Early Islam: what scenario do you believe?

Which scenario seems more likely to you?


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Anglo Saxon conquest of England?

Most modern historians argue it didn't happen and that germanic migration to britain was much smaller in number and mostly peaceful and the stories of a bloody invasion was made up by men like Gildas for political aims and then repeated by men like bede so that it became accepted as fact by the english.
Unlike with the 7th century, we have a major lack of knowledge on the Anglo-Saxon conquest of sub-Roman Britain. So it's hard to draw any solid conclusions as to how that went down. This is a completely different scenario.
This is an anachronism I think. When the Umayyads were booted out of power, the only survivors went to Al-Andalus, where they were left alone, provided they accepted the title of emir (not Caliph) and were willing to be vassals of Baghdad, at least nominally. This of course would only work if they shut their mouth ...

It is only 150 years later that a descendant of the Umayyad Emirs proclaimed himself Caliph and therefore became officially independent. But paradoxically, in order to be accepted as Caliph by his own subjects, he had to claim for himself the status of Quraish descendant that the official story gave him. And therefore he could not repudiate the official story. Did he know that it was bogus? Hard to say ....

For more on this see [post=12273868]this post[/post].
This is bordering on ridiculousness.
 

fi11222

Banned
I cannot think of a case where this has happend at any point in ancient or medieval history. Ancient and medieval states simply did not have the capability to suppress all other differing accounts of that era. Neither, for that matter, did religious institutions since we still know of plenty of other early Christian sects for example that the Church would have liked to pretend weren't around.
It seems to me that this is an euro-centric view. The truth, I believe, is that the ability for a ruler to succeed at history-rewriting on this scale depended heavily on the cultural context. In societies with a strong historical tradition which has become independent of the main local religious narrative, such as existed in the Greco-Roman world or China, it would indeed be so near impossible as to be ruled out entirely. In the Iranian cultural sphere or in India, however, where there were no historical tradition that was truly independent of mythology and religion, such a thing was probably not that hard, and indeed probably did occur on a number of occasions. In Sassanian Iran, for example, the Zoroastrian Canon was extensively edited, and probably re-written in large part, under the Sassanid dynasty. In the process, many earlier layers of texts which were relevant to how the Parthians and Achaemenids practiced the religion apparently vanished. In the process, or maybe even earlier, the knowledge of Achaemenid times became extremely hazy and mythologized in Iran. The result is that by the VIth century, the Romans (Byzantines) were still reasonably knowledgeable about who the Achaemenids were while the Sassanid Persians considered them as mythological "Kayanid" kings.

Pretty much this for me. If they couldn't totally eradicate their origins championing an Alid for the caliphate, how exactly would they fabricate this stuff?
I believe that the way this happened, and the reason we, and everyone else, were so completely fooled was that the re-writing occurred at the moment the Muslim middle-east was in the process of adopting the canons of the Greco-Roman history writing tradition (at least in form) while a large portion of it population was still thinking about "history" in the Persian way.

It must be noted that all early muslim history writing (between 750 and 950) occurred in Baghdad, and was done in large part by litterati which hailed from the former Sassanid empire. Al-Tabari, for example, was from Tabaristan, as his name indicates, i.e. the province just south of the Caspian sea. Al-Bukhari, the first great compiler of Aadith, was from Bukhara in Central Asia. Ibn Hisham, the author of the first text about Muhammad that was transmitted down to us, was from Basra.

All these people wrote more or less in a style of historical narration that was heavily influenced by the Greco-Roman one. This influence had no doubt in part spread out from the areas formerly of the Roman Empire which were under Arab control since the VIIth century: Syria and Egypt. But this influence probably also stemmed from the fact that the Byzantine Empire was now the main enemy and also the model to be feared as well as imitated. So the early muslim writers were indeed influenced by the form of the Greco-Roman historical tradition yet we may ask ourselves whether they were equally influenced by its criteria of accuracy. Were they even aware of them? that is not so sure. It is one thing to read Greek or Roman historians in Arabic or Syriac translations and quite another to adopt the ethos of their authors and readership. The litterati who were active at the Abbassid court during the first 2 centuries of its existence were much more Persian than they were Roman in outlook. And the dynasty itself, as well as most of the courtiers surrounding it (i.e. the indended audience of the early muslim historians), were also still very much of Persian culture, coming as they did from Mesopotamia and Iran. The overthrow of the Umayyads had cut-off most of the Syrian and Egyptian Arab elites from the innermost circles of power. There were almost none at the court in Baghdad, which was itself build, from the ground up, on the model of Sassanid royal circular cities, and not on a square grid-plan Roman one.

