1. You make gratuitous claims about what the majority of secular scholars believe by showing a couple of examples of people merely speculating.
I have provided quotes from multiple monographs and peer-reviewed journal articles written by leading secular scholars stating elementary details about their field of expertise.
You have quoted zero scholars, and seem unable to actually understand the basic summaries you have been provided with as you have repeatedly made errors comprehending what they actually say.
You even managed to read a simple statement of fact from a peer reviewed journal as some kind of mendacious twisting of the truth, rather than an object statement of fact
2. You provide exactly zero alternative narratives.
See, you can't even understand the most elementary aspects of the discussion.
You are arguing that the Muslim tradition is highly accurate in its details (despite the fact we know it’s not, for example, other than miracles we know Mecca wasn’t a major trading hub, wasn’t holy to all Arabs, wasn’t an isolated pagan backwater, etc. so even the basic context is wrong)
That there is a rough historicity to the story (Muhammad was seen a prophet, preached an apocalyptic monotheism, spent time in Mecca and Medina, was involved in some local conquests, died unexpectedly and his successors created a large empire) but that the traditions are significantly fabricated in their details
is an alternative narrative.
Given what we know about the history of religions, the fluidity of oral traditions and a critical-historical analysis of the available evidence, this is by far the most likely narrative.
Writing the Biography of the Prophet Muhammad: Problems and Solutions - R Hoyland
At first sight it really does seem, therefore, that we know a tremendous amount about Muhammad. But scholarship after Renan suggested that the picture might not be quite so rosy.
Ignaz Goldziher dealt the first blow when he demonstrated that many of the traditions about Muhammad originated in the doctrinal, legal and sundry other controversies of the second and third centuries after the Hijra. For example, Muhammad is reported as saying that one should rebel against unjust rulers and that one should not rebel against rulers even be they unjust, that one should write down his sayings and that one should not do so, that the Arabs were the best of people or that the non-Arabs were, that Syria was the favoured country of God or that Iraq was, and so on. Goldziher’s conclusion was that ‘the hadith will not serve as a document for the history of the infancy of Islam, but rather as a reflection of the tendencies which appeared in the community during the maturer stages of its development’.7 This was a boon for those interested in these ‘maturer stages’, but it shook the confidence of those trying to document the rise of Islam.
The next major assault came from Henri Lammens. He argued that allusions from the Qurwan were taken up and elaborated into stories, and doctrinal and legal traditions were collected and arranged chronologically, and the resulting combination, together with a few ‘packets of historical truth’, constituted Muhammad’s biography.8 Though many declared his theory extreme,9 none have successfully refuted it, and it has recently been reiterated by Patricia Crone, who states: ‘
Much of the apparently historical tradition is in fact of exegetical origin . . .As for what remains, some is legal and doctrinal hadith in disguise’.10
As an illustration of how ‘the Qurwan generated masses of spurious information’, she adduces the chapter (sura) named Quraysh, which speaks of ‘the ilaf of Quraysh, their ilaf of the journey in winter and summer’ (106:1–2). The context gives no clue at all to the meaning of ilaf, but commentators provided ready answers. The journeys were, they said, the greater and lesser pilgrimages to Mecca, or they were the migration of Quraysh to Tawif in the summer and their return to Mecca in the winter, or else they were trading trips by Quraysh to various places, and so on. Her conclusion from this diversity of explanations is that the exegetes had no better knowledge of what this sura meant than we have today; what they are offering is not their recollection or what Muhammad had in mind when he recited these verses, but, on the contrary, so many guesses based on the verses themselves; the original meaning of these verses was unknown to them.11
The implications of Goldziher’s ideas were taken up and developed by Joseph Schacht, who emphasised that ‘
to a much higher degree than hitherto suspected, seemingly historical information on the Prophet is only the background for legal doctrines and therefore devoid of independent value’. For instance, the jurists of Medina regarded the marriage concluded by a pilgrim as invalid while those of Mecca and Iraq considered it valid. The Medinans projected their doctrine back to the well-known early scholar vAbdallah ibn vUmar and, with spurious circumstantial details, to Caliph vUmar I himself (634–44). The opposite doctrine was expressed in a tradition to the effect that the Prophet married Maymuna as a pilgrim. This tradition was countered, on the part of the Medinans, by another tradition related by Sulayman ibn Yasar, who was a freedman of Maymuna, alleging that the Prophet married her in Medina, and therefore not as a pilgrim. Thus,concludes Schacht, ‘we see that even the details of this important event in the life of the Prophet are not based on authentic historical recollection . . . but are fictitious and intended to support legal doctrines’.
