I had originally planned for this to be the third and final part of a series of posts detailing some of the problems with the way that some of the world’s “great faiths” are known and understood. I had intended to stick to one post each for Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

Naturally, things went a bit agley, as they are aft gang to do. After my first and second installments about Islam and Judaism respectively, I ran into another excellent series of videos concerning the origins of Islam – this time looking at the actual physical evidence for the existence of Mohammed and the events described within the various “holy” texts of Islam.

The new videos were so good and so interesting that I simply had to dedicate another article to them.

I have written extensively about the obscure and very poorly understood origins of Islam before, using the works of Emmet Scott, Dr. Robert Spencer, and a few others as the basis for my conclusions. Everything that I have seen and read so far indicates that the entire canonical origin story of Islam is simply hogwash. Things just did not happen the way that Muslims claim they did in the 7th Century to create the world’s supposedly third great Abrahammic faith.

To understand Islam, you first have to understand something about Judaism and then about Christianity.

Islam and Christianity share a common origin in Judaism, in both theological and practical terms. Theologically, Muslims claim to be heirs of Abraham via his son Ishmael, born via his wife Sarah’s handmaiden Hagar. The legend that Arabs believe says that Ishmael went on to father the Arab peoples and tribes, while Abraham’s son Isaac is of course the primogenitor of the Jews through his son Jacob.

Islam argues that it was Abraham that built the Ka’aba, their holiest site. Never mind that Muslims consistently get the whereabouts of Abraham completely wrong, and say that he did things which he could not possibly have done, given what we know about the locations described in the Old Testament. And never mind the fact that the Ka’aba was actually a pagan religious site in Mecca well before Islam ever made any sort of appearance on the scene.

Islam and Christianity are also similar in that they are basically heresies of Judaism – and weirdly enough, Jews view Islam with considerably less hostility than they do Christianity, at least from a scriptural perspective. As I pointed out in my second article in this series, Jews consider Jesus Christ to be the arch-heretic, and despise Him so profoundly that they believe that He is tormented for all eternity in a vat of boiling excrement in the lowest reaches of Hell. (Rather a picturesque image, it must be said.) This is of course because Christ repudiated the ceremonial and religious laws, which had come to obscure the most important moral laws – and which He preserved intact and then enhanced. And they regard the New Testament as absolute and utter blasphemy.

With Islam, though, Jews just view the Koran as basically nothing much more than another holy book – though a completely misguided and hopelessly wrong one.

Islam claims to accept the teachings of the Pentateuch wholesale – though, of course, it actually doesn’t – and therefore claims to be the final fulfillment of Jewish prophecies and revelations. This, in spite of the fact that Mohammed never once performed a single miracle, never fulfilled a single prophecy, and never, ever held any real legitimate claim to being a descendant of the prophetic line stretching all the way back to Abraham.

Islam and Christianity share one final similarity, in that they revolve around one man, and one book.

Christianity’s claims to legitimacy revolve around the person of the Christ, and the compiled writings of the New Testament. If you are so inclined, you can argue that the New Testament consists of: the sayings of Jesus in the red texts, the life of Jesus in the Gospels, and commentaries on His life and sayings given in the Book of Acts and the Epistles. All three of these aspects of the canon of Christianity have been questioned, repeatedly and rigourously, throughout the last 2,000 years.

There is no getting away from the fact that the closer one looks at Christianity, the more one is forced to admit that it basically just plain makes sense. Christians have had two thousand years worth of practice at investigating and defending their faith, and they have gotten to be very, very good at it – because, after all, Christianity is actually true.

It can be difficult and very costly to defend the truth – but the great thing about defending and stating the truth is that one is always right.

Islam also claims to revolve around one man and one book. The man is Mohammed, and the book is the Koran. To draw an analogy with the New Testament above, the sayings of Mohammed are given in the Hadith, the life of Mohammed is given in the Sirah, and the commentaries on his life and sayings are given in the Tafsir.

Unlike Christianity, Islam has faced very little serious mainstream criticism of its claims for most of its (supposedly) 1,400-year existence. This might have something to do with the fact that, whenever anyone tries to make any kind of informed criticism of this supposed “religion”, he is immediately threatened with beheading and murder – and in all too many instances, Islamists go right on ahead and carry out their threats.

Fun bunch…

The problem that Islam faces is that, once people start looking at it closely, it fails to make any kind of sense on any level whatsoever.