Does the difference between circle and square matter here? I believe it does matter quite a bit, as rewriting history has a lot to do with cutting corners. How many corners do remain when you switch from a square to a circle?
 
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I've never until now heard of any particular reason to dispute the historical consensus I've always encountered that Islam and the organized Arab eruption from Arabia occurred essentially as the Koranic/Abbasid accounts would have it. Having been required to attempt to read the Koran within a week (might have been able to do that for myself, perhaps, but I was reading it aloud to a disabled partner, so I had to skim) I found its textual character reasonably consistent with writing down what one individual prophet was saying, and elements of it seemed consistent with a personal, historical locus of political events. Anyway it is only now that I'm hearing of this radical revisionism that the whole thing was collated and historically re-written out of a very different sheaf of events and records.

In the latter case, I'd think that all along, throughout the entire Islamic era, there would have been a vigorous counter-argument denying the historicity of the Koran and all traditions associated with it. Hostile Christians, especially in Europe of course, would have picked up on this and collated a counter-narrative which would become the norm of European historiography. Even after the fires of inter-religious conflict had largely died out and relations with Muslim powers became expedient (as indeed specific western Catholic regimes did find expedient with specific Muslim ones from very early contacts on) at most this would result in a controversy of two narratives, with powers supporting good relations with this or that Muslim polity advocating for the OTL conventional one, but there would always be a refuge, indeed more likely the dominant consensus among most Christian powers, for the one that debunks the authority or even existence of Mohammed.

And yet, even when Christian writers were quite hostile to Islam and keen to adopt all sorts of beliefs about Islamic practices that were pretty much fanciful, they never did settle on a credible counter-narrative such as you (fi11222, the author of this thread and proponent of the radical revisionist alternative in Evilprodigy's thread) suggest is the actual historical basis of modern Islam. Lots of anti-Muslim polemics emerging from the Roman sphere were quite irresponsible and fantastic of course; they hardly needed a well-grounded critique when wild defamation would do just as well.:rolleyes:

But I would think if there were such a huge gap between historic events and a canonized narrative collated centuries later as you suggest, that more or less responsible (if biased) Christian scholars in a Europe pitted in existential struggle with Islamic powers would, some time between the year 1000 and 1500 (CE of course! Or in this context, appropriately enough, AD) get wind of dissenting narratives in the Muslim world and its peripheries and collate your counter-narrative, adducing evidence from diverse sources, and develop a much more solid, historically grounded debunking of Muslim ideology--complementary with Catholic theology of course. Protestants might quarrel with details but would accept the basic thesis as well, Enlightenment era and 19th century scholarship would elaborate on it. It would not always, in every European power, be expedient to emphasize this, but there would hardly be a basis for some sort of Orwellian expulsion of all historic memory of this counter-narrative from the European historic tradition. On the whole I think it would obviously dominate the conventional view of Islam in the European west, and be used as justification for various attempts to extirpate Islam completely, in the name either of Christ or of secular humanism. After all the latter tendency did not balk at undermining the Christian consensus in its own heartland, why fail to denounce the other great Abrahamic tradition along with Christianity?

After all, it would not only be Christendom arrayed against the Abassid fabrications. However powerful that Caliphate might have been, surely it never reached full control over the whole sweep of the Islamic world as known OTL. They never controlled the far Maghreb; why would the Moroccans accept the narrative, doubtless coming to them belatedly after divergent precursors had reached them first?

By and large, legendary accounts typically turn out to have some truth to them. Not always; the effort to try and ground the Hebrew Book of Exodus in solid historic context seems to be chimeric for instance. But plenty of other Hebrew legends as recorded in say Genesis turn out to have some independent historic confirmation. The city of Troy turns out to have actually existed, and I believe archaeologists have come upon a consensus as to which sacking of the layered ancient city does correspond roughly to the events described in Homer. By and large, legend does turn out to have some correspondence to ascertainable fact.

