Some years ago I wrote an essay which I titled The Most Famous Man who never Lived which critiqued the mythology that had been created to support the notion that an extraordinary man, who purported to be the Son of God lived on this earth some two millennia ago who held the keys to eternal life.

In an attempt to demonstrate my ecumenicalism I intend to devote this essay to dissembling some of the mythology that developed about Muhammad who Islamic followers claim was born in the sixth century and who was inspired by Allah to write, under the guidance of the Archangel Gabriel, a series of revelations that were later to become the basis of the Islamic holy book, the Koran.

Religions that reach great stature have a tendency to rewrite their history in the process. They eschew the likely narrative of their creation from antecedent belief systems. They find an epoch-making figure – a Moses, a Jesus or a Muhammad – and attribute the underlying principles to the revelations received by such an iconic personage.

However, with respect to Islam, the message propagated in this way by Muhammad is wrought with many contradictions. Many students of Islam have observed, for example, that those parts of the Koran attributed to Muhammad’s early period in Mecca, before he had consolidated his power, are more accommodating and benign than those parts attributed to his latter period in Medina when he had grown more powerful.

There are many instances of contradictory statements in the Koran and adherents to Islam have adopted the protocol that where contradictions occur, later passages of the Koran must take precedence over earlier passages.

In any event the Koran seems to have been consolidated into a single book, purportedly reporting the revelations to Muhammad as dictated by the archangel Gabriel, long after Muhammad’s death. Just like the New Testament it seems to be a rather arbitrary collection of verses from different sources but allegedly initially received by Muhammad.

Historians and religious scholars can point to no historic references concerning Muhammad dating from his own lifetime. Most of the references, as we shall see, date from decades and even centuries after the generally accepted time of his life.

Interestingly also is the fact that whilst the Koran is purportedly a record of the revelations from Allah via the intermediary, the Archangel Gabriel, in the whole of the Koran there are only four references to Muhammad.

Adding to the confusion, the Koran is written in Arabic. Indeed Islamic traditionalists believe that the Koran should only be quoted and taught in the original language of the Prophet. This seems to mitigate against its claims of being a universal religion. But this is not surprising because the Koran in many ways is a parochial document purporting to depict a history of warring tribes located in a geographically confined part of the Arabian Peninsula.

Now, being written in Arabic presents problems of its own. The written Arabic language of Muhammad’s time has two confusing features. To begin with it uses dots to distinguish consonants like “b” and “t” and these are easily confused in the original texts. As well in its original form it had no sign or symbol for short vowels. The Arabic script was standardized in the later part of the ninth century. In the meantime the undotted and oddly vowelled Koran was generating wildly different interpretations of its contents. So much for its claim to be the inviolable and unalterable word of Allah! These contradictions are played out even today where some Muslims like to emphasise the Prophet’s belligerence whilst others like to insist that Islam is a religion of peace.

Nevertheless there is substantial evidence to suggest that a man called Muhammad (or something similar) actually existed, whereas there is little convincing historical evidence that a man called Jesus ever existed. But it is a reasonable assumption that the man called Muhammad who actually existed was far different from the idealised version that occurs in the teachings of the religion of Islam.

Muhammad is generally believed to have lived from c. 570 – 632 CE. A little more than a hundred years after the death of the Prophet, Muslim scholars began to assemble the great collections of Muhhamad’s sayings (abadith) and customary practice (sunnah), which would form the basis of Muslim law.

As Karen Armstrong has written

The Sunnah taught Muslims to imitate the way that Muhammad spoke, ate, loved, washed, and worshipped, so that in the smallest details of their daily existence, they reproduced his life on earth in the hope that they would acquire his internal disposition of total surrender to God.

 Thus Islam (which literally means “submission”) seems determined to perpetuate the mores of a seventh century illiterate Arab.

It is instructive to remember that the construction of the history of the Prophet was put together well after his death and that most of the sources were second hand. In this way we might say his life was “reconstructed” just as the life of Jesus was.

In fact one historian maintains that:

The life of Muhammad, dependant on sources written centuries after he lived, increasingly has come to seem a thing very difficult to define as fact.

However little we know about Muhammad, I think that there is sufficient evidence to acknowledge the existence of a sixth or seventh century merchant who became a warlord uniting disparate Arab tribes. There are frequent historical references to such a figure (albeit often with other but similar names). But scholars have failed to make a connection with such a figure and any divine connection.

The first serious biographers of Muhammad began to outline his life in the eighth and ninth centuries. It should be admitted that their work would not satisfy modern biographers. They accepted into the recorded history many references that were obviously suspect and often recorded contradictory interpretations that were allowed into the historical record side by side.

