Why Invent Mohammed?
Why invent a new religion? Robert Spencer’s excellent new book Did Mohammed Exist? collates recent historical research questioning the existence of the historical Mohammed, much of it previously not accessible to a lay American audience. This is a dangerous thing to do, and a courageous one.
Some years ago I chided Spencer for giving the Koran too much credibility; more important than the nasty things one finds in the Koran, I argued, are two questions: “1) Mohammed may never have existed, and 2) If he existed, he may have had nothing to do with the Koran, which well might be an 8th- or 9th-century compilation.” Spencer’s present book will be translated into major Muslim languages and published on the Internet, according to Daniel Pipes. That is an important and welcome development.
This point was made eloquently last year by the Georgetown University political philosopher Fr. James Schall, who argued, “The fragility of Islam, as I see it, lies in a sudden realization of the ambiguity of the text of the Koran. Is it what it claims to be? Islam is weak militarily. It is strong in social cohesion, often using severe moral and physical sanctions. But the grounding and unity of its basic document are highly suspect. Once this becomes clear, Islam may be as fragile as communism.” Koranic criticism, I have argued since 2003, is Islam’s Achilles’ Heel.
In his capacity as prosecuting attorney in the Mohammed hoax, Spencer has laid out means and opportunity. A bit more could be said about motive. Why invent a new religion? There have been efforts since the 18th century to recast Moses as a renegade Egyptian priest of a sun-worshiping sort of monotheism who became the leader of the backward Hebrews. We find this canard repeated from Schiller’s essay “Moses’ Mission” to Freud’s 1938 Moses and Monotheism. But Judaism is not monotheism as such, but a human relationship with an infinite God who loves and suffers with his people. Vast amounts of scholarship show similarities between the language of the covenant in the Bible and earlier legal documents in the region, or parallelisms between Ugaritic hymns and the Psalms. These are interesting but have no direct bearing on the astonishing innovation of Jewish revelation: nowhere in earlier history do we hear of an infinite and eternal God who also has a personality and engages human beings with love.
Serious scholars no longer argue that Judaism is somehow descended from an Egyptian sun cult. No-one has yet explained, moreover, why an ancient tribe would invent a history that portrayed its ancestors as slaves, or itself as conquerors of a land rather than as its autochthonous and legitimate inhabitants. In short, there is neither a literary, nor an historical, nor an anthropological, nor an archaeological argument against the Jewish claim that the written and oral laws were given to Moses at Mt. Sinai.
Christianity proposes to extend the Jewish covenant to all of humankind. After countless academic lives have burned out in the “search for the historical Jesus,” no reputable scholar claims to be able to demonstrate that Jesus of Nazareth was a fiction. One can argue about the reliability of different accounts of Jesus, but not the existence of Jesus himself. The Christian doctrine of Jesus’ resurrection cannot be refuted. One believes it, or not.
But Islam is an entirely different matter. We have extensive archaeological evidence in the form of coins and inscriptions from the 7th century, and there is no mention of a new religion in any of them until 70 years after Mohammed’s supposed death, as Nevo and Koren showed in their 2003 book Crossroads to Islam. Two centuries go by before an account of Mohammed’s life is circulated. The Koran itself is evidently a compilation that draws on contemporary Jewish and Christian sources, in a language that often does not resemble Arabic.
Why does this article assume that a movement without a logical and properly documented basis is fragile? People fall for a lot of stuff all the time.
If the power of Islam over small minds is to end, and perhaps it may, this will not come with proofs of its fiction. Truth has no grip on the Arab or Muslim mind. It has little enough on ours. Kalisch is proof of that.
All very interesting ans worthy though.
The racist republic of south Africa fell after it was revealed that Pieter Botha president, was descended from a Zulu woman. Myth fail!
Ahem. Climatarianism.
Bob,
I responded to David’s and your comment at my blog. If you are interested, see:
The historical fragility of religion: David Goldman on the historical Mohammed (UPDATED)
http://www.fallofknowledgeandreason.blogspot.com/2012/05/historical-fragility-of-religion-david.html
Maybe he was invented to legitimize sex with little girls, dead women and goats? You could call it thighing, dying and crying. These societies are barbaric because of their false religion, as C.S. Lewis stated:
You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred — like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.
Actually, the actual existence of Muhammad, a point of pride to the benighted Arab world of those times, is a worse embarrassment to moderate Muslims of today. A child-marrying, wife-stealing, treaty-breaking, mouth-foaming, woman-assassinating, camel-urine-prescribing, violent, intolerant, and in all other respects a horrible human being, once (and today) a justification for similar barbaric practices, cannot survive exposure to Western (and originally Christian) values.
In online discussions with moderates, some have actually claimed the material in the hadiths are lies by enemies of the faith! More at answering-Islam org.
Thats why we pray to God to give us a “clean heart” a start to see things of this evil world more clearly…..
.
2. RJL
Maybe he was invented to legitimize sex with little girls, dead women and goats? You could call it thighing, dying and crying. These societies are barbaric because of their false religion, as C.S. Lewis stated:
You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred — like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.
———
RJL
would you mind if I post here a few links to articles and names of quite of a few prominent top Rabbies in Israel and NY that were having sex with under age BOYS (and Girls) .. thought homosexuality was a sin not only in Christianity but Judaism as well .. seems Rabbi following their Catholics brotherens
Goats ? ? LOL
well , all kind of crazy thing used to happen at that time, not only by Semite but by all nations
that was 1000s of yrs ago
but
what about this right now :
http://www.icenews.is/index.php/2008/05/20/animal-brothels-legal-in-denmark/
is this indicative of Christianity ? ?
Come on RJL, Come on
.
Yes, I see. What you have here is exactly the same as attributing these things to the founders of the religion. That proves that Islam is true. I see it so clearly now!
Apparently you can’t see the difference between professed adherents to a religion doing something contrary to the teaching of their religion (the Rabbis you refer to), and another religion (Islam) that expressly authorizes the perversions discussed.
Come on, man.
Every religions has it’s wayward adherents, that’s not an argument against it. That’s completely different than a religion’s formal teachings. Elementary logical distinction you just missed!
azariloveiran,
the difference is that islam teaches these things as good and normal. All Jewish and Christian teachings claim these forms of behavior are sins.
To me, the great irony is that Islam can never truly modernize itself. To do so is to leave Islam. So, we’ll either have failed cultures, or cultures cleansed of Islam, or hybrid con games like Malaysia, where Chinese basically have been the economic boom by hiding behind Malay front men. Muslims look a lot better in Malaysia than they would if all the Chinese and Indians left. If Nasser had thought of this con game, Egypt wouldn’t be sinking into the desert.
Wish I’d said that. I probably will.
Except of course that in Malaysia , the Pakistan of S.E. Asia, the Chinese , Indians and of course the Europeans who are responsible for Malaysia’s prosperity are not HIDING behind the ethnic Malays, AKA the MUSLIMS. They are FORCED there by the TYRANNY of the majority so much so that EVERY Malaysian company is OBLIGED by LAW to have ethnic Malays on the Board regardless of their contributions either Financial or otherwise. Ethnic Malays also get PRIORITY when it comes to education and HOUSING, which explains why so many Malay Chinese, Europeans and Indians choose to send their children overseas for education. To top off this Malaysian RACIST AFFIRMATIVE ACTION (so similar to that which BLACKS alone in the USA enjoy) the default result for all ethnic Malays at University is PASS. So is Malaysia successful yes but IN SPITE of the ethnic MUSLIM Malays not because of them.
Why else would I say they were “hiding?” I was there in ’86 and saw “bumiputra” for myself. I also speak Indonesian.
I do not wish to contradict any details of fact in what you have said. All the details may be true. But what about the principle of embarrassmnent?
No propagandist would have invented Mohammed. He is too embarrassing. No fiction writer could have invented Mohammed – he is too eccentric. The Hadiths are so revealing and unintentionally revealing. The Koran and the Sunnah reveal a character and a career. Just as the fith paragraph above starting with “Serious scholars no longer…” uses the priciple of embarrassment to defend Jewish and Mosaic claims, so the principle of embarrassment can be used to defend claims that the Hadiths and the Koran are Islamic. Of course Islam looks disgraceful and disgusting with this defense, but at least it is a logical defense against the claim of fraud committed many decdes later. Why make your prophet a peadophile and a necrophiliac and a cut-throat highway robber? If you had the power to edit the hadiths and your motive was to invent a new prophet then surely some hadiths would have been suppressed. Mohammed was the first man in written history to be married to a woman over 70 and a girl under 7. Could you make it up? If you were inventing a mythical holy man from scratch would this be the sort of detail that you would include?
It is a mystery.
If the Koran was fraudulently composed by non-Arabs (it is full of Syriac-Aramaic words) then why the Arab nationalism in the Koran? Why would conquerers alllow the conquered to compose their big book?
You are assuming that the Arabs who invented the story wanted a “holy man” as defined by modern post-Christian westerners. But even at the time this religion was being invented, external observers noted that its practitioners had a very different “morality” from the surrounding Christians and Jews.
The Chronicle of Zuqnin, around 775 CE (Muhammad supposedly died in 632), says the following:
“They [the Arabs] are a very libidinous and carnal people, and any law framed for them (by) Muhammad or by some other God-fearing person which is not framed to appease their own desires they have ignored and set aside. But any law which fulfills their own wishes and desires, even though it framed by the most contemptible of their number, they pledge allegiance to it and say, ‘This was framed by the Prophet….”
So if the question is, “how could the stories of Muhammad have been invented?” the answer is:
Because the character of the “prophet” reflected the character and morality of the people who invented him. The Arabs assumed that their prophet acted in the manner they themselves acted, and they invented laws to religiously and legally justify those activities.
Also note that this chronicler observed the process by which Muslims would invent laws, and then retrospectively claim that the laws came from their prophet.
Obviously one of the problems with Islam is that it encodes or “deifies” some of the worst aspects of an ancient, primitive desert warrior culture. Of course, the Jews were an ancient, primitive desert warrior culture at one time during their history. The difference seems to be that Judaism has evolved into a comparatively “civilized” religion while Islam still seems to have one foot in the desert. Why is that?
Because the Jews learned of the one true God?
No I am not assuming the Arabs wanted a modern holy man. I am trying to outline a strong objection to Mr Goldman’s theory set out in his 8th paragraph…”If Islam is an invention of the 8th and 9th century, the question is: Why? The simple answer is that the Arabs were founding a new empire and wished to legitimize their power.” The objection is that principle of embarrassment has been ignored. The evidence should not be ignored.
There is no embarrassment. The Arabs who putatively invented the stories were not embarrased. Their prophet reflected their own ideal religious identity.
The Koran and some Hadiths contradict that claim. The evidence should not be ignored. Read the evidence.
David WL. Muslims can indeed be embarrassed. When imams make absurd fatwas on television in Arabic, and the world hears about it in English, the world laughs. We laugh at a religion which dictates which hand we must wipe ourselves with, or whether grown men can nurse a woman’s breast in order to be like a son to her, or weather drinking camel’s urine gave the prophet super human strength. Father Zakaria Butros has been mocking the prophet on Christian satellite television and making converts of the prophet’s followers for years. When they are laughed at, they are ashamed and often backtrack.
It’s amazing how they will do that for ‘western eyes and ears’.
Taqiyya is not a rock upon which to build anything, let alone a religion.
Bingo – that is the reason, plain and simple. Attempting to decipher or intepret stone age thoecratic thinking is wasted energy. Wasted because the answere is obvious. Added to it is the obvious hubris, jealousy, and ego – does anyone doubt that in any Arab male – coupled with the hatred of the Jews explains it all very neatly. Those misogynist barbaric primitives created a picture of themselves and world in which they wanted to live. All one has to do is examine the absolute maniacal rantings of the religious leaders of the “religion of peace”/sarc – to clearly see that the same types compiled the foundations for the religion of frauds. Straightforward and crystallizes everything concerning these jealous posers.
I respectfully disagree. Deciphering theology is critical to understanding social behavior, desirable as well as undesirable. Without theology, how can we explain the mass impulse towards suicide?
Mr. Goldman,attempting to decipher theocratic thoughts from the 8th century through a 21st century prism of rationality as to why someone would construct a character with obvious odious attributes by any civilized standards is a wasted exercise. Again I point to the current day imams and their fanatical rants. I think the these current day imams could be time swapped with the 8th century ones and you would not know the difference in oratory. It seems to me – as pointed out by the poster to whom I was referring – that any understanding of the “reasons” for the writings of someone in the 8th century should be viewed from the cultural, political, and historical environment of the time. (Note – I greatly admire and respect your writings and especially listen carefully to your many economic analyses which are brilliant. Thank you for both)
Seriously theorizing about ancient Arabic motivations using current western thought processes seems a fools errand. We can only guess at factors embarrassing adult males in those lands and times. Your point may seem pertinent, at first, but upon reflection may say more about your desire not to offend than their goals and objectives. We aren’t being unseemly “judgmental” when we make valid judgments that today would castigate them. They were what they were. Accept it.
Why does the Bible remain more true?
Because it began as a history, kept alive by the desperate survivors of at least two unimaginable disasters (the flooding of the river cities and the great asteroid strike called the Fall of the Ehdeen.)
The Habiru refugees of 2200 BC improved or invented the aleph-bet in response to the terrible need to preserve what portable scraps of knowledge they could.
The Bible remains the best socio-archaeological reference work we have of the ancient world. Christians often forget that it sparked or is part the Classical
tradition of literacy. No wonder the Arab auxiliaries of the 5th and 8th centuries began burning the libraries of their competitors.
(Ideograms are not as accurate or accessible, in my opinion)
It’s a simple fact that letters are more accessible than ideograms. You only have to memorize between twenty and thirty symbols that individually and collectively represent fifty to one hundred sounds, which is far easier than memorizing thousands of symbols that each represent a different word or concept. Vocabulary can be learned through the spoken word, and an alphabet directly connects the spoken with the written.
I tried googling Fall of the Ehdeen and found nothing. Am I searching the wrong way? I’d like to read more on it.
Try it spelling it Ehden. Eden.
Thank you- Ehdeen is Babylonian, ‘the Garden(land)’, rendered now as Eden.
Either it’s a reference to irrigated Sumer or the Marsh Arab area of Iraq’s Euphrates.
Much as Pardes, ‘orchard’, became Paradise (persian, if I remember rightly).
There is at least one Bible reference, possibly more, to ‘the tribes of Eden’ as just one bunch amongst many. Perhaps ari could help me here? I was surprised at how casual was the mention, and how casually ignored it is today.
Many apologies, A2, just my own notes collected for decades as I attempt to figure out why and how religion functions. I’m low-born, overworked, and I don’t speak university.
I do this for a reason; it’s a small part of a larger project in which I believe results more practical than most would dream are possible.
I disagree with both preists and professors, with both atheists and the faithful. No one is 100% right; that does not make them 100% wrong.
We must build with what bricks they can give us, even your good bricks, ari!
This is old hat. I was writing about these same issues eleven years ago.
Indeed. But there is a great deal of new scholarship since you wrote about it.