So if events went as you describe, I'd think the Islamic world would be shattered into dozens of rival sects, just as Christendom was. Imperial Roman power did succeed in imposing Chalcedonian Orthodoxy on the various peoples who would, after Islam overrode and overwrote many of the dissenters, in their divisions between Eastern and Roman orthodoxy and then Protestant dissenters as well, comprise the vast majority of surviving numbers of Christians. But the historic fact of the various non-Chalcedonian dissents was never forgotten even so, and of course millions of Christians to this day maintain some trace of these once-numerous alternate rites and traditions. The fact that the Germanic conquerors of the Western Empire were not "orthodox" Catholics but Arians is of great and unforgotten historic importance. So, if Islam in its modern orthodox form was in fact a late imperial construction, I'd think that the nature of dissent in the Muslim sphere today would have a similar fragmented mosaic nature; we'd all know all about dozens of divergent traditions. Compared to the breadth and depth of the splits in Christian tradition, the split between Sunni and Shi'ite branches of Islam seems pretty slight and superficial, and would require that the dissenters who became and remained Shi'ites failed to remember and cite the fabrications of their Sunni rivals-or vice versa of course!

So to me it seems evident that the best way to account for the unanimity with which the Islamic traditions all affirm a large corpus of basic truths, despite their bitter quarrels over relatively small divergences, and that Islam's rivals have not long ago settled on a debunking consensus such as you offer, is to suppose that events of the Koran and the related Hadith and other core traditions of Islam were based firmly on historic fact. That Mohammed was an individual of great intellect and moral fervor who personally learned of and collated many strands of Jewish and Christian tradition and refashioned them into a coherent world view that corresponded well with the sentiments, beliefs and experiences of his Arab neighbors, and with prophetic conviction tapping into shared resentments and passions of his people, assailed the existing class structure in Mecca, was driven into exile in Medina, and there gathered up forces to return to Mecca and take it, and from this base and with expanding credibility, organized the majority of Arabs within range for collective action.

Since I am no Muslim myself, I don't suppose the clearly miraculous events of the Koran, such as his being bodily taken up into Heaven to receive yet more detailed instruction and inspiration there, literally happened, though it seems plausible enough that he had subjective experiences that seemed best understood that way to himself, and his interpretation was literally accepted by his followers. But on the whole, what reason is there to doubt that the secular events as traditionally attributed did happen more or less as described?

These events being fundamentally true and widely known, there would then be little basis for dissenters to base their differences on arguing their falsehood. The Christian critique of Islam would not find the fertile ground of widespread doubt about the historical narrative of events, only arguments about their interpretation.

This accounts well for the state of things as known today, including the entire European history of attacks on Islam.

I don't know what accounts for your out of left field suggestion that the whole thing is one huge fabrication instead. Certainly there are suggestions that Christianity is such a narrative re-collation of ahistorical legends and assertions, but Christianity also shows the fault lines that might lend some credibility to that kind of debunking. Islam seems much more historically solid, and I don't believe that any state of a thousand years ago could have the Orwellian power to so completely cover its tracks as to pass off a fabrication as reality. Even the development of the Confucian narrative in China could not completely paper over the divergent foundations on which it rested, and that was with the help of a tightly centralized state. Could the Abassids have exercised the sort of control over the far reaches of Islamic proselytization that the Han Emperors did over relatively isolated China? Even if they had, the fault lines would still be there to find.

So I'm afraid that your counter-narrative looks to me like the recent fabrication of people who are perhaps frightened of a possible Muslim ascendency and are looking for ways to try to undermine it, and observing the manner in which Western scholarship and perhaps partisanship have undermined the historic basis of Christianity, have sought to reconstruct a plausible sequence of events that would try to account for Islam as we know it today in terms of a collation of diverse narratives for political purposes, which is just how Chalecedonian Christianity can be described. But where is the messy detritus that would sprawl all around such a construction? And where is the caustic Christian critique that would surely have capitalized on such dubious foundations?

