[url="http://bastiat.net/en/cercle/meetings/Understanding_Islam.htm"]Understanding Islam[/url]
Since this is my first post here, mods can move this post to the relevant thread.....
Quote:Account of the talk given by Jean-Jacques Walter on 16th February 2008
One of the rules of Judeo-Christian civilisation is that the law is superior to power. The most ancient demonstration of this is when David seduced Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. When David learnt that Bathsheba was pregnant, he didn't know how to explain it to Uriah, and had the latter killed so as not to have to answer for it. David was punished by God, because king though he was, he had no right to kill his neighbour to take his wife : the law is above the king. In the Old Testament, this story is presented as exemplary, but, in fact, it took 3000 years for that principle to become integrated into Christian societies. Only two centuries ago, there was a legal principle in France, "Rex a legibus solutus est", in other words, he who lays down the law is above the law. I remember a discussion I had ten years ago with a member of the Council of State. He said to me, "Yes, of course, the State is subject to the law like anyone else, but it happens to be one step above". That is exactly what Orwell remarked : "All men are equal, but some are more equal than others".
It took two thousand years for the principle of equality to be adopted by society as a whole.
When one analyses societies that have been shaped by an ideology, it is important to look closely at the ideology, because that is what enforces itself in the end, and eventually changes society. This holds good for Islam. What matters is its ideology and not the way in which it is embodied in different countries. The wars between France and Islam are an example. We always speak of Poitiers : "the Muslims were defeated at Poitiers and they left". We are more or less consciously comparing it to other battles, for instance the battle of Vouillé, in 507 : Clovis defeated the Visigoths and Aquitaine became French. That is not at all what happened with Islam.
The Muslims entered what was then France in 714. They seized Narbonne, which became their base for the next 40 years, and carried out methodical raids. They ravaged the Languedoc region from 714 to 725, destroyed Nîmes in 725 and devastated the right bank of the Rhone as far north as Sens.
In 721, a Muslim army of 100,000 soldiers laid siege to Toulouse, defended by Eudes, the duke of Aquitaine. Charles Martel sent troops to help Eudes. After six months' siege, the latter made a sally and crushed the Muslim army, which retreated in disarray to Spain and lost 80,000 soldiers in the campaign. Little is said of the battle of Toulouse because Eudes was a Merovingian. The Capetians were in the process of becoming kings of France and didn't fancy recognizing a Merovingian victory.
The Muslims concluded that it was dangerous to attack France from the eastern end of the Pyrenees, and they conducted their fresh attacks from the western end of the chain. 15,000 Muslim horsemen took and destroyed Bordeaux, then the Loire region, laid siege to Poitiers, and were finally stopped by Charles Martel and Eudes twenty kilometres north of Poitiers in 732. The surviving Muslims broke up into small bands and continued to ravage Aquitaine. Fresh soldiers would join them from time to time to take part in the looting. Those bands were eventually eradicated only in 808, by Charlemagne.
The ravages in the east went on until, in 737, Charles Martel went south with a powerful army, successively regained possession of Avignon, Nîmes, Maguelone, Agde, Béziers, and laid siege to Narbonne. A Saxon attack on the north of France compelled Charles Martel to leave the region. Eventually, in 759, Pépin le Bref regained possession of Narbonne and crushed the invaders definitively.
The latter broke up into small bands, as they had done in the west, and continued to devastate the country, notably by deporting the men to turn them into castrated slaves, and the women to introduce them into North African harems, where they were used to give birth to Muslims. The bastion of these bands was at Fraxinetum, the present-day La Garde-Freinet. An area of about 10,000 square kilometres, in the Maures massif, was totally depopulated.
In 972, the Muslim bands captured Mayeul, the Abbot of Cluny, on the road to Mount Geneva. The event created an immense stir. Guillaume II, count of Provence, spent 9 years conducting a sort of electoral campaign in order to motivate the inhabitants of Provence, then, from 983 onwards, methodically hunted down all the Muslim bands, small or large. In 990, the last of them were destroyed. They had devastated France for two centuries.
