IGIT:
Indeed a Very Interesting article. I read the following from the text and could not help but remembering what Persians had always believed that islam was created not by Mohammad alone, but by “some other” religious figure of the time. Persians believe it was Salman Farsi who was the Zoroastrian supreme religious leader of Persia who betrayed his country in 660-670AD and who had come to know Mohammd a decade earlier, and brought Arabs to invade Persia and through force bring and impose Islam on them. It is believed Salman Farsi wanted to impose and create his own religous idelogoly that differed from that of Zoroastrianism. There is a whole series of research on this subject that claimed that Quran was in effect written by Salman Farsi and enhanced by him after Mohammad’s death. That is why in Farsi (i.e. Persian) language, a Muslim is called MoSalman (meaning we are from Salman. Although if you ask an average Iranian Muslims he/she would have no clue why he/she calls himself/herself a MoSalman!).
Like I said here is a whole series of research done on this by the Westerners and others in the 50’s and 60’s, but it was suppressed during the Shah’s regime for the obvious reasons as this article is also pointing out and in order not to anger Muslims (or at least Iranian Shiet Muslims). And of course now (in khomeini’s regime) this is of course a forbidden subject to even mention and is punishable by death!
If I find the time I will look and provide the resource links to those research studies (if available of course). At the time I was told of these studies I was very very young and do not really remember the exact nature of findings expcet the overall of what I recall as expressed above.
Anyway, here is the segment from the article that really grabbed my attention:
Crone is one of the most iconoclastic of these scholars. During the 1970s and 1980s she wrote and collaborated on several books -- most notoriously, with Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977) -- that made radical arguments about the origins of Islam and the writing of Islamic history. Among Hagarism's controversial claims were suggestions that the text of the Koran came into being later than is now believed ("There is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century"); that Mecca was not the initial Islamic sanctuary ("[the evidence] points unambiguously to a sanctuary in north-west Arabia ... Mecca was secondary"); that the Arab conquests preceded the institutionalization of Islam ("the Jewish messianic fantasy was enacted in the form of an Arab conquest of the Holy Land"); that the idea of the hijra, or the migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622, may have evolved long after Muhammad died ("No seventh-century source identifies the Arab era as that of the hijra"); and that the term "Muslim" was not commonly used in early Islam ("There is no good reason to suppose that the bearers of this primitive identity called themselves 'Muslims' [but] sources do ... reveal an earlier designation of the community [which] appears in Greek as 'Magaritai' in a papyrus of 642, and in Syriac as 'Mahgre' or 'Mahgraye' from as early as the 640s").
I wonder, I really wonder, what would happen if Moslems come to know what they have been practicing and believing is nothing but the best kept secret scam of the past 1500 years or so! That really would be a day!
However, since that vast majority of Moslems really have no clue what Quran says as they do not understand it, or do not care to read and study it for which it is hard to understand, I doubt it would have any impact on their beliefs. Nothing would change much. Although, if Quran ends up being more civil and humanistic in its teachings, there maybe some hope for a quick and speedy purification and sanitation of the religion.
Anyway thank you so much for this very interesting article.
Regards,
- Addi |