Tit for tat might seem fair to desperate people, but it is hardly scientific. As a non-Muslim I will readily concede that certain articles of Islamic faith are clearly false, such as the assertion, embedded in the Koran itself, that that document was produced by divine inspiration enabling the illiterate Mohammmed to personally scribe the whole thing end to end (in his spare time between all the activities attributed to him). But that it is a collation of things that he himself largely said, written down by faithful followers concerned to get it literally correct, and tied together and published by people who followed him with a close consensus as to what he actually said and did, seems pretty likely the case, probably with a lot of stuff taken wholesale from other sources--but with Mohammed's personal approval. I can accept that scholarship might prove that this or that passage or section was interpolated late, or that others once considered canonical were omitted, and that some creative editing might have happened under the early caliphs. But by and large, the unity of the Islamic world, the lack of schisms over the texts, all suggest to me these things progressed on a more unified and consensual basis than the development of Christian canon. The two cases are not in fact comparable. This obviously to me is no evidence that one was divinely inspired and approved and the other was not; I'd attribute instead to the supposition that Mohammed was of his people and hit a strong vein of resentment and reformism that was close to their collective hearts, and therefore there was much consensus among numerous people about his words and actions.
 
I wrote my post above before skimming through the prior posts in the thread, after the first post anyway.

This group of modern Germans coming up with this hypothesis now, at the modern juncture where there is a lot of agitation against Islam in Europe (and I'm sad to say, the USA:() for reasons that are understandably agitating, hardly strikes me as a disinterested bunch of investigators enjoying a Eureka moment as evidence comes together. It looks an awful lot to me like an emotionally driven ideological counterstrike, as I suggested before analogizing from a secular critique of Christian historicity to a parallel one against Islam--based on nothing more than a desire that it be so, for the discomfiture of feared enemies.

There is of course currently a movement among certain Muslims nowadays to attack Western civilization. The solution to this problem does not seem likely to be to escalate ideological warfare and throw the baby of truth out with the bathwater of inexpediency!

It may seem cool and exciting to someone who finds the classic narrative of the early Caliphate dynasties "dull," I suppose. Then again I for one don't think the story of a new religious cult that ties together formerly divided forces, secures the help of oppressed religious dissenters in a powerful neighboring empire by offering and delivering a relaxed, less oppressive regime that subsequently recruits substantial numbers of these populations to their cause (forming the basis of the Islamic navy in the Mediterranean for instance) and goes on to form a mighty and vibrant nexus of civilization for centuries to come, alive with scholarship and science, is exactly dull myself. Nor improbable in retrospect. Nor terribly oppressive.

This is part of why I have some hope that with sincere diplomacy and fair dealings, the potential apocalyptic threat can be defused to mutual advantage, without either side having to cravenly surrender to the other. It is well to remember that some if not all aspects of the current conflict go back to oppressive and arrogant behavior by our own side of this conflict, and we would do well to behave more reasonably ourselves and see what benefits that might bring to the situation.

I've yet to see any revolutionary new facts brought into the discussion to throw any doubt on the mainstream consensus, which is that Islamic early history is substantially as traditionally represented and understood. And again repeat, a point I've seen brought to this discussion only tangentially--if the Abassids performed such a sweeping and radical reconstruction of the events of the centuries before them, where are the dissenting counternarratives?

Particularly where is the European critique which to my knowledge consisted of a mixture of wild fantasy and acceptance of the basic claims of tradition as fact? Should this not instead be a quarrel a thousand years old, with the weight of European tradition, rightly or wrongly, on the side of accusing the generations long after Mohammed's alleged time of fabrication? Why would European scholarship have ever accepted the traditional narrative in the first place, if it wasn't well founded?

If they were attempting instead to keep ruled Muslim populaces quiet, of course critiques to rile them up would not be encouraged--but the powers that did manage to claim rule over large Muslim areas or populations historically did tend to a freedom of scholarship and speech in general, and the contact of their agencies with ruled Muslim populations would produce material for study that probably would have led to more or less scientific arguments. Would one suggest that peoples as keen to debate and polemics as the English or the French would shy away cautiously from disturbing Muslim sentiments, while going to civil war with one another over the claims of various classes to dignity and power?:rolleyes:

No, the entire history of the confrontation between more or less Islamic peoples and European Christendom would be completely different if the true foundations of Islam were as fragmentary as you and your sources suggest. The Muslim world itself would be far more sectarian, and Christian apologists would not be slow to develop keen and incisive polemics on that basis, if the Muslim peoples themselves somehow unaccountably did not develop their own partisan scholarship.

