Forty-first in a series
We’ve covered a lot of ground since March, and we’re almost finished. I hope you’ve benefited from the material. Before the final leg, it’s time to put things together. A kind of survey. Some pieces will likely fit together differently now than they did at the beginning. That’s as it should be. You likely have more information now than you had before, so there are more things to connect with.
The number forty is symbolic of this journey. A number representing a time of testing and transformation; completing a journey and preparing one for life at a new level. We see this number at significant places within the Bible. It rained forty days and forty nights during the flood. God told Abram his descendants would live in a foreign land and be their slaves for four hundred years. Ten times forty. Moses lived three periods of life, each one forty years in length. He also received the law from God while on the mountain for forty days. The Israelites explored Canaan’s land for forty days; Goliath challenged Israel’s army for forty days. David, who slew Goliath, ruled Israel forty years. And Jesus fasted forty days after his baptism, before being tempted by the Devil.
Much of the first material concerned the standard Islamic narrative. This material comes from Islam’s traditions, and is what we hear from not only Islam, but our media and other sources today. It includes Islam’s history and development. That is followed by a critical analysis of some inconsistencies, myths, and historical criticism findings within the traditional sources and narrative. Finally, we most recently covered a few articles on cultural beliefs and extremism. The question remaining is, “What do we do?” How should we respond? This article helps set the stage for that discussion.
Standard Islamic Narrative
Islam’s basics include;
- A man named Muhammad lived in Mecca from 570 until 622, before migrating to Medina (Yathrib) where he lived until 632.
- He received the revelations contained within the Qur’an during his lifetime. Those revelations were not written down. The Qur’an is Allah’s final revelation to man, is eternal and unchanged.
- The third caliph, Uthman, ordered the verses collected and written down in 651. He selected the Medinan codex, and ordered all others destroyed.
So, by 651, Islam is complete. An overview of some of Islam’s tenets, and the changes to them, is presented at the end of this article. Revelations changed during Muhammad’s lifetime, resulting in later verses modifying, or abrogating, the meaning of earlier ones.
Material Covered so Far
The articles written so far include:
- Islam’s Ideas and Tenets
- Material Islam borrowed from other religions. These include borrowings from Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Nestorianism, Gnosticism, Paganism, and Christianity.
- Implications from the Arabic of that time not containing the dots and diacritical used today to distinguish between differing consonants and vowel insertion.
- Compilation of Islam’s primary documents, including the Qur’an, sirat, and hadith.
- Islam’s view of Allah, Jesus, and man’s nature; all of which vary significantly from Christianity.
- One such difference. Christianity teaches: God is love, man is made to have a relationship with God, and this relationship influences man’s relationships with his fellow man. Allah is beyond all being, nature, and essence – pure will. Man cannot have a relationship with Allah; he can only obey. Obedience comes from following Allah’s revelations. Islam is an ideology. Christianity a religion which influences one’s ideology. Another implication is that Jesus is only a man – a prophet within Islam.
- Societal implications stemming from the above which include foundational ideas such as; governance, man’s place within society, rights, laws, and freedom.
- Inconsistencies within Islam’s ideas, some myths repeated by its followers, and extremism.
- Some beliefs from surveys concerning religion, law, and culture.
- Results of applying historical critique to Islam. Much of this has only come into the English-speaking world over the last three years, and it is still developing. See below.
- Islam’s History
- Muhammad’s life (570 – 632),
- The first four caliphs from his inner circle, the Rashidun period (632 – 661).
- Umayyad Dynasty (661 – 750).
- Abbasid Dynasty (750 – 1258).
- Ottoman Empire (1299 – 1922).
The history included how Islam’s tenets were incorporated into society and culture, and how those evolved over time.
Historical Criticism Results to Date
Historical criticism looks at Islam’s claims about its founding, and asks for evidence around those things. In essence, proof that a Muhammad lived in Mecca and Medina, received the revelations now in the Qur’an, and this was all completed by the middle of the seventh century. So far, Islam has been unable to support any of its claims. The following is an overview of the results to date.
Mecca
Within the Qur’an’s story of Adam and Eve, Allah cast them both down to earth after eating from the tree. Eve came to Mecca, and Adam to Sri Lanka. Adam joined Eve in Mecca, making it the world’s oldest city, and the center of all trade. There are also between 70 and 300 prophets buried in Mecca according to tradition.
Again, no historical evidence has yet been found supporting Mecca’s existence in the seventh century.
Linguistic Issues
- Mecca is mentioned only once in the entire Qur’an (S 48.24). How important was it?
