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A tough question that must be asked about the prophet of Islam.
In his sermon, which should have, but almost certainly didn’t, raise eyebrows among Canadian law enforcement and intelligence officials, Abyat said: “I attest that Muhammad is Allah’s servant and His prophet who awakened the desire for Jihad and incited the believers, who made Jihad for the sake of Allah the pinnacle of Islam, and the one who said that Paradise is underneath the shades of the swords.”
This was a statement of faith, but it was also a claim that was rooted in history. Without any doubt, Abyat believes that Muhammad was a real man who walked this earth and made statements that can be known today among his multitudes of followers. As the man whom Allah chose to deliver his eternal message to mankind and whom he designated as the “excellent example” for the believers (Qur’an 33:21), Muhammad’s words carry special weight for Muslims. In fact, Muhammad’s words are why jihadis take up the sword.
Abyat himself went on to explain this: “His shari’a [law] elevated the status of the mujahideen [warriors of jihad] and he said that Jihad for the sake of Allah raises a man a hundred levels in Paradise and the distance between levels is like the distance between heaven and earth.”
All this raises the question once again: what if Muhammad really said none of this? What if the stories Islamic tradition tells us about what he said and did are more myth and legend than sober historical fact? Then Hamas and other jihadis all over the world are killing and dying for a fiction. It would be the cruelest of cruel jokes on the jihadis, but if this idea became widely known in the Islamic world, the result could be transformational.
I explored this question several years ago in a book entitled “Did Muhammad Exist?“, which, you might be surprised to learn, was controversial. In it, I demonstrated that the earliest available biographical data about Muhammad dates from two centuries after the traditional date of his death. There are a few mentions of “Muhammad” here and there before then, but none of them match what we know, or think we know, about the prophet of Islam.
Islamic apologists attempt to explain away the long gap between Muhammad’s life and the appearance of written records about that life by asserting that this material was preserved as oral tradition in a time when memories were long and writing materials were scarce. That’s plausible, but if the early Muslims were carrying around elaborately detailed accounts of Muhammad’s words and deeds in their minds for two centuries, they were remarkably reticent about doing so.
The first six decades of the seventh-century Arab conquest contain no mention anywhere of the existence of the religion of Islam, or of the Qur’an, or of Muhammad as the prophet of Islam. The Arab conquerors had extensive contact with the people they conquered, many of whom wrote about these conquests. Yet Islam, the Qur’an, and Muhammad just don’t seem to come up.