We have examples in OTL history of false narratives seeming to triumph over truer ones, but by and large, the counternarratives are there to be found, if in eclipse. Where are they here?
 

fi11222

Banned
I'd think that all along, throughout the entire Islamic era, there would have been a vigorous counter-argument denying the historicity of the Koran and all traditions associated with it. Hostile Christians, especially in Europe of course, would have picked up on this and collated a counter-narrative which would become the norm of European historiography.
Again, this is an anachronism.

What we fail to see here is that the traditional narrative suited everyone just fine, including the Shia, the Umayyad survivors in Spain (who were both granted a kinship tie to the prophet by it) and even the Christians.

Why did the Christians like the official muslim story? Because it painted the Arabs as the followers of a prophet preaching a religion denying the central position of Jesus Christ. What is better than an enemy who is self-avowedly the follower of a false prophet? In those times, historical truth was completely inessential. What truly mattered was religious allegiance. The official muslim narrative was perfect in that respect, it provided a clear-cut litmus test of loyalty for its adherents (Muhammad is the messenger of Allah) as well as an equally clear cut proof of heresy for its enemies (Muhammad is a false prophet who denies that Jesus is the son of God).

Trying to build up a clearer picture of what truly happened would have muddied the picture considerably, especially for the Christians, because it would have forced them to admit that the Umayyad period was much closer to Christianity than they would have liked to admit. Why bother with the complicated and amiguous truth when your foes' own propaganda provides you with all the arguments you need to mobilise everyone in your own camp againt him?

Historical accuracy was deemed important only in pre-Christian ancient times (and even then that concern was only shared by a small elite). After the rise of Christianity, orthodoxy (i.e. ideological correctness) became the new paramount criterion and Christian theologians quickly threw the old Greco-Roman historical accuracy norms by the wayside. It is a well known fact, for example, that Eusebius, the first major "historian" of the Church, was a habitual fraudster.

At the time of the Arab conquest, after several centuries of Christian ascendancy, even the Byzantine heirs of the Greeks and Romans had become markedly less interested in historical accuracy, or even in history itself, than their pagan ancestors. That is one of the reasons why we have so few Byzantine testimonies about the rise of Islam. The few we do have are mostly homilies, which only mention the Arab's arrival in passing and for dramatic effect. During most of the Byzantine Empire's existance, the few historical writing that did go on was done either by court panegyrists, who had of course no interest in writing about the shameful defeats suffered at Arab hands, or abbots who were actually no historians at all but polemicists bent on showing how divine providence shaped human events.

Before the Arab conquest, the regions that were eventually lost to them, Syria and Egypt, had been stubbornly addicted to the Monophysite faith, despite the efforts of successive Emperors to return them forcibly to orthodoxy. In many ways, the conquest of these regions by Arabs was a boon to the righteous-minded orthodox abbots and bishops. You see! Now the heretics have received the rightful divine punishment they deserved. They have been invaded by barbarians even more heretical than themselves!

In fact, once again, the Arab conquest proved to be in everyone's best interest. The Orthodox could claim a moral victory over the "heretical" Monophysites while the "heretics" themselves were in fact relieved to no longer be under the yoke of the persecuting Orthodox church.

At first, Orthodox Byzantine writers did not knew just how to characterize the faith of the new masters of Syria and Egypt. They hesitated between calling them pagans (which many probably still were at this time) or heretics. In the end, many early Byzantine witnesses of the Arab conquest opted to assimilate the Arabs to the Jews, maybe on account of the non-Trinitarian Ebionite-like christologies espoused by certain groups, but above all because the Jew was at that time the most easily recognizable symbol of the Monotheist-yet-rejector-of-Christ bogey. But that situation was too complex and therefore not very satisfactory for the Christian polemicists and this is probably one of the reasons why the allusions to the faith of the Arabs are so scarce in VIIth and ealy VIIIth century manuscripts. However, with the spread of the new official Abbassid Muhammad story in the late VIIIth century the situation changed dramatically. Now the Christian ecclesiastic chronicle writer had at his disposal a clear-cut tale which had all the elements he needed: a "false prophet", an official denial of Christ as saviour, and even a number of similarities with the Antichrist narrative of the Book of Revelation, including a near "world conquest". From that point onwards, Christian writers embraced the new muslim version of history with gusto. When in the XVIth century some Western European scholars started to rediscover the ancient historical traditions of factual accuracy, it was far too late. The muslim official narrative was far too firmly established and all dissenting traces had vanished for a long time.
 

