De-Radicalising Muhammad(Tom Holland)

[Islam Imamate]

Interesting video I saw recently about Muhammad as it relates to the terrorism and Islamism we see in the world. IMO it gets interesting at about 15:40 and the lecture ends at around 37:00 so despite the length of the video I'd say that's the most relevant bit. He also answers a "but Christianity" and "what about the grievances?" questions from the woman chairing the event after his lecture at about 38:00


I know its long and I don't expect most of you to watch it so here's a much longer than intended list of some interesting points
-There is no authentic Islam
-Biographies of Muhammad also vary widely
-To address some of more questionable behaviors of Muhammad Muslims either relative them or question the sources but each of these potentially puts the entirety of the Sunnah and its legitimacy in question.
-Reading the biographies of Muhammad literally, as both Muslims and non-Muslims do, is not true to the intention of their authors who wrote them to illustrate symbolic truths rather than historical fact
-For instance, the hadith regarding Aisha and her youth was recorded by Bukhari to emphasize the legitimacy of Abu Bakr(her father) as the first caliph and not necessarily historical fact or as a prescription for future marriages.
-Muhammad's biographies might've been created to introduce elements of Jewish, Christian, Zorastrian, ad Persian law by converts. For instance, the penalty for adultery in the Qur'an is to be whipped but in the hadith it mirrors the penalty in the Torah(stoning)
-Biographies of Muhammad might've also been constructed to reconcile contradictions within the Qur'an to the benefit of the more war like, expansionist sections to justify the imperial endeavors against the Romans.
-Western biographical assumptions that were spread by colonialism might've influenced Muslim readings of Muhammad's biographies and lead them to understand them more literally
-Muslim contemporary understanding of Muhammad is partly influenced by the Great Man school of historical Western thought
-The Western project of placing and understanding Muhammad in his historical context has lead Muslims to prioritize earlier sources concerning his life and has contributed to the rise of Salafism which is in itself an Islamic reformation
-Medieval Islamic traditions and their emphasis on the mystical and symbolic, rather than literal, truths of Muhammad's life are a possible counter to this
-Any positive shift in Islamic thought won't be a top down affair and can't rely on institutions like Al Azhar
-Nonintervention on the part of the West is probably better than intervention

Also loled at these statements
"When beheading an infidel seems to have been enshrined as something every jihadi now aspires to do, its surely not entirely irrelevant that Muhammad himself owned a sword that can be translated as 'The Cleaver of Vertebrae'"
"It seems ironically, actually, that you are likelier to provoke grief and pain and anger among Muslims by insulting the Prophet of God than God himself "
"As many a disgraced 70s celebrities could attest, attitudes towards underage sex have hardened very, very significantly"

 

[Abezal]

Lets not overly complexify what is a simple issue. Its an old archaic stupidity that fools take literally 1500 years later, it needs to be eroded forgotten destroyed for the betterment of the world. By what ever means possible, for the good of the whole world.

 

[StannisTheMannis]

unknown facts about Mohammed:

1. He was poor and illiterate.
2. Salman the Persian(Traitor) born Ruzbeh wrote the koran and formulated arabic script. before him they wrote in kufic but not Momo cause he was illiterate.
3. Who was Salman the Persian/Traitor? A Persian explorer who went to south Yemen to explore arabs much like how europeans went to africa to study natives there in the 20th century.
4. He fell inlove with their savage ways and settled there and befriended Momo and thus Islam was born.
5. Muslims(Sunni) will deny all of this cause they feel its more plausible that God talked to an illiterate man.

 

[Islam Imamate]

unknown facts about Mohammed:

1. He was poor and illiterate.

He wasn't poor, he was a merchant and his first wife was a wealthy widow.

He was illiterate but that is widely known and used as some sort of legitimacy for the Qur'an for could an illiterate man compose the Qur'an? In truth almost everyone in Arabia was illiterate at the time because they relied on oral transmission and so they were experts at memorizing and reciting long stories and poetry. Merchants in particular were exposed to a lot of that in market places so if anything its incredibly believable that a guy like Muhammad, despite being illiterate, could've composed the Qur'an without any magic or divine intervention.

 

[StannisTheMannis]

He wasn't poor, he was a merchant and his first wife was a wealthy widow.

He was illiterate but that is widely known and used as some sort of legitimacy for the Qur'an for could an illiterate man compose the Qur'an? In truth almost everyone in Arabia was illiterate at the time because they relied on oral transmission and so they were experts at memorizing and reciting long stories and poetry. Merchants in particular were exposed to a lot of that in market places so if anything its incredibly believable that a guy like Muhammad, despite being illiterate, could've composed the Qur'an without any magic or divine intervention.

ya we all heard the retconned version before.

