The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the oldest Quran

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Christoph Luxenberg is just one of several scholars who are questioning the orthodox Islamic view of the formation of Islam.

I have the following works:

- The Hidden Origin of Islam
- Early Islam

... both with Luxenberg as co-author.

The core message in both works are:

- The Qur'an consists of multiple independent text of various age, and was not a single manuscript
- The Arabian Peninsula was Christian decades after Muhammad was supposed to have lived
- Islam evolved from Nestorian Christianity (which rejected the divine nature of Jesus)
- Muhammad never existed; his name was a mistranslation of a title bestowed upon Jesus

The most damning evidence against the orthodox account of Islam is that Muawiyah I (the first Umayyad caliph from 661-680) minted Christian coins despite the fact that he succeeded the expansion of the Rashidun caliphate. This suggests that Islam did not evolve until much later than the alleged death of Muhammad in 632.

Furthermore, the earliest bibliography of Muhammad in his Islamic form was written anywhere between 120 and 170 years after his apparent death, thus casting serious doubt about its veracity.

What are your sources and evidences of this? Most historians say that the Arabian Peninsula was mostly Pagan, there are plenty of passages and documented events of Mohammad's army destroying Pagan temples (like the Allah's daughters temples of Izzat, Allat, and Manat), If the Peninsula was really mostly Christian, wouldn't be Churches instead of temples? Also a lot of evidences indicate the Pagan origin of the Kaaba and the Islamic pilgrimage.

My sources are (as previously mentioned):
- The Hidden Origin of Islam
- Early Islam

http://www.amazon.com/The-Hidden-Origin ... 1591026342
http://www.amazon.com/Early-Islam-Criti ... 161614825X

Much of that does not head-on contradict conventional history.

When Islam emerged out of the Arabian desert it was regarded by folks in the former Roman Mediterranean world as just another form of Arianism- the heretical non-trinitarian version of Christianity that was popular with the Barbarians coming out of the north (here come another bunch of arians nomads out of the south now-whats new?).

Indeed many of the early versions of Christianity (like gnosticism, and other early versions) are more alien theologically from modern christianity than is modern Islam (but they were called 'gnostic christians' but we dont call muslims 'christians' -go figure). The Gnostics even had demiurge as the creator. God drew up the blueprint, but the demiurge was the incompentent handyman who tried to execute the blueprint and made creation the frigged up thing that it is!

Someone on WP talked about the earliest biographers of Muhammed and how they wrote things like "he a did a little pillaging here and there. And he did some even worse sounding stuff, but I wont go into that-because it might be misunderstood."

If a muslim biographer of Mohammed says stuff thats that unflattering to Mohammed (a friend admits to bad stuff) then that suggests that the things he says about the man must be true. Which suggests that the man himself mustve really lived.

It might be that in the early days Islam was thought of by both its followers and by the orthodox/catholic Byzantine and Frankish worlds as a form of christianity. An abominoble heretical verison of christianity to the latter, but still an offshoot of the same religion. And as the battlelines hardened they both gradually came to think of each other as seperate faiths. Mohammed got elevated from a preacher of a brand of nontrinitarian christianity to being remembered as a Prophet of a whole seperate religion.

But there's no demiurge concept in the Quran.

I used to think that Jesus never existed, that the Jesus myth was simply a version of the Resurrected God Myth that goes back to Sumer. Then I learned about the Nag Hammadi Gospels, which are varying versions of the meaning of Jesus's resurrection from the early days of Christianity. The Roman Church tried to destroy all opposing views of Jesus, but somebody hid the NHG in Egypt, where they were found in the 1940s. Also, there have been documented cases of people "dying" only to later "come back to life". Also, there is exorcism, which only exists in Christianity and which is seriously weird. I haven't been able to find a good scientific explanation for demonic possession, especially some of the harder to dismiss ones. Spirit possession also exists in Voudoun (voodoo). All this argues towards there being a real Jesus who was perceived to have died and come back to life. Whether this "resurrection" was a miracle is another debate, I personally don't think it was. Also, the exorcisms talked about in the Bible are unusual in holy writings from the Mediterranean. In addition, Jesus's peace and love message is also unique, most religions of that region are obsessed with killing your enemy and exacting revenge upon him, while "Jesus's" message is a complete 180 from that. I'm still not ready to go sign up for Christianity, but Christianity may at least be based upon a real person.

