The masjid of the jews
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the godless Saracens entered the holy city of Christ our Lord, Jerusalem, with the permission of God and in punishment for our negligence, which is considerable, and immediately proceeded in haste to the place which is called the Capitol. They took with them men, some by force, others by their own will, in order to clean that place and to build that cursed thing, intended for their prayer and which they call a mosque (midzgitha).
The above is the testimony of a christ-worshipper, sophronius, which corroborates the arab account of (israel-lover?) umar, upon entering jerusalem, immediately proceeding to the garbage-dumping site, cleaning it & making it "holy" for his followers. It is of interest to notice his mention of "the cursed thing," which was called "midzgitha" by its builders.
The word "masjid" as place of prostration/worship is of antiquity, as attested to in the quraan
177 'If you do good, it is your own souls you do good to, and if you do evil it is to them likewise.' Then, when the promise of the second came to pass, We sent against you Our servants to discountenance you, and to enter the masjid, as they entered it the first time, and to destroy utterly that which they ascended to.
Also, a jewish temple for yahweh at elephantine was called "msgd" (place of prostration/worship) as far back as in 5th century b.c, as attested to by the elephantine papyri.
I wonder whether this biblical pagan was calling any masjid accursed or the structure built by his vanquishers.
al'hamd li Allaah Rabb al'alaameen
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I always thought that Masjid is something older than the Quran. I have some questions;
-What is the date of the Crusaders quote?
-Do you a have a link to this 5th century papyri?
-Why did Umar build a Temple in Jerusalem. What is the importance of Jerusalem? or is it only for the Saracens settling there?Peace,
Rami
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rami-I always thought that Masjid is something older than the Quran. I have some questions;
What is the date of the Crusaders quote?
The testimony was appended to the work of john mochus on the authority of theodore, a contemporary of sophronius, & was possibly written around 670 a.c. What has to be remembered is that this is not any accurate account of an unbiased historian, but a frustrated account of a devout christian. Not withstanding his unreliability, he provides a reasonably accurate picture of arab advent of jerusalem.
Amusingly, crone & her puppies try to use his lamentation as proof against arab history, whereas this account confirms even the details (immediately proceeding to the site, cleaning the place) of the arab narrative.
-Do you a have a link to this 5th century papyri?
As far as I am aware, neither the elephantine papyri nor the nabatean inscirptions (of a later date) are on display. Please refer to "ayyubid metalwork with christian images, eva baer, page 644" for both of these.
-Why did Umar build a Temple in Jerusalem. What is the importance of Jerusalem? or is it only for the Saracens settling there?
The account of umar building the temple, the location of which was pointed out by an ex-rabbi, is described in greater detail by arab sources. Apparently, he was popular with the jews & was called by (raabi) simon ben yohai a "lover of israel".
From the arab sources
http//free-minds.org/forum/index.php?topic=9598008.0
I am not aware of the importance of jerusalem in islaam. The word "jerusalem", as it is, does not exist in either the quraan or the torah. There is no evidence of muhammad ever being in jerusalem.
The term saracen is possibly word-play by the jews & christians to slight the muslims (then mostly arabs). It apparently alludes to the biblical narrative where hagar is sent away empty-handed by sarah, & thence to the invading arabs being descendants of the one sent away empty-handed. A less accepted view is that saracens means sharqiyyin (easterners). In a like manner is the possible word-play on hagarene. In face of the unprecedented assault by the arabs, such attempts at wit possibly served as a vent to the jews & the christians, & allowed to maintain their "sanity" & vanity.
ma'a salaam.
God bless all.
al'hamd li AllaaH Rabb al'aalameen
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It is the preface of "hagarism" which sums up its worthlessness. In a confession, necessitated doubtless by the nature of the work rather than modesty, crone allows her reader the incontrovertible conclusion that in recostructing islaam based on "infidel sources" (sic),an undue credibility & reverence has to be afforded to the non-muslim witnesses. & this fact has not gone unnoticed by the conscientious readers of the book who have questioned this extreme approach. But far worse is the deliberate misrepresentation & manipulation of even these hostile testimonies, the outcome of which has been embarrassing to its author. No wonder the authors have themselves seeked to dissociate themselves from the premise of the book.
ma'a salaam.
God bless all.
al'hamd li Allaah Rabb al'aalameen
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zidane-You might want to read this
- Yes, that article carries the unmistakable influence of crone's works. Thanks for reminding me about it.
A remark - I think the article has been edited since I last read it. In her diatribe, crone has wittingly or unwittingly changed "night" to "evening," & this had been faithfully reproduced in that article. However, this mistake seems to have been corrected in the current version.
Earlier version
And you pass by their ruins (Sodom) in the morning; And in the night. Do you not understand? (The Message 37137-13
And they have come upon the town (Sodom) that was showered with a miserable shower. Did they not see it? No, they do not expect any resurrection. (The Message 2540)
How can someone pass-by the remains of another people EVERY MORNING & EVERY EVENING?The only way you can achieve that, is if you LIVED NEAR THERE!
Thus, we can determine, with certainty, that Mohammed was indeed within the vicinity (possibly with a day's journey) of the ancient town of Lot.