Writing the Biography of the Prophet Muhammad: Problems and Solutions
Not to mention the following:
It is well known that the extant Muslim narrative sources relating to the life of Muhammad date from
at least 150 to 200 years after Muhammad’s death in the year 11/632 and that
these sources are highly problematic when used as sources for the life of Muhammad: since
no archaeological surveys have been conducted in Mecca or Medina, there is no external evidence that could be adduced to support the accounts presented in the Muslim sources.
The non-Muslim sources – several of which predate the Muslim sources – often are at variance with the Muslim accounts, if they mention Muhammad at all. S
everal of the Muslim accounts about the life of Muhammad appear to be interpretations of the Qur#anic text and do not constitute independent sources, but rather seem to have grown from exegetic speculations. Other accounts
clearly reflect later theological, legal or political debates, while yet
others constitute what can be termed salvation history. Moreover,
the accounts often contradict each other regarding chronology, the persons involved or the course of events.
First Century Sources for the Life of Muhammad? A Debate
In the case of Mohammed, Muslim literary sources for his life only begin around 750-800 CE (common era), some four to five generations after his death, and few Islamicists (specialists in the history and study of Islam) these days assume them to be straightforward historical accounts…
Most of the early sources for the prophet's life, as also for the period of his immediate successors, consist of hadith in some arrangement or other.
The purpose of such reports was to validate Islamic law and doctrine, not to record history in the modern sense
Patricia Crone (Princeton University)
No extant books that preserve the sīrah-maghāzī traditions date from before the period stretching from the late eighth century C.E. to the early ninth—approximately 150 to 250 years after Muḥammad’s death—and the works that do survive are filled, to varying degrees, with theologically tendentious and even outright legendary materials. For this reason, a great number of modern historians have come to hold that the sīrah-maghāzī literature tells us far more about the formation of the early cultural memory of Muḥammad than it does about the so-called historical Muḥammad. Expressed another way, the sīrah-maghāzī corpus is a primary source less about the historical figure of Muḥammad than for understanding how early Muslims understood Muḥammad and his message, as well as how they chose to depict God’s disclosure of His providential plan for human salvation through both. From the sīrah-maghāzī literature, we learn mostly about how Muslims of the eighth and ninth centuries C.E. wished Muḥammad to be known and how they used their constructed images of him to forge their own confessional and sectarian identities, but perhaps not much else.
Sean Anthony (Ohio state university)
The problem is that this detailed picture of Muhammad's career is drawn not from documents or even stories dating from Muhammad's time, but from literary sources that were compiled many years--sometimes centuries- later... and shaped with very specific objectives in mind... There is also reason to suspect that some--perhaps many--of the incidents related in these sources are not reliable accounts of things that actually happened but rather are legends created by later generations of Muslims to affirm Muhammad's status as prophet, to help establish precedents shaping the later Muslim community's ritual, social, or legal practices, or simply to fill out poorly known chapters in the life of their founder, about whom, understandably, later Muslims increasingly wished to know everything.
Further, some episodes that are crucial to the traditional biography of Muhammad look suspiciously like efforts to create a historicizing gloss to particular verses of the Qur'an; some have suggested, for example, that the reports of the raid on Nakhla were generated as exegels of Q. 2.217... Other elements of his life story may have been generated to make his biography conform to contemporary expectations of what a true prophet would do (for instance, his orphanhood, paralleling that of Moses, or his rejection by and struggle against his own people, the tribe of Quraysh)...
Fred Donner (University of Chicago)
You have wasted more than enough of my time
If you read what leading secular scholars said with an open mind instead of clinging to your delusion that the Muslim narrative is overwhelmingly accepted as historical fact, you would be investing your time wisely.
It’s only a waste if you favour ignorance over learning.