fi11222

Banned
This group of modern Germans coming up with this hypothesis now, at the modern juncture where there is a lot of agitation against Islam in Europe (and I'm sad to say, the USA:() for reasons that are understandably agitating, hardly strikes me as a disinterested bunch of investigators enjoying a Eureka moment as evidence comes together. It looks an awful lot to me like an emotionally driven ideological counterstrike, as I suggested before analogizing from a secular critique of Christian historicity to a parallel one against Islam--based on nothing more than a desire that it be so, for the discomfiture of feared enemies.
This is hardly fair to the group of professional historians in question. There are, of course, bigots at work today who would very much like to "debunk" Islam at all costs and would certainly not be encumbered by historical truth. But these German historians, and the many others from various countries who work with them, are no Trumpists. Neither am I.

As I indicated earlier, the rise of militant Islam is not necessarily a cause for fear. It can be a cause of interest, a stimulus to try and understand why Middle-Eastern culture is the way it is and therefore how it came to be. Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists. Yes! Yes!! YESSS!!! Yet an alarming number of them are at the very least highly susceptible to the allure of intolerant and violent extremism. Recent history has proved that beyond doubt. If it was established, as I believe it will, that what we call "Islam" today is the end result of the propaganda efforts of a semi-totalitarian mid-VIIIth century state which blended Zoroastrian saviour stories with non-Christian messianic traditions, I think it would make a lot of what we see today in the news much less difficult to understand.
 
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I teach this stuff (although my research focus is elsewhere).
And I can say that, at least, the debate is serious an there are indeed scholarly reasons to approach the Islamic sources cautiously.
One is that they actually do display a large amount of differing accounts on many things. Which, of course, supports the obvious reality that it would have been almost impossible to suppress accounts not in line with official propaganda.
"Revisionist" proposal are sometimes interesting and very likely they might be correct on single points, but I came to be convinced that the in the broad outline they are wrong at least in their most extreme variants. Late Patricia Crone, who had a very important role in challenging the accepted wisdom on the topic, came from saying roughly "it is possible to accept or reject the Muslim historical tradition, but to work with it", to a signifcantly more balanced view in which she did work with it, often with remarkably intriguing results.
(The account she gave in "Hagarism" is now entirely untenable in the light of present knowledge and she appeared not to hold to it in her last years).
Also note that people like Luxenberg are considered fringe within academia and his work is widely regarded as methodologically unsound. For a more balanced yet critical approach to Qur'anic material I may recommend the work of Andrew Rippin (even tough I do not fully agree with him).

I recent years, scholarship has generally moved toward a more reflective acceptance of the gist of the traditional account, which some important discoveries seem to broadly support, butt there is no consensus. I lean toward this sort of view myelf, but there is still a lot we don't know.
 
I'm not lying anymore - not a Muslim, but I am distressed at Fi's rantings and ravings. This is pure, bigoted, denial of truth and logic and reason in favor of spiteful ideological flexing.

People should stand up for Jew, Christian and Muslim both. People should stand up for peace and coexistence. People should at least look at the fact that our real enemy isn't Islam/The West, but Religious Fundamentalism/Anti-Theism themselves, because both Religious Fundamentalism/Anti-Theism are mirror images of one another, both betray Faith/Reason and Logic, things they claim to revere.

The same people who claim that there is no Historical Jesus are just as bad as those who believe Revelation to be an accurate account of events in the future. The same people who claim that there is no Historical Muhammad, whatever their ideological stance, are bad people who betray Faith and Reason both.

So stop, Fi. Stop this at once.
 
Recent history has proved that beyond doubt. If it was established, as I believe it will, that what we call "Islam" today is the end result of the propaganda efforts of a semi-totalitarian mid-VIIIth century state which blended Zoroastrian saviour stories with non-Christian messianic traditions, I think it would make a lot of what we see today in the news much less difficult to understand.

