- Dec 20, 2003
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I think that the best evidence that Mohammed did exist lies in the early Sunni-Shia split. This was all predicated on who was to be the successor to Mohammed, and to have a successor there must have been someone there in the first place to take his place.
That's the best argument yet I have heard for his existence.
Almost certainly though, whoever Mohammed was, the birth of the religion was more the working of political need than of angelic revelation. From very early there were thousands upon thousands of sayings attributed to him as Koranic, and it was a very arbitrary task that the early leader of the movement made to choose some and eliminate others, even eliminating the copy that the widow of Mohammed held in her possession. This is to say that the religion of Mohammed already existed, in the lore of the Persians and the Christians and the Jews and the Christian apocryphal writings. The model of government in those days was a theocracy, and when the Arabs(Hagarites) found themselves with a world-class empire, they scrambled to create a religion with which to govern it.
The earliest leader of the movement even said as much as he went about picking and choosing which elements to put into the new religion, and which to leave out, all in the overt intent to not repeat the political divisiveness of the Christian world over what version of the religion was authentic and which were not.
Create an empire of conformity and pretend it was a work of God. Yes there are distorted echoes of earlier Christian writings in the Quran. In fact the religion was a means of establishing political unity and a reason for conquest. Seems an accurate summary to me. Mohammed may well have existed but a myth was crafted from his life and words which has little to do with God.
I was thinking this today. In Christ we have a freedom. In each person there is a universe of possibility. What Christ releases when we enter into his grace can appear incredibly messy and disorganised to someone from the outside looking in. Each person is different and the song of praise that they sing is different too. Christian pluralism and diversity is a distraction to those who want an earthly unity and kingdom. The idea that our unity is in Christ rather than an emperor is a problem for many. But in sense that is the essence of freedom. We are not slaves to some earthly imperial order but rather freed to live for Christ. The diversity, creativity and richness of the Christian world by comparison to that of Islam is testimony to the freedom we have in Christ. We are the children of the free woman Sarah not the slave woman Hagar. If Islam has any divine root then it comes from the blessing God gave to the slave child Ishmael. But that blessing was inferior to the one given to the free child Isaac.
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