robert spencer-did muhammad exist__ an inquiry into islams obscure origins-intercollegiate studies institute (2012) (1)

priest refers in the 640s, whose Taiyaye were doing battle with the Byzantines. There was the Muhammad
of the cross-bearing coins struck in the early years of the Arab conquests. Did this “Muhammad” refer to
an actual person bearing that name, whose deeds are lost, or was it a title for Jesus, or did it refer to
someone or something else altogether? The answer to that is not known.
Whatever the case, the records make clear that toward the end of the seventh century and the beginning
of the eighth, the Umayyads began to speak much more specifically about Islam, its prophet, and
eventually its book. The Dome of the Rock's insistent assertion that the “praised one” was only Allah's
messenger and not divine lent itself well to the creation of a whole new figure distinct from Jesus: a
human prophet who came with the definitive message from the supreme God.
Muhammad, if he did not exist, or if his actual deeds were not known, would certainly have been
politically useful to the new Arab Empire as a legendary hero. The empire was growing quickly, soon
rivaling the Byzantine and Persian Empires in size and power. It needed a common religion—a political
theology that would provide the foundation for the empire's unity and would secure allegiance to the state.
This new prophet needed to be an Arab, living deep within Arabia. If he had come from anywhere else
within the new empire's territory, that place could have made claims to special status and pushed to gain
political power on that basis. Muhammad, significantly, is said to have come from the empire's central
region, not from borderlands.
He had to be a warrior prophet, for the new empire was aggressively expansionistic. To give those
conquests a theological justification—as Muhammad's teachings and example do—would place them
beyond criticism.
This prophet would also need a sacred scripture to lend him authority. Much of the Qur'an shows signs
of having been borrowed from the Jewish and Christian traditions, suggesting that the founders of Islam
fashioned its scripture from existing material. As Arabians, the conquerors wanted to establish their
empire with Arabic elements at its center: an Arabian prophet and an Arabic revelation. The new
scripture thus needed to be in Arabic in order to serve as the foundation for an Arabic Empire. But it did
not have an extensive Arabic literary tradition to draw on. Abd al-Malik and his fellow Umayyad caliphs
were not even centered in Arabia at that point; their conquest had brought them to Damascus. It is perhaps
no coincidence that the Qur'an betrays many Syriac influences. This Arabic scripture contains numerous
non-Arabic elements and outright incoherencies.
Demonizing the Umayyads
Although the Qur'an issues furious warnings of judgment and divine exhortations to warfare and
martyrdom that would have been useful for an expanding empire, it leaves the figure of Muhammad, the
“praised one,” sketchy at best. By investing Muhammad with prophetic status and holding him up as the
“excellent example” of conduct for the Muslims (33:21), the Qur'an sparked a hunger to know what he
actually said and did. Thus a larger body of traditions painting the picture of this prophet would have
been necessary, not only as a matter of pious interest but also to formulate Islamic law.