"Islam is an invention for the purpose of providing a religious justification for Arab Imperialism. The Conquest is the reason and explanation for Islam, not the other way around."
"the life of Mohammed in Mecca and Medina is a myth, a "baseless fiction." *** Mohammad ibn al-Rawandi
"Islam and Mohammed an invention for Arab Imperialism."
A.
The dates given for Mohammed's life are 570-632 AD. Ibn Ishaq was born about 717 and died in 767. He thus wrote his biography well over 100 years after Mohammed lived, precluding his gaining any information from eyewitnesses to the Sira as they would have all died themselves in the intervening years.
However, no copies exist of Ibn Ishaq's work. We know of it only through quotations of it in the History of al-Tabari, who lived over two hundred years after Ibn Ishaq (al-Tabari died in 992). Thus the earliest biography of Mohammed of which copies still exist was written some 350 years after Mohammed lived.
B.
Mecca is located in the Hejaz region of what is today Saudi Arabia. It is portrayed by traditional belief as a wealthy trading center, full of merchants trading goods by caravan from Yemen in the south and Syria and the Byzantium empire in the north. Crone shows that Mecca was in fact way off the incense route from Yemen to Syria, which bypbutted where Mecca is today by over 100 miles. Further, there is no mention whatever of Mecca in contemporary non-Moslem sources:
C.
For an increasing number of Islamic historians, the tradition of Mohammed being the source and explanation of the Arab Conquest, wherein Arab tribesmen on horseback emerged out of the Arabian deserts to conquer Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, and Spain in less than 80 years (636-712), stands history on its head. They demonstrate that the story of Mohammed uniting various Arab tribes like Genghiz Khan did for the Mongols, and providing them with the religious fervor to conquer in the name of Islam, is "sacred history," rather than real history. Historian Gordon Newby explains:
"The myth of an original orthodoxy from which later challengers fall away as heretics is almost always the retrospective buttertion of a politically dominant group whose aim is to establish their supremacy by appeal to divine sanction."
This applies to the Arab Conquest, says al-Rawandi, because for some two hundred years the Arab conquerors were a minority amongst a non-Moslem majority. For al-Rawandi, Islam is an invention for the purpose of providing a religious justification for Arab Imperialism. The Conquest is the reason and explanation for Islam, not the other way around.
While there may well have been an historical individual named Ubu'l Kbuttim who was later enbreastled Mohammed ("The Praised One"), who raised followers and participated in the initiation of the Arab Conquest, he likely came from northeast Arabia in what is now southern Jordan. The deity that Ubu'l Kbuttim chose to follow was Allah, a contraction of al-Lah, the ancient Arab God of the Moon note: which is why the symbol of Islam to this day is the crescent moon. Ubu'l Kbuttim died, however, some years before the Arab Conquest was fully underway (the traditional date is 632). Al-Rawandi summarizes what then happened:
"Once the Arabs had acquired an empire, a coherent religion was required in order to hold that empire together and legitimize their rule. In a process that involved a mbuttive backreading of history, and in conformity to the available Jewish and Christian models, this meant they needed a revelation and a revealer - a Prophet - whose life could serve at once as a model for moral conduct and as a framework for the appearance of the revelation. Hence (Ubu'l Kbuttim was selected to be the Prophet), the Koran, the Hadith (Sayings of the Prophet), and the Sira were contrived and conjoined over a period of a couple of centuries. Topographically, after a century or so of Judaeo- Moslem monotheism centered on Jerusalem, in order to make Islam distinctively Arab... an inner Arabian biography of Mecca, Medina, the Quraysh, the Prophet and his Hegira (flight from Mecca to Medina alleged in 622, Year One in the Islamic calendar) was created as a purely literary artifact. An artifact, moreover, based not on faithful memories of real events, but on the fertile imaginations of Arab storytellers elaborating from allusive references in Koranic texts, the canonical text of the Koran not being fixed for nearly two centuries."
Al-Rawandi concludes that the Sira, the life of Mohammed in Mecca and Medina is a myth, a "baseless fiction." This is the conclusion of a substantial number of serious academic historians working on Islamic Studies today. They include Mohammed Ibn al-Warraq, Mohammed Ibn al-Rawandi, John Wansbrough, Kenneth Cragg, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, John Burton, Andrew Rippin, Julian Balprivates, Gerald Hawting, and Suliman Bashear.