Muslim pressure did not cease for all that. It was exerted over the following 250 years by raids carried out from the sea. The men who were captured were taken to castration camps in Corsica, then deported to the forced labour prisons of Dâr al Islam, and the women of nubile age to the harems. The Muslim pirates' lairs were in Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, on the coasts of Spain and of North Africa. Toulon was completely destroyed in 1178 and 1197, the population massacred or deported, the town left deserted.
Finally, the Muslims having been driven from Corsica, Sicily, Sardinia, from southern Italy and northern Spain, the attacks on French soil ceased but they continued at sea. It was not until 1830, that France, exasperated by the exactions, made up its mind to go to Algeria in order to definitively destroy the last bastions of the Muslim pirates
What is striking is that between the years 714, the first incursion, and 1830, the final crushing of the Barbary pirates, there elapsed over a millennium. Now no political organisation lasts for a thousand years. How then was that endless war kept going for so long?
The active principle of the war was the same as that of the war waged by the Spaniards on their own soil, and which also lasted over one thousand years : ideology. Only an ideology is lasting enough to give rise, century after century, to that sort of inexpiable war. That is why, if you wish to understand Islam, you must study its ideology and not conduct an almost ethnological study of the different varieties of Islam. I repeat : its ideology; because, for Muslim scholars, Islam is Dîn, Dunya, Daoula, i.e. religion, society, state. Khomeiny used to say that 90% of Islamic rules are to do with civil society, and that, in an Islamic library, 90% of the books deal with society and the state, and only 10% with private morals and man's relationship with God. The problem with Islam is not religion, it is the civil part of the ideology.
Islam is founded on the same structure as political totalitarian machines. The most well known are the total socialisms of the 20th century, but if we delve deep into history, the Akkad dynasties, ancient China, the Incas etc. were totalitarian machines that have a certain number of elements in common with Islam. To show up these elements, one only has to compare the main features of total socialisms with those of Islam.
Islam, like soviet socialism, is founded on a dual basis : on the one hand the ideological foundation, and on the other the imposition of that ideology through armed force. The combination of the two is characteristic. The earliest person to speak of this was Sima Qian, one of the greatest intellectuals in China, a historian, who was also prime minister. As an intellectual and as prime minister, he was perfectly acquainted with a system based both on ideology and on violence. In his letter to Jen An, which dates back to 91 B.C., he explains that, in such a system, there can be only two solutions :
* physical death : you oppose the system and in that case you are killed
* spiritual death : you pretend to believe in the ideology, and in that case you wear a mask.
But "the mask sticks to your face", as Sima Qian puts it. The mask becomes your face and you become what you didn't want to be. It may take a few years or a few generations, but it always happens.
Thus, according to Sima Qian, in a system founded both on force and on ideology, one can choose only between physical death and spiritual death.
That is precisely the structure of Islam, founded both on ideology and on the use of armed force. I have already spoken of violence towards the exterior. One must add to that the interior violence that is exerted on the 'dhimmis'. The term 'dhimmis' refers to peoples conquered by the Muslim armies, who lose all their political rights and the greater part of their civil rights, and who become foreigners in their own country. They are driven to extinction by a combination of methods.
Throughout antiquity, and right up until the second half of the 19th century, there were fluctuations in population due either to famines, or to epidemics, or to wars. After each decline, the population would increase again until it reached its equilibrium, that is, the maximum number of people who could live on the land considering the agricultural techniques available. The Muslims built new towns, Oran, Cordoba, Cairo, etc. while slaughtering or deporting the local populations, and peopling the towns with Arabs either from the Hedjaz region or from Syria. At first, these immigrants were few in number. In North Africa there were 5 million Berbers. About 200,000 Arab-Muslims were brought in and established in areas that had been depopulated to that end. The immigrant population grew to the maximum number tolerated by the agricultural production of the occupied areas, they then cut up the remaining land into strips that were depopulated one by one and given over to the expansion of the Arab-Muslims. Each successive strip was small enough not to stir up a general revolt, but sufficient for the Arab-Muslims never to reach their demographic equilibrium, and to be able to continue their growth.
Alongside localized massacres in order to invade new areas, a fall in the birth rate was deliberately brought about among non-Muslims. The latter, the 'dhimmis', had to wear a round yellow badge on dark clothes. They could use only donkeys, lowly mounts, camels and horses, noble mounts, being reserved for Muslims. Donkeys could only be mounted with a pack and not a saddle, in the country and not in town. Dhimmis' houses had to be smaller in size than those of Muslims. Many other provisions of a similar nature destroyed the dignity of dhimmis and lessened their self-confidence, whence a drop in their birth rate and their progressive extinction.
