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Matt Osborne's avatar

I was quite eager to read the sources, indeed I was prepared to reason out a mythicist Muhammad, but that is not where the evidence led me. I'm glad the revisionists tried, though, because someone did need to make an exploding diagram of everything and reexamine it all from first principles rather than receive the wisdom. This raised my confidence in my conclusions.

That said: why isn't the Qur'an in Nabatean script if it all started at Petra? I think the desert Ishmaelites developed a culture of secretive literacy around a script that could be drawn in the sand or dust and erased by a hand, or by the wind. The Qurayshi script is great for secret literacy. I suspect Muhammad was not in fact illiterate, but at least literate enough to have studied the relevant non-canonical texts. Feigned illiteracy seems to have been a kind of ritual humility that was common in the Hejaz; we know of Arabs who owned books and had their collections burned upon death. Reading was apparently not something poets or prophets or respectable men were supposed to do.

Ironically, we have no early copies of the Qur'an as a result. Tradition holds that the war against Musaylimah and the Lakhmids killed so many of the men who had memorized the Qur'an that the Umma had to start keeping written copies. I read this as an apocryphal story, the grain of truth in it being this abandoned taboo. As you note, logistics and communications across those vast distances are very slow, which is why the dates of key early battles and other events are so sketchy. A message transmitted that far must be perfectly memorized, or else written down.

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A.'s avatar

Great study. Will go back and reread it at some point with an eye for more inquiries. For now, one question looms. What do you think of the Muawiya Coins with the Cross? I know people have used it to argue for the non-existence of Muhammad, but that seems like a bit of a thin argument at this point.

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