[JasonC]

It was monotheism, the God of Abraham without any other, Muhammad as a prophet and lawgiver supposedly inspired by said God, a day of judgement, political subordination and unity among those who agreed to the creed, non-tolerance of polytheism, required prayer. The basic bones of the doctrine, the signs of which and clear political results of which are seen in the subsequent conquests, and reported by contemporary non-Arabic sources, as well as being agreed on by all the later Arabic ones despite their other internal differences.

As already explained, any given item of minutae may be questioned as to whether it was original or late. But there is no question of all of it being late, because then there would have been nothing to graft the later bits onto, and the whole political history of the middle east in the 7th century would be completely falsified.

You insinuate that Muhammad may not even have existed. Stop insinuating and make a claim, or don't make a claim. If he didn't, explain middle eastern political history in the 7th century. If you can't, then he did. You insinuate that all of Muslim doctrine may date from the 8th century and stem from Syrian sources. If so, then explain the doctrinal conflict of Gerflume (the new substitute for "Islam" as the name of the political state) with that of conquered and previously Byzantine Syria.

If they got it all from Syrian monks, why doesn't the later doctrine in Baghdad in the 8th century agree with the prior doctrines of those Syrian monks? Did they just forget the Incarnation because they overlooked it? Or did somebody deny it and get widespread political backing for that denial? Who was it, supposedly, in your revisionist version of middle eastern history?

The twin denials of (1) the existence of a man named Muhammad and (2) his creating a state that did not believe what Syrians prior to him believed, lead to historical gibberish. Taken as hypotheses, posited for the sake of argument, they cannot explain any of the contemprary history of the mideast in the 7th and 8th centuries. But they are advanced as hypotheses supposedly because they accord better, not worse, with known historical facts and sources. And they simply don't. They fail the test of perfectly skeptical, in no way apologetic, objective history.

It remains a tendentious bit of historical revisionism pushed to the breaking point, that predictably then breaks. The facts it sets out from (late Koran, backdating particular precedents for legitimation in Arabic sources) are not disputed by scholars and haven't been for more than a century - although they are denied by Muslim orthodoxy, which is hardly surprising. The place it wants them to drag us all to, the non-existence of Muhammad and invention of all the teachings ascribed to him by Syrian Christians, neither follows from those premises nor can explain any of the surrounding history.

One may charitably say that seeing why it is wrong is a useful exercise. But it is totally wrong.

[Nogbad]

What religion did the pre-Omar Arabs of Syria practice?
Certainly not their old pagan beliefs,
more likely some mish-mash of Christianity and Judaism.
When Omar took over Syria, like many conquerors,
he and his group probably adopted many of the customs
of the conquered territories
including the religious beliefs of the native Arabs.

Like all conquerors, they needed authority.
So, in order to set themselves above the populace
they invented the story
that all these new-fangled monotheist beliefs
really were their own originally
and had been given to one of their former tribal kings
by the Angel Gabriel.
Thereupon, they composed some sacred scripture
to prove it.

This theory seems to me not only plausible
but probable
certainly much more probable
than the fairy-tale we read about
in the Koran.