The Worldwide Jihad: The Truth About Islamic Terrorism (2 page)

Inventing Muhammad?

Why would it matter if Muhammad never existed? Certainly the accepted story of Islam's origins is taken for granted as historically accurate; while many don't accept Muhammad's claim to have been a prophet, few doubt that there was a man named Muhammad who in the early seventh century began to claim that he was receiving messages from Allah through the angel Gabriel. Many who hear about my new book “
Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam's Obscure Origins
” ask why it would matter whether or not Muhammad existed—after all, a billion Muslims believe he did, and they are not going to stop doing so because of some historical investigations. Yet the numerous indications that the standard account of Muhammad's life is more legend than fact actually have considerable implications for the contemporary political scene.

These are just a few of the weaknesses in the traditional account of Muhammad's life and the early days of Islam:

• No record of Muhammad's reported death in 632 appears until more than a century after that date.
  
• The early accounts written by the people the Arabs conquered never mention Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur'an. They call the conquerors "Ishmaelites," "Saracens," "Muhajirun," and "Hagarians," but never "Muslims."
  
• The Arab conquerors, in their coins and inscriptions, don't mention Islam or the Qur'an for the first six decades of their conquests. Mentions of "Muhammad" are non-specific and on at least two occasions are accompanied by a cross. The word can be used not only as a proper name, but also as an honorific.
  
• The Qur'an, even by the canonical Muslim account, was not distributed in its present form until the 650s. Casting into serious doubt that standard account is the fact that neither the Arabians nor the Christians and Jews in the region mention its existence until the early eighth century.
  
• We don't begin to hear about Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, and about Islam itself until the 690s, during the reign of the caliph Abd al-Malik. Coins and inscriptions reflecting Islamic beliefs begin to appear at this time also.
  
• In the middle of the eighth century, the Abbasid dynasty supplanted the Umayyad line of Abd al-Malik. In the Abbasid period, biographical material about Muhammad began to proliferate. The first complete biography of the prophet of Islam finally appeared during this era-at least 125 years after the traditional date of his death.
  

The lack of confirming detail in the historical record, the late development of biographical material about the Islamic prophet, the atmosphere of political and religious factionalism in which that material developed, and much more, suggest that the Muhammad of Islamic tradition did not exist, or if he did, he was substantially different from how that tradition portrays him.

How to make sense of all this? If the Arab forces that conquered so much territory beginning in the 630s were not energized by the teachings of a new prophet and the divine word he delivered, how did the Islamic character of their empire arise at all? If Muhammad did not exist, why was it ever considered necessary to invent him?

Every empire of the day had a civic religion. The Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire was Christian. Its rival Persia, meanwhile, was Zoroastrian. The Arab Empire quickly controlled and needed to unify huge expanses of territory where different religions predominated. The empire was growing quickly, soon rivaling the Byzantine and Persian Empires in size and power. But at first, it did not have a compelling political theology to compete with those it supplanted and to solidify its conquests. It needed a common religion—a political theology that would provide the foundation for the empire's unity and secure allegiance to the state.

Toward the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the eighth, the leaders of the Muslim world began to speak specifically about Islam, its prophet, and eventually its book. Stories about Muhammad began to circulate. A warrior-prophet would justify the new empire's aggressive expansionism. To give those conquests a theological justification—as Muhammad's teachings and example do—would place them beyond criticism.

This is why Islam developed as such a profoundly political religion. Islam is a political faith: the divine kingdom is very much of this world, with God's wrath and judgment to be expected not only in the next life, but also in this one, to be delivered by believers. Allah says in the Qur'an: "As for those disbelieving infidels, I will punish them with a terrible agony in this world and the next. They have no one to help or save them" (3:56). Allah also exhorts Muslims to wage war against those infidels, apostates, and polytheists (2:191, 4:89, 9:5, 9:29).

There is compelling reason to conclude that Muhammad, the messenger of Allah, came into existence only after the Arab Empire was firmly entrenched and casting about for a political theology to anchor and unify it. Muhammad and the Qur'an cemented the power of the Umayyad caliphate and then that of the Abbasid caliphate.

This is not just academic speculation. The non-Muslim world can be aided significantly in its understanding of the global jihad threat—an understanding that has been notably lacking even at the highest levels since September 11, 2001—by a careful, unbiased examination of the origins of Islam. There is a great deal of debate today in the United States and Western Europe about the nature of Islamic law; anti-sharia measures have been proposed in at least twenty states, and one state—Oklahoma—voted to ban sharia in November 2010, although that law was quickly overturned as an infringement upon Muslims' religious freedom. Others have been successfully resisted on the same grounds.

If it is understood that the political aspect of Islam preceded the religious aspect, that might change. But that will happen only if a sufficient number of people are willing to go wherever the truth my take them.

The Real Lesson of Benghazi

The Obama administration is approaching full meltdown over the steady stream of revelations concerning its inaction and lies over the massacre of Ambassador Chris Stevens and other U.S. personnel in Libya. Obama and Biden are
lining up against Hillary Clinton and the State Department
, claiming that they weren’t told about Stevens’ requests for additional security. Meanwhile, administration officials are
denying
 that they ever linked the attack on the consulate to the Muhammad video that has been blamed for worldwide Muslim riots, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. One fact, however, is as clear as it is little noted: the entire incident demonstrates the abject failure of the Obama administration’s Middle East policy, and its analysis of the jihad threat in general.