The fall in the birth rate, massacres and conversions under coercion were the means which, in invaded countries, gradually brought about what Bat Ye'or calls a demographic reversal. There were 200,000 Muslims to 5 million Berbers at the start of the Muslim invasion. After 8 wars, and three centuries of the above methods being applied, there were 1% Berbers left in Tunisia, 10% in Algeria, where they were driven into Kabylia, about 35 to 40% in Morocco, where they were driven into the Atlas and Riff regions, each time infertile mountainous lands.
It is a general phenomenon. Thus the Turkish population, initially 100% Christian, had fallen to 30% Christian by 1900, and is 0.2% Christian today.
The methods referred to above compel the inhabitants of invaded countries either to become Muslims or to disappear. In addition, within the Muslim populations themselves, the ideology imposes a certain type of society.
The first Islamic principle is the primacy of the collectivity, or 'Ouma'. In that word, the radical 'oum' means the mother and 'ouma' means that Muslims should be to Islam as children are to their mother. The primacy of the collectivity is the opposite of what goes on in our present-day societies. Our view is that society is at the service of each person to help him or her to develop. The collectivist view is that each person is at the service of the collectivity to establish its power. That is one of the elements common to total socialism and Islam.
The second principle is the foundation of morals. A Russian dissident said : what is morally right is what those in power declare to be right at present (it may change tomorrow, and morals will change tomorrow). Islam means "submission" and Muslim "a submissive person". Many Muslim intellectuals will tell you that it is only a question of submission to God. But if you read the Koran, you will see that it says twenty or so times "obey God, obey the prophet" and once "obey the prophet" (without adding God). But there is no verse that says only "obey God". Again it says "obey God, obey his prophet, and those in authority", that is to say the caliph and his representatives. The caliph is Allah's deputy, one must obey him, and his representatives, as one obeys God. Submission is the basis of Muslim morals and it is also an element common to all totalitarian systems.
Yet another principle is the combat against anything that develops the ego. One of the first factors that develop the ego is affectivity. You are aware of some of the rules governing the statute of Muslim women, in particular polygamy. A man may have four wives, but a woman may not have four husbands. That is not all. A man may have as many concubines as he wants, as long as they are not the wives of another Muslim. If a woman has a lover, no matter whether he is a Muslim or not, she will be stoned to death. In a court of law, it takes two women to have the same weight as one man. When it comes to inheritance, a woman has only a half share. A husband may repudiate his wife but a wife may not repudiate her husband.
The Muslim ideology is founded on the Koran, and on the hadiths, the words or acts of Mohammed. There are a million and a half of them. It would have taken him 600 years to utter them. Everybody knows, including Muslims, that most of the hadiths are apocryphal. There are, however, six compilations, containing 20,000 hadiths in all, that are held to be assuredly authentic. Among those books there is one, compiled by the scholar Bukhari, that is considered to be particularly sure. The Koran and the compilation by Bukhari are the only two books on which a Muslim can lay his hand to take an oath.
In the above compilation, Mohammed explains : "You know that women can give only a semi-testimony in a court of law, well, that is because of the inferiority of their intelligence". He says that he had a vision of Hell. There were principally women there. He also says that there have been perfect men in history, but no perfect women. Or again, taking up the Bible story in which Eve is supposed to have been created from one of Adam's ribs, "woman was made from a rib, she is bent like a rib; if you try to straighten her, you will break her, so let her remain crooked and take your pleasure from her as from a crooked thing". The conclusion is the Sunnite definition of marriage : "marriage is the contract by which one acquires a woman's genital organs with the intention of taking pleasure from them".
In such an ideology, it is difficult to respect a woman and to build a relationship of marital love. It may happen from time to time, because men are not always completely subject to ideology, but there is massive social pressure to prevent it. The destruction of affectivity and respect in the relationship between husband and wife is destructive of the ego, both for the man and for the woman.