- The words Islam and Muslim do not appear until the eighth century. Arabs referred to themselves as; Ishmaelites, Haggarene, Muhajiroun, Hagraye, or Saracene.
- Arabic word endings within the Qur’an come from Nabataean Aramaic, around modern Jordan, about 600 miles north of Mecca’s location.
Location Issues
- Most of the Qur’an’s sixty-five geographic references are to people or locations 600 – 1,000 miles to the north of Mecca’s location.
- The primary trade route between east and west, before Rome and Persia went to war, came up India’s coast, through the Strait of Hormuz, and up the Persian Gulf. Then to Baghdad. After this war began, the route shifted across the water to Yemen. Trade then came either up the Red Sea or overland along the Hijaz. There are no trade records for the city of Mecca up to the seventh century. In addition, Mecca is located 3,000 feet below the Hijaz. There is no water there as there is no aquifer. No water; no food. No food; no people. No people; no city.
- Soil samples indicate the ground in and around Mecca has not held life for thousands of years. However, Mecca is described in the Qur’an as a garden.
- Mosque qiblas are to face Mecca, but don’t until the eighth century. They face either Petra or Jerusalem instead.
Historical Issues
- Ptolemy’s second century geographic references for the Arabian Peninsula do not mention Mecca, although smaller settlements are mentioned.
- No European maps from the 15th or 16th century for the peninsula refer to Mecca either.
- Mecca is not mentioned in any seventh century documents from the societies on the Arabian Peninsula, or further north in the writings of the Romans, Persians, Assyrians, or Babylonians, or from the kingdoms along the African coast. However, smaller, less important settlements, along the Hijaz trade route, are mentioned. The first mention of Mecca is in 741, and indicates it is located in southern Turkey.
- Significant skyscrapers are being built in Mecca. These structures require deep foundations. To date, no prophets have been discovered. The earliest reported discovery is the remains of a thirteenth century Ottoman fort.
Finally, the Hajj is one of Islam’s five pillars. A large part of its rituals appear to be borrowed from Jewish custom.[1]
Muhammad
The Arabic word used today for Muhammad did not exist in the seventh century as the text was unpointed, and did not contain dots indicating vowel placement. The word was MHMD, and pronounced as either “MahMad” or “Mamed.” While it could be used as a name, it was a title meaning “anointed one”, “blessed one”, or “praised one”. Solomon uses it as a title referring to himself in the Bible. (Song 5:16)
The word MHMD is only used four times in the Qur’an. By comparison, Moses is referred to 136 times, Jesus 91 times, Abraham 79 times, and Pharoah 74 times. None of the Qur’an instances of MHMD refer to a person. They are titles referring to “the blessed one”. Seventh century manuscripts only make five references to a person named Muhammad. Three of those references are too far north to be the Muhammad of Islam, and two others occur after 632.
Since there is no evidence to a person named Muhammad from Mecca, we also looked at coins and inscriptions.
Coins
There were no coins minted during Muhammad’s life referring to him. All the mints were located either too far to the north or east within what is now Iran. However, Persia fell to Arab invaders in 651. There are coins minted during the time of the first four caliphs. The front and back of these coins bear crosses. Would an Islamic leader use crosses on their coins, or were they Christians?
The first two Umayyad Dynasty caliphs were Mu’awiya and Abd al-Malik. Two coins minted during Mu’awiya’s reign also had crosses on the front and back. He reigned from 661 – 680. There is a five year gap between the reigns of Mu’awiya and Abd al-Malik. The first coins minted by Abd al-Malik (685 – 705) were Byzantine gold solidus. During this early period, were the Umayyad paying tribute to the Byzantine ruler? We do not yet know.
A Change in the Coins
The solidus had images of the Byzantine emperor and his two sons on the front, and a cross representing the Trinity on the back. In 691, Abd al-Malik minted coins with caricatures of the emperor and his sons on the front, and an empty stand on the back where the Byzantine cross appeared. Also appearing on the back was the Shahada, “There is no god but God and the praised one (MHMD) is a servant of God.” This was not an attack on Christianity so much as one on the Byzantine view of the Trinity, and a more Arian (non-Trinitarian) view of Jesus as a man.
The coin sparked a war between the Byzantines and Umayyad, and the Umayyad won. Abd al-Malik minted a coin in 693 with him holding a sword as victor, and an empty stand surrounded by the Shahada on the back. That was followed by a coin minted in 696. This coin had the Shahada on the front, and two other verses now within the Qur’an on the back. These were, “Say not three, for God is one.” (S 4.171), and “For God neither begets, nor is he begotten.” (S 112) All three inscriptions also appear in the Dome of the Rock, built by Abd al-Malik. See below.