Speaking about the Libyan revolution in March 2011, Obama warmly praised the dawning in Libya of “the rights of peaceful assembly, free speech, and the ability of the Libyan people to determine their own destiny.” After providing military aid to the anti-Gaddafi rebels despite evidence of their al-Qaeda links, the administration–whether the call really came from the White House or the State Department or both–had every reason to ignore the request from Benghazi for more security, and to pretend that the whole thing was just a spontaneous uprising over a video, not the carefully planned September 11 jihad attack that it proved to be.

To have acknowledged what was really happening would have been to admit that the Allahu-akbaring mob besieging the Benghazi consulate was nothing remotely close to a responsible citizenry enjoying their rights of peaceful assembly, free speech, and self-determination. It would have been to admit that the jihad against the United States would not be turned away from its goal by hearts-and-minds gestures, even if those gestures included the removal of a brutal dictator. The people of Benghazi were no more inclined to welcome the Americans as liberators–and Ambassador Stevens had attempted to play exactly that role, sneaking into Libya during the most difficult days of the uprising and doing everything he could to aid the rebels–than were the people of Iraq when Saddam Hussein was toppled.

The reason in both cases was the same: the rebels against both Saddam and Gaddafi were largely Islamic supremacists who wanted a Sharia state, disdained democracy, and considered the United States to be their enemy not primarily because of various aspects of its foreign policy, but because it is the world’s foremost infidel polity, against whom the mujahedin believe they have a sacred duty to wage war. The Qur’an and Islamic law direct Muslims to wage war against and subjugate the “People of the Book” (cf. Qur’an 9:29)–that is, primarily Jews and Christians–not if they behave badly by supporting Israel or Middle Eastern dictators, but simply because they are not Muslims.

But the White House and State Department not only do not acknowledge this fact–they have done all they can to deny and obfuscate it. The one cardinal proposition that accepted analysts must repeat is that the present conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims have absolutely nothing to do with Islam; indeed, Obama administration officials are expressly forbidden to link Islam with terrorism, as if Islamic terrorists weren’t busy linking the two on a daily basis. The errors of analysis and wrong decisions that cost lives all follow from this initial false premise.

About six months ago a State Department official contacted me privately and told me about State employees who had been assigned to study the life of Muhammad, with an eye toward putting together a positive portrayal of the prophet of Islam that would presumably win more Muslim hearts and minds by going out with the United States government’s seal of approval. The officials who began studying the earliest Muslim sources about Muhammad, however, were astonished as they came face-to-face not with a seventh-century Gandhi, but with a figure of war and rapine who appeared to justify the worst allegations of the “Islamophobes” that the Obama administration has so roundly excoriated. Needless to say, the puff piece on Muhammad did not appear.

This disconnect from reality was reminiscent of what is said about State during the Iranian Revolution: that while the Ayatollah Khomeini was bringing about the toppling of the shah and the establishment of the Islamic Republic, only one of his books could be found anywhere in the State Department, and no one had read it. No one thought the rantings of an obscure fanatic who for years had been exiled to far-off France were important.

This was the willful blindness that killed Chris Stevens, and is the real scandal of Benghazi. The politically correct fantasies that characterize the Washington establishment’s views on Islam and jihad not only make for bad policy; they also kill. Clearly what happened in Benghazi was part of a coordinated, carefully planned series of jihad attacks–in all the controversy over what the White House knew and didn’t know, it has also been forgotten that jihadis stormed the U.S. embassy in Cairo on the same day. That raises the question: What did the Muslim Brotherhood know, and when did it know it? And the related question: Why is the Obama administration continuing to cultivate warm relations (and shower money upon) the Morsi regime in Egypt, without undertaking even the most cursory investigation into the possibility of its involvement in those attacks?

From the beginning of the “Arab Spring,” I said repeatedly that it was not a democracy movement as the Western press and the White House were claiming, but an Islamic supremacist takeover that would result in the creation of Sharia states far more hostile to the U.S. and Israel than the Arab nationalist regimes they were supplanting. This assessment was greeted with the usual scorn, but Benghazi shows who was right and who was wrong and how desperately the foreign policy establishment in Washington needs a very thorough housecleaning.

Ahmadinejad and Morsi Lay Out the Islamic Agenda

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mohammed Morsi, arguably the foremost exponents today of Sharia rule, both spoke at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, and their speeches together amounted to an Islamic supremacist wish list for the world.

The foremost item on their list, not surprisingly, was the destruction of Israel, although both knew better in the glare of international media than to state their aspirations quite so baldly.

Ahmadinejad drenched his address in Islamic piety, beginning with a traditional Islamic invocation: “In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. All Praise Belongs to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, and May Peace and Blessings be upon the Greatest and Trustworthy Prophet and His Pure Progeny, His Chosen Companions, and upon all Divine Messengers. Oh, God, Hasten the Emergence of Your Chosen Beloved, Grant Him Good Health and Victory, Make us His Best Companions, and all those who attest to His Rightfulness.” And then: “I thank the Almighty God for having once more the chance to participate in this meeting. We have gathered here to ponder and work together for building a better life for the entire human community and for our nations.”

And how can we work together for building a better life? Ahmadinejad ticked off a list of things that he posited had interfered with international brotherhood and harmony, including “egoism, distrust, malicious behaviors, and dictatorships,” as well as the Dark Ages and the Crusades (although he didn’t mention the centuries of murderous jihad warfare all over the globe).