There is no plausible history of the Prophet before he purportedly began to receive his revelations from Allah.

When his biographers began to relate his earlier life they embellished the story with mythical elements just as those who purported to record the life of Jesus did.

It is difficult not to admire some ofthe achievements of Muhammad. He united disparate Arab tribes into a great nation. He stimulated an Arabic Empire that for a time extended from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees. The great affront that Islam now confronts us with is largely as a result of an ambition to recreate the Islamic world of a thousand years ago. Apart from the oil rich states in the Middle East, Muslim states have not prospered. They are largely third world countries that have not been able to benefit from the achievements of modernity. They are stuck in the mire of their Islamic tradition, trying forlornly to bring back the triumph of their ancient history.

In trying to understand Islam many have pointed to the distinct difference in Muhammad’s teachings in his early years when he lived in Mecca and those that came after his relocation to Medina. In Mecca he struggled to have anyone pay attention to his teachings. At this time he was tolerant and accommodating. But when he went to Medina he was immediately successful in attracting converts to his teaching. It seems that as his power and influence grew his tolerance waned and he became quite bellicose and quick to take punitive action against unbelievers. If you read the Koran you will see many contradictory passages as a result.

According to the reconstructed history, for some twenty three years, from about 610 until his death in 632, Muhammad claimed that he was the direct recipient of messages from Allah delivered through the medium of the Archangel Gabriel. These messages were assembled in the text that we now know as the Koran. The Koran is a difficult text because it was compiled piecemeal, one part at a time, without any logical structure. Sometimes a revelation would be made to address a current issue that Muhammad was purportedly dealing with. Consequently successive verses can seem illogical and arbitrary with respect to their subject matter.

According to tradition, as each new set of verses was revealed to Muhammad, his followers learned it by heart, and those who were literate wrote it down. (Unsurprisingly, historians have not been able to locate such written references!)

There is disagreement about when the Koran was initially put together. Some authorities believe that it was compiled during the first Caliphate of Abu Bakr immediately after Muhammad’s death. Others assert that it was compiled by the Caliph Uthman who reigned from 644 to 656.

Whomever and however the Koran was compiled it seems certain that it was derived from many disparate sources. It has been said that the Koran was first collated in order to settle issues between competing interpretations of Muhammad’s teachings. But this didn’t resolve the matter. As we saw above, the written Arabic language renders the difference between some consonants difficult to distinguish and it has no symbols for short vowels. As a result vastly different interpretations were still possible.

According to believers, the Koran is the final and unalterable word of God. This claim is hard to defend in light of the many inconsistencies and possible interpretations.

It is worthwhile remembering at this stage that the Christian reformation occurred when the Bible was translated from Latin into European languages which made the text accessible to all. From this sprang the discipline of biblical criticism. This movement could be said to have enabled Christianity to be reconciled with modernity.

Judaism, of course, has also a long tradition of scholarship, criticism and interpretative debate.

Unfortunately Islam doesn’t allow such self-examination. The Koran is purported to be the final and inalterable word of God. It is to be taken as the literal truth.

(There is an exception to this hard-line literal translation. Sufism is a far more mystical version of Islam. The Sufis believe that God reveals himself in many ways. They recognise that much of the revealed doctrine is actually myths which point believers towards an understanding of God rather than depicting the literal truth. The religious leaders of conventional Islam disparage the approach of the Sufis and paternalistically maintain that ordinary believers don’t have the skills or temperament to use a more symbolic, imaginative approach to ultimate truth.)

So let’s cut to the chase. Islam is based on the Koran which Muslims maintain is the inalterable and final word of God. The Koran is replete with contradictions. It is a document fashioned by fallible men, relying on hearsay and dubious references about the Prophet’s life. It relates largely to a minor geographical area and the lives of insular tribesmen in the seventh century.

But religious scholars maintain that authoritative records of the existence of Muhammad don’t appear until the ninth century. Before this there had been references to various prophets who had appeared in the Middle East but who instead of preaching Islam, as we have come to know it, were disciples of Abraham and championed the beliefs of the Old Testament. Religious historian, Robert Spencer, believes that the century or two after the historical death of Muhammed was a kind of gestation period for the manufacturing of a new religion centred on the life of Muhammad.

The New Testament which promoted the Christian religious ethos was also manufactured in the decades after the supposed death of Jesus.