Inscriptions
Ilkka Lindstedt examined 100 rock inscriptions dated from 640 to about 740 on the Arabian Peninsula. Most of these are found in Syria and Jordan, about six hundred miles north of Mecca, but a few from the later part of the period also appear in Yemen. The early inscriptions mention some generic pious formula, but there is no mention of Islam or Muhammad until after 690.
There is an inscription from Mu’awiya that is carved using Greek letters. Why Greek instead of Arabic? Greek and Aramaic were the primary languages for New Testament manuscripts. The inscription contains his name, and the phrases “servant of God” and “commander of the believers”. What believers? The very first character in the inscription is a cross, indicating he is a Christian.
Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock in 691, the same year he minted the coin disparaging the Byzantine emperor and his sons. The same inscriptions as are on the back of the coin minted in 696 are found on the walls of the inner ambulatory (covered walkway) into the mosque. Those are followed by the same phrase appearing on the front of the coin. Is “the blessed one” once again a title referring to Jesus? Another instance of the difference in belief between the Byzantine Trinitarians and Umayyad non-Trinitarians? Finally, it should be noted that the inscriptions are not the exact same verses existing in the Qur’an today. Instead, they may be precursors to those same verses.
Islam’s Source Material
Within Christianity, who wrote down what Jesus said? Two of the Gospels, Matthew and John, were written by his disciples. Two others were written by disciples of his disciples, Mark and Luke. What Jesus actually said appears in red letters within the Gospels. Commentaries on Jesus’ sayings are provided by the New Testament letters, many of them written by Paul – who encountered the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. Luke also wrote the early Church history in the book of Acts.
This leads to a question: who is it that wrote down what Muhammad said? Islam has similar sources. There are the writings of the Sahaba (companions or disciples) and those who obtained their information from the Sahaba. Muhammad’s sayings are found in the hadith and his life in the sirat. Commentaries and history also exist. But when were these written?
Drs. Yasir Qadhi and Shabir Ally are two of today’s leading Islamic scholars. In June 2025, Dr. Qadhi was asked how Muslims know what the Sahaba said about Muhammad and how we know they got it correct, as we have nothing written down from the seventh century. He replied, “[T]here is no middle ground, and the historical critique method (Western academia) and isnad analysis (Muslim science) are two diametrically opposed ways of looking at early Islam.” Later that same month, Dr. Ally was asked about Dr. Qadhi’s comments that the Islamic traditional sciences were ‘discredited’ by Western academia. He admitted that everything Muslims know about Muhammad comes from 200 to 300 years of isnad (oral tradition) tabulated in the ninth and tenth centuries. But was it?
Results
Scholars searched for the documents Islam’s tradition say were written between the seventh and tenth centuries. No manuscripts for any category have been found so far before the eleventh century. That is about the middle of the Abbasid Dynasty, and more than 400 years later than tradition says Muhammad died. Further, these documents were not canonized into final texts until 1,200 to 1,270 years after Muhamad’s death, during the late Ottoman period. In addition, the primary sirat, commentaries, and history used today by Muslims were all written in the nineteenth century by Europeans – Ferdinand Wüstenfeld and Michael Jan De Goeje, respectively.
These findings suggest accretions, deletions, and text corruption could be present. Al-Bukhari accepted only a very small percentage of the hadith he reviewed in his compilation. Ignaz Goldziher also notes research indicating some source fabrication (particularly the hadith) in previous articles.
A timeline of the manuscripts supporting Islam is shown at this article’s end.[2] None of the documents before the eleventh century exist. This makes up the period for the “Muhammad of faith”, as faith (iman) is required. When Dr. Qadhi was asked by Muslims what tools they should use, he responded, “When you don’t have iman (belief), or live in the bubble of iman, you will believe the [Muslim] sources are weak … we know that the Sahaba will never lie … our hadith system is unprecedented, yet some aspects require faith … a leap of faith.” The existing manuscripts from the eleventh century and beyond comprise the “Muhammad of history.”[3]
The Qur’an
We’ll first present some material about Bible manuscripts. These serve as a baseline for discussing the Qur’an’s source material.
Bible Manuscripts
Today there are about 24,000 manuscripts in eleven different languages, which all agree. Two hundred and thirty pre-date the seventh century. Most were likely written before 64 AD, when Rome burned under Nero, and Christians were persecuted afterward. Also, neither the deaths of James (62), Paul (64), or Peter (65) are mentioned. It’s unlikely such events would have been omitted from the manuscripts if written after these events. That’s a mere thirty years or so after Jesus’ death.