Of course, that is the nature of scholarship. Contemporary scholars are always looking at older scholarship, adding the latest research and updating the interpretation. I often see references to fascinating scholarship that was done long ago, but no one reads anymore. If new scholars don’t present the ideas to the modern audience (of their time) the ideas are forgotten. As it is said, we are always “standing on the shoulders of giants”.
And we are always just one generation away from amnesia and barbarism. Knowledge, to be preserved, must be used.
Three cheers!
Bombarding the Islamic world with doubt would be far more effective than a military campaign, which they would thrive on.
It’s the only way to break the hold of the corrupt authority of the false preists. Same with communism.
Gutenburg’s press aided Luther’s exposure, giving us the Reformation.
Referring to an earlier article, I heartily agree with Spenglers’ attempt to heal the great Schism between Rome and Israel. The Protestants are evolving into a Western form of Hindu-Bhuddism, messy, disorganized, parochial, without the power of the Church Militant or the Empire against the barbarians.
as a Protestant, I’ll thank you to not talk smack about what you do not understand.
If Catholicism entirely appealed to the minds and logic and souls of natural Protestants, than it would not have been needed, or thought. As it is, there ought to be about an even dozen apostolic seats, with at least a dozen major understandings of the life of Jesus Christ. That’s honestly pretty minimalist- understandings of the infinite impinging on the finite- with the finite’s struggling to understand.
If you’re going to get sneery, explain how Catholicism, an off-shoot of a schism from the Orthodox community, ought not be thrown on the trash-heap of failed ideas, as well.
Ari,
Talk about “sneery”! What I gather from your comments is that your understanding of revelation is as uninformed as your church history. You yourself are doing a good job of changing Protestant thought into gnosticism (natural Protestants?)
Beh, enough, Islam has always benefited from fractures in Christianity.
Happy Ascension!
not trying to change protestantism into anything else. just immensely irritated with anyone who thinks their religion is the final way-station, and then judge some other religion on their own scales. Not even too concrned about the Catholic/Protestant split. One of my dearest friends is a devout Catholic, another is a devout Pentecostal, and I’m mainline Lutheran. The dialogues are pretty fascinating, b/c they are undertaken with kindness.
The church as powerful and militant, as claimed by the other commentor, is a coercive institution- if one is powerful- one can force another to violate their conscience. Public religion can look powerful, and be subject to dry-rot, as everyone quietly leaves the plaze with the stage for the powerful: look at the May Day parades in the Brezhnev era. There’s plenty of hand-waving and plenty of old grey men on the stage, but the regular people look blank. The mullahs in Iran might have a vision, but the people raised under it have doubts. Catholics couldn’t ever really persuade anyone in the north of Europe- they were late joining, and early leaving, the catholic church. I don’t know why. I know that Martin Luther’s catechism makes joyful sense to me, while the catholic catechism is fairly perplexing on some points. Lithuania didn’t convert until the 18th century, and basically leaped into communism, as well as dproviding the most persuasive paganist writers of this century.
Catholicism is as welcome to try and persuade people as is Judaism, Orthodox Christianity, Mormonism, Pentecostal protestantism. It is not welcome to force anyone into it’s set of propositions.
There, by rights, are twelve apostolic seats. How they go about interpreting the Bible and the life of Jesus, including what they emphasize, what they meditate on, the prayers of their heart, the prayers of their mouth- these are all different. My dad, for instance, emphasizes the unity of the faith based on the Nicene Creed. Well, the Coptic Church, and the “chaldean” churches, do not confess the Nicene Creed. It’s more like siblings, than a “one religion, one ruler” sort of situation. “one religion, one ruler” breaks down in about 2 to 5 hundred years, after all sorts of thrashings of oppression.
and, yes, Judaism can be persuasive. my sister converted. my moms playgroup friend converted, and then her family- her father, husband, children, mother.
I’m having to work through an Orthodox Christian critic right now, who is criticizing a Mormon writer for bad theology. That’s where my irritation is coming from. His starting premises are about two theological splits over, for one, and for two, most people in America don’t even share his starting premises. He’s pretty sure he’s right, and that she is suffering under her religion, all evidence to the contrary. That’s more my irritation, than this particular posting.
and, seriously, it just gets irritating. Protestants have a consistent view. It includes a lot of local multiplicity, a lot of personal judgment, a lot of freedom. It’s not nihilistic. It’s just different than the more collective, group views prevailing in other versions of worship.
I hadn’t thought Protestantism involved a majorly different understanding of the life of Jesus Christ. In any case, I thought the comment referred to mainstream Protestantism in the West. Of course there are some “orthodox Protestant” holdouts.
The life of Jesus Christ? Not really. The role of the Church? Very much so. How does one become a minister? What is the nature of Communion? What is the nature of baptism? Can the Church forgive sins? Is remarriage after divorce possible (without the estranged spouse dying in the interim)? What is the relationship between faith and works in salvation? These are vitally important questions that Catholics and Protestants disagree on.
First of all, it was the Orthodox that was the offshoot, because they rejected the Primacy of Peter, despite the fact that the Bishop of Rome had been settling doctrinal disputes between bishops for centuries. Nevertheless, they still have valid apostolic succession, meaning that each of their presbyters and deacons was ordained by a bishop, and each of their bishops was ordained by a bishop in a line that traces back to the Apostles, who were ordained by Jesus.
Concerning Apostolic Seats, there are in fact hundreds of them today. As the Church grew, more bishops were needed than simply a sufficient number to replace the Apostles each generation. There are well over a hundred in the United States alone, each by definition occupying an Apostolic Seat. So Apostolic Seats can be divided without being diminished.
The problem with Protestantism is that you don’t have Apostolic Succession, and therefore you don’t actually have clergy, nor any means to sanction so-called pastors who teach heresy or engage in corruption. Indeed, though they call themselves pastors, they are not pastors, because one must be ordained as a presbyter in order to be a pastor, and though they call themselves ministers, they are not ministers, for one must be ordained a minister (deacon, from the Greek “diaconus,” meaning “minister”) in order to be one, and only a bishop can ordain. Read all of the First Letter of St. Paul to the Bishop Timothy, and you’ll understand the role of Apostolic Succession.
Not claiming a dog in the fight, but I’m certain you don’t know your history here. It took several centuries for the “primacy of Peter” to take hold, even in the western Empire.
Sounds familiar this.
@3. Mo was not invented by a propogandist. The Koran is a compilation of disjointed and non-continuous narratives. As a result control of the message was limited. Note, Allah is (was) the name of an ancient Arabian fertility goddess. There is one line that priests of Allah had a big part in the writing of the Koran, thus explaining the strange sexual issues and why “important” men, like priests, get extra wives and concubines.
What is even more interesting, to me, is that David seems to be echoing my post of months and months ago that a propaganda effort to provide Islam with a new narrative has possibilities.
ta
I am far from expert. When you read the Koran, however, it is clearly NOT created as a code of belief and behavior designed to encourage believers to become their best selves. It IS quite blatantly a polemic for consolidating power among the few while it quashes individuality and thought and excuses/justifies oppression, abuse, theft, destruction and death.
It’s likely Mohammed, like Obama, is a composite character that has “evolved” over time to suit the very earthly desires for power and supremacy.
Thankyou for your insight.
David, what do you make of St. John of Damascus’s Critique of Islam? I dates from approximately 100 years after Muhammad’s death. Islam and Muhammad are clearly portrayed in this work which quotes several chapters in the Quran. I find it hard to believe that Muhammad is fictional and that the Quran is a mythology concocted for political purposes. Yes, the hadith might be the product of post-conquest mythologizing about Muhammad and there may be some editing of the Quran. But to me the quran is a typical product of a preliterate society, in poetic form, retained in memory by Muhammad’s followers and put down in writing when the culture became literate. Muhammad himself seems to have been an illiterate Arab with occasional contact with poorly educated, possibly heretical Christians and Jews on the periphery of the civilized world.
John of Damascus is talking about something, but not necessarily about Islam as we know it now; he quotes some sources that are found in the Koran as well as some things that evidently never made it into the Koran. Koren and Nevo in “Crossroads to Islam” cite these inconsistencies to argue that Islam was not a fully-developed religion a century after its supposed founding.
Was Christianity fully developed in 100 A.D.?
Christianity was not fully developed after 100 years of its genesis because unlike Islam which was militarily triumphant, Christians were fugitives in the Roman empire whose messiah had been executed by the Roman authorities(Jew hating “Christians” please note that Pontius Pilate and the Romans were let off easy by the writers of the Gospels in order to appease them).
The Council of Nicea and the conversion of Constantine didnt occur for another 200 years while Mohammad was Constantine as well as the Council of Nicea!
Therefore your analogy is flawed.
While the Council of Nicea is when the bulk of the Nicean creed was formulated (certian lines were added by the Catholic church and rejected by the Orthidox) and elements were defined out even as late as teh councils in teh 400′s (Ephesus and Chaldea), the Apostles creed dates from the early 100′s. The letters of Paul all date from no later than AD63 or 66 (I forget the year of Paul’s martyrdom)
One could argue equally as well that Christianity was completely developed the first century AD and 2 has wide spread agreement between what is beleived today and what was believed in AD35. Most of todays differences between Protestants, Orthidox and Catholic is the difference between shades of a color red, and not between teh color red and blue or the color red and the sound of a whistle.
What analogy? I was asking a question.
Judaism has its own share of unhistorical and even early theological issues (Habiru is not Hebrew, there was never Egyptian slavery, El is not the same deity as YHWH, etc), but the fundamental religion is mostly intact from the 6th century BC onwards due to interpretations, and the legendary period isn’t taken too seriously. The Jewish religion has been forged through adversity, blood and struggle, more than any academic scriptural integrity. The human heart is uplifted first, the details forged out later. The other way around leaves you with Zoroastrianism.
A notable feature of Islam is that, unlike Judaism or Christianity, it has never been truly defeated in the long term, and there’s no knowing how it would react in that case. It can play the part of the land winning warrior just as easily as that of the fecund peasant, the most flexible combined traits of its predecessors. It can produce repressed, obedient men of honor just as easily as repressed, fertile women (doing BOTH is very profoundly difficult, historically). Scriptural minutiae aside, Muslims can proudly point to their journey up to modern history, rather than their formative period, as validating their election over the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyZaJg1n4Ho
Communism tends to directly suppress men (East Germany, North Korea) or indirectly suppress women by wooing them (Che, college liberals, etc), but it has never done both at once to the refined degree as Islam. The sexual power of Islam is its most powerful secret weapon, not heroism or nationhood or fanaticism or universality or election or anything else. Nuclear politics are a distraction, at best.
I think you say it all in saying that fundamentalist Islam is for morons, without quite knowing it. The religion’s full blown contradictions are excellent for driving away the effete true intellectuals who would water down the movement* (just like Communism). Islam is the most successful low IQ r-strategy yet, absolutely perfect for the modern world; it succeeds in Europe more than in Iran for a reason!
*Think of the peacock. It clearly wastes resources on its tail, but this amplifies its successes. Intentionally wasteful and stupid displays can make weakness a strength, by making strengths stand out more. The surprise of beauty is AMPLIFIED by imperfections; they enhance rather than distract. The understanding of psycho-sexuality in Islam is more than 1000 years ahead of its time! It knows how to both proselytize and multiply on the very deepest levels. This is what matters in the long term, not minor or even major details about Muhammad.
Regarding Judaism – denied. All archaeological evidence accumulated to date is at least consistent with, and often outright supportive of, the Biblical narrative. See http://www.amazon.com/The-Exodus-Decoded-History-Channel/dp/B000HOJR8A
This critical analysis seems to explain one thing which is observable today: The Saudi monarchs are afraid of the Bible! Why should they make the possession of a book they have supposedly superseded such a crime? Where does such insecurity come from? The Islamic scriptures are often invoked to justify murderous deeds in our time, like honor killings. Could the Islamic body of literature be a masterpiece or rationalization, both in the moral and political planes?
The tree and its fruits… We might perceive this with better clarity if we were not so deeply confused in the repudiation of own values, which did in fact deliver value. The supposed accomplishments of the Islamic culture do not stand empirical scrutiny very well, as Pope Benedict wisely and courageously remarked.
.
Though Moh left too many traces with the ladies, still some doubt he existed .. why shouldn’t he ? ? when asked whether he could pull some of those stunts, miracles Moses & Jesus used to entertain the folks, he said, I am as human as anybody else and can’t do those things
but
there is not a single historical or archeological evidence Moses existed .. not a single one .. British museum chronicles, day by day, Ramses II rule, all that Hebrew stuff just “Märchen”
so
in that sense
Moh ahead, whether he existed (what 1.7 Billion believe he did) or not
.
Except for those pesky Egyptian chariots and the bottom of the Red Sea (read: Sea of Reeds).
You speak of fairy tales apparently unaware of the tendency to redact embarrassing episodes in their history or exploits of Pharaohs from the previous dynasty. Also, since Exodus doesn’t name the Pharaoh, we are left to speculate when the Exodus happened, and by extension, who was Pharaoh at the time.
Now you have conceived and shall bear a son;
you shall call him Ishmael,*
for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.
12 He shall be a wild ass of a man,
with his hand against everyone,
and everyone’s hand against him;
and he shall live at odds with all his kin.’ GEN 16-11-12
The descendants of Ishmael and their militant behavior, was foretold to Hagar by the message of an angel. The descendants of Isaac have been fighting this war for a long time.
If we follow your mentor Rosenzweig, it could be said that Christianity “universalized” Judaism; Islam “universalized” Paganism. I could understand someone coming to the belief that Islam represents a “satanic” response to the increasingly effective Christian universalism. Of course, that would suggest that Christianity was very, very successful at this “universalism.” The history of Europe suggests it was not quite as effective as one would hope.
.
Langenbahn ,
according to Rosenzweig, Islam conform entirely with Judaism, in fact,
Islam is viewed as a “new edition”, a improved version of Judaism .. all those funny stuff in Islam, comes from Judaism .. stoning adulterers no Islam invention, rather Judaism law
Christianity “universalized” Judaism; Islam “universalized” Paganism .. LOL .. that is good one
Ask your Rabbie whether he would feel more comfortable in a mosque or christian church ? that Judeo-Christian rubbish just invented recently by Zionist to make a case for Israel .. it ain’t so
.
American church: rabbie feel comfortable.
Saudi church: no church in Saudi.
Iran church: no church in Iran.
American mosque: rabbie feel comfortable.
Saudi mosque: rabbie feel escared.
Iran mosque: rabbie feel nothing – his head cut off.
.
get your facts straight B4 distorting them
Iran has more Jewish holly places than Israel
Iran is the real spiritual birth place of Judaism and not Israel
Zionist neither believe nor practice Judaism
.
Who the @#(#)*)*!!!?? are you to say that Zionists “neither believe nor practice Judaism?” What do you know about religious Zionism? Cyrus of Persia was a Zionist: he sent the Jews back to Zion.
Now THAT was a low blow, Mr G! lol
Iran has many Jewish holly places. Just no actual Jews.
