Did Mohammed exist?

I don't recall if this was ever a thread here, but a couple of years ago Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch wrote a book entitled Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins. Spencer concludes that there is no evidence that Muhammad ever existed.

Robert Spencer's website Jihad Watch: http://www.jihadwatch.org/

 

Where did you get your information about Alexander the Great? The same Roman historians who mentioned Jesus also mentioned Alexander the Great. No one mentions Muhammad.

 

Oh, I see what you are saying. Of all the ancient world, only Jesus is well-documented. You could just as well argue that there is no proof that Julius Caesar existed along your lines of thinking. Where you miss the boat is that no one at all who does leave a record mentions Muhammad. Another problem that you are not discussing is that we are talking of an era a thousand years after the one that you are talking about.

From the Encyclopedia Britannica:



Alexander the Great, portrait head on a coin of Lysimachus (355–281 bce); in the British Museum.
Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/14224/Alexander-the-Great/59261/Evaluation

 

If Muhammad never existed, Spencer says that the story about his marrying a 9 year old girl when he was 54 (child molestation) does provide cover for the widespread Arabic and Islamic practice of marrying little girls.

I myself agree with English Puritan poet John Milton that Allah is another name for Satan.

 

Oh, that is just one of several images and sites listed by Encyclopedia Britannica and others that survive dealing with Alexander the Great. Of course, the ancient world left more accounts of Jesus than Julius Caesar, but 1000 years later comes the time of the record of Mohammad so that is a different epic and has a different set of historical documents. The problem is that apparently there are no surviving contemporary mentions of Mohammad and no surviving coins, etc.

To say that a coin is not documentary proof is technically correct since it would be archeological evidence and there is no archeological evidence from the 7th century for Mohammad, not to mention no documentary evidence. Here again we are dealing with 1000 years after ancient Greece so I am not sure that the analogy holds.

Another review of Spencer's book listing the details of the evidence is here:

http://answering-islam.org/authors/roark/muhammad_exist.html

 

Another problem is that the account of Mohammad's live comes from a fragment dated 834, two hundred years after his life. Now the fragments of the New Testament do not date that far back but the Gospel seems to have been written around 60 AD, or thirty years after the death of Jesus. And there are many accounts and secular histories also, but nothing like that at all for Mohammad.

 

Concerning archeological evidence, Zombie in PJ Media writes in his review of Spencer:

http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2012/04/23/book-review-did-muhammad-exist-by-robert-spencer/2/