And yet religiously motivated violence is already not difficult to understand as a political and sociological phenomenon, and even without going into some sort of elaborate "clash of civilizations" mythology. Really, everything that is happening in the middle east is perfectly comprehensible just by exploring history from the 1950's onward, even without any meaningful backstory. If you seek to understand the origins of Daesh and modern Islamic extremists, I'd suggest approaching it from a modern, sociological or political science standpoint, rather than a historical one.

The alternative is rather like trying to understand chattel slavery in the Antebellum South by reading the letters of early Christian writers. You might be able to make connections if you tried, but you'd end up with a false conclusion based in speculation.

There are others more qualified to speak about the Islamic history than I; but I really think that these beliefs, true or not[1], have minimal applicability to the modern day or to the current problems faced by the global community.

[1]The consensus seems to be false, incidentally. The big question is defining "substantially" true.
 
And yet religiously motivated violence is already not difficult to understand as a political and sociological phenomenon, and even without going into some sort of elaborate "clash of civilizations" mythology. Really, everything that is happening in the middle east is perfectly comprehensible just by exploring history from the 1950's onward, even without any meaningful backstory. If you seek to understand the origins of Daesh and modern Islamic extremists, I'd suggest approaching it from a modern, sociological or political science standpoint, rather than a historical one.

The alternative is rather like trying to understand chattel slavery in the Antebellum South by reading the letters of early Christian writers. You might be able to make connections if you tried, but you'd end up with a false conclusion based in speculation.

There are others more qualified to speak about the Islamic history than I; but I really think that these beliefs, true or not[1], have minimal applicability to the modern day or to the current problems faced by the global community.

[1]The consensus seems to be false, incidentally. The big question is defining "substantially" true.

Agreed with all of this. If Fi's lack of ability to listen to actual Reason and Logic has given us anything, it's statements like yours'.

I'm not exactly known for reason and rational argument, and I once asserted on An Age of Miracles that I preferred my own personal emotional satisfaction over realism, but I've also never pretended that 'credible scholars' were backing my arguments.

Also, as Fi hasn't listened to anything calm and friendly, I'm going to invoke this AH.Com rule:

You are allowed to accuse someone of being a liar, a racist, an antisemite, and so on - providing you immediately provide thorough and believable substantiation. Otherwise, any such accusations will be treated as a severe personal insult.

Fi, you are an Islamophobe and the fact that you started this thread in the first place counts as 'thorough and believable substantiation'. Yes, some Muslims engage in terroristic activities. Yes, certain Muslims have attacked the West. But it is quite frankly foolish that Daesh is seen by many as the true face of Islam when most of its victims are fellow Muslims.

Edit: You have repeatedly asserted that Islam itself was an invention of the Abbasids, ignored all evidence to the contrary, and ridiculed our intelligence while saying ridiculous things yourself. People have tried to rationally engage with your viewpoints, yet you keep repeating these same old statements as though they are fact, and not arguing in good faith.

So, people have to stand up to you.
 
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Fi, you are an Islamophobe and the fact that you started this thread in the first place counts as 'thorough and believable substantiation'. Yes, some Muslims engage in terroristic activities. Yes, certain Muslims have attacked the West. But it is quite frankly foolish that Daesh is seen by many as the true face of Islam when most of its victims are fellow Muslims.

So, people have to stand up to you.
Raising questions or re-evaluating historiography about the founding of a religion means you hate that religion?

So then you must believe that Reza Aslan is a "Christianophobe" for writing Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth? It's revisionist history about Jesus being a zealous rebel; clearly by re-interpreting early sources it must be work of hate, right?
 
Raising questions or re-evaluating historiography about the founding of a religion means you hate that religion?

So then you must believe that Reza Aslan is a "Christianophobe" for writing Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth? It's revisionist history about Jesus being a zealous rebel; clearly by re-interpreting early sources it must be work of hate, right?

1.) That's not what Fi is doing. He's throwing away the entire historiography and refusing to listen to the credible and rational arguments made elsewhere in the thread.

2.) Reza Aslan at least admitted that Jesus existed.

3.) You are using a strawman argument in order to defend Fi, misrepresenting what I say, and what Fi is getting at, in order to defend him.

