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

them, reprimand them, warn them, and especially the women united with such men, to keep themselves
from food [derived] from their sacrifices, from strangled [meat], and from their forbidden
congregations.” 20
Muslims do sacrifice animals once a year, on the feast of Eid ul-Adha, marking the end of the time of
the hajj, the great pilgrimage to Mecca; they do not, however, strangle the animals thus sacrificed. It is
thus extremely unlikely that Athanasius had Islam or Eid ul-Adha in mind, and much more probable that
there were actual pagans in the precise areas from which Islam is supposed to have eradicated paganism
fifty years earlier.
It may be that the conquerors themselves were more pagan than Muslim—not because they had recently
converted to Islam and retained some of their old practices, but because Islam itself, as we know it today,
did not exist. 21 In any case, whether it existed or not, neither the Arabians nor the people they conquered
mentioned the fact.
No Muslims
In 639 the Monophysite Christian patriarch John I of Antioch held a colloquy with the Arabian
commander Amr ibn al-As; it survives in a manuscript dating from 874. 22 In it the author refers to the
Arabians not as Muslims but as “Hagarians” (mhaggraye)—that is, the people of Hagar, Abraham's
concubine and the mother of Ishmael. The Arabic interlocutor denies the divinity of Christ, in accord with
Islamic teaching, but neither side makes any mention of the Qur'an, Islam, or Muhammad. 23
Similarly, in 647 Ishoyahb III, the patriarch of Seleucia, wrote in a letter about the “Tayyaye” and
“Arab Hagarians” who “do not help those who attribute sufferings and death to God, the Lord of
everything.” 24 In other words, the Hagarians reject the divinity of Christ. Here again, there is no mention
of Muslims, Islam, the Qur'an, or Muhammad the Islamic prophet. Ishoyahb's account agrees with the
disputation from eight years earlier in saying that the Arabian conquerors denied Christ's divinity, but it
says nothing about any new doctrines they might have been bringing to their newly conquered lands.
When the early non-Muslim sources do mention Muhammad, their accounts, like the Doctrina Jacobi,
diverge in important ways from the standard Islamic story. A chronicle attributed to the Armenian bishop
Sebeos and written in the 660s or 670s portrays a “Mahmet” as a merchant and preacher from among the
Ishmaelites who taught his followers to worship the only true God, the God of Abraham. So far, so good:
That sounds exactly like the prophet of Islam. But other elements of Sebeos's account have no trace in
Islamic tradition. The bishop's chronicle begins with the story of a meeting between Jewish refugees and
the Ishmaelites in Arabia, after the Byzantine reconquest of Edessa in 628:
They set out into the desert and came to Arabia, among the children of Ishmael; they sought their help, and explained to them that
they were kinsmen according to the Bible. Although they [the Ishmaelites] were ready to accept this close kinship, they [the Jews]
nevertheless could not convince the mass of the people, because their cults were different.
At this time there was an Ishmaelite called Mahmet, a merchant; he 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 very well-informed, and very well-acquainted
with the story of Moses. As the command came from on high, they all united under the authority of a single man, under a single law,