The recent Magdalene Manuscripts contain fragments from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. All pre-date the earliest known fragment from John. The fragment from Mark was likely written before 68, and the one from Matthew in 65 or 66. This material excludes the Early Church Father’s writings. Their work contains 32,000 scripture references written before the council of Nicea in 325. Sir David Dalrymple’s examination of Bible quotations from the second and third centuries indicate all but eleven verses of the New Testament could be reconstructed from this alternate source alone.
Manuscript Errors
The way a manuscript error is defined is one reason why so many errors are attributed to these manuscripts. In essence, any stray mark on a manuscript is an error, not just one time, but on every manuscript where such an error occurs. No other document from the ancient world has as many manuscripts as the Bible. Per Philip Schaff, of the 100,000 to 150,000 variations in the Bible manuscripts, only about 400 materially affect the sense. Of those, only about 50 are important for some reason or another, and none of those affects an article of faith or precept of duty which is not sustained by other passages. Finally, there were about 40 verses added later, and these are generally noted in the translation. The Bible did not evolve over time, as claimed by Dr. Qadhi, but was written only a few decades after Jesus’ death, and assembled later.
Qur’an Manuscripts
Compared to the above, there are only six Qur’an manuscripts existing today. All are incomplete. None of them agree with each other, nor with the Qur’an used today. Is this due to the application of cleric consensus and reasoning as applied to other materials?
The manuscript text has no diacritical marks or dots indicating vowel placement. There were an estimated 700 Qur’ans in existence by the tenth century. From these, seven were chosen in 936, and two transmitters for each of these seven were selected in 1194. Three more were chosen in 1429, each with two transmitters; bringing the total number of Qur’an to thirty. There are 93,000 variants between these thirty. The Hafs Qur’an was selected by Egypt in 1924, and underwent seven revisions before being finalized in 1936. This Qur’an was adopted by Saudi Arabia in 1985. The others are still in print and available today.
Tradition says the Qur’an can only be understood in Arabic. However, only about 20% of the world’s Muslim population speaks Arabic. The five countries with the largest Muslim population are Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. These account for about 967 million of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.
The manuscript maintained by the Ottomans, on which the Hafs Qur’an is based, contains erasures, insertions, coverings, and strikeouts. These bring the manuscript into alignment with today’s Qur’an. Shouldn’t today’s Qur’an align itself with the manuscript? Tradition says the Qur’an is without error and unchanged. Dan Brubaker analyzed just 22 of the 4,000 consonantal differences from the early manuscripts. The changes standardize the manuscripts and bring them into alignment with the Hafs Qur’an text.
Qur’an Source Material
The work of Günter Lüling and Christoph Luxenberg examined what were called the Dark passages within the Qur’an. They contain poetry and other writing for which there was no known basis, but the verses comprise a quarter or more of the Qur’an. Lüling believed he recognized the text and set about discovering its source. He first removed the pointing and other markings to arrive at the base text. Next, he translated this base text into Syriac, a form of Aramaic used by Christians, and discovered the material came from a fifth or sixth century Syriac Christian hymnal.
Günter found four text layers within the examined writings. The earliest was pre-Islamic. Islam pressed upon the first layer created the second. Additional Islamic text was added as commentaries or glosses for the third. Finally, the fourth layer consisted of the remaining Islamic text. Luxenberg expanded this research, and found that this material all came from Christian hymns, homilies, and lectionaries written in Syro-Aramaic, and inserted into Arabic later on.
Some of the text from these Christian sources has been omitted, modified, or added to over the years. However, all the Dark Passages originated from Christian sources. These writings all pre-date Islam, and all concern Jesus.[4] Another project is ongoing to determine the source of all the verses in the entire Qur’an.
There is a theme running through Islam’s sources, and it is Jesus. The word became flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14)
Footnotes:
[1] Wolf, Dan, Historical Critique, Part I, Virginia Christian Alliance, https://vachristian.org/historical-critique-part-i/ , July 8, 2026.
[2] Smith, Jay, Dr., Jesus vs. Muhammad, Pfander Center for Apologetics & Polemics, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_wmRYymU3c , June 26, 2026. Accessed July, 2026.
[3] Wolf, Dan, Historical Critique, Part II, Virginia Christian Alliance, https://vachristian.org/historical-critique-part-ii/ , July 13, 2026.
[4] Wolf, Dan, Historical Critique, Part III, Virginia Christian Alliance, https://vachristian.org/historical-critique-part-iii/ , July 15, 2026.
