim is better than the best non-Muslim. Since the litmus test of Muslimness is not proper Islamic behavior but merely professing the Shahada, it logically follows that words are of paramount importance, even when they are not followed by actions or even when actions directly contradict words.
This friend of mine agreed with this thesis.
Shavua tov!
Rafael
On 29 March 2025 at 20:24, Anjuli Pandavar wrote:
Shalom Rafael,
Let me dive straight in:
A. I once asked Robert Spencer about the prospects for a Hebrew translation of one of his books and he explained that translation was in the hands of his publisher. Having said that, I agree that an Arabic translation would have a powerful impact. Speak to him if you want to explore it.
B. "...this doesn't dent the faith and fanaticism of believers."
Is this Spencer's aim? Definitely not.
Is this the aim of challengers to the historicity of religious founders? I'd say rarely, and if so, then it would be a curious aim, as historians are concerned with what was, and not with how anyone should react to what they discover. They are likely to understand that faith is a function of personality and none of their business. It only becomes their business when the person of faith challenges their conclusions, or even their challenges in principle. This does not mean that the historian cannot be a person of faith, as, indeed, Robert Spencer is. It could be—and I am making no claim—that he is able to be a historian because the religious founder in question is not the one of his faith. As a historian, he would be well aware of such work done on other religious founders, including of his own, and aware of how their work is received, by the faithful and the secular alike.
C. "What does dent this faith are three things: 1) Scientific falsehoods in religious texts; 2) Logical inconsistencies in these texts; 3) Evidence of the toxic effects of religion and religiosity on economic and social development.
This is a curious assertion, especially in the context of Spencer's book and its reception amongst Muslims. Muslims have been confronted with the three things you list since the 19th century in academic circles, and since the 1990s more widely. They have always successfully resisted such challenges because it is hardwired into them that the Qur'an and Allah are perfect, and anything other than praise for Muhammad deserves death.
As long as such challenges came from outside of Islam, they had a faith-safe defence against them: they're enemies of Allah; of course they would spread such lies. But such challenges have also increasingly been coming from apostates in the Muslim world. These, too, they have been able to reject out of hand for obvious reasons.
But then... While a well-respected, world-renowned sheikh, Dr Yasser Qadhi, in trying to shield the perfect preservation of the Qur'an from a Muslim running his mouth and risking blowing the whole scam wide open, the sheikh himself ran his mouth and blew the whole thing wide upon. Note: a sheikh, and not just any sheikh, and his novice, between them, both defending Islam, not only dented the faith of many Muslims, they shattered it. Many Muslims left Islam as a direct result of that fiasco, quickly dubbed the holes-in-the-narrative controversy.
While Muslims are generally immune to exposure to: 1) Scientific falsehoods in religious texts; 2) Logical inconsistencies in these texts; 3) Evidence of the toxic effects of religion and religiosity on economic and social development, they are not accustomed to relentless onslaught from the kufaar and generally do not expose themselves to them in ways that would make their faith susceptible to challenge.
This is not the case, however, with those who give da'wah. Of course, they receive their da'wah training from Muslims, and Muslims are incapable of critical thinking. The only kind of thinking they are capable of imagining is their own: never questioning; deference to the word of authority; and hear and obey. Since they've learnt all the right things to say, they fan out all fired up to bring the world to Islam, expecting crowds to flock to say the Shahada.
Instead, they encounter regular non-Muslims who not only are able to demolish their thinking even before getting anywhere near all the good stuff the Muslim wants to tell them, but it turns out they actually know Islam better than the Muslims do, not being hamstrung by Muslim thinking. The non-Muslims turn every da'wah attempt into a challenge and invariably prevail, leaving the Muslim baffled and frustrated, never able to figure out what just happened, which means they'll soon be back to try again. Thus, by attrition of their own making, Muslims not only wear themselves down, lose heart and quietly disappear from the scene, but these are also public spectacles in which the Muslims seek to humiliate their challengers and end up humiliated themselves, before non-Muslims and Muslims alike. At the end of the day, it is Muslims themselves who hang Islam. Non-Muslims simply provide the rope.
D. "the third sphere [evidence of the toxic effects of religion and religiosity on economic and social development], remains underexplored."
This is true. This is the area I work in, 1. the psychological impact of being Muslim (hence the tagline of my website: "Recovering from Islam"); and 2. the political economy of Islam.
E. I'm sorry, but I'm going to be a little skeptical as to whether your Pakistani friend is capable of appreciating such subtlety, and secondly, the connection you're trying to make between the Shahada and action is overly simplistic. Your intuition is correct, but both the origin and the path to the outcome are quite a bit more complex, and if your Pakistani friend is a Muslim, then it is unlikely that he will have explored this question, since this is exactly how doubt arises, something a Muslim is taught to avoid at all costs. It is even possible that your friend agreeing with you was his way of shutting it off.
I look forward to continuing this debate with you.
Layla tov.
Anjuli
On 3 April 2025 at 16:46, Ben Dor A. wrote:
Dear Anjuli Pandavar
Thank you for sharing this interesting review of Robert Spencer's books.
I will definitely use it. 😊 and share it.
I have found online a very detailed online historical article about the Arab conquest of the Holy Land with maps and pictures, including many references.
Regretfully, it's only in Hebrew with many links to other sources.
https://www.hamichlol.org.il/%D7%94%D7%9B%D7%99%D7%91%D7%95%D7%A9_%D7%94%D7%A2%D7%A8%D7%91%D7%99_%D7%A9%D7%9C_%D7%90%D7%A8%D7%A5_%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%9C
Should you wish to get the gist of the main information for your knowledge, you can open the link with Chrome and translate it to English. The translation is imperfect but you will get the general idea of the events and characters involved including dates and places. If you need a specific clarification of a certain part, let me know.
Enjoy 😊
Best Regards
Ben Dor A.