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

7 Arthur Jeffery, “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad,” in Ibn Warraq, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, 340.
8 Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 515.
9 Ehteshaam Gulam, “The Problems with Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasoul Allah (Arabic for The Life of Messenger of Allah) and Other Early
Sources of Islam and Prophet Muhammad (2009),” Answering Christian Claims, http://www.answering-christian-claims.com/The-Problems-
With-Ibn-Ishaq.html. The Arabic for “mercy for all the worlds” is more properly transliterated as Rahmatan lil Alamin.
10 Jeffery, “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad,” 340.
11 Ibn Warraq, “Studies on Muhammad and the Rise of Islam: A Critical Survey,” in Ibn Warraq, The Quest for the Historical
Muhammad, 25.
12 Johannes J. G. Jansen, “The Gospel According to Ibn Ishaq (d. 773),” paper for the “Skepticism and Scripture” Conference, Center for
Inquiry, Davis, California, January 2007.
13 Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 223.
14 Ibid., 224.
15 For a related phenomenon, see Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 205–14. Note how
the origins of military slavery, a secular event that took place two hundred years after Muhammad's supposed life, is variously handled in fortyfour
different Arabic and Persian sources. In this case, new information kept turning up many centuries after the events took place—about a
political event in the early ninth century. How much more easily, then, could such a process unfold regarding religious events in the seventh
century that were far more central to the lives of the believers?
16 Gregor Schoeler, The Biography of Muhammad: Nature and Authenticity (New York: Routledge, 2010), 16.
17 Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 452. I am indebted to Jansen's “Gospel According to Ibn Ishaq” for this discussion.
18 Ibid. 381.
19 Ibid., 501, 605.
20 Ibid., 81.
21 Johannes J. G. Jansen, “The Historicity of Muhammad, Aisha and Who Knows Who Else,” Tidsskriftet Sappho, May 16, 2011,
http://www.sappho.dk/blog/335/The-historicity-of-Muhammad-Aisha-and-who-knows-who-else.htm.
22 Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 106.
23 Jansen, “The Gospel According to Ibn Ishaq (d. 773).”
24 Crone, Meccan Trade, 220.
25 W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 35–36.
26 Jansen, “The Gospel According to Ibn Ishaq.”
27 The Sunni-Shiite conflict has in many instances evolved into a conflict between Arabs and non-Arabs: Sunni Arabs versus Shiite
Persians (although there are, to be sure, many Shiite Arabs). This came to a head in modern times in the violence between Shiite Iranian
pilgrims and Sunni Saudi security forces in Mecca during the hajj in 1987.
28 Quoted in Crone, Meccan Trade, 7.
29 Ibn Kathir, Tafsir Ibn Kathir (abridged), vol. 9 (Riyadh: Darussalam, 2000), 153–54.
30 Crone, Meccan Trade, 134.
31 Crone disputes the identification by pointing out that the two words actually have quite different roots and that the location Ptolemy
gives for Macoraba does not correspond to the site of Mecca. (See Crone, Meccan Trade, 135–36.)
32 Crone, Meccan Trade, 137.
33 Ibid., 134.
34 Ibid., 137.
35 Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 105 (quoted in Crone, Meccan
Trade, 6).
36 Crone notes that according to the medieval Islamic historian al-Azraqi (d. 1072), trade was conducted in pre-Islamic Arabic at “pilgrim
stations” including Mina, Arafa, Ukaz, Majanna, and Dhul-Majaz. “That Mecca itself is supposed to have been a pilgrim station,” Crone
observes, “is here totally forgotten” (Crone, Meccan Trade, 175).