But Islam is a more dangerous proposition than the other Abrahamic religions. As we saw earlier the other religions of the “book” have been able to scrutinise and revise their beliefs and as a consequence be able to accommodate modernity. Through its obstinate insistence that the Koran is inalterable and as a result criticism is forbidden, Islam has locked itself in to a seventh century interpretation of the world.

With its ongoing conflict with modernity, there seems to be only two possible outcomes – either Islam accommodates modernity or it succeeds in compelling the rest of us into adopting its archaic beliefs.

It seems to me that our interests (and paradoxically the interests of Muslims also) are best served by encouraging an Islamic reformation. We need to give succour and support to those Muslims who are brave enough to challenge fundamentalism and we should never falter, despite the protests of the fundamentalists that they are subject to Islamophobia, when they challenge our basic freedoms.

But what of Muhammad? I suspect there was a tribal chieftain who lived in seventh century Arabia. He might have been called Muhammad, Mahomet, Mehmet, Mahmoud, or something similar, and he succeeded in amalgamating warring Arabian tribes and led them to military success.

Those who seek to support the historical case for Muhammad as a prophet encounter difficulty with the first historical references to someone they claim to be Muhammad. These references don’t refer to a prophet but to an Arabian warrior.

Another oft-quoted reference comes from an Armenian Bishop named Sebeos. Sebeos, writing in the 660,s or 670,s recorded:

There was an Ishmaeltite called Mahmet, a merchant, who presented himself to them as though at God’s command as a preacher, as the way of truth and taught them to know the God of Abraham, for he was well-informed and very well-acquainted with the story of Moses.

Now some Islamic apologists cite this as proof of Muhammad’s existence coming so soon after his death. But unfortunately it seems that this Mahmet didn’t preach the Koran or the doctrine of Islam but was a purveyor of the events of the Old Testament just as the Jews were.

Tradition has it that in 639 the Patriarch of Antioch, John 1 engaged in a discussion with the Arab Commander Amr ibn al-As. There is no contemporary record of that discussion but it is recorded in a manuscript compiled in the year 874.  No one on either side is recorded as having made the slightest reference to the Koran, Islam or Muhammad.

Most of the early references Islamic scholars rely on to prove the actual existence of Muhammad don’t refer to a prophet but merely to an Arabian Warlord. This adds weight to the notion that whilst Muhammad might have actually existed his spiritual importance is likely to be a confected add on.

The spiritual enhancement of Muhammad must have occurred rapidly after his death. In the next century or so, as I related above, the Arab Empire expanded dramatically. As it did so the mythologisation of Muhammad also accelerated.

The Arab expansion saw them regain Jerusalem. In 691 the Dome of the Rock was completed n the site of the Temple Mount. On its inner walls there are inscriptions written that appear to be from the Koran, indicating that the tenets of Islam were beginning to be disseminated.

In Spain during the Middle Ages Cordoba was a major Muslim centre. It was the capital of the Muslim state Al-Andalus. Here it is recorded in 850 Christians were put to death because they wouldn’t concede that Muhammad was a greater prophet than Jesus. Obviously by then Muhammad must have achieved the status as the “Last of the Prophets”. So over approximately two centuries Muhammad had been transmogrified from camel herder and merchant to Prophet!

No doubt the persuasive might of the all-conquering Muslim warriors played a part in this miraculous transition!

Archaeologists have reported that mosques constructed in Egypt a century or so after Muhammad’s death were not configured so that the congregation faced Mecca when it prayed. Now this is seen to be an important tenet of Muslim practice. This indicates that the Islamic beliefs were probably still being consolidated at that time.

Islam’s concept of Muhammad as a prophet seems to have been manufactured in the two or three centuries after his death. Nevertheless it has proved to be a compelling myth; Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion and the West is having great difficulty in accommodating it, especially in its most radical forms!

There have been many biographies of Muhammad written by those relying on the later uncorroborated references to his life. In general they depict a man who was ruthless in the pursuit of his enemies. They portray someone who was particularly bloodthirsty, misogynistic and with strange sexual deviances. Muhammad traded in slaves, acquired concubines and married his wife (one among many)Aisha when she was but a little girl.(See for example Robert Spencer’s Muhammad – A Critical Biography or Karen Armstrong’s more sympathetic Muhammad – A Biography of the Prophet.) His story is embellished with unsubstantiated miraculous fantasies. (Probably first among these was Muhammad’s fantastic Night Journey when he mounted a winged steed that took him from Mecca to Jerusalem where he conversed with Moses and Jesus and climbed a ladder to ascend into the Seventh Heaven!)

It seems strange that from such a dubious base a religion has emerged that is now growing so rapidly and challenging our Western values.