"This should end well" dept.

Can we start a dead pool please?

 

 

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"This should end well" dept.

via Daimnation! by damian on 11/17/08

A German university professor - and convert to Islam - says Mohammed may never have existed. And he doesn't appear to be suicidal:

Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert and Germany's first professor of Islamic theology, fasts during the Muslim holy month, doesn't like to shake hands with Muslim women and has spent years studying Islamic scripture. Islam, he says, guides his life.

So it came as something of a surprise when Prof. Kalisch announced the fruit of his theological research. His conclusion: The Prophet Muhammad probably never existed.

Muslims, not surprisingly, are outraged. Even Danish cartoonists who triggered global protests a couple of years ago didn't portray the Prophet as fictional. German police, worried about a violent backlash, told the professor to move his religious-studies center to more-secure premises.

"We had no idea he would have ideas like this," says Thomas Bauer, a fellow academic at Münster University who sat on a committee that appointed Prof. Kalisch. "I'm a more orthodox Muslim than he is, and I'm not a Muslim."

[...]

Prof. Kalisch, who insists he's still a Muslim, says he knew he would get in trouble but wanted to subject Islam to the same scrutiny as Christianity and Judaism. German scholars of the 19th century, he notes, were among the first to raise questions about the historical accuracy of the Bible.(via The Volokh Conspiracy)

Many scholars openly question the existence of Jesus Christ and the veracity of the Old Testament, and Kalisch should have every right to promote his provocative theory about Mohammed. (To their credit, many European academics - including several Muslims - have risen to his defence.)

That said, questioning the existence of Mohammed - not whether he was a prophet, but whether he existed at all - seems more like questioning whether L. Ron Hubbard really existed:

Many scholars of Islam question the accuracy of ancient sources on Muhammad's life. The earliest biography, of which no copies survive, dated from roughly a century after the generally accepted year of his death, 632, and is known only by references to it in much later texts. But only a few scholars have doubted Muhammad's existence. Most say his life is better documented than that of Jesus.

Damian P.

 

 

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