In total socialisms, the destruction of affectivity was achieved through the encouragement of denunciation. Anybody could inform against anybody. You could trust neither your spouse, nor your parents, nor your children, nor your friends. Soviet socialists had made a hero of Pavel Morozof, a boy of 14 who had denounced his father for protecting kulaks who had been condemned to death. The father died in the Gulag. Even today, in Moscow, the building where the Komsomols hold their meetings is called Morozof palace. These mutual denunciations give rise to a system that destroys all mutual trust, which leads to the death of affectivity.
The combat against affectivity was complemented, in the early years of soviet socialism, by an attack on marriage ââ¬â which did not last very long, but which was extremely violent. In the flats built during the twenties, there was no kitchen so that people would be forced to have their meals in common. In fact, they preferred to use Primus stoves so that they could have their meals as a family all the same.
Islam destroys affectivity by humiliating women, total socialisms do it by encouraging denunciation and hampering married life; the means are a little different, but the result is the same.
Another means of destroying the ego is the combat against intelligence. The way in which the contradictions in the Koran are dealt with shows the methods at work in Islam. For example, a surah that Muslims are always quoting (verse 257 of surah 2) : "No constraint in religion" is in contradiction with another verse, known as the verse of the sword : "Massacre all heretics". Mohammed had been asked how it was that two surahs that had come from Allah could contradict each other. The answer is in surah 2, verse 100, and in surah 16, verses 104 and 105, which say that Allah is the master of the Koran; he does as he pleases with it. When he replaces one verse by another, the newer one is better. And those who consider Mohammed to be a falsifier will go to Hell. The Koran is like a packet of circulars, the most recent of which cancels and replaces the previous ones on the same subject. Thereby, all the moderate verses are cancelled by the violent ones, which came later. In that case, the contradiction is settled, through a process whose validity may be questioned, but in other cases the contradiction is deliberately maintained.
A certain number of examples are given by the vice-chancellor of Al Azhar university in Cairo, the largest Muslim university. There are taxes levied on the rich to provide money for the poor, and to conduct wars of conquest. Wealth is determined according to the number of animals. If you own five camels or more, you have to pay tax. But you don't pay any for herds of horses, even if they comprise several thousand animals.
When a woman has her period, she has the right to fast, but not to pray. Yet prayer is more important than fasting.
When a thief commits a petty theft, he has his hand cut off, because it was the instrument of his fault, but they do not punish a rapist or an adulterer by cutting off you-know-what.
There is a whole series of contradictions of this kind. The vice-chancellor of Al Azhar explains that this is deliberate. It is to show that Allah is not bound by logic. Nor is he bound by morals. If he had said that one should lie, then lying would be good.
Tabari, one of the greatest exegetes of the Koran, explains that anyone who approaches the Koran with his or her intelligence, and who is in the right, is nevertheless at fault : no one has the right to be right.
Islam rejects novelty, which it calls 'bida'. Characteristically, the word means both what is new, and the moral fault consisting in doing or thinking something new. This outlook renders progress impossible, especially in economy, with the result that most Muslim countries experience great poverty. 57 States belong to the Conference of Islamic States. Their standard of living is 22 times lower than in Europe. Of these 57 States, 8 are oil-producing and 3 are only partially Muslim : Turkey, which has been trying to be a secular country for 80 years, Lebanon, where the population is 45% Christian, and Malaysia, where 28% of the population is Chinese and 7% Indian. Those three countries are six times richer than the others. If you exclude the oil-producing States and the partially Muslim States, the rest, that is, nearly one thousand million people, have a standard of living 35 times lower than that of Europeans. At such a degree it really means something. The fundamental reason is the totalitarian nature of Islam, destructive of the ego.
Countries under total socialism have experienced the same poverty, for the same reason : damaged egos can no longer be creative, whether in economics, in the intellectual or artistic sphere, or in any field whatsoever.
I have had discussions with many Muslims and have explained to them that one cannot be a Muslim and a Frenchman at the same time. If you are a Muslim, you say that woman is inferior, if you are French, you say she is equal. I have received the same answer umpteen times : according to one hadith, Paradise is under the feet of mothers, so women have a particular dignity which compensates their inferiority. I would retort that this point of view reduces women to their reproductive function. Furthermore, in that case, maiden girls, sterile women or women married to sterile men, have no dignity.
