Islamism - 7

[ramana]

A French essay



Understanding Islam



Unfortunately most of what he says applies to Christianity too.

Over the past ten years, the work of a number of researchers has made it possible to uncover texts written in Georgian, Armenian, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew or Coptic, that give information (a few sentences in books of several hundred pages) on what the Islam of the origins was. The discoveries are surprising : Mohammed was never a Muslim, for the words Muslim and Islam appeared sixty years after the death of Mohammed. His first companions called themselves the 'Magrayes', a Syro-Aramaic term meaning emigrants. Their holy language was Syro-Aramaic, not Arabic. Mohammed was not born in Mecca, for the work of Patricia Crone, a specialist on Islam who teaches at Princeton and Cambridge, has shown that the town was founded around 670, forty years after the death of Mohammed.



Islam as we know it today is a fabrication by the caliphs, invented to serve as an ideology for the empire that Mohammed's companions had started building, and that his successors developed. Mohammed's religion was Nazareism, a Judeo-Christian sect born in the Middle-East. Nazareism could not serve as a binding agent for the empire they were setting up, on the one hand because it was not Arabic, while the Arab conquerors wanted a religion that would justify their pre-eminence over all other Muslims, on the other hand because Nazareism anticipated the return of Christ, who would come and take command of the Nazarene armies to conquer the world by force. Since that had not happened, Nazareism had to be replaced by a religion that made no false prophecies. The construction of the new religion out of material drawn from the earlier one and the obliteration of all trace of the earlier religion went on for over two centuries. Hence the destruction of all written evidence of what had happened, and the construction by the caliphs in power of a sacred book in Arabic, an Arab prophet, and an Arab history that could be used as a basis for their ideology.



The enormous number of researchers in every field in the modern world, the use of new techniques in exegesis, archaeology, epigraphy, etc., the discovery of ancient, non-Muslim texts on the development of Islam, dating from 10 to 30 years after the event, and not from over 200 like the Islamic documents - all the above are leading people to question everything they thought they knew about the development of Islam. It is unlikely that the Islamic religion and ideology will be able to withstand the destruction of their historical foundations by modern science.

What do we know about Muhammad Patrica Crone



and

Google Book:



Meccan Trade and Rise of Islam



Patricia Corne



Meccan Trade and Rise of Islam



Fordham Uty article.