The best sentence I read this weekend: Cyrus of Persia was a Zionist: he sent the Jews back to Zion.
You telling someone to “get your facts straight”? hah, hah, hah, hah,
Actually, though from the standpoint of Judaism Islam is closer theologically (in terms of the nature of the deity) to Judaism than Christianity (whose trinity raises issues of polytheism and idolatry), according to Jewish law, a Jew can discuss elements of the Torah with a Christian but not with a Muslim. That’s because Christianity holds that the Hebrew bible is God’s inerrant word, even if they disagree with the Jews as to the interpretation. Islam, in contradistinction, says that the Jews corrupted the Torah and that the Koran is the true narrative.
Christians testify to the historical accuracy of the Jewish bible. Muslims say that the Torah is a fraud.
I would disagree, following Wyschogrod’s observation that the presence of the Shekhinah in Am Yisrael is in a sense “incarnational,” and that the Christian idea of incarnation really is an attempt to universalize a pre-existing Jewish notion of the holiness of the Jewish people. Christianity therefore can be seen as way to extend the covenant to Christians. There is no such concept in Islam, and the notion of the Indwelling of God in humans (whether Am Yisrael or the individual Jew Jesus of Nazareth) is entirely alien to Islam.
Thus saith the Lord, “It is too little for You to be my Servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob and restore the survivors of Israel; I will make You a Light to the Gentiles, that My salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”-Isaiah 49:6
David, it’s probably 15 years since I last read Wyschogrod and Berger’s book.
Perhaps, but I can guarantee you a Christian will be quite comfortable in a synagogue and not at all in a mosque. We know our roots, and the only reason our ancestors stopped attending synagogues is because they kicked us out, the culmination of 50 years of tension between Christians and Pharisees, dating back to the ministry of Jesus (John the Baptist had a lot to say against the Pharisees, too, but there is no record that they actually persecuted him or his followers until Jesus began multiplying them).
While I am ignorant of the material arguing that Mohammed didn’t exist, I am familiar with Ali Sina’s theory that he did exist and that the Koran was just his narcissistic cult-building.
The idea is that Mohammed was a narcissist (and had some other mental problems), gathered the scum of the society together, created a big self-justifying narrative, and managed to win power thanks to concentrating and motivated the most violent and outcast members of various Arabian tribes.
I find that entirely credible on the face of it. I will try to look into the theory that Mohammed did not exist but I hardly think that Islam is on firm grounds even if so.
Muslims have taught that when Mohammed started “hearing voices” he told his wife he feared he was going crazy. But his wife convinced him they were real, and that he was “chosen” to be a prophet. In contrast, Maimonides, the great Jewish scholar and physician of the 12th century, described Mohammed as “ha’meshugah” – the Crazy One.
Like Obama’s girlfriends, Mohammed may be just a “composite” – a construct. But at its foundation, I can easily imagine a Jim Jones-like character, using “theology” not only to justify his sexual appetites but his lust for power in tribal Arabia.
It’s often suicidal to inform your elders you disagree in the slightest with their faith. Our strongest link to religions remains in our heritage, which we are scorned for questioning as if ancestry itself is a god.
As to the reality of prophets and saviors, we continue to dance around the issue at hand. One can’t summarily dismiss X as a sun cult while embracing the ethereal, the transcendental, and other pseudoscience as real. Yet the quickest way to offend today’s spiritualists is to show them their religion is correct – only not by their fathers’ teaching, but in accordance with the driest of facts.
Some people just won’t take “yes” for an answer.
‘Something’ unusual happened in the early 600s that got disparate tribes of desert nomads to unify and swarm out of the Arabian Peninsula as an unstoppable military force. ‘Something’ was appealing enough to cause entire tribes and cities of non-Arabs to join the Muslims.
Without any evidence of this other Something, Mohammed is as good an explanation as any.
Nothing unifies barbarians like the promise of military success, plunder, riches, conquest, territorial expansion, and lordship over the formerly-civilized. You don’t need a religious movement to explain it.
On the other hand, it’s possible that then, as now, the Arabs didn’t separate religion from anything else they did. Who do Arabs seem to follow most readily today? Generals with great military records? Politicians with great ideas for reform? Or bearded old men in robes who claim to know what God wants? Maybe that was the whole purpose of Mohammed’s “revelation:” to establish his spiritual bona fides.
Perhaps he was a composite of military leaders.
Does history know exactly what that “something” was? Scientists have speculated the dark ages were caused by a meteor impact – in this regard the rumor that what is worshiped at Mecca is a meteor fragment is interesting.
How could large populations surge out of a desert? Was it desert at the time as it is now? Was it desert but that enabled riches because of trade routes – riches could mean large populations. Was it a result of overpopulation? Was it more a form of a migration such as pushed people around like the Magyars? Was the expansion enabled by the vacuum of power from the hollow shell of the Byzantine Empire at the time?
Were these Arabs conquerors simply because of their energy and resolve and mobility, such as the Mongols? Cities can’t really move and so are easy prey, and the energies of such places tend to be spent militarily on walls rather than offense.
What caused this surge out into the Mediterranean littoral?
There is also the view that the Christian Gospels may have been copies of, or influenced by, the Buddhist scriptures which predate them:
http://www.jesusisbuddha.com/
“Recent epoch-making discoveries of old Sanskrit manuscripts in Central Asia and Kashmir provide decisive proof that the four Greek Gospels have been translated directly from the Sanskrit. A careful comparison, word by word, sentence by sentence, shows that the Christian Gospels are Pirate-copies of the Buddhist Gospels (combined, of course, with words from the OT). God’s word, therefore, is originally Buddha’s word.
Comparison reveals that there is no person, no event, no locality mentioned in the four Christian Gospels not already present in the Buddhist Gospels that are, for sure, far earlier in time than their Christian copies.”
(1) The website you cite is on a Timecube level of crazy.
(2) The most cursory study of the themes and stories in the Mishnah and Talmud (rooted in 2nd Temple Judaism) would reveal stark simlarities with the gospel teachings of Jesus*, and that he was extremely well versed with the thoughts, controversies and storytelling styles of the Tannaic Sages and their Pharisee disciples. Jesus wasn’t a Buddist, a Muslim, a Catholic or a Baptist, or part of any other gentile sect. He was Jewish, is Jewish and will be Jewish when he returns to reign in Jerusalem.
*I’d recommend the book “Everyman’s Talmud” by Abraham Cohen. You’ll lose count of how many times something in the Talmud sounds like it came from the gospels.
We are Catholics because we follow the teachings of Jesus, both in written word and oral tradition. We hold Jesus to be the perfect Man and the perfect Jew, and His Life and teachings to be the fulfillment of Judaism. Thus, we see ourselves not as something that broke off from Judaism, but rather what follows naturally from Judaism after the coming of the Messiah. No longer do we need animal sacrifices, for we have one, eternal (in the sense of not being bounded by time, not that we are recrucifying Jesus) Sacrifice.
Islam is a cheap knock-off of Judaism, unoriginal and poorly done.
With some Christian elements thrown in (if we believe Kalisch, heretical Gnostic elements in particular). That was Franz Rosenzweig’s argument in The Star of Redemption.
See
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/09/003-christian-muslim-jew-18
Thank you, Mr. Goldman, for your excellent essay and for the link to the very good review of “The Star of Redemption.” An amazing title for a book.
.
LOL ..
Judi, you nailed it
true
Islam a bad copy of Judaism
.
You’re missing the key point, though. It’s Judaism rewritten to Arabic music, with a subtle but critical change to the story: Ishmael replaces Issac. This has specific appeal to two groups; the Arabs, (who believe that they are descended from Ishmael), and the Egyptians (because Hagar was Egyptian). It’s a type of replacement theology. And they do something really odd; they claim that Islam preceded Judaism, and the Jews hijacked Islam, and Mohammad came to restore ancient Islam.
The whole point of it was to replace the Jews with Arabs/Egyptians. The rest of it is all mundane details.
Orthodox Wiki about St. John of Damascus — interestingly enough, he is associated with the fierce defense of the icons (Islam and some forms of militant Protestantism in the past if you recall have prohibited them as ‘graven images’) and he is considered the last of the Church Fathers or doctors of the Chuch in Orthodoxy (the Catholics have St. Thomas Aquinas centuries later). He also is associated with the feast of the Ascension.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Damascus
And the pattern of a court with Muslim (or heterodox Muslim) leaders and a Christian court is very old in Damascus. Perhaps this is why the KLA-trained, Saudi-funded thugs the Freedom House, the Henry Jackson Society and others tell us are wonderful freedom fighters who will liberate Syria from Assad have not been very successful so far. I knew an American who actually met little Bashir once, and almost all of his housemaids and baby sitters were Christians. That was 1981, when the Syrians were warning my friend that America’s emerging alliance with Saddam Hussein was a big mistake.
So yes Assad should retire to an old folks home for dictators who’ve killed their people, perhaps in Belarus, but God knows we don’t need another Muslim Brotherhood dominated state on its borders. The fact that Spengler permits such comments whereas others do not is quite telling indeed.
And George P. it’s actually the other way around. Boddisthatva or popular Buddhism of Buddha as an invidual savior (which is still the most popular today in India, Burma and Thailand if not Tibet) only took off long after St. Thomas and his followers came to India in the 1st century AD.
True Syria’s Christians are a minority (though their numbers have been swollen by the one million or so Iraqi Christians who’ve fled their ancient homeland for Syria or Jordan or the rest of the world). Yet they’re an aspirational minority in that wealthy Sunni merchants from colonial times sent their kids to Jesuit Catholic, Anglican (later) or Greek Orthodox run schools. Thus they are the pivot minority of Syria, more so than the Kurds up on the Turkish border.
“Thou wast a holy instrument and a tuneful harp of godliness / Thy teachings shone forth to the ends of the world; O righteous John / We pray thee to entreat Christ our God to grant us His great mercy.”
EOT for me.
Mr. Goldman, this seems as good a place as any to ask you: do you know the latest on the famous trove of German photos of ancient and historical Korans, that was pretended to have been destroyed by WWII? The project beagn with German scholars attempting to analyze the Koranic text[s], much as the Old & New Testaments were being analyzed. WWII delayed it, then a German prof claimed the ~450 rolls of film had been destroyed…FALSE!! He had locked them away, and frozen the project.
I recall the WSJ had a long article on this amazing story back in 2008, but since then…nothing. Do you know anything?
The documents remain at the University of Berlin. Part of the problem is that there are very few scholars willing to depart from the standard narrative and face the consequences — that’s why a lot of the work is done by amateurs like Nevo, Koren, and Spencer.
May God bless the amateurs!
Since reading the book, it has make me wonder what secrets the Sana’a manuscripts are hiding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sana%27a_manuscript
The break-out of barbarian tribes into the civilized world followed by their military conquest and rule over civilized communities was a common theme of the era that spanned the first civilized communities until the the beginning of the Qing dynasty in 1644. In this context, the Arab eruption of the 7th century requires no peculiar explanation. The Byzantine and Sassanian Empires were exhausted from centuries of incessant warfare, and riven by internal disputes.
The Arabs saw their opening and took it. My reading is that Mohammed was a war leader who conquered Mecca, subdued the Arab Tribes, and began the external expansion of Arab rule.
They found it easy to detach Egypt, which had long chaffed at Byzantine rule, and Semitic Syria from Greek Byzantium. The Sassanian Empire included the Semitic, Christian and Jewish, Mesopotamia and the Persian, Zoroastrian, highlands, the clash of cultures and priorities between those two parts of the empire made the conquest easier.
The religion is fairly easy to account for. Barbarians conquering civilized peoples are envious of the cultural sophistication of their subjects. But, they want to preserve their tribal unity. An easy way of doing that is for the barbarians to adopt a heretical variant of the civilized culture. Thus, the Goths adopted Arianism. The Arabs wanted to do that too, and there were dozens of heresies waiting for them. The Arab adoption of Judaizing heresies is also unsurprising. They were popular amongst the Greek hating, Semitic speaking peoples of Syria and Meopotamia, many of whom were Arab tribesmen. There were also plenty of Jews around.
The Arabs would have needed the clerical and bureaucratic skills of local Jews and Christians to manage their new found empire. The persons who they hired, were most likely from minority communities. They would have pushed their masters to rationalize and regularize their new found religion and use it as a tool for unification and rule. They would have preferred heretical views.
The name Mohammed was used because of his popularity as a war leader. There may be some real bits of information in his biography, but most of it is midrash designed to justify the title of prophet. The Koran was razor bladed out of locally popular devotional pamphlets from the source heresies. The hadith were cut and try, and shariah was mostly taken from Jewish law with bits of Arab custom, roman law, and local traditions.
“This makes Islam far more fragile than Judaism or Christianity. If the West chose to exploit its fragility rather than attempt to appease, engage, or reform Islam, the outcome would surprise everyone.”
True enough, but what executive element in “the West” would pursue that opportunity? The Roman Catholic faith (northern hemisphere edition) has lost much of its moral capital because of its inability to deal with the predatory homosexuals that nest (and receive succor) within its bosom. And in any event, given the current antipathy of the Western elites towards Christian piety (as opposed to the sacred church of environmentalism), Euro-American Christianity is not likely to mount any new military crusades. The mainline Protestants’ nominal thirst for ‘social justice’ translates into self-denying paralysis, with the occasional exception of re-electing a Democratic politician. The Zionists are willing to defend their existence, but it remains to be seen if that portion of Judaism residing on the the East and Left Coasts of the U.S. will support their existential position. And in the meantime, the current U.S. administration continues to vote ‘present.’
So where, in all of that, might one find any likelyhood of the West’s exploiting Islamic fragility?
David P. Goldman
Who the @#(#)*)*!!!?? are you to say that Zionists “neither believe nor practice Judaism?” What do you know about religious Zionism? Cyrus of Persia was a Zionist: he sent the Jews back to Zion.
—–
Hmmm .. interesting definition of Zionism
have to admit, never heard of “religious Zionism”
well
Nobody is against Jews being in Zion .. As David Ben-Gurion rightly said, Palestinians probably are the original Jews and they in Zion since long long time
Cyrus the Persian would have sent Mr. Sharon and BiBi and Lieberman back to Poland and Russia and latvia .. in that sense not only Cyrus the Persian but Ahmadinejat a Zionist too
Look David, Iranians are a friend of Jews, argument can be made most Iranians have Jewish blood, entire cities were pure Jewish .. so , Jewish antagonism towards Iran is pissing in the wind, and, counter productive
Be nice to Ahmadinejat
LOL
and
that Zionism neither believe nor practice Judaism is not from Azari, but from Rabbi Weiss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9OIqy6md9w
and he is right
.
I am old enough to remember when the Palestinians were the native Jews. Others who lived in the Mandate were Arabs,Turks,Greeks, Druse, etc. That is what Ben Gurion meant.
DonM
I am old enough to remember when the Palestinians were the native Jews. Others who lived in the Mandate were Arabs,Turks,Greeks, Druse, etc. That is what Ben Gurion meant.