The above argument made no impact. On the other hand, another would leave Muslim women and girls without an answer and very troubled : the French conception of relationships between men and women is equality, the Islamic conception is female inferiority compensated by a special dignity. The woman who chooses equality is French, she who chooses compensated inferiority is not, even if compensated inferiority suits her personally.
In fact, 95% of those with whom I have debated believe themselves to be Muslim men or women, but they are not. In all important matters they have made their choice, and their choice is to be French and not Muslim. When you ask a girl, even wearing a veil to assert her identity, "Do you fancy having 3 co-wives?", she will answer passionately, "Oh! Out of the question!"
"Do you fancy your husband bringing concubines home?"
"Out of the question!"
"Do you consider it normal that, as the Koran says, if your husband suspects you of thinking of disobeying, he has the right to beat you?"
"Out of the question!"
In France, you have the right to think what you like, and to change your convictions if you feel like it. In Islam (surah 4, verse 91), a person who ceases to be a Muslim must be put to death. The first time I said that in a talk, a Muslim got up and shouted, "That's not true!" Now I take a copy of the Koran to talks, and show people the verse. And they say to me, "Well, we don't accept that".
"So you're not Muslims, you're French!"
"Eh, no, I am a Muslim, but I take some and leave some".
"If you say that in Egypt, or elsewhere in Dâr al Islam, at best you'll go to prison, at worst you'll be killed by your neighbour. You can choose to reject part of the Koran because you live in France, where you have French and not Muslim rights. Since you make use of those rights, you have chosen to be French, you are not a Muslim any more".
Each time you take a point on which the opposition between the French and Muslim views is irreducible, you find that all the women and most of the men are in fact French and not Muslim.
I do not believe Islam can last very long in the modern world. I am told it has lasted 14 centuries, and that it will continue. In 1980 people also said, "Communism has lasted 70 years, it will go on". Then in 1989, Mitterand, who was an excellent seismograph of public opinion, said, 5 weeks before the fall of the Berlin wall, "The reunification of Germany is neither for this generation nor for this century". He had seen nothing coming, despite his political sensibility, because the violence of the repression in countries under total socialism dissimulated the loss in conviction of their inhabitants. Islam exerts the same repression against dissident opinions, which gives rise to the same dissimulation, but that does not prevent minds from secretly evolving.
As I was able to see in Lebanon and in Kabylia, there are three factors on which the modern world is radically opposed to the Muslim world, and those three factors will eventually bring about its downfall :
* Freedom. Freedom to defend one's opinion, to change one's mind. Muslims are demanding it more and more. As they are in danger every time they demand it in a Muslim country, they do not do so very often, but the yearning is stronger and stronger.
* Rationality. The Koran, according to Muslims, was written by Allah before the founding of the world, in Arabic because Allah spoke Arabic with the angels. Now Arabic has only existed for 2,000 years while the creation of the world goes back 14 billion years. Confronted with that sort of improbability, a Muslim, even moderately cultivated, will answer, "We can't believe that!"
* Affectivity. Among the Kabyles, there are many conversions : about 5,000 per year. They are converted by the American Baptists. I asked several converts, "Why did you become Christian?". The answer wasn't what I expected at all. Freedom, that was secondary. Rationality hardly bothered them for they were not great intellectuals. The decisive factor for them was affectivity. The Baptists organise prayer meetings, Muslims come along to have a look, and they are taken by the affectivity that reigns in those meetings, between men, between women, between men and women. From what they say, at Muslim gatherings there is comradeship, solidarity, but not the sort of affective warmth they find amongst Christians.
Affectivity is one of the foundations of the Western World. Today 50% of marriages break up. One has the impression that the institution is falling apart. It is exactly the opposite. For centuries marriage was based on the desire to have descendants and on social convenience. When there was affection or love between the spouses, it was all the better. Today, the ideal is marital love. If love is not there, the couple separates. That is radically incompatible with Islam. The idea of marriage founded on personal choice and on marital love is incompatible with the woman's place in Islam. That is the strongest pressure at work on Islam.