 

[Islam Imamate]

ya we all heard the retconned version before.

I'm not exactly lending credibility to his divine inspiration ya goof.

 

[StannisTheMannis]

I'm not exactly lending credibility to his divine inspiration ya goof.

Salman the Traitor converted to Christianity shortly after leaving Persia. If Momo got any ideas of religion he got them from Salman. Even thats a stretch. The koran was written by Salman. He took a bit of every religion and mixed it with tribal beduin traditions and viola islam was born and Momo the illiterate was all of a sudden a prophet.

 

[Islam Imamate]

Salman the Traitor converted to Christianity shortly after leaving Persia. If Momo got any ideas of religion he got them from Salman. Even thats a stretch. The koran was written by Salman. He took a bit of every religion and mixed it with tribal beduin traditions and viola islam was born and Momo the illiterate was all of a sudden a prophet.

That's nonsense. I'm not denying that Muhammad was influenced by Judeo-Christian traditions. Merchants were traditionally the vehicles that exported and imported ideas between cultures and Muhammad was probably no different. Like I said earlier being illiterate at the time didn't translate to being ignorant, Arabs memorized long and complex stories and poems and merchants in particular would compose and share their poems at marketplaces.

Its possible he was influenced by Salman but chunks of the Qur'an were written before he even met him so that's a pretty silly idea. He was probably influenced by a number of different people and sources if indeed the Qur'an was written by a single person named Muhammad.

 

[The ScorpioN]

Seems like the West can't catch a break.

 

[Islam Imamate]

Seems like the West can't catch a break.

What makes you say that? The exponentially higher rate of death and destruction in the Islamic World?

 

[Mike]

Honestly the most relevant bit to me is their attempt to rationalize the more extreme elements of their faith. You can't take any religion a hundred percent literally because they were made up thousands of years ago when society was very different.


Christianity used to have some rather extremist beliefs as well. They were just forced to bend and adapt to changes in culture. Ultimately if they want their faith to survive, more of them need to adopt the attitude of well that was waaaaaaay back then though regarding the extreme parts of their beliefs.


The middle east is just hundreds of years behind the civilized world culturally.

 

[Islam Imamate]

Honestly the most relevant bit to me is their attempt to rationalize the more extreme elements of their faith. You can't take any religion a hundred percent literally because they were made up thousands of years ago when society was very different.


Christianity used to have some rather extremist beliefs as well. They were just forced to bend and adapt to changes in culture. Ultimately if they want their faith to survive, more of them need to adopt the attitude of well that was waaaaaaay back then though regarding the extreme parts of their beliefs.


The middle east is just hundreds of years behind the civilized world culturally.

But as he points out the literal approach is in fact the reformist strain within Islam and it wasn't always that way. In fact early on plenty of traditions from other societies were integrated into Islam and it was the Salafists who pointed this out and called for a return to true Islam. The Wahhabi are probably the most successful form of this given they have their own country and looking at their history its clear they're a relatively recent movement produced in the 18th century in the context of the decaying Ottoman Empire.

It seems to me in fact that the suppression of the Wahhabi insurrection by Muhammad Ali of Egypt was the first clash between Islamists and the Western inclined tyrant. Both formed as a reaction to Ottoman failures with the first seeking to look to a puritanical Islam for the solution and the other toward Western industrialization and each producing counterparts throughout the 20th century with neither chain fully winning over the other or producing stable, effective societies.

 

[The ScorpioN]

What makes you say that? The exponentially higher rate of death and destruction in the Islamic World?

-Western biographical assumptions that were spread by colonialism might've influenced Muslim readings of Muhammad's biographies and lead them to understand them more literally

-The Western project of placing and understanding Muhammad in his historical context has lead Muslims to prioritize earlier sources concerning his life and has contributed to the rise of Salafism which is in itself an Islamic reformation

 

[platypus44]

As I understand it - 1. the oldest prints of the Koran we have were likely inscribed some 150 years after the death of Mohammed and are incomplete, 2. the biographies of Mohammed were actually written nearly 200 years after his death although they are allegedly based on lost biographies that may have been written about 100 years earlier, 3. there is virtually no contemporary evidence of either Mohammed or the Koran at the time Mohammed was supposed to have lived or for some 50-70 years thereafter.
So - in reality - we may not really know much about what Mohammed was really like or how the Koran came to be.
Islam had a "golden age" from about 900-1200 and then went into a decline with the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols and the dominance of a very inflexible, literalist theology starting around 1300. My theory is that early Muslims took the official version "with a grain of salt" because they were aware that it was based on writings long after the fact. As time passed, Muslims "forgot" this and the writings became enshrined with infallibility.