4.) Strawmen are wrong. Again, Fi isn't just raising questions. He's raising questions, then ignoring the answers, because said answers are 'Orthodox'. He's not taking the answers by their own merits, he's actively dismissing them out of hand because 'they reflect the mainstream'.

He's not rebutting said answers, merely using logical fallacies to make them appear rebutted.
 
Yeah, I have to agree with the spirit of what Alligator says - and making the argument about Fi himself isn't really worth it. Although Reza Aslan's book is also filled with holes, imo, so maybe not a great example.

Revisionist history, when based upon strong facts and good research, is an important part of academia - it challenges existing narratives and moves us closer to understanding. Questioning things in general is important.

However, Fi has not persuaded many people, from the looks of the poll and the comment section, and the authors he relies upon have been largely indicted despite his claims of an academic consensus in his favor.

So you're right, the case pretty much is closed, especially after some excellent posts by Shevek.
 
1.) That's not what Fi is doing. He's throwing away the entire historiography and refusing to listen to the credible and rational arguments made elsewhere in the thread.

2.) Reza Aslan at least admitted that Jesus existed.

3.) You are using a strawman argument in order to defend Fi, misrepresenting what I say, and what Fi is getting at, in order to defend him.

4.) Strawmen are wrong. Again, Fi isn't just raising questions. He's raising questions, then ignoring the answers, because said answers are 'Orthodox'. He's not taking the answers by their own merits, he's actively dismissing them out of hand because 'they reflect the mainstream'.

He's not rebutting said answers, merely using logical fallacies to make them appear rebutted.

I think he's over-eager to be skeptical and historical revisionist and I don't necessarily agree with everything he is saying. That doesn't make him Islamophobic.

Also you're strawmanning his argument at the same time. He's not questioning the sources only because they're orthodox is bad in general, or because it's the mainstream story now, but because at the time, the people writing those sources would have been pro-Abbasid. That's regular historical revisionism motivated by trying to find something new from old sources, not motivated by hate. Self-serving? Maybe, like a significant portion of historical revisionism. Hateful? Definitely not.

And saying Jesus doesn't exist is contrary to historical evidence, but is not -phobic of Christianity. It's only Christianphobic if the person actually hates Christians living today.

If denying parts of religious texts meant you hated that religion, then literally every non-Muslim is Islamophobic, every non-Christian is Christianphobic, every non-Jew is anti-Semitic, every non-Hindu is Hinduphobic...

And that is your apparent argument, not a strawman, because you're accusing fi of hating modern real people based on their religion (aka Islamophobia), simply because of his sloppy historical revisionism of ancient writings whose authors are not alive today.

Thank you, PL, but my accusation on Fi as a person still stands, because it does have 'thorough and believable substantiation' as seen on the thread.

Explain how fi's assertions are Islamophobic, as in, hating people of Islamic faith today because they are of Islamic faith today, rather than just saying "as seen on the thread".
 
I think he's over-eager to be skeptical and historical revisionist and I don't necessarily agree with everything he is saying. That doesn't make him Islamophobic.

Also you're strawmanning his argument at the same time. He's not questioning the sources only because they're orthodox is bad in general, or because it's the mainstream story now, but because at the time, the people writing those sources would have been pro-Abbasid. That's regular historical revisionism motivated by trying to find something new from old sources, not motivated by hate. Self-serving? Maybe, like a significant portion of historical revisionism. Hateful? Definitely not.

And saying Jesus doesn't exist is contrary to historical evidence, but is not -phobic of Christianity. It's only Christianphobic if the person actually hates Christians living today.

If denying parts of religious texts meant you hated that religion, then literally every non-Muslim is Islamophobic, every non-Christian is Christianphobic, every non-Jew is anti-Semitic, every non-Hindu is Hinduphobic...

And that is your apparent argument, not a strawman, because you're accusing fi of hating modern real people based on their religion (aka Islamophobia), simply because of his sloppy historical revisionism of ancient writings whose authors are not alive today.



Explain how fi's assertions are Islamophobic, as in, hating people of Islamic faith today because they are of Islamic faith today, rather than just saying "as seen on the thread".

Now that you've explained your own arguments clearly and coherently, I must admit to misunderstanding you.

I concede.
 
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