In Lebanon and in Kabylia at least, Islam finds itself in the position in which communism found itself in 1970. I'm going to tell you an anecdote. My wife, the founder, director and chief editor of a music magazine, had been invited to Poland along with 200 French journalists. During a grand cocktail party, one of the ministers present told her, in quite good French, that she was an abominable capitalist and that she ought to be in the Gulag. "Besides, you'll be there before long because the Soviet army can reach Brest in ten days". Two minutes later another minister said to her, "Don't think Poles are stupid. My colleague is the only communist amongst us. All the others are ministers because it's pleasanter to be a minister than something else, but none of them believes in communism. We know perfectly well that communism doesn't work " I was very surprised that communist ministers should speak so freely to journalists and I calculated that the system was ripe for collapse. It was holding out because of the administrative structures whose interest was to make the system last, but no one believed in it any more.
Islam today is in a similar position. Its internal mental structure is caving in. At any rate in Kabylia and in Lebanon. And I don't think the political organisation can survive the downfall of its ideology for very long.
Today, Islam versus the Western World is like the fable of the clay pot against the iron pot, it has met more than its match : let us look at what those who are neither Muslims nor from the West are doing, that is to say the Indians, the Chinese, the Japanese etc. I remember going to a concert about ten years ago, in Berlin. The pianist was Japanese and wore a black western-style dress. The conductor was Chinese and wore "tails". I have never, anywhere on earth, seen a Chinese, Japanese or Indian person don a turban and a jellabah and intone an Islamic chant. Nowadays, if you go to any country that is neither Islamic nor of the West and look at the architecture in the towns, at the town planning, at the methods applied in economy, at science, at technology and even at marriage, everything comes from the West. When Eugénie de Montijo married Napoleon III, she wore a white dress. All the Parisian girls copied her, French girls copied the Parisians, European girls copied the French. Now the whole world gets married in a white dress.
As a whole, countries that are neither Islamic nor of the West, that is over 4 billion inhabitants, have adopted Western ways. Islam has but a very weak power of conversion : it converts about one million people a year, essentially in black Africa, whereas the different variants of Christendom convert 10 million every year, essentially in the southern hemisphere. When it comes to freedom, rationality, and especially affectivity, Islam has no capacity of assimilation into the modern world. Moreover, Islam has been frozen for over a thousand years, whereas, at the instance of the West, the world today is experiencing the most rapid evolution in its history.
Islam has another weakness that is even more deadly : the way in which it was developed is beginning to become known. People commonly believe that the history of the development of Islam and Mohammed's biography are quite well known. That is not the case at all.
In the region where Islam developed, all the original documents, covering over two centuries, have disappeared. The biography of Mohammed was written 220 years after his death, under the orders of a caliph. The hadiths were written down between 250 and 300 years after the death of Mohammed. The Koran was replaced several times, notably by general Hajjâj, in 692, sixty years after the death of Mohammed, with the destruction of previous copies.
Islam in its early years extended over the Middle East, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, the most civilised region in the world at the time. It had libraries, scribes' workshops, universities. It is absolutely unnatural that all the original documents should have disappeared. That can only be explained by a deliberate and methodical intervention by the political authorities.
A comparison with France at the same period is significant. At that time there was no library, nor university, nor scribes' workshop, nor bookshop in France. Yet those holding political power in France, Clothaire II and Dagobert I, left their traces in many a written document, and it is even more the case with their immediate successors, Pépin de Heristal, Charles Martel, Pépin le Bref, Charlemagne. The prominent religious figures were bishops, Saint Ouen of Rouen, Saint Omer of Thérouane, Saint Césaire of Arles, Sidouane Apollinaire of Clermont, Saint Grégoire of Tours, Saint Léger of Autun, Saint Eloi of Noyon, etcââ¬Â¦They are well known.
Mohammed was both a political and religious figure. Why did no original document about him remain, unless it was to cover up a story that was very different from that told by Muslim scholars? As a famous specialist on Islam, Harald Motzki, says, either one makes a critical study of the sources of Islam and one does not write a history, or one does not make a critical study of the sources and one can write "stories". Alfred-Louis de Prémare, professor at the university of Aix-en-Provence, a historian of the Arab-Islamic world, and a lecturer at the Institute of Research and Study on the Arab and Muslim world, adds, "Any biography of the prophet of Islam has as much value as a novel that one hopes is historical".
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.
(Translated by Diana Dupuy)
Since this is my first post here, mods can move this post to the relevant thread.....