 

[Islam Imamate]

-Western biographical assumptions that were spread by colonialism might've influenced Muslim readings of Muhammad's biographies and lead them to understand them more literally

-The Western project of placing and understanding Muhammad in his historical context has lead Muslims to prioritize earlier sources concerning his life and has contributed to the rise of Salafism which is in itself an Islamic reformation

Oh that. I still don't see the issue, do you deny that cultures influence each other and that imperialist ones are going to have a wider sphere of influence?

 

[Islam Imamate]

As I understand it - 1. the oldest prints of the Koran we have were likely inscribed some 150 years after the death of Mohammed and are incomplete, 2. the biographies of Mohammed were actually written nearly 200 years after his death although they are allegedly based on lost biographies that may have been written about 100 years earlier, 3. there is virtually no contemporary evidence of either Mohammed or the Koran at the time Mohammed was supposed to have lived or for some 50-70 years thereafter.
So - in reality - we may not really know much about what Mohammed was really like or how the Koran came to be.
Islam had a "golden age" from about 900-1200 and then went into a decline with the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols and the dominance of a very inflexible, literalist theology starting around 1300. My theory is that early Muslims took the official version "with a grain of salt" because they were aware that it was based on writings long after the fact. As time passed, Muslims "forgot" this and the writings became enshrined with infallibility.

That's sort of what Holland is trying to say. The earlier Muslims probably knew that the biographies and hadiths weren't written with historical accuracy in mind but rather an attempt to demonstrate some non-literal truth but the emphasis of Western historical practices that did prioritize historical truth influenced Muslims to read their own biographies that way.

Interesting that you mention the sacking of Baghdad, its often an event that's been pointed to to help explain the intellectual malaise of the Muslim world. Interesting how something that happened 700 years ago might've been so destructive and traumatic so as to have some effect to this day even if its indirectly. Those fucking Mongols were no joke.

 

[Mike]

That's sort of what Holland is trying to say. The earlier Muslims probably knew that the biographies and hadiths weren't written with historical accuracy in mind but rather an attempt to demonstrate some non-literal truth but the emphasis of Western historical practices that did prioritize historical truth influenced Muslims to read their own biographies that way.

Interesting that you mention the sacking of Baghdad, its often an event that's been pointed to to help explain the intellectual malaise of the Muslim world. Interesting how something that happened 700 years ago might've been so destructive and traumatic so as to have some effect to this day even if its indirectly. Those fucking Mongols were no joke.

Yes it's interesting how actions can echo for hundreds or thousands of years. In many ways they never recovered from that invasion. kinda crazy when you think about how different their culture might be today if that had never happened.

 

[Zankou]

Holland is a very good historian who knows his stuff, in contrast to 98% of what you will see floating around the web about Islamic origins.

 

[Islam Imamate]

Yes it's interesting how actions can echo for hundreds or thousands of years. In many ways they never recovered from that invasion. kinda crazy when you think about how different their culture might be today if that had never happened.

Who knows how much of an impact that had. Its true that Baghdad was the intellectual center of Islam at that point but the caliphate into numerous principalities so its possible. It was a horrible event though, I remember reading somewhere that the population of Baghdad had only recovered to the level it was before the Mongol slaughter in the 19th or 20th century. They not only slaughtered almost everyone but they even diverted rivers and razed farmland, damaging the potential of the city to such an extent that it took centuries to be able to support a similar population. I believe its intelligentsia would be even more fragile and hard to put back together.

Holland is a very good historian who knows his stuff, in contrast to 98% of what you will see floating around the web about Islamic origins.

And he doesn't seem to approach the topic with an agenda at all. This talk was supposed to be "controversial" but for a supposedly controversial lecture he was quite cautious and fair.

One of the more interesting statements he made was in saying that there's probably more evidence of the historical Jesus than Muhammad even though, anecdotally, I see the former's existence questioned much more than the latter. Even on this forum where Muhammad is reviled I've never seen his existence questioned but I have seen Jesus disputed.

 

[Zankou]

I think the evidence is roughly comparable. With both you can make a rational argument that they never existed, but it's definitely the weaker argument overall.

A lot of people are astounded to hear this because they are under the misimpression that we know enormous amounts about Muhammad due to the literature that was written down centuries later.

However there is increasingly good evidence that the Qur'an (or at least parts of it) was written down quite early, perhaps even largely predating Muhammad's life. A hot topic currently.