The Muhammad we know of today was created by the Abbasids in the 8th and 9th centuries, and then redacted back on to the 7th century. But why and how did they need to create him? This is the question Odon answers here. To understand it one has to return to the 7th century where there were warring Arab leaders who were waiting for the Messiah to return, and when he didn't they took on his Messianic figure for themselves, and often referred to themselves as 'Muhammad', which in Arabic means 'The Praised one'. But it wasn't until Abd al-Malik, who considered himself as the 'caliph of God', that a revelation and a prophet, followed by a place was really needed for the Arab people. This was later solidified under the Abbasid rule, post 749 AD. But they couldn't invent a religion out of nothing, because there was already a historical core which was dependent on a text (the early Qur'an), and existing buildings (such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem). Similar to Mormonism, which needed a book and a prophet to give them theological legitimacy, so did the Umayyads and subsequently the Abbasids need the same legitimacy. So, the nascent Qur'an was pre-Islamic, thus an Islamic narrative needed to be created to then make it Islamic. This desire to create that narrative was referred to by the French Islamicist Henri Lammens (d. 1940) who said: "Just like the corpus of the Muslim Tradition, the inspiration for the SIra is first and foremost exegetical, derived from the text of the Qur'an. The Sira was intended to serve as a commentary in action. It must be translated into precise and picturesque anecdotes, the most obscure illusions, the least intelligible innuendos of the verses, hunting down the animus, the impersonal, so disconcerting in the reading of the Surahs, everywhere, so-to-speak, affix commemorative places, multiplied dimensions of proper names, dates, so carefully avoided by Muhammad. So, this was exegetical in the first instance, so that the Sira is doctrinal, but with more abandonment, with a sensible affectation than in the traditions itself." Thus, as Lammens suggests, the Standard Islamic Narrative was created to make that which wasn't Islamic (the Qur'an) into an Islamic narrative. That explains why the SIN are so big and long and so descriptive, as they were the vehicle which made sense of what had been before, and given it a body. Muhammad's title existed in the 7th century, used by various Arab caliphs to give them authority as the 'blessed one of God', so this name was quite familiar to those living in that century. Some historical memory existed, and couldn't be done away with (i.e. the story of the Mi'raj) so they were used to give authority to existing structures. Thus, the Miraj became a vehicle to explain the Dome of t ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx_7w2aOIv0

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Following the introduction at Speaker's Corner to Dr Dan Brubaker's new book on the 22 "Corrections in Early Qur'an Manuscripts", Jay and Hatun decided to make a 'Studio Copy' of these Corrections, away from the noisy crowd, and in a sedate setting where people could hear what they were saying, and actually see what they were looking at. This is the introduction to that studio copy, where Jay and Hatun explain why we need to question corrections in the Qur'an, to begin with. This, then is the first part of that studio © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2019 (24,050) ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUEXqLItF14

Muslims claim that another of the scientific proofs of the Qur'an concerns the mountains, which according to Surah 31:10 were placed on the earth to keep them from shaking. Jay, along with the 'Science Guy', John McLatchie, looks at this claim and debunks it by using what we now know at Tectonic Plates, proving that mountains are the result of these tectonic plates colliding, which causes much shaking and earth-quakes, similar to what we have just experienced this year in Nepal, situated in the Himalayas, the largest mountains on earth, and certainly some of the most unstable, all due to the Indian plate sliding under the Chinese Asiatic plate, which create the wrinkles in the earth's surface, better known as the Himalayas. This is yet another proof that the Qur'an is anything but scientific, and thus, nothing more than a book written by man and not God. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcmgFB4JejI