Did Muhammad Exist?...I mentioned previously several other historians who have questioned the conventional story of Islam’s origins in my posts on Tom Holland’s book; here are a few of many more names listed by Spencer:
Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921): Lateness of earliest biographical sources on Muhammad along with tendency to invent stories to support later political and religious positions made it impossible to treat the biographies as historically reliable. Spencer lists many names of scholars who have raised questions about Muhammad’s historicity but I list only a few here;
Henri Lammens (1862-1937): Questioned the traditional dates associated with Muhammad; noted the “artificial character and absence of critical sense” in the earliest biographies of Muhammad.
Joseph Schacht (1902-1969): Impossible to extract authentic core of historical material from the earliest texts. Many documents claiming to be early were in fact composed much later.
John Wansbrough (1928-2002): Doubted the historical value of early Islamic texts. Qur’an was developed for political purposes to establish Islam’s origins in Arabia and to give the Arabian empire a distinctive religion.
Patricia Crone and
Michael Cook: Noted lateness and unreliability of most early Islamic sources; reviewed archaeological, philological sources, coins from seventh and eighth centuries. Posited that Islam arose within and then split from Judaism. Argued the Arabic setting (including Mecca) was at a late date and for political purposes read back into the history of Islam’s origins. Later, however, Crone wrote that the evidence for Muhammad’s existence is “exceptionally good” (see the quotation above).
Günter Lüling: Qur’an originated as a Christian document; reflects theology of non-Trinitarian Christianity that influenced Islam.
Christoph Luxemberg (pseudonym): Qur’an shows signs of a Christian substratum; Syriac, not Arabic, resolves many difficulties in the text.
So what are the main points that prompt questions about the historicity of Muhammad and suggest that Islam emerged as a major religion some decades after the Arab conquests? Robert Spencer lists the following:
*The first record of Muhammad’s death in 632 appears more than a century after that date.
*There is a mid-630s Christian reference to a living Arab prophet “armed with a sword”.
*Those conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century never mention Islam, Muhammad or the Qur’an until much later. They refer to their conquerors as Ishmaelites, Saracens, Muhajirun and Hagarians but never as Muslims.
*The coins and inscriptions of the Arab conquerors do not mention Islam or the Qur’an for the first sixty years after their conquests. Mentions of Muhammad are ambiguous: does it refer to a name or an honorific? Twice the name appears with a cross.
*The Qur’an in its present form was not distributed until the 650s according to the orthodox account. The Qur’an is not mentioned by the Arabs, Christians or Jews in the region until the early eighth century.
*The Arabs constructed a public building with an inscription headed by a cross during the reign of caliph Muawiya (661-680).
*Coins and inscriptions indicating Islamic beliefs, and the first mentions of Muhammad as a prophet of Islam, emerge in the reign of caliph Abd al-Malik in the 690s.
*At the same time Arabic (the language of the Qur’an according to tradition) superseded Syrian and Greek as the dominant language of the empire.
*Abd al-Malik claimed to have been the one to have collected the Qur’an sayings into the one volume contradicting Islamic tradition that this had been accomplished forty years earlier by caliph Uthman.
*At the same period (690s) the governor of Iraq Hajjaj ibn Yusuf edited the Qur’an and distributed it to various provinces, according to multiple hadiths — also something the traditional account attributes much earlier to Uthman.
*Some Islamic traditions date certain practices such as the recitation of the Qur’an during mosque prayers from the directives of Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, not to the earliest period of Islamic history.
*The first complete biography of Muhammad appeared 125 years after the traditional date of the prophet’s death. This biographical material proliferated after the Umayyad dynasty was replaced by the Abbasids. The new dynasty accused the Umayyads of being most irreligious. The new biographical details of Muhammad emerged at this time.
*Mecca (the supposed birth place of Muhammad and Islam) in the centre of Arabia was never a centre for trade and pilgrimage as claimed by canonical Islamic accounts.
There are many textual oddities in the Qur’an and Spencer discusses some arguments of scholars who have suggested that these remain problematic only if we accept the traditional account that they were originally composed in Arabic. They can apparently be resolved if we hypothesize Syriac and Christian sources behind them.
<full post at link>
http://vridar.org/2015/03/26/did-muhamm ... s-origins/ 
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