——–
No he did not
Because he not only said this, but elaborated further .. he explained that (he said “most probably”) Palestinians are the original Jews (Hebrew tribe) and they have been forced to convert to Islam (like everybody else) .. he further went on showing sympathy to Palestinians explaining they are innocent in all this but the European Jews have no other choice .. he further explained, for European Jews either this or no future
here an interesting clip Sharon & Ben Gurion
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1150038623212181786&q
.
Well, you gotta give Azari credit for trying to defend a gutter religion in the only way possible, but if his responses are typical for how Islam has to defend itself, is there any wonder why the Islamic world has no choice but to resort to one basic creed: “my god is the only god because I’ll kill you if you assert anything else.”
If it’s the Rabbi Weiss I’m thinking of, he represents a fringe of a fringe and is about as representative of Judaism as, well, as a Palestinian who did not believe in extinguishing Israel would be representative of Palestinians.
That David Ben Gurion quotation I’ve seen before; it’s spurious and no one who knows anything about Ben Gurion would credit it for a moment. He was, for example, well aware of the fact that substantial numbers of the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine in 1948 were either recent immigrants or the children of recent immigrants.
Alex Bensky
If it’s the Rabbi Weiss I’m thinking of, he represents a fringe of a fringe and is about as representative of Judaism as, well, as a Palestinian who did not believe in extinguishing Israel would be representative of Palestinians.
That David Ben Gurion quotation I’ve seen before; it’s spurious and no one who knows anything about Ben Gurion would credit it for a moment. He was, for example, well aware of the fact that substantial numbers of the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine in 1948 were either recent immigrants or the children of recent immigrants.
——–
Yes, Alex , Weiss is same Weiss you thinking of, and you should be proud of him
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQY60tN9yL8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-r04SQ97_Q
and , no, he does not represent fringe of a fringe .. can post a few Jewish scholars confirming what Weiss saying .. Judaism and Zionism do not mix .. like oil and water .. Zionism is a political movement , Judaism is a religion
Re Ben Gurion & Palestinians, can post more quote of that nature if you still doubt his views about Palestinians .. at least he was honest
.
The truth is very powerful, as lies are.
The self destroying advantage of lies is that are inconsistent,
as humans .
Truth don’t give concessions. Lies adapts for needs, frustration and fears;
but Islam adaptation became stiff too.
Imitate truth not giving concessions.
Doesn’t mind if Mahoma was real or not, to spread the doubt will help
to made another fissure in the old yellow mirror.
As a mirror of truth, fissures will finally break it completely.
Islamists used from the beginning it corners as swords,
and will use the breaking glass as a thousand knifes.
Lies loses its sharpness with the use.
People must accept and adapt to truth,
but lies adapts for people needs and fears.
The inflexibility of Islam is an adaptation
If the inflexibility of Islam is an adaptation, it is a tragic one, even is self-consistent.
The truth is very powerful, as lies are.
The self destroying advantage of lies is that are inconsistent,
as humans .
People must accept and adapt to truth,
but lies adapts for people needs and fears.
Truth don’t give concessions.
Lies adapts for needs, frustration and fears;
but Islam adaptation became stiff too.
Imitate truth not giving concessions.
Doesn’t mind if Mahoma was real or not, to spread the doubt will help
to made another fissure in the old yellow mirror.
As a mirror of truth, fissures will finally break it completely.
Islamists used from the beginning its corners as swords,
and will use the breaking glass as a thousand knifes.
Lies loses its sharpness with the use.
I’m learning a lot by reading Spencer’s articles on the existence of Mohammed and Spengler’s articles commenting on Spencer’s ideas. However, how does the non-existence of Mohammed reflect upon the nature of the Koran that I and many others have come to believe? If we look at the tenor of Koranic voices, we find in the early verses conciliation with and respect for the Jews and the Christians. As Mohammed becomes a warlord and gains power, the verses become harsh, advocating violence and death to all who do not accept Mohammed’s being the supreme prophet. This narrative squares with the generally accepted history of Mohammed’s life and his movement. What becomes of this narrative, which seems to be so compelling and at the same time does not flatter Islam or its (alleged?) founder?
Avidyananda
Aviyanada,
I believe this is the right question, and if there is a right answer, you are most qualified to contribute.
.
David P. Goldman
Who the @#(#)*)*!!!?? are you to say that Zionists “neither believe nor practice Judaism?” What do you know about religious Zionism? Cyrus of Persia was a Zionist: he sent the Jews back to Zion.
——
thought a bit more about “religious Zionism”
interesting (China a Capitalist Communist)
how can forcefully taking over Zion rime with Torah forbidding this ?
to be Zionist one must ignore what Torah explicitly forbids
unless
there is a new interpretation of what Torah says
re Cyrus the Persian being a Zionist,
respectfully
there’s a misunderstanding
Cyrus freed many TRIBES, among them the Hebrew Tribe, to go back to their homeland and practice their religion, he even paid for the construction of the Hebrew temple
Poor Cyrus did not mean those who by a miracle had become sons & daughters of Sara to wipe out the indigini of Zion
Again, David, Zionist antagonism with our beloved (Greater) Persia unjustified, rests on a misunderstanding .. Iranians are not against Israel .. Iranians just want Zionist to recognize Iranian leadership in that SPACE .. Iran building the NEW ME and Zionist must come under Iranian wing .. colonial forces are in retreat, Israel must look how ME will look like in 50 or 100 yrs if Israel intends to be there still in 1000 yrs
Key to a lasting Jewish state is in Tehran, not in Paris or London
Be nice to Ahmadinejat
.
An impressive argument. The wonders of high grade LSD.
See, Gary? He put you right. Iranian displeasure isn’t with Israel per se, it’s with Israel failing to acknowledge Iranian hegemony in the area.
All that stuff from all the mullahs about Israel being a cancer, a blot on Muslim honor, deserving of being wiped off the map…Ahmadinejad’s frequent threats to destroy Israel, all the Iranian-sponsored terrorism against Israel, just that colorful Iranian rhetoric that makes their culture so unique and valuable.
Alex Bensky
See, Gary ?
He put you right.
Iranian displeasure isn’t with Israel per se, it’s with Israel failing to acknowledge Iranian hegemony in the area.
All that stuff from all the mullahs about Israel being a cancer, a blot on Muslim honor, deserving of being wiped off the map…Ahmadinejad’s frequent threats to destroy Israel, all the Iranian-sponsored terrorism against Israel, just that colorful Iranian rhetoric that makes their culture so unique and valuable.
—————
correct Alex
Iranians are a friend of Jews, that last 2600 yrs .. as Iranian VP, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, said, Iran even a friend of Israel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esfandiar_Rahim_Mashaei
Iran never said Iran wants to wipe out Israel, Israel’s Deputy PM Dan Meridor: ‘Iran never called to wipe out Israel’ (full interview)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgGP2l46WfU
but
Iran is now spearheading a Middle Eastern uprising, renaissance
Iran is the dominant civilization to build the “NEW MIDDLE EAST”
For doing that, colonial beasts must be pushed back, out of ME
unfortunately
present Israel, the Zionist, are on the opposite camp .. 1956 Suez Canal war, claiming Suez Canal belonging to Brits and French
for ME people, for Iranian people, present Israel, is a forward military base for colonial (western) powers
Zionist entered into a Faustian deal with colonial powers
in that sense, present Israel is an impediment
but
If a Jewish homeland is really the goal
if so
As Israel is in ME, Israel must take ME interest to heart, tow ME interest and not colonial beast’s
Only fools do not see that west will be completely out of ME in generation or two .. Iran will be have central Asia, KavKaz and and under the wing
and than what ? ?
If Israel swings to a ME nationalist policy .. shaking hand with Iranian nation,
if so
Iran will deliver a Jewish home for @ least next 1000 yrs .. only Iran can deliver that .. why so ? .. because “rule by justice and not by sword” gives Iran the credential to do and able so
In that sense, Zionist should drop their antagonism towards Iran, “Greater Iran” is the next China
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Persia
.
They used to make damn fine rugs. I hear it was a nice country when they spoke Greek.
.
Gary Ogletree
They used to make damn fine rugs. I hear it was a nice country when they spoke Greek.
———-
Gary, please smile next time it’s passing over you
Track Iran’s Satellite LIVE !!
http://www.n2yo.com/?s=25544
.
By the way, your lack of knowledge about “religious Zionism” indicates that you don’t know much, if anything, about actual Zionism. It’s a long-standing tendency within the Zionist movement and anyone with a cursory knowledge of Zionism would be well aware of it.
Criticizing Zionism isn’t necessarily anti-Semitism, although it often is, but you might want to read up on it some before you offer your opinions on it.
Return to Zion has been a foundation of the Jewish religion since the fall of the First Temple and since the fall of the Second Temple is mentioned three times a day in Jewish prayer. One may criticize some aspects of Zionism without being an anti-Semite, but to reject Zionism as such is to demand that Jews give up their religion, that is, cease to be Jews, and that is anti-Semitism.
.
David P. Goldman
Return to Zion has been a foundation of the Jewish religion since the fall of the First Temple and since the fall of the Second Temple is mentioned three times a day in Jewish prayer. One may criticize some aspects of Zionism without being an anti-Semite, but to reject Zionism as such is to demand that Jews give up their religion, that is, cease to be Jews, and that is anti-Semitism.
———–
yes, true
people, tribes, nations, can, legitimately return to their homeland
Hebrew tribe .. the Persian and Babylonian Jews, are the Hebrew tribe .. and .. they have a valid case wanting to return to Zion
When Cyrus the Persian freed Hebrew tribe, most Hebrew tribe DID NOT return to Zion, most went to Persia .. as said entire cities in Persia, Ecbatana, were Hebrew tribe .. is said, nearly 1/3 of Persian population were Hebrew stock (before Islam Judaism was prevalent in Persia)
but
European, Russia, Khazari claiming to have converted to Jewish religion and become, by act of miracle, part of Hebrew tribe, sons & daughters of Sara, they neither a people, neither a tribe nor a nation .. they in Zion only because they were chased out of their homeland in Europe and Russia and and
Hebrew tribe can pray three times a day in Jewish prayer to go back to Zion, quite legitimate .. but .. European and Russian claiming same right is like Indonesian and Bangladeshi and Indian Muslims claiming they all can move to Arabia
Fact is, Hebrew tribe had their own religion, called Judaism .. that religion was meant, (tailored to) for Hebrew tribe and not for Russian or Europeans .. unlike Christianity
All this well known to Zionist .. but they do not care .. as Ben Gurion said, world can say anything, what counts is we are here.
Notion, European and Russians convert to Judaism (in itself an issue) have no right to Zion constitutes anti-Semitism, is self defeating and no need of debate
.
Alex Bensky
By the way, your lack of knowledge about “religious Zionism” indicates that you don’t know much, if anything, about actual Zionism. It’s a long-standing tendency within the Zionist movement and anyone with a cursory knowledge of Zionism would be well aware of it.
Criticizing Zionism isn’t necessarily anti-Semitism, although it often is, but you might want to read up on it some before you offer your opinions on it.
——–
In “one hour “Conversation” produced in 1989 Rabbi Israel Domb of London, England a long time Spritual leader of the organization “Neturi Karta – Jews United Against Zionism” discusses Origins and the Philosophy of the movement. He talks in detail about his book “The Tranformation” which documents his view that Zionism represents the abondonment by Jews of their rich “Torah True” Prophetic Tradition in favor of a false and disastrous Secular Nationalism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QfgvDXsDds
Look Alex, I debate this with David and his friends last few years .. each time, when push came to shove, they banned Azari
Azari knows what he talkin
.
This applies to you:
the belief that an esoteric knowledge enables the adepts to see past the surface:
Yep, yep, yep. Lil’ ol’ you has it all figured out. You watched a youtube video and now you are wiser, smarter and more insightful than the ancients. Sheesh. Spare us your open mouth dribbling.
Rabbi Dumb of London and a handful of other sectarian loonies oppose the existence of the State of Israel. Their support among Jews is well under 1%. Religious Zionism, by contrast, is a very large movement which was important in the founding of Israel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Isaac_Kook
A third of Israeli army officers are religious Zionists:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/sharp-rise-in-number-of-religious-idf-officers-1.313861
Broadly speaking, religious Zionists are part of what we would call Modern Orthodoxy. I could fairly characterize myself as a religious Zionist.
Karta was seen with David Duke at that Holocaust denial party in Iran (which itself was a farce, but still offensive in its own way). Point being, whatever the public thinks about him is exactly what he intended. He’s a jerk.
See this is why so many westerners secretly or not so secretly believe the Middle east is pretty much destined to blow itself to nuclear powder.
But, if we admit we believe that so many are going to die so horribly we feel guilty. So we go back to pretending there is hope.
john
See this is why so many westerners secretly or not so secretly believe the Middle east is pretty much destined to blow itself to nuclear powder.
But, if we admit we believe that so many are going to die so horribly we feel guilty. So we go back to pretending there is hope.
———-
Interesting
“many westerners secretly or not so secretly believe the Middle east is pretty much destined to blow itself to nuclear powder”
why so ?
what has ME done to deserve all to die in a nuclear genocide ?
all bad things to Jews were done by westerners
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vian_Conference
ME gave refuge to Jews .. without ME there would be no Jew today
European and Russian Jews must point their anger to Westerners and not to ME
Ben Gurion said, these people (Palestinian) are innocent, but we have no other choice
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AzariLoveIran,
Your arguments weave around actual facts and you change the subject faster than most of us change channels when political adverts show up. Fisking individual comments is really not something that helps one build great social skills.
You may actually believe what you are saying; but it’s all been wrong, off-topic, weird, and really creepy.
You want folks to believe in Iran or Islam as a good thing? Fine. You need to do 3 things:
1. Quit paying people to bomb children in India, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
2. Quit beheading people who disagree with you. And the “honor killings” of rape victims, too.
3. Quit telling everyone that “Israel must be obliterated and your country is building the nukes to do it”.
Do this for ten years in a row and get back with us…
Those weren’t bran muffins, Brainiac…
AzariLoveIran,
Your arguments weave around actual facts and you change the subject faster than most of us change channels when political adverts show up. Fisking individual comments is really not something that helps one build great social skills.
You may actually believe what you are saying; but it’s all been wrong, off-topic, weird, and really creepy.
You want folks to believe in Iran or Islam as a good thing? Fine. You need to do 3 things:
1. Quit paying people to bomb children in India, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
2. Quit beheading people who disagree with you. And the “honor killings” of rape victims, too.
3. Quit telling everyone that “Israel must be obliterated and your country is building the nukes to do it”.
Do this for ten years in a row and get back with us …
————
Yes, I do address individual posters on their posts, and not here to built social skills
and
We Iranians have learned from Cyrus the Persian, to respect, honor any religion even it is worshipping cow or rats or their G_D asking for blood of other tribes and asking more goats and Gold .. we respect all other religions , and , do not ridicule and insult believes of billion other people
that is what made Iran the greatest civilization human has known
- I as Iranian neither defend Islam nor think Islam a good thing .. my view is Islam not better nor worst than the other 2 Abrahamite .. any rock you throw to Islam I can find a rock in Judaism or Christianity to throw back .. but that is now how Iranian behave, we respect other views
- As said, and posted the link Israeli VP saying so, Iran never said Israel must be obliterated , watch the clip .. Zionist invented that
- If there is one nation in this world that deserve nuclear weapon, that nation is Iran .. not a nation that already dropped 2 nuke on civilians, not a nation that was the greatest slave trader in history, not a nation that killed 1/3 of Algerians and and and
Do this for 10 yrs in a row and get back to you .. LOL
You living in dark ages my friend, in dark ages .. you need 1000s of years to reach Iranian civilization
.