As J. K. Sheindlin shows in a book called The People vs Mohammed – Psychological Analysis, the so-called “prophet” of Islam is an individual so extreme, so riddled with pathological and psychological disorders, that by modern standards he would be deemed clinically insane and locked up in an institution for the rest of his life. (The book, by the way, is shot through with spelling and grammatical errors, which annoyed the crap out of me, but its overall case is still pretty compelling.)

Meanwhile, as noted in my first article in this series, Dr. Jay Alan Smith [I made a mistake with Dr. Smith’s name, which is my fault and mine alone] and Al Fadi showed conclusively, using the latest scholarly advances and information, that the claims that Islam makes about the Koran are simply not supportable.

It is not an immutable, unchanging, fully correct, and final revelation – it has in fact been changed many times, and was not fully canonised until the 20th Century in its current form. It contains huge errors and problems dating back to the earliest manuscripts. Its age is uncertain and it is likely that the Koran itself predates Mohammed.

Furthermore, the scholarly evidence that we have available indicates that it was originally actually a Christian lectionary text written in Syriac, not Arabic, and much of it was copied and even plagiarised outright from various much older texts.

So that deals with the book. It is filled with utter nonsense, and its claims to legitimacy are completely unfounded. It is of almost no merit whatsoever, especially not when compared with the Old and New Testaments, and can be safely dispensed with and discarded without a second thought.

What about the man?

As the six episodes below show, just about everything that we know about Mohammed, the man, is easily called into question with devastating effect.

Muslims cannot answer these basic questions about Mohammed. There are simply too many inconsistencies in their own purported history. There are too many problems with their own narrative.

So who was Mohammed anyway? Did he actually exist?

The bad news for Muslims is that the best possible answer, as far as anyone with real scholarly background can tell, is “no – at least, not as he is described”. The best we can do is say that Mohammed is an amalgam of three or four different historical figures – and these include Jesus Christ, Joshua of Nun, and at least one other merchant or warlord or king who did actually exist at around the time that Ol’ Mo’ did.

It is here that things get quite confusing. There are several different, more or less equally plausible, possible theories about how the Mohammed Myth came to be.

Emmet Scott’s argument is that Crazy Uncle Mo is basically a compilation of characters invented by the Arabs after their takeover of the Persian Sassanid Empire, which was the actual power that built the original “Arabic” empire after converting more or less en masse to the Ebionite Nestorian heresy of Christianity. It was this empire that spread rapidly using Arab bedouins as their shock troops, backed up by Persian heavy cavalry, and which forced the Byzantine Christians back to Turkey. It was the Persian Emperor Chosroes II who performed most of those conquests, and whose biography later Arab caliphs “retconned” into history by combining his accomplishments in war with the characters of Jesus and Joshua.

This theory fits in quite nicely with a very large body of numismatic, archaeological, historical, and textual evidence – but, unfortunately, it does not fit all of the facts.

One major fact that it does not fit is the one concerning the orientation of the various qiblas of the earliest “Islamic” mosques.

As our friends point out in the videos below, the earliest mosques were not oriented toward Mecca. They were not oriented, as Muslims claim, toward Jerusalem either.

They were actually oriented, with an extraordinary degree of accuracy, toward Petra – the religious centre of the Nabatean civilisation, from which the original Ummayad caliphate derived its origins and history.

There were other orientations of the qiblas as well – to some location between Petra and Mecca, and to another set of “parallel” orientations which defy the standard Islamic narrative completely.

The alternative theory presented by Dr. Smith and Al Fadi is largely, but not completely, compatible with Emmet Scott’s version. Their argument is that Islam started out as essentially a Nabatean religion, informed and heavily influenced by both Judaism and Christianity, and eventually morphed into something much uglier and more sinister after an Arab empire was created by first the Ummayads and then the Abbasids.

After the Arabs took over and subverted Persian civilisation from within, they needed a stamp of religious legitimacy upon their new empire. Unlike the Persians, who had a long and colourful religious history dating back to well beyond the time of Alexander the Great and his Hellenistic influences, the Arabs had no such strong identity.

But the Jews and especially the Christians did.

So the Arabs ended up basically stealing an identity and then modifying it to suit their own purposes.

The result is the sticky mess of contradictions, nastiness, brutishness, unscientific nuttery, and pathological psychosexual disorders that is Islam.

Take 2 hours out of your schedule this week and watch all of the episodes below, all the way through. I guarantee that you will be richly rewarded for your investment:

The documentary referenced in these episodes is also available on YouTube, by the way – though who knows for how much longer: