HEART OF DARKNESS
“I fear that a demon has possessed him.”
It’s time I share something disturbing about the five holy books we are using to expose Muhammad, Allah, and Islam. They were not contemporaneous writings. Muslims say that Islam, unlike Judeo-Christianity, was played out in the light of recorded history but the opposite is true. The prophets and patriarchs of the Bible were lettered, and their contemporaries were literate. Their written scrolls encountered an educated audience of voracious readers within a generation of the events they described. The Islamic scripture, however, was all based upon long lines of oral tradition. No copy of the Qur’an dated to within a hundred years of the prophet’s death survives. The oldest Hadith manuscript is two hundred years removed from the events it chronicles. Islam’s dark past is addressed at length in the “Source Material” appendix.
Muslim Traditions allege that the Qur’an first became a book at the direction of Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law, during the War of Compulsion. We are told that the first Caliph feared that Muhammad’s divine revelations would be lost because most of the best “reciters” had become warriors. According to a lone Hadith, Umar, the second Caliph, convinced Bakr that something had to be done. The fleeting memories of Jihad fighters were the sole repositories of the Qur’an, and they were being killed at an alarming rate. The loss of most or all of Muhammad’s “revelation” was imminent. Legend has it that Zaid, a native of Medina and one of the prophet’s helpers, was assigned the task. He “gathered together the fragments of the Qur’an from every quarter, from date leaves, bones, stone, and from the breasts of men.”
According to J. M. Rodwell, one of the early Qur’an translators, “Zaid and his coadjutors did not arrange the materials which came to them with any system more definite than that of placing the longest and best known surahs first. Anything approaching a chronological arrangement was entirely ignored. Late Medina surahs were often placed before early Meccan ones; the short surahs at the end of the Qur’an were its earliest portions; while verses of Meccan origin were embedded in Medina surahs, and verses promulgated at Medina were scattered up and down in the Meccan surahs.”
Muslim scholars don’t dispute Rodwell’s claim. And that’s alarming, because it means that no one was able to discern when a surah was revealed. No one even knew what comprised a surah. They were jumbled together gobbledygook, completely out of order. And if Muhammad’s contemporaries were this confused, there is no chance they actually remembered the detail of what he claimed was disseminated by the almighty.
Rodwell continues his analysis with these words: “It would seem as if Zaid put his materials together just as they came to him, and often with entire disregard to continuity of subject and uniformity of style. The text, therefore, assumes the form of a most unreadable and incongruous patchwork, and conveys no idea whatever of the development and growth of any plan in the mind of the founder of Islam, or of the circumstances by which he was surrounded and influenced.” Then after praising Zaid for his lack of “tampering” Rodwell adds that it is “deeply regrettable that no contemporary provided any historical reference, suppressed contradictory verses, or excluded inaccurate statements.”
Therefore, even in the best possible light, the Qur’an as first assembled was a mess. It was out of order, jumbled together, contradictory, and inaccurate. Yet there is no proof that even this best-case scenario is reliable. There is no corroborating evidence that the “revelations” actually became a book under Bakr, Umar, or Zaid. There are no fragments or tablets. All we have is a flimsy oral tradition suggesting that this best-case scenario occurred. There isn’t even a letter or a historical reference from any of the literate nations conquered b |