Pre-Islamic Literature (also a fraud)
====================================
Much the same arguments used to question the authenticity of the Islamic tradition (Islam,Koran,Mohammed), can also be leveled against the authenticity of the so-called pre-Islamic literature (mostly poetry) which informs a substantial part of the modern Arab ethos.
That semi-barbaric bands of tribesmen roaming the desert scratching out the driest oases for food and water could possibly have “orally transmitted” such a high level poetic tradition rivalling that of ancient Greece tasks credulity.
It too was almost surely a product of later generations who “invented” much of this poetry for socio-political reasons as a unifying historical “tradition”. The hadith are also notoriously suspicious on this basis.
It is interesting to note that several early 20th century Arab writers (Taha Hussein comes to mind) have long ago questioned all of this only be to be silenced for their “outrage”.
I don’t see why that’s impossible. Homer is I think acknowledged as not having been written down until much later than the poem’s origination. A pre-literate culture, especially given that such cultures tend to develop memory beyond what is usual in literat cultures, could well develop an intricate oral poetry.
I have no idea if pre-Muslims did, but it doesn’t seem unlikely.
peaceful religon in middle east sad to sad most are 3rd world tyrants running their countries like a mob family.no freedom of anything there no justice for other faiths yet islam is a peacful religon blah blah.sad to say we keep up these evil people for our own interests whatever they need out of that country.like mubarik peace for east but not his own people same with iran.read the balfour agreement an see what a mess they made out of that place.
Is there a scholarly English translation of the Koran…especially of its more controversial parts?
There is no really good “critical” translation in contemporary English. My preferred translation is the 50-year old translation by A. J. Arberry: http://www.amazon.com/The-Koran-Interpreted-A-Translation/dp/0684825074/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337551044&sr=1-1 . On the downside, he uses a now-archaic KJV English (similar to the King James Version of the Bible). But he does a good job of capturing the poetic character of the text.
A second resource is an on-line comparative translation at http://www.cmje.org/religious-texts/quran/ . Each verse is given in the translations by Yusufali, Pickthal, and Shakir. The downside of this is that it is difficult to follow the text as a whole.
A 130-year old western scholarly translation, by E. H. Palmer, part of Sacred Books of the East, vol. 6 can be found at http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/sbe06/index.htm . This was originally published in 1880 by Oxford University Press, and therefore represents the best of 19th Century English scholarship. On the whole Arberry and Palmer are closer to the Arabic original (insofar as it can be known), in contradistinction to the Muslim translations, which will use the reinterpretations of the Muslim commentarial tradition.
Finally, on several of the forums that discussed Mr. Goldman’s earlier work (as “Spengler”), there was an extensive analysis of the Qur’an by a “samwise”. He/she went surah (chapter) by surah, discussing each in some detail. He not only relates it to Spengler’s concerns, but interacts with the position of Rosenzweig on Islam, that Spengler/Goldman makes use of. If you known nothing about the Qur’an or its contents, it might not be a bad place to start.
This can still be found at http://spengler.atimes.net/viewtopic.php?t=11737&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 .
Given the ambiguity and frequent incoherence in the text, I rely on the comparative translation site. And thanks for pointing to “Samwise’” valuable work.
Samwise, is that you? Good to see you here. If we have to put up with ALI and view from Cloud Cuckoo Land, it nice to have the sane and serious people here as well.
The Koran as Literature
========================
It is important to note the following regarding the “understanding” of the Koranic text:
1. The vast majority of Muslims world-wide (about 80%) are not native to Arabic. That means they cannot read the Koran in the original (unless they’ve studied Arabic for at least 10 years). They rely on translations into their own languages in the same way English speakers do.
(In addition, translated texts of the Koran, so the tradition goes, are considered weak interpretations, at best, of the original. This leads to the widespread belief, among Arab Muslims, that non-Arabic speaking Muslims aren’t really Muslims, only a weak representation. They are not among the “chosen”.)
2. The vast majority of native Arabic speakers are unable to understand a good percentage (probably close to 50%) of what the Koran is saying in their own language. That is why there’s a massive thousand year old scholarly tradition in Arabic explaining the Koran, line by line. Many of these “explanations” differ radically from one another.
Bottom line: No one really knows what a good portion of the Koran was meant to convey to the reader, native Arabic speaker or not.
My eye was caught by the reference to Judiasm not being descended from worship of an Egyptian sun god.
Im not a theologian but here is what I learned from watching TV:
This Egyptian sun cult featured as many do, the concept of the judging of souls. After death, a judge takes the soul of the dead and weighs it against the feather of Maat. If your sins are lighter than a feather you are in.
Obviously thats a problem for most of us. So there entered a lawyer to argue the part of the damned. And, to offer his own heart in place of the sinners.
To a Christian ear thats very good news. Someone was there even then. Always was.
Thus enters “substitution theology,” which has no place in an understanding of Christ as fulfillment of the Jewish law. Remember, the Passover sacrifice involved *two* animals, one killed and one left alive. The one that died, isn’t the one that took away the sins of the people.
No, that was the Yom Kippur sacrifice. That said, in Christian reckoning, Good Friday is the Pasch and Yom Kippur rolled into one.
This article made me think a bit. It made me realize how ignorant I am of my Catholicism and its underlying Christianity. It was a bit of a slog but I worked through it. I was concerned that the comments would be dogmatic in their pros and cons (and some were) but on the whole were reasonable debate. I didn’t change channels, if you will.
I learned that as we go through time there will always be this debate and I for one, find it interesting. I do have some questions that were prompted by the article as well as the debate. Is there not found in Islam the critical thinking and questioning that has been the hallmark of Catholicism and Protestantism? I keep thinking of the fundamental madrassahs and their rote learning techniques. Does this continue through the universities? I ask because I don’t know.
And as a side note the image that John leaves of Jesus as a mediator/shyster is funny. I enjoyed it all.
I’ve read that the Koran claims that the Pharaoh who opposed Moses told his servant Haman to build the Tower of Babel. Any deliberate forgery by anybody in Egypt or Syria would have been a better imitation. The Koran sounds like it was dictated by someone far away from Byzantine heresies who was going by rumor.
The above uses the same type of reasoning that Isaac Asimov used to show that Shakespeare’s plays could not possibly have been written by Francis Bacon.
The Dem Party is laying the foundations for the Tower of Babel as we speak, and it is far advanced. Their sad addiction to diversity and race advocacy is a de facto classroom and teaching them to eventually pit themselves against each other. Women and minorities all screeching for a share of a shrinking tax and productivity base.
This is interesting historical research and hats off to Spencer for taking the lead in disseminating it to the Muslim world. I hope Pipes is correct and this private initiative has the ultimate effect of “leav(ing) Islam a less literal and doctrinaire religion with particularly beneficial implications in the case of doctrines of supremacism and misogyny”.
That being said, “Islam” seems to me a vague definition of a target for any USG active measures intended to achieve a strategic effect. Also, floating this meme is a technique of unknown efficacy. On the other hand, the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a very specific target which poses a very specific threat to the United States and its allies.
So, for my money, the most important thing Americans can do in this fight is work for our government to use all instruments of national power to eliminate the threat. That would have a number of positive effects, including giving a lesson to other terrorist supporting rogue regimes with hopes of achieving nuclear weapons status.
You have stated clearly the extraordinary and revolutionary concept of god who describe as “an infinite and eternal God who also has a personality and engages human beings with love”. The importance of that fact can not be overstated. God is revealed spectacularly to the jews and explodes again in christianity as god (or son of god which is god equivalent) in human form and brings salvation to his people. One of the unremarked but profound effects of this is kind of a epistemic sanity which is not complete but substantial. In addition to islam lacking an original foundation it is also missing the essential ingredient of a god that is highly personal and loves his people and which is the critical foundation for epistemic sanity. Actually the opposite is the case in islam. God is unknowable except through the written text of the koran and perhaps vaguely through the elect.
The smoking gun, or rather the dog that didn’t bark, as I see it, is that we have voluminous contemporaneous Byzantine (if not Sassanian)testimony from the time of Muhammad’s conquests and immediately after. They are all gloomy reports, all bewailing the fact that “these Arabs out of the desert are taking over everything and we can’t seem to stop them”. But NONE of them bother to mention “oh, and these guys that are eating our lunch?–they have this new religion as well,” something you would have expected Byzantine commentators to analyze to death.
This is nonsense for so many reasons I can hardly begin. This ‘bold new theory’ doesn’t speak truth to power; it speaks rubbish to the gullible.
In practical terms, the historicity of Muhammad is inconsequential. Those who choose to believe he existed will do so in the face of any argument or evidence to the contrary. Pressing the point with them will serve only to enrage them — not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.
Faith is the stubbornnest of all human adaptations because it requires no proof. (I speak as a devout Catholic, so don’t get uppity about that; it’s simply inherent in the nature of faith.) More, a faith which legitimizes Man’s basest impulses will have a powerful grip on the minds of its adherents, above and apart from whatever value they derive from its mythos. The wildfire spread of Islam through our prisons should tell you all you need to know.
Good point. Islam spreads in prisons because it is a belief system based solely around emotions. It rejects reason, rejects individualism and thus individual responsibiity (it’s all god’s will), rejects questions and dissent, rejects accountability, supports lies and manipulation of others, and sets up a perspective that views Others as enemies. Perfect for the criminal world.
It also fails to help one avoid the trappings of fatalism.
About six months ago a did a web search on what the word Allah meant. It came with Moon God. Not the a god like the one refer to in by the Jews or the Christian. It seems like the Moon God was worshiped throughout the Middle East.
The center of this Pagan god is Mecca. What even gets more interesting is the fact is that Islam is represented by a crescent moon and star, The Star being Allah the Moon God and and the star represents one of his daughters he has with the sun goddess.
It gets even more interesting it seems that on ruins from the time of the Queen of Sheba there is a crescent moon craved on a arch way. We know the Queen of Sheba liver in the time of King Solomon. Sheba was located in what is present day Yemen. I believe the Koran is a pagan book because it says in the later verses kill all the non believers. That is what the Muslims are doing around world right now. Just look at what Muslims are doing in Nigeria are doing to the Christians. If Muslims and the Koran worshiped the same God of the Jews and Christians as they say they do. They wouldn’t be killing non Muslims around the world. No they worship a Pagan god.
“Allah” is an Arabic variant of a generic Semitic word for “high” (as in elevated), meaning God, as in Bethel (Beth-El, House of God). It is the same root as the Hebrew generic name for God, Elohim. It does not specifically connote a moon god. We Jews, though, don’t pray to Elohim but to YHWH, to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who has a personal name. Christians don’t pray to a generic God but to Jesus of Nazareth. Allah is a remote and absolutely transcendent god who might take pity on humankind (“Allah the merciful”) but the idea that Allah suffers along with his people is absurd in the extreme as far as Islam is concerned. Try to get a Muslim to follow Song of Songs as a religious document (“the holy of holies,” Rabbi Akiva called it).
Nitpick: In general, Christians would claim that we (also) primarily pray to the God of the Jews (aka “God the Father”), being qualified to do so through the mediation of Jesus Christ. This isn’t to say that Christians don’t pray to Jesus also, but a Christianity which sees Jesus as replacing God of the Jews would be regarded by traditional Christianity as heresy.
In support of David’s point, Christian thought sees the personal God of the Jews becoming even more personal (ie the ultimate expression of His historical interaction and identification with people), rather than rejecting this trend in favour of an unknowable and/or distant god.
Mr. Goldman – just a note, that is not quite correct about Christians. We pray to the Trinity. I realize that the Trinity is a difficult concept to non-Christians, heck to most Christains, we usually call this a mystery – or if you will something of the nature of YHWH that is beyond the limits of our (human) minds.
I did a web search and found that squirrels are conspiring against humanity.
More generally, one heuristic I use is “Does this sound like people who comment on a topic I know something about?” In this case, this sounds entirely too much like self-congratulatory atheists discussing the Bible.
Perhaps not to his family and life-insurance underwriter.
All religions were invented to facilitate the control of the many by the few, it’s simply the first political system to extend influence beyond familial ties. The muzzis slather on a layer of tribal behaviors over the Christian religion that was a modification of Judaism that was a re-vamp of Babylonian babble.
Like the famous line from Star Wars, “Fear will keep the local systems in line.”
Don’t forget one of the first books on this subject written back in 1977, long before the current Islamist resurgence.
“Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World” (1977) by the historians Patricia Crone and Michael Cook.
Is is very difficult to get a copy of this book. I was once offered a copy for $350 but turned it down since it exceeded my book buying budget at the time.
The book and it’s authors were savagely attacked by the Islamic establishment. You can see some of that hostility in the current Wikipedia review.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagarism:_The_Making_of_the_Islamic_World
http://www.amazon.com/Hagarism-The-Making-Islamic-World/dp/0521297540
Mr. Goldman – I must have missed something. If Islam was invented for political reasons, you asked why it spread so strongly. Indeed, it spread to areas that were not conquered. But I couldn’t find your answer. Regards, Neil
As the Byzantine and Sassanid (Persian) empires fought themselves to exhaustion, Arab auxiliaries of the Byzantines moved into formerly Roman territory. In the 7th century they began raiding extensively, destroying irrigation systems and urban life. Survivors joined the horde in order to survive and it snowballed.
What about the Asian regions with Muslim majority like Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan or the Xinjiang Region in Northwest China?
Robert Kaplan argued in “Monsoon” that the conversion in South-East Asia was due to missionaries and not military conquest.
and I would argue that pirates and Mongol raiders were the “missionaries”
Xinjiang — then the Kingdom of Khotan — was conquered by Yusuf Qadr Khan of the Karakhanid Empire in 1006, its inhabitants thenceforth converted to Islam from Buddhism and Manichaeanism as a result of military conquest.
Likewise, Sindh, Punjab, and Baluchistan — modern-day Pakistan — were conquered by the victorious armies of the Umayyads in the late 7th/early 8th centuries.
The Majapahit Empire — a Hindu Empire in Malaysia and Indonesia — was conquered by the armies of the Sultanate of Demak under Sultan Patah in 1527, leading to the exile of many native Hindus and Buddhists to Bali (which was never conquered directly by any SE Asian sultanate, but merely made tributary).
