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

encountering some mention of Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur'an. The shahada, the Islamic confession of
faith, is featured on the Saudi flag. Coins all over the Islamic world carry inscriptions containing some
Islamic element. The most obvious and proudly held aspect of the Islamic world is that it is Islamic. But
in the earliest days of Islam, that is the one element most conspicuously lacking.
The earliest known coins that the conquerors produced bore the inscription bism Allah, “in the name of
Allah.” Allah is simply the Arabic word for God, used by Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians as well
as by Muslims. Yet coins minted in the 650s and possibly as late as the 670s bore this inscription alone,
without making any reference to Muhammad as Allah's prophet or to any other distinctive element of
Islam. This is the period of the first flush of Arabian conquest, when one would most expect the Arabians
to stress the particular features of their religion, which they considered to have been made victorious over
other, competing religions in the region.
Other coins dating from the same period feature inscriptions such as bism Allah rabbi (“In the name of
Allah my Lord”), rabbi Allah (“my Lord is Allah”), and bism Allah al-malik (“in the name of Allah the
King”). 5 Conspicuously absent is coinage bearing any reference to Muhammad rasul Allah (“Muhammad
is the messenger of Allah”).
One coin that the Arabian conquerors apparently struck in Palestine between 647 and 658 does bear the
inscription muhammad. And yet there is no way it can be taken as a product of pious, informed, believing
Muslims: It depicts a figure, apparently of a ruler—in violation of Islam's prohibition of images. Even
odder is the fact that the figure is carrying a cross, a symbol that is anathema to Islam. 6
Numismatist Clive Foss explains this coin's obverse (shown at left) as depicting a “crude standing
figure with detached crown, flanked by long cross r., , muh[ammad].” 7
Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, is supposed to have been the principal agent of a new civilizational
order based on a holy book that admonished Christians that Jesus was neither killed nor crucified: “They
did not slay him, neither crucified him” (Qur'an 4:157). Would the caliph, the leader of a religious group
that claimed it a blasphemy for a rival religion to regard Jesus as the Son of God, really place the
crowning symbol of that rival religion on his public inscriptions? Would the leader of a religious group
whose founding prophet claimed that Jesus would return at the end of the world and “break all crosses”—
as an insult to himself and a testament to the transcendent majesty of Allah—really allow a cross to be
featured on any inscription carved anywhere in his domains? 8