Thats my point.

The Koran is less far off the rails from what is now taken to be "christianity" than some late Roman Empire era versions of "christianity".

The point is that there are almost no contemporary sources detailing the life of Muhammad (nor the 4 Rashidun caliphs, for that matter). Coinage from the early Umayyad Caliphate (year 661 and forward) suggest that the Arabian Peninsula was Christian at the time, and only later did explicit Islamic motifs appear on coins from this region.

Here are a few examples of Arabian coins (no earlier than 661, no later than 697)

^^ What about the Pagan heritage in Arabia? There are undeniable evidences of pre-islamic paganism there. The Black Stone of the Kaaba is said to be a part of pagan ritual and there are strong evidences for that, which suggests that people were Pagans there.

It's no secret that Christian tribes existed there but are you sure these coins were used all across the Umayyad empire?

These how are Ummyad dinars looked like: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categ ... yyad_dinar

They had "There's no god but Allah" and no cross.


What you've showed were probably Arab-Byzantine coins, or Ummiyads probably adopted some Byzantine coin models and then modified the cross.

I've found this example:

http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Histor ... inar4.html


It still doesn't add up tho, why the Umayyads would want to imitate Byzantine coins?

I have no idea. We are talking about something that took place more than 1,300 years ago. Nonetheless, the ruler of the Arab world at the time took upon himself to mint coins with explicit Christian motifs even though the official Islamic position is that the Arab world was wholly islamized by the time of Muhammad's apparent death in 632.

This is the evidence we have. The remaining history of the Arab world before the 8th century is very poorly documented.

What we do now is that there was a split in the Catholic Church in the 5th century which resulted in Nestorius (who questioned the official Church position on the Divine nature of Christ - just as Mainstream Islam) was forced East from Constantinople, and eventually settled and died in Egypt. Several historians in the two books I mentioned believe that Islam may have evolved from this branch of Christianity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorius
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorianism


These are all from a later date than the ones I posted. From what I could find, the oldest one of those can be from no earlier than 691, 11 years after the end of Muawiyah I's reign.

Muawiyah I was the first Umayyad caliph (and the first caliph whose existence is supported by historical evidence). Based on his coinage, though, the evidence suggests that he was a Christian.


It adds up if they were Christians competing with Constantinople, and if Islam only began to evolve later around the beginning of the 8th century.

What I know for sure that Muawiyah's wife was Christian.

I'm more interested in when religions will end than in how they were started.

It will be interesting to see what linguistic scholars and archaeologists can further dig up on this. Unfortunately I haven't read much of the Quran, maybe only the first 12 suras, but from what I have read so far it definitely smacks of a local averaging between Judaism and Hellenized Christian ideology.

What I'd love to know is what kind of cultural failure was occurring in the pagan cultures that caused the monotheistic impulse to catch fire. From the very conception of polytheism one would have to make intense threats (like eternal hell fire for shirk) to recondition such a society's habits and bring it under one deity. To me the early parts of the Quran gave the best signs that something like this very much was happening - to hear of direct wars with the pagans, the need for charity constantly echoed as if to say there had been little or nothing in that regard to speak of, and later particularly when the caliphs would ride from town to town telling the people that they could either be Jews, Christians, Muslims, or Sabians but not polytheists. It seemed like the most urgent message was not 'Submit to Islam or die!' but rather 'Our world can't handle the collateral damage of polytheism any longer!'.

Forensic work on the roots of religions seem to hold a great deal of promise for unwinding fundamentalism. We could see religion fall apart in the next few centuries as dogmatic bodies, however all of the religions seem to have various understandings/misunderstandings of mysticism at their root - that's something that I think will be the more commonly embraced path.

I wish I could say that research findings would create the death knell for fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is not based on the results of research; it's based on an unquestioning "faith."

You find this sort of thinking even in physicists at times; one told me that he was seeking the "essence" of the Christian "God" in the mechanism behind the promulgation of the Big Bang.