Neil Steyskal
Mr. Goldman – I must have missed something. If Islam was invented for political reasons, you asked why it spread so strongly. Indeed, it spread to areas that were not conquered. But I couldn’t find your answer. Regards, Neil
——–
Neil ,
Thought this address to Mr. G, I would like to add my views
- Constantine adapted Christianity to counter the Persians (Romans were Mithras (Persian) worshippers)
- Hebrew tribe, being totem worshippers, got the idea of one G_D in Babylon from Persian Zoroastrians .. they decided to adapt all the Saga of Zoroastrian
and built Judaism around it .. that is where all that Abraham, Gabriel, G_D and and comes from .. reason again was political
- Iranians, Sunni till Safavid, decided to invent Shia to counter Ottoman Sultans, to differentiate and not anymore follow Sunni Muslim Khalifa but Persian Ayatollahs
All those Abarahmite religions are just Märchen .. stories .. invented for political reason at the time .. they lack any factual truth
Only real religion, spirituality, is Zoroastrianism .. everything else is just rubbish made to business
.
“Serious scholars no longer argue that Judaism is somehow descended from an Egyptian sun cult.”
Oh really?
Yeah. I bet he never existed. But he was a pedophile, nonetheless.
Religion is a matter of faith, not logic. What I see in the effort to historically “prove” their own religion correct and other religions as false is groups of people that are not very nice.
I agree that religion is a matter of faith rather than logic. But there is a difference between Islam, and a religion that tells its adherents to love the stranger as they do themselves, for they were once strangers, and calls them “strangers and sojourners before me, for the land is mine,” in the same breath that it declares a jubilee year in which they must “proclaim freedom throughout the land.” Different kinds of faith have different consequences.
Dr. Goldman, correctly I think, rejects the emergence of Islam within the ‘Hero’ tradition, ie, the development of an ideology by one man defined as a hero. I’d also reject the Hagarist view of the choice by a population of an ideology which focused on conquering the ‘holy lands’.
The problem is that neither view explains WHY a population would follow each perspective. After all, we continuously have various belief systems announced in our populations, various cults, beliefs in aliens, in messages from various spirits and so on. They are peripheral.
My view is that a population lives and adapts to economic reality.
Therefore, Judaism, Christianity and Islam developed as ideological responses, guiding specific economic and societal modes of behavior – and the impetus for these modes – was economic adaptation.
Judaism is a tribal ideology; that is, you are born into the group. There is no attempt to convert other peoples or to expand the population. Furthermore, it is matrilineal, descent is via the maternal kin. This suggests to me, that the economy of this ancient people was horticultural, based primarily around small scale non-irrigation agriculture with the work done in large part by the women. Note that this was very different from the Egyptian irrigation economy which was large scale, work done by the enslaved populations (and men). My view is that you had a peripheral economy adapted to non-irrigation techniques and maintained best in pockets of isolation.
Christianity developed as a result of the Roman technological communication and irrigation advances, which enabled settled town populations – using mixed horticulture and small animal (goats, sheep) and animal labor. This increased the population size..which led to developments in trade, the need for currency, and for commonality. Christianity is a trade ideology; it rejects tribalism. You are not born into it; you choose to belong. Therefore, it encourages interaction and collaboration (love they neighbor) rather than adversarial or isolate tribalism.
The expansion of the Byzantine economic mode, based on the Roman, was a vital force in this early era, with the growth of populations, expansion of settlements and trade.
Islam is, in my view, an economic reaction to the Byzantine-Christian population and land use expansion of this period. The peoples who became Islamic were, I suggest, using an entirely different economic mode. Pastoral nomadism. This is tribal, based around the work of the men (Islam is patrilineal) with large scale herding of animals (cattle, camels). This economy is migratory, it requires a very large land base for the constant movement of the animals to fresh pasture and water.
This land base was being encroached upon by the Byzantine-Christian expansion of settlements and trade. My view is that Islam emerged as an ECONOMIC reaction to this, and thus, as outlined in the Koran and Hadiths, is a militant, defensive, adversarial ideology – intent not on converting but on conquering and killing all others.
That is, I am removing from causality the notion of a Hero in contact with god, I am removing also the notion of a desire among a population for power. Neither of these views explains why a population would accept and follow such an ideology.
Instead, my view is economical and based on demographics (increase of population base) and challenges to existing economic modes.
It’s plain Mr. Goldman. I’m a dropout from two PhD programs.
The trouble with this way of putting the matter is that populations regularly fail to adapt to economic conditions and die out, in large part because their religion inhibits them from adapting.
But, logically, because one population’s ideology prevents adaptation, this does not mean that another population would not develop a new ideology that enabled adaptation.
First, could you give some examples of populations whose ideology them from adapting? Adaptation, after all, doesn’t happen overnight; it can take several generations, where the population would be at first reduced and then, under the new set of beliefs/behavior, would explode in numbers.
My own view is that there is no reason for a population to accept a belief system that is totally conceptual, that has no functional grounding in the realities of daily life. A few individuals, ‘kept’ by their communities, can indeed live a life totally engrossed in the conceptual, but the population as a whole must live in the daily, finite realities of basic material life.
A population in economic and ideological trouble right now, is of course the Islamic peoples of the Middle East. The basic problem is that their belief system, Islam, is a non-industrial tribal mode. It’s fine for a no-growth, non-industrial, medium size population. It rejects individualism, rejects reason, science, entrepreneurship, change. It can’t handle the realities of a population explosion (due to distributed revenues from oil) – and the realities that even this oil revenue isn’t enough to sustain these new massive populations. The Islamic nations of the ME are in severe economic trouble.
They must move to enable a middle class economy, ie, a private sector, individually owned small and medium business entrepreneurial market economy. Their statism, their rejection of individual freedom and private gain – is destroying them. The only reason they are ‘unable’ to adapt is because those oil revenues have kept them. But this won’t last – thus – the need for change. Islam will have to change as it is economically unsustainable in these nations.
The multiculturalism of the West, an ignorant and misguided policy, has kept Islamic immigrants in a bubble of economic security, kept by welfare, and therefore, isolated from confronting the real ideological problems of Islam: its rejection of individual freedom, rejection of reason, etc. This has set up a secure Islamic fascism and militancy in the West – their beliefs aren’t subject to economic reality.
Sometimes it’s too late, and people die. Look at Egypt right now. Even better, read my book.
Most certainly, people die with their ideology conflicts with economic reality. People don’t want to change their belief systems – that’s the last thing you want to change. It took the West 400 bloody years, filled with wars, famines, disease – to switch from their own tribal, two-clalss, dogmatic, close-minded belief system, based around local feudal agriculturalism, to a market, trade-centred, town-centred, middle class capitalism.
Egypt and the ME are at an economic and thus, ideological crossroads. Economically, they can’t sustain their current massive populations by a statist redistributive two-class economy. Islam is a two-class statist, no-growth ideology. This is a disastrous mix. The ME attempt to retain the two-class political and economic system has led to Islamic fascism, the utopian notion that ‘if only we could be ideologically pure, then, we’d be economically OK’.
Of course, mind doesn’t rule matter, and economic reality has to be faced. The ME has to reject tribalism, move into a civic mode of governance, allow a private and free economic middle class, allow the growth of individual intellectual freedom. It will take time, but they have no choice. The population pressures are too great.
The one problem – is the ideology has moved into a safe haven in the West, where Islamic fascists are economically cocooned in welfare – and can foment lifestyles of followers based totally around utopian ideas. The West has to reject this and has to support change in the ME>
Fragile? weak? They ruled the world for centuries.
And they saved Western heritage. Where islamist intellectual who saved what remained of Alexandria´s library.
Gibson praised Mohammed.
Understimating the enemy is not the best way to defeat the greatest threat ever to civilization
“The world”? Hardly, unless you accept the inflated claims of end-stage empires that the ekumen is coterminous with the world, and that beyond the pale are only the faceless, feckless barbarians.
But if those claims are accepted, why then so too did Rome rule the world, as the Han and Qing. Today the West rules it — and has a far better claim than ever did the August Caesar, the Son of Heave, or the Commander of the Faithful.
This too shall pass away.
Weird then that diversity and cleverness of thought in Alexandria today is relatively less than 2,000 years ago. They wouldn’t have metal doorknobs if we didn’t constantly remind them they exist.
As the Koran wasn’t written down until something like 150-200 years after (the illiterate) Mohammed’s death, all sorts of hanky panky (that’s an historical/technical term) and agenda driven ideas could have made it into the Islamic holy book in the interval.
Hasn’t that agenda has been elaborated on and extended by all sorts of holy men (doesn’t the Koran say intermediaries are unnecessary in the worshiper’s direct relationship to Allah?) in hadith/sunnah etc.
As an example of this insane elaboration of rules for behavior…
See Khomeini’s Little Green Book
First, the question of what Islam seeks to accomplish is of first importance. The definitive claim of the religion, if we follow Prof. Kalisch, is the Election of the Arabs to replace the Jews. Any manifest sign of Jewish election (for example, a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael) challenges the founding premise of Islam and constitutes an existential threat to the religion itself.
So to understand the insane (seems to be the word of the day) current posturing of radical Islamists towards the existence of the state of Israel, you have to imagine a true chosen people seeing themselves defiled by the simple physical presence of the Jewish state.
I guess that’s the inspiration for the Hamas charter and all the teachings in Arab madrassas whose geography maps of the Middle East conveniently omit Israel.
Mohammed (illusory or not) reportedly paid the Jews of Medina for ideas, hence similarities between the Koran and the Old Testament. He “took” a Jewess as concubine and another as wife after the death of wife #1, financial benefactress, Khadija.
I find no logic or reason in any of this contrived animosity, only a waste of time and a waste of human talent.
Seems to me that the conclusion that the purpose of the invention of Muhammad as “the Election of the Arabs to replace the Jews” is mistaken. The purpose was to replace the Catholics who at that time were already seen as a replacement for the Jews.
I prefer a more sinister explaination for the Koran. In the Proverbs there is an interesting statement; “dame folly apes wisdom”. Folly in this case is satanic. Augustine’s treatise, the City of God also points out that humanity is divided; thus the City of God and the city of man. Folly has invented a guide for the city of man, resulting in a “mohamed and the Koran.
The three heresies of the 21st century:
1. There was no Mohammed.
2. Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii.
3. Climate sensitivity is low.
Stone me.
There is no proof or reason to believe that a mythical sky god handed Moses anything inscribed in stone because there is no proof or reason to believe that mythical sky gods exist.
You are dishonest. When you start from that position (not only dismissing out of hand the existence of God, but in fact ridiculing that possibility), you are incapable of honestly considering evidence that proves the existence of God. As it is, I can prove based on the testimony of 500 witnesses, the photographic evidence in the Shroud of Turin, and the inability of His enemies to produce His Body that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead after being scourged, crucified, and confirmed dead by piercing His side with a spear to reveal that His Blood had separated from the serum, evidence His Heart was no longer beating.
Sorry Walter, you’re comments don’t exist because I don’t believe in atheists. On the other hand my God who rules the universe believes in atheists whether they are aware of it or not. Might want to consider that.
Some years ago I chided Spencer for giving the Koran too much credibility; more important than the nasty things one finds in the Koran, I argued, are two questions: “1) Mohammed may never have existed, and 2) If he existed, he may have had nothing to do with the Koran, which well might be an 8th- or 9th-century compilation.”
While this debate is interesting, especially in light of the great place Moslems now hold in the global public consciousness, it doesn’t matter. If a billion people believ something, it is. Like a Fictive Reality bubble built around, say, man-caused global warming, Islam is accepted so widely that whether or not it’s true is beside the point.
Islam is a Rube Goldberg machine, but with teef, sharp explosive teef. It is a perpetual motion machine designed to gather land and people inexorably, without remorse, for its stated purpose, which always has been and still is total defeat of and takeover from “competing” belief systems. So far, the machine has performed brilliantly. True, it takes the occasional regional defeat, sometimes even a loss, but on whole as a system of organization it’s the biggest winner ever.
There must be a flaw, a fundamental fatal weakness in there somewhere, right? The good historians say something stretches, but then finally breaks. Snap: the end of Islam, the end of victorious Moslems. I’ll believe it when I see it, which I never will.
“If a billion people believ something, it is.”
You’re assuming that what is will always be, so we must deal with it. But if these billion people only “believe something” because their father or some semi-educated imam says so, that’s a fragile basis for maintaining that belief. Most Muslims can’t read Arabic, so can’t study the source material that’s the foundation of their faith. (Indeed, some 35% of Egypt’s adult males and 45% of its adult females are functionally illiterate.) Islam’s theological foundations are so fragile that it must maintain social solidarity at all costs. We’d be fools not to foster doubts, as the potential gains are so significant.
You’re assuming that what is will always be, so we must deal with it.
I assume no such thing, who knows how this amazing historical trend will turn out.
What I do see is the total lack of organized resistance to this expansionary system. The question is, as it expands, and it’s expanding rapidly, whether it’s stretching towards a breakdown to result from an inherent flaw that made it seem unbeatable but it was actually not, a big snap, or is the the thing actually working fine rat now and rolling on towards total and final global takeover over the course of the next few decades.
The fundamental flaw in Islam, and it is a major, a basic primal, flaw, is that it has sealed its ideology in concrete. It thus prevents its followers from adapting to a modern industrial socioeconomic lifestyle.
First, Islam has little theological in it and most of that, as noted, is taken from Judaism.
Islam is primarily a socioeconomic and political way of life. This lifestyle is non-industrial, tribal agriculturalism. A tribal mode is two class: there are the elders who control the wealth (which can be herds of animals, land base, knowledge0 and..the rest of the population.
Second, Islam is a militant lifestyle that emerged, in my view, as a defensive response of one singular economic mode to a totally different economic mode that was encroaching its land base and thus disabling its pastoral economy. As defensive, it is non-collaborative, militant and imperialist.
Third, Islam set its ideology up as dogma rather than analysis; that is, it claims that its beliefs and behavior are dictated ‘straight from the mouth of god’. Hmm. That means that you, a human, have no ability or right to dissent, question, change, adapt. You’re stuck in concrete.
This might work if, if, the population base was low and above all, only in a non-industrial economy of primitive agriculturalism. But, it won’t work when the population increases into the multimillions and when the economy is industrial. These two factors – the size of the population and the economic mode absolutely require a civic rather than a tribal mode of organization.
That is – a free, independent, entrepreneurial middle class, busy with setting up private small and medium businesses. Statism, which is two class, won’t work, as the statist mode of wealth production – which is state control of massive raw resources – doesn’t produce enough wealth to sustain a population in the multimillions. You MUST have a robust private middle class economy.
Islam rejects individualism, rejects free enterprise, rejects questions and dissent and freedom – economic and political freedom. That means: no middle class. That means, as we see now in the Middle East Islamic nations, economic catastrophe. Revenue from the oil (which was developed by the West since Islamists didn’t have the technology and knowledge to extract and process and use it)…isn’t enough. Revenue from the Suez tolls (also built by the West for the same reasons) isn’t enough. Tourism from the West isn’t enough.
These nations must develop an internal middle class economy – and the old tribal clans in power are fighting to retain power. The people want freedom, they want the economic and political power to run their own lives.
