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

Inventing Muhammad
If Muhammad Did Not Exist, It Was Necessary to Invent Him
From the foregoing it is clear that when it comes to the history of early Islam, the records, both of the
Arab conquerors and of the conquered people, are sketchy in the extreme. Instead of what we might
expect—depictions of Muslim warriors shouting “Allahu akbar,” invoking Muhammad, and quoting the
Qur'an—we see hardly any presence of the Qur'an, Muhammad, or Islam at all. The early Arab rulers,
while styling themselves as “servant of God” or “agent of God” (khalifat allah) and “commander of the
faithful,” are vague at best about the content of their creed and make no mention whatsoever of the
putative founder of their religion or his holy book for decades after beginning to conquer and transform
huge expanses of territory across the Middle East and North Africa.
Compounding this curiosity are the shaky historical foundations of the Hadith, the voluminous accounts
of Muhammad's words and deeds. The importance of the Hadith in Islam cannot be overstated. They are,
when Islamic scholars deem the accounts authentic, second in authority only to the Qur'an itself. Along
with the Qur'an that they elucidate, the Hadith form the basis for Islamic law and practice regarding both
individual religious observance and the governance of the Islamic state. And in fact, so much of the
Qur'an is obscure and opaque, and explained only in the Hadith, that functionally, if not officially, the
Hadith are the primary authority in Islam.
Much of the Muslim holy book—not only its Arabic neologisms and turns of phrase—would be
incomprehensible without the Hadith. The Qur'an is prohibitively uninviting to those unschooled in its
particularities; reading much of it is like walking into a conversation between two people one doesn't
know who are talking about incidents in which one was not involved—and they aren't bothering to explain
matters.
Thus the Hadith become a necessity. They are the prism through which the vast majority of Muslims
understand the Qur'an. According to Islamic tradition, these accounts clarify the import of cryptic Qur'an
verses by providing the asbab an-nuzul, or occasions of revelation. These are stories about when, where,
and why Muhammad was given a certain verse—usually in order to settle a question in dispute among
Muslims, or to answer a query that one of the believers posed to the Islamic prophet.
Some of the hadiths are fairly straightforward. In one, Ibn Abbas, forefather of the Abbasids and a
companion of Muhammad, recalls that the Qur'anic command to “obey Allah, and obey the Messenger,
and those charged with authority among you” (4:59) was revealed to Muhammad “in connection with
Abdullah bin Hudhafa bin Qais bin Adi when the Prophet appointed him as the commander of a Sariya
(army unit).” 1 That is as plausible an explanation for the verse as any, but the context and setting are
entirely imposed from without: Nothing in the Qur'anic verse itself refers to this particular appointment by
Muhammad; it could just as easily refer to any number of similar incidents.