Can Islam be allowed to adapt? Well, when you declare that you can’t…it’s difficult. However, this same view of rigid adherence was also visible in the 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th centuries in Europe when the Church (not the original faith) dominated the West. The dominance of the church collapsed and a middle class emerged – and – we know the rest; the rise of the West.
Can the Islamic people allow themselves the right to live in the modern world of individual rationality and exploration? I don’t think they have a choice.
But we do; our choice is to refuse to accomodate the cultural rigidity they have developed during this phase of statism and tribal control and their refusal to live with us when they are in the West. So, we must reject any sharia law in the West; reject veils, which are a clear statement of a refusal to interact with Others; reject other forms of cultural (not religious)primitiveness such as honor killings, refusal to integrate, insistence on special treatment.
Aside from its mysticism, socially, Islamic doctrine is centered around managing captured populations while maintaining strict orthodoxy so Muslims are not tainted by their conquests. If this is true, it means Islam was created on the fly, between early conquests.
Islam is a Rube Goldberg machine…So far, the machine has performed brilliantly.
I choke on the word “brilliantly”.
Only through our weakness, political correctness & phony “multiculturalism” has Islam been allowed to rise up and take a place in public consciousness in these times.
Strong cultures would laugh at the brouhaha manufactured over the Danish cartoons.
When it comes to getting away with raping girls in Norway and Britain or sometimes getting away with “honor killings” from Australia to Canada or some success in infusing sharia into western law, I have an explanation other than “brilliant”.
Bugs
Iran has many Jewish holly places. Just no actual Jews.
———
After Israel, Iran has the highest Jewish population in all that Space, right now there are 35,000 Iranians of Jewish faith in Iran .. the rest of Iranian Jews are in Beverly Hills California .. LOL
Synagogues of Tehran – کنیساهای تهران – בתי כנסת בטהראן, איראן
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qux_cS6f3AE
http://www.7dorim.com
24 active synagogues in Tehran
http://www.7dorim.com/Tasavir/kenisa_pesian.asp
http://www.beheshtieh.com/
Iran is the real Jewish homeland
.
I was just thinking that if you needed to protect Jews after the Holocaust, you might tell the world they are moving to X but send them to Y. I’m not prepared to say there are no Jews in Israel, but crazier things have happened.
“The fragility of Islam, as I see it, lies in a sudden realization of the ambiguity of the text of the Koran. Is it what it claims to be?
The fragility of Islam?! A quick look out the window, or into the TV, shows a resounding strength. A purposeful implacability that is held in reserve above serious criticism. I think the professor meant to say the possible fragility.
Moslems had doubts about the Holy Prophet at the start. Many of his Companions were upset at how he spent all day in bed with a grade school wife doing God knows what, finally entering her on her 9th birthday.
But they got with the program within a few years, by her 9th birthday, having over the past few years learned the joys of freedom over civilization, getting their own with the by then burgeoning sex-slave trade they’d built from dozens of unprovoked attacks on Jew banus. Most who know about that say bani Qurayza was the worst, but they were all bad. Real bad. So bad that such deeds stood beyond the pale of civilized criticism.
They still do.
It’s a facade of strength. They are in fact quite weak; it’s just that the world has grown soft and is too scared to challenge them.
Thank you, Mr. Goldman, for this post and for the often very interesting discussion thread. I have been considering getting Spencer’s new book, and now I will add your “Civilization” book to my wish list as well. I have Spencer’s “The Truth About Muhammad.” I have also an English/Arabic Koran which is distributed by the authorities at the main mosque in Mecca. I checked many points in Spencer’s book against the English in this official Koran. In each case Spencer was accurate according to the Saudi source.
Those in the above thread who doubt the historicity of the Exodus tradition might want to read “Israel in Egypt” by James K. Hoffmeier. The Joseph, Moses, and Exodus stories of the Torah are clearly heavily grounded in the Egypt of the second millennium BC. as archaeology has revealed it.
Instead of calling Muhammad
Muhammad (s.a.w.w.) = the Arabic original of
Muhammad (p.b.u.h.) = “peace be upon him”
we should call Muhammad (i.f.e.e.e.) = if he ever even existed
ooop, I meant Muhammad (i.h.e.e.e.) = if he ever even existed
But the Arabic original is still fitting, calling to mind a chainsaw.
Modesty refrains me from alerting you all to my own book on monotheism in late antiquity, ‘In the Shadow of the Sword’ – which argues, contra Robert Spencer, that Muhammad almost certainly did exist, but that it is most improbable he came from Mecca.
(There’s also quite a bit about rabbis – and how telling, it is, for instance, that Kufa, the first great centre of Islamic scholarship, should have been so very close to Sura, with its celebrated yeshiva.)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304050304577378091511934480.html?KEYWORDS=%22malise+ruthven%22
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/in-the-shadow-of-the-sword-by-tom-holland-7600583.html
http://www.historytoday.com/tom-holland/islams-origins-where-mystery-meets-history
Mr. Holland, you sure deserved a mention; sadly, I haven’t had time to read your book, which my friend Daniel Pipes praises.
Thanks for the heads up Mr. Holland.
We dont have time for modesty these days.
The subversion and undermining of Islam in a multi-headed hydra manner is what is needed.
FUD
This whole discussion will make certain Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed tinder for a much larger bonfire.
Islam is weak militarily. It is strong in social cohesion, often using severe moral and physical sanctions.
Sorry, but the writings of the good Brother begs refutation.
Yes, Moslems are weak militarily in the traditional, and fast fading, sense of military. But, with weapons becoming increasingly small, portable and cheap, it’s the case now that military operations with a more personal and local touch are more paramount now. And don’t forget the element of surprise. If a military promises to surprise the hell out of you, there is no choice but to expend a tremendous amount of resources, including freedom, to reduce the risks in that threat. Go to an airport and you’ll see what I mean.
Yes, Moslems operate by severe moral and physical sanctions… and at a personal level, which makes the surprise that much more dangerous. They may be amoral, but they’re physical. This has been there to see for 1,500 yrs now, in recent times with Leon Klinghoffer being rolled off the deck of the Achille Lauro in his wheelchair, the Munich Olympics, the doomed hotel in Beirut, the Bali nightclub, the U.S.S. Cole, the WTC the first time, the Murrah (go ahaid, call me a conspiracy theorist), the embassies in East Africa, the WTC the second time, the confused white kid wearing the bomb vest that went off too early outside the Sooner home football game as he was entering, Seattle, Little Rock, Chapel Hill, Fort Hood… you get the idea.
Up close and personal, like a fragile but earnest Jesuit.
Yes, but that threat is easily taken care of….if one has the will to do it. And Musseldom has no counter to stop its elimination, dispatching its agents, aka Muslims.
have read both of the last books of David P. Goldman and I have to say it is worth reading and studying, although I am torn between such deeply religious influenced works of Goldman and culture philosophers like for example Sloterdijk in Germany;
I like biblical rules but find it difficult to believe in a god as a being
Frank,
Most sophisticated theologians after Heidegger do not speak of God as a Being. Heidegger argued that there must be something anterior to Being which lets being be. [Yes, I know, but that's how Germans and philosophers talk.] The Jesuit commentator William Richardson, whom Heidegger called the first person to understand Sein und Zeit and for whom he (H) wrote the preface to R’s book so stating, offered a radical critique of medieval Catholic philosphy, especially Aquinas’s notion of God as the Supreme Being.
Counterfeiting is the felony of making the fake appear to be the true.
But the counterfeit, no matter how perfect, is still false. And worthless.
Counterfeiting is the felony of making the fake appear to be the true. But the counterfeit, no matter how perfect, is still false. And worthless.
Now wait a minute, it sure looks like fakery is a boom business nowadays. Just axe Secretary Eric Holder or Islamic theologan Ayman Zawahiri, they’ll tellya.
From what I can see, there’s never been a better time to profit by made up things.
David – I have not read the comments (although I plan to, later during the evening). I have to take a bit of issue with you on Israelite/Judean origins. Regretfully, there is precious little evidence of the Exodus or of the invasion by Joshuah. Personally, I do think there was an Exodus and that there was a Moses. My reason for saying so is that Moses’ name is Egyptian, as are his brother’s name, his sister’s name (which may mean Beloved of Amun) the names of the Levitical families and the name of at least one of Aaron’s children (Phineas, which means, swarthy). Also, the name, Gershom, one of Moses’ sons, may be Egyptian. My reason for thinking there was an Exodus is based on those names. As I see it, Moses, possibly having been a priest in Egypt, led a small band of Israelites out of Egypt to Canaan, where other Israelites may have already been residing. (I say small band, because I think the ostensible numbers in the Torah are too big to be believeable; I have, though, seen ways to interpret the data that lead to more believable numbers.)
As for the invasion by Joshua, current arachaeological thought is that the destruction layers, attributed earlier to him, are now attributed to the Phillistines, or to the Sea People. I’m not sure where that puts Joshua in the bigger scheme of things, but his story is problematic. The Book of Judges has a much more historical ring to it than does the Book of Joshua.
Finally, being the pedant I am, let me correct you on one matter. The people who left Egypt were Israelites. What we call Judasim has its origins late in the First Temple period, but the person who really got it going was Nehemiah. If you look at the Book of Ezra until the appearance of Ezra in chapter 7, as well the prophetical books, Haggai and the first of Zechariah, what you see is a temple-oriented religion very similar to that in the First Temple. Once you get past Nehemiah, you start seeing a Torah-centered religion. Not for nothing are the Sophrim dated to Ezra who was contemporaneous or after Nehemiah. I should add that by the time you get to third century BCE, what you see is a very recognizable, though early form of Judaism (some call it Middle Judasim).
There’s no evidence against the Exodus, either. A perfectly rational person can believe it happened. Who cares if Moses’ name is Egyptian? So was Esther’s (Ishtar) and Mordechai (Marduke). Suppose his name had been Irving?
David – With all due respect, it does make a big difference. It gives a lot of credence to the story. One thing that jumps out in the story is the ease of access Moses had to Pharaoh. That is only explicable if Moses was an Egyptian of high standing. Also, why are the Egyptian names located only in the Levitical tribe and in no other tribe?
Mordechai’s name is Marduke, and it’s Babylonian not Egyptian (and curiously, he did not have a Hebrew name). Esther may be a variant of Ishtar, which is a Babylonian goddess, or it may mean Astar, meaning, star. At least, she had a Hebrew name (Haddasah). [PS The likelihood of that story having occurred as we have it in the Masoretic text is quite small. For a somewhat comparable, albeit different setting, and with no heroine, see III Maccabees.)
David, don’t get me wrong. I wear my arbah kanfoth, with a thread of t’cheleth, and my week-day and Shabbath talaitim both have t’cheleth, and I am known for the shiur of matzoh I eat as the Seder. You get the picture. This is just to point out that one can be an observant Jew without giving up one’s skeptism.
Agree. Thank you for mentioning the Babylonian angle much better than I could have. Redundancy is verification. Nothing was written in a vacuum.
The characters may have eventually been given Jewish names, but the themes from dozens or hundreds of cultures are remembered.
What people forget so often is that Abraham originated in Ur of the Chaldees in the region of babylon and Sumeria, the son of an idol maker so its not unreasonable to expect him to be thouroughly suffused in Mesopatamian myths.
Of The Five Books of Moses ,Genesis in particular couldve been written beforehand and Moses simply couldve been reviving a lost history.
As for Moses reared in the Pharoahs court, it was customary for Pharoahs such Ramses upon conquest of a country like Syria to coopt the children of the ruling family and raise them in the Egyptian manner.
It could be that Moses was a “kapo” who went “rogue” and reidentified with his people.
Jack,
Either God made himself manifest in history through the Exodus, or he didn’t, and we have a self-consoling myth. It doesn’t bother me if the biblical account is not perfectly accurate (maybe it wasn’t 600,000 men who left Egypt, maybe it wasn’t 40 years), but it would bother me if it was concocted of whole clot. But that makes no sense to me. It’s not the sort of account one would concoct.
“Who cares if Moses’ name is Egyptian?”
The name is Egyptian!
He had other Hebrew names such as Avigdor and Tuvia (there is a medrash Yalkut Shimoni that gives 10 possibilities).
The Egyptian name is used to respect Batya, the Egyptian princess who took him from the water (and converted to Judaism).
Mordechai may be a Persianization of “Mor deci” – pure Myrrh. Ester is cognate with “hester” hidden or concealed. Her Hebrew name was Hadasah.
Could it be that Islam grew from socioeconomic conditions that first led to jealousy and then to a gangster mentality? By that I mean that the Arabs were at first simple nomadic tribes making their living on their selling sheep and goats. As their neighbors became more civilized, moving into towns and farming communities, they had less need for the nomads goats, hence less income for the nomads. Even the Shari’a laws fit in with a primitive tribal system. Anything like murder or theft would harm the tribe and since there was no organized law enforcement, or for that matter any organized set of laws, they made them up as they went along. Stick your hand where it don’t belong and whack, cut it off.
As the nomads saw the trade caravans between the towns grow they became jealous of the riches they were no longer getting a share of. From there they bound together in bandit gangs to raid the caravans bringing their tribal form of laws along with them. As this became more profitable they attracted more followers hence growing themselves out of just the caravan raiding business. From there they would progress to raiding the towns themselves or extorting protection money. Those towns they raided provided prisoners they turned into slaves or gave them a chance to join in the bandit gang. As the gangs grew ever larger they needed something to keep the gangs from turning on each other so all of a sudden God had given them the Word that they were in charge and anyone that argued the point got shafted, literally both here on earth and in the hereafter. Mohammad could have been one of the first to start collecting the tribes into raiding parties and came up with the idea of God speaking through him to keep them in line.
From there things stagnated. They no longer created anything for themselves, preferring the easy way out of just stealing anything they thought would be of value to them and destroying the rest.
Could it be that Islam grew from socioeconomic conditions that first led to jealousy and then to a gangster mentality?
Way, way back in the old daze, when men were men and everybody else ended up dead, there were mass migrations of groups based on power relationships based on their ingenuity.
The forebears of the Arabs somehow ended up on wasteland with worthless soil and scant water. It would be racist of me to mention genetics here, so I won’t. But, could this unfortunate circumstance have something to say about the origins of the Islam belief system?
There are NO moderate muslims. Islam is pure evil and needs to be erased from the earth. Its murder and destruction knows no bounds. Mohammed be damned to hell.
Absolutely correct there may be ‘moderate’ Muslims, and God knows I know many, but there is no such thing as ‘moderate’ Islam.
The Koran declares for itself and Muslims claim it to be the ‘ACTUAL and UNALTERABLE ‘ words of their God. So apart from making any reformation IMPOSSIBLE, what mere MAN is qualified to change the word of GOD.It also means that their God is a self contradictory, turgidly repetitive, mistake ridden, misogynistic, slave owning, wife beating, Jew HATING, ILLOGICAL, Arab Supremacist.
Its all there in the Koran just take a look. BTW the Bible is largely HISTORICAL and written by men about God whereas the Koran is PRESCRIPTIVE and is claimed to be DICTATED by God as INSTRUCTIONS and RULES from cradle to grave for men.
Even their adversity to pigs, dogs and cats could be traced to their nomadic lifestyle. Ever tried herding pigs? Dogs, at least, could be trained to do something useful but still needed to be fed which would cut into the nomads scant food supply. Cats are pretty useless except for companionship when they feel like it and again the have to be fed. Pigs are more trouble than they are worth. Not only do they have to be fed, even if they do eat leftovers and garbage, but they just don’t like going where you want them to. Not a good thing for a nomad.
As to the genetics,the nomadic lifestyle is a pretty lonely way to live. They wouldn’t get around others for long so raiding parties to capture slaves and women would at least help the gene pool. Too many men, not enough women would explain their propensity to young girls too. Take whatever you can get before someone else snaps them up. The polygamy could also show their status in the tribe. The more wives the higher up in the chain of command.
Islam is a religion of death. I defy any supporters of islam to prove me wrong. Mohammed may be real or may be fictitious, that is irrelevant, the only thing that is relevant in this discussion is the sheer anti-reason anti-life beliefs that cause the persecution of all non-muslims, the barbarity of treatment to “infidels”, the utter lack of protection of life, liberty, and property, the treatment of women like cattle, ad nauseum…..Yes, the bigger picture of islams disgusting anti-values are what need to be called out with fervor. Any Imam douchebag who wants to put a death fatwa on somebody needs to be taken out by our elite military sniper or drones. We cannot let the fear inspired islamist cult scare us into submission of its wretched belief system of death and servitude.
The transliteral of the word Islam from the 7th century Arabic was surrender.
After the miracle brought forth by the Holy Prophet, only two questions are left about the word:
1) Is it in the passive sense or the active one? Does it mean personal surrender or Surrender?
2) The first question axed and answered, does the word Surrender have an exclamation point behind it, as in Surrender!
With the exclamation!
I have seen a practical example: in Jordan a taxi had the seat belts deliberately cut out. The devout Muslim driver explained “If there is a crash only Allah’s will can save people, not the seatbelt”. Surrender!
To compare, in Jerusalem a devout Jewish volunteer on a moped with a GPS and a portable defibrillator was ready to dash off to save someone having a heart attack. (Mopeds can get to the scene faster than an ambulance). His radio had a special sabbath mode so he could get calls from dispatch without “working” on the sabbath.
Not “surrender!” but something of a mutual respect or even partnership in saving human lives.
Joe Atwill, in his book, _Caesar’s Messiah_, lays out a thesis that is extremely deep in explanatory power and provides a short step to understanding Islam as well.
It is easy to discover that Josephus states that the Jewish children would not proclaim Caesar as their Lord even if tortured to death. So, for the Romans, the problem became, “How do we get the Messianic Jews to bow down and worship Caesar without them knowing that they are worshiping Caesar?
Answer: Create a new religion which praises good tax paying Jews and shows that the Messianic Types were demon infected. Vespasian is the Father, Titus is the Son and, when he ascends to the throne, Domitian is the Holy Spirit.
BTW, it is easy to show that “Jesus” did not exist and the Crucifixion Motif is a set piece around the deaths of Galba, Otho and Vitellius (Indeed, the word puns on “Golgotha” “Gabbatha” “Galba-Otho” are transparent at this point.)
Fast forward a few hundred years and other Flavians have to shore up their eastern flanks – see Flavius Constantinus Heraclius, esp. What better way than to re-establish Caesar Worship again!
As Atwill states, your reward for not getting the joke is a belief in a false god.
CW
After reading about St. Paul’s release from Roman jail, miraculously unharmed, and the subsequent deaths of the remaining apostles, leads me to suspect that Saul/Paul was a member of the secret police.
His pose was to ferret out remaining leaders of the rebellion against Rome, his doctrinal stances may have been supplied by Roman (or Sanhedrin) propagandists.
Religion begins in politics; the patina of holiness only appears long after the audience is dead and the speaker’s motivations are forgotten.
Religion IS politics, under a different name.
alzaebo-
You are on to an EXTREMELY important point about what you think you read and what is actually there.
“Saul/Paul” turns out to be a man named “Mucianus”, who was Governor of Syria when Vespasian was given the orders by Nero to clean up the mess left by Cestius. Vespasian and Mucianus had a bit of a dust up until Titus, dba “The Son”, met with Mucianus and convinced him to end the feud and throw in with Vespasian.
This is the “Vision on the Road to Damascus”.
Homework assignment: Look at the list in Acts 6: 5, where Stephen Martyr is chosen. The last entry is “Nicholas, acolyte of Antioch”. Of course, it may be spelled “Nikolaus” or something and it might be translated “Hero of Antioch”. OK.
Lower your standards a bit and go to Wikipedia and search “Antioch”. Scroll down to “Roman Period” and fill in the blank in this sentence: “A great temple to Jupiter Capitolinus rose on Silpius, probably at the insistence of __________, whose cause the city had espoused.”
What do you find? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
CW
I accept the interpretation of Matthew 12 in Benedict XVI’s book Jesus of Nazareth, drawing on work by Rabbi Jacob Neusner: Jesus made radical Christological statements (“The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath”) which contain by implication the salvific claim of Christianity.
I discuss that a bit here:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NE15Dj02.html
Christian doctrine, practices and ritual were not formally developed by AD 100, to be sure, but the founding doctrine of Christianity had already been stated by Jesus and elaborated by Paul. I am no Christian, to be sure, but the historical record is what it is.
If only such detailed factual debates were held on the liturgy and history of Islam. I think opinion of Moslems among the Infidel masses would change drastically if they knew what Mohammed said and did, and what Moslems have been thinking and doing ever since. It’s been 1,400 yrs now, and it’s still a deep and dark mystery. And a very dangerous one to boot.
It’s all rat there in Ishaq and al-Tabari, in the Holy Ko-Ran and Hah-Deaths, and in a million other authoritative sources, all of them Moslem sources. But for some reason, the obvious truth has been relegated to a wishful and suicidal fog of… the preserve of religious status.
danielpipes.org/comments/195173 (&) danielpipes.org/comments/195225 reveals where real Hebrew and Egyptian history match in time. Moses told the truth about ancient world history.
It’s always good when archaeology or other disciplines confirm biblical accounts (as they appear to do in the same of Judges, Samuel and Kings), but as an observant Jew, it only matters to me that our tradition cannot be factually refuted. The fact that Jericho was destroyed presumably by the Sea Peoples at a time incompatible with Joshua does not mean that Joshua did not take the city on another occasion. If a an autobiography of Moses in hieroglyphics were to be found and carbon-dated to the right period, stating that Moses was an Egyptian priest who put one over on the dumb Hebrews, I would worry, same as Christians would be if someone dug up a corpse that could be authenticated as the body of Jesus of Nazareth. All we have is a few archaeologists who think that their guesswork is a bit more probable than the biblical account. If they make a living that way, I don’t mean to bother them, but why should I worry?
Good news for little Aisha – she wasn’t raped by filthy old Arab Uncle Mohammed at age six then…
But how do we explain all the battles in the next generation between Ali, Hussein, Hasan – is it all Ramayana-like fantasy stuff? The question is fair game though, especially in light of the Qoran’s howlers – eg Miriam the sister of Moshe is the same person as Miriam the mother of Yesu – this mistake alone should disqualify the Qoran forever from being an inspired book.
Reply to Goldman’s statement: “No-one has yet explained, moreover, why an ancient tribe would invent a history that portrayed its ancestors as slaves, or itself as conquerors of a land rather than as its autochthonous and legitimate inhabitants. In short, there is neither a literary, nor an historical, nor an anthropological, nor an archaeological argument against the Jewish claim that the written and oral laws were given to Moses at Mt. Sinai.”
Reply: I am not a scholar on this subject. But isn’t there a theory or thesis that after the Jews went into Babylonian Exile and some had intermarried but wanted to go back to Judea – they needed a “calling card” or history that explained to Judeans that they were descendants of Moses and came from Egypt? Thus the Pentateuch was born. Not that the Pentateuch was invented whole cloth as fiction. Imagine Mexican immigrants coming to America and using certain ancient sacred scriptures that corroborate they were Christians or Mormons. This isn’t exactly “gnosticism.”
Were the first five books of the Hebrew Bible written much later? Are they a mix of historical and historicism? Is Second Isaiah written by another author? Does this lessen its credibility or integrity or theology? Jeremiah says that Deuteronomy is a fraudulent book. What did he mean?
Sure. That’s been around for 150 years since Julius Wellhausen, and it’s a crock. There’s a reasonable argument that older texts were redacted, but it makes no sense that a bunch of guys in Babylon would invent this particular story.
Along the same line, the New Testament was written 3 centuries after Jesus and the Holy Ko-Ran was put to paper over a century after the Holy Prophet moved on up to Jannat.
But… are you saying that scriptures and sacralized histories could be rigged after the fact by self-interested liturgical bureaucrats beset with the problems & goals of their particular milieu?
Now you have conceived and shall bear a son;
you shall call him Ishmael,*
for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.
12 He shall be a wild ass of a man,
with his hand against everyone,
and everyone’s hand against him;
and he shall live at odds with all his kin.’
Fwiw, I seem to recall that the phrase “his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him” can also be read as “He will need everyone and everyone will need him” which appears to referring to Arab / Islamic Oil (along with aid, etc).
I was interested in this article until it started clamining that no one could disprove Moses at Sinai, et al
Did someone named Mohammed exist? I have seen nothing to indicate otherwise. Did Jesus exist? I have seen nothing to truly prove that a singular man of that nature did. Moses? Ditto
All of your imaginary friends in the sky are that; imaginary
As far as Mohammed’s character? That was acceptable at the time by their culture. I would like to point out that one of you Americans’ “gods”, Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves, impregnated same. Do you feel utter revulsion for him now? Using your logic above, if you do not, then you are an utter hypocrite
From the original article:
“This substantial lag between the time Mohammed is supposed to have lived and the first historical evidence of the religion he is purported to have founded is extremely suspicious,” Kalisch observes. “How can a world religion have erupted in a virtual literary vacuum?”
…
That’s easy.
Among Islam’s early adherents literacy was extremely rare. Mohammed murdered the local Jews who had very high levels of literacy, and at first the Muslims had limited regular contact with the Persians and Byzantines who were (relatively) literate.
When almost no one reads or writes you get a literary vacuum, which continued for a couple centuries until the Muslims conquered a significant number of people who actually did read and write and could create Muslim literature.
That’s fine Jay but apparently Mohammad did finally learn to read and write but still never bothered to jot down some of these really important Gody things being told to him. He also had people around him that were mentioned writing notes to others to convert or die, unless they pay the ransom or Jizya of course. So, there were people literate enough to leave some kind of paper trail on his side. There is also enough of a paper trail from the other side talking about these wild and crazy Arab guys trying to kill everything and everybody in their path but nothing about Mohammad or Islam. Nobody running around shouting Aluha Akbar, Mo’s number one!
I liked the part where one of his wives noted that Allah always seemed to contact Mo about things he and the wife were arguing about and for some reason, Allah was always on Mo’s side.
The Moslems were all over Egypt, Byzantine and Persia shortly after the Holy Prophet died in 632 AD. For it to take so much longer for the Holy Ko-Ran to be written down could be cruelly used as proof that the original Moslems, Arabs all, were just plain stupid. But I’m not cruel, and can’t help but recall Prez Barack’s great speech in Cairo extolling the virtues of Moslem genius. Oddly, the crowd loudly agreed with this statement, and Prez Barack Hussein nodded and smiled at their fervent applause.
There is very little evidence for all the speculation that the Jews borrowed from the Babylonians, Egyptians or others in canonical accounts. [Most of this material, like Maccabees III stayed as curious, if interesting, digressions left on the scrap heap.] Either most of the material we have from other cultures does not pre-date Jewish sources or the original source material has substantially changed in fundamental ways from its earlier content and does not reflect a firm transcending tradition like the Jewish accounts do and similarities are mostly superficial. A case for the former is Zorostrianism, which varied greatly from region to region and whose written material, other than a few ritual rubrics, dates to a post-Christian era. Furthermore, scholars can’t place Zoroster in an historical period: with dates ranging from 5000 BC to as late as 200s’. But most seem content to guess that Zoroster lived sometime in the 600s but AFTER the Babylonian captivity. A case for the latter point is seen in the Noahidic story of Gilgamesh, the account having changed dramatically from the earliest known written evidence. The later story is much more personalized and influenced by an outside source. The earliest cuneiform and its subsequent redaction actually makes a stronger case for the Julian Jaynes bicamerial mind theory. And even Gilgamesh is a rather facile comparison for the Noah story since the substance of the two are vastly different. Gilgamesh is a search for immortality, which the gods are hiding, and the eventual despair of such a quest. Noah is clearly interacting with a Deity who loves life so much He wants it to survive and helps those who equally love life and seeks its continuation.
If we are to speculate who the Hebrews were before their Exodus and peoplehood, I found this narrative by an unabashedly frank Eastern Orthodox “biblical anthropologist” fascinating if a bit fey: http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/
What is most intriguing is her discussions of Afro-Asiatic peoples and their shared religious practices. Though it is more speculation that needs to be taken with a grain of salt, (and if you are easily offended by someone who sees Jesus Christ in everything while minimizing the Jews in the scriptures, it might not be for you,) but for all her work, she does drive home a fascinating point that Abraham and his descendants (up until Moses) were more likely members of an original priestly-caste spread throughout Africa, Asia and later Europe when they adopted the Jupiter/Zeus mythos which came in from the Middle East.
For all the speculation that Moses was Akhenaten, or associated with him; no one ever sees that the irony may be that it is true that the Exodus was connected to Akhenaten but only because during the reign of Akhenaten was when a group from a conquered priest-ruler caste would have both the motivation and likelihood to likely exit without a trail of evidence recording the incident from an Egyptian perspective. (not to mention that in the classical world, groups and people brought into slavery were usually of the upper, educated classes where their skills would be useful- slaves were not made of the poor people of the land.) That Moses would have been an antagonist, and not ally, of Akhenaten would make Freud spin in his grave.
And it may be divertive, but the story of Akhenaten and his “religious” conversion of Egypt by the narrowing of a formerly henotheistic Empire to something best described as monolatry parallels more closely with Muhammad and the Islamic narrative than the Jewish one and I wonder why more people do not discuss this resemblance of a ruling class shoring up its power by enforcing a newly recognized religion that subsumes the diverse peoples and their religious expressions underneath it.
Abraham’s people didn’t adopt the Horus myth. The Horus myth is the origin of Messianic expecation among the Jews. Abraham’s ancestors were Horites who believed that He would come because of the prophecy of Gen. 3:15. The Horite ruler-priests were devotees of Horus, the Seed/Son of God, who was expected among the Proto-Saharan ancestors of the Jews.
My fear is that as interesting as this theory is, it itself has a bit of the gnostic revealed truth to it. (that’s just my skeptical first reaction) However, there are clearly gaps in the record from the early times of Islam and given that Arius was from Alexandria its feasibly that heretical thought lasted long enough in the desert to have an influence.