Crone's opinion
In addition, the Qur'an twice describes its opponents as living in the site of a vanished nation, that is to say a town destroyed by God for its sins. There were many such ruined sites in northwest Arabia. The prophet frequently tells his opponents to consider their significance and on one occasion remarks, with reference to the remains of Lot's people, that "you pass by them in the morning and in the evening". This takes us to somewhere in the Dead Sea region. Respect for the traditional account has prevailed to such an extent among modern historians that the first two points have passed unnoticed until quite recently, while the third has been ignored. The exegetes said that the Quraysh passed by Lot's remains on their annual journeys to Syria, but the only way in which one can pass by a place in the morning and the evening is evidently by living somewhere in the vicinity.
ma'a salaam.
God bless all.
al'hamd li Allaah Rabb al'aalameen
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An interpretation espoused by crone, & the parallel she draws for the prophet, which she finds an extremely good fit for her infidel testimonies
An alternative hypothesis would be that Islam originated as a nativist movement, or in other words as a primitive reaction to alien domination of the same type as those which the Arab conquerors were themselves to provoke in North Africa and Iran, and which European colonists were later to provoke throughout the Third World. If we accept the testimony of the non-Muslim sources on the nature of Muhammad's teaching, this interpretation fits extremely well.
Nativist movements are primitive in the sense that those who engage in them are people without political organization. Either they are members of societies that never had much political organization, as is true of Muhammad's Arabia,.or they are drawn from these strata of society that lack this organization, as is true of the villagers who provided the syncretic prophets of Iran. They invariably take a religious form. The leaders usually claim to be prophets or God Himself, and they usually formulate their message in the same religious language as that of the foreigners against whom it is directed, but in such a way as to reaffirm their native identity and values. The movements are almost always millenarian, frequently messianic, and they always lead to some political organization and action, however embryonic; the initial action is usually militant, the object of the movement being the expulsion of the foreigners in question. The extent to which Muhammad's movement conforms to this description can be illustrated with reference to a Maori prophet of the 1860s who practically invented Islam for himself. He reputedly saw himself as a new Moses (as did Muhammad), pronounced Maoris and Jews to be descended from the same father (as were the Jews and their Ishmaelite brothers), and asserted that Gabriel had taught him a new religion which (like that taught to Muhammad combined belief in the supreme God of the foreigners with native elements (sacred dances as opposed to pilgrimage). He proclaimed, or was taken to proclaim, the Day of Judgment to be at hand (as did Muhammad). On that day, he said or was taken by his followers to say, the British would be expelled from New Zealand (as would the Byzantines from Syria), and all the Jews would come to New Zealand to live in peace and harmony with their Maori brothers (as Jews and Arabs expected to do in Syria). This, at least, is how his message was reported by contemporary, if frequently hostile, observers.8 And though he may in fact have been a pacifist, his followers were not. Unlike the followers of Muhammad, howcver, they fought against impossible odds.
Like the Maori prophet, Muhammad mobilized theJewish version of monotheism against that of dominant Christianity and used it for the self-assertion, both ideological and military, of his own people. It is odd that what appears to have been the first hostilc reaction to alien domination, and certainly the most successful, should have come in an area subject to Byzantine rather than Persian influence, that of the Persians being more extensive. But Jewish-Arab symbiosis in northwest Arabia could perhaps account for this according to Sebeos, the Byzantine victimization of Jews played a crucial role in the birth of Muhammad's movement. In any case, Muhammad was not the only prophet in seventh-century Arabia, and two of his competitors, Musaylima and Aswad, were active in areas subject to Persian influence, the Yamama and the Yemen, respectively, while a third, Sajah, was sponsored by tribes known to have participated in the celebrated battle against the Persians at Dhu Qar. The fact that the resistance to Islam in Arabia was led by imitators of Muhammad rather than by representatives of traditional paganism is thus unlikely to mean that traditional beliefs and values had lost force in Arabia; on the contrary, Muhammad would seem to have hit upon a powerful formula for the vindication of those values. And this formula was, of course, likely to be used against Muhammad himself when he began his subjection of Arabia.
Little wonder that pagan puppies cannot stand to hear a word against their goddess crone, the avowed enemy of muhammad. grin
al'hamd li Allaah Rabb al'aalameen
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An interpretation espoused by crone, & the parallel she draws for the prophet, which she finds an extremely good fit for her infidel testimonies
Little wonder that pagan puppies cannot stand to hear a word against their goddess crone, the avowed enemy of muhammad. grin
al'hamd li Allaah Rabb al'aalameen
We stand a good chance of making headway, for we are nowhere near having exploited to the full our three main types of evidence ? the traditions associated with the prophet (primarily the hadith), the Qur'an itself, and (a new source of enormous promise) archaeology.
The first is the most difficult to handle; this overwhelmingly takes the form of hadith ? short reports (sometimes just a line or two) recording what an early figure, such as a companion of the prophet or Mohammed himself, said or did on a particular occasion, prefixed by a chain of transmitters. (Nowadays, hadith almost always means hadith from Mohammed himself.) Most of the early sources for the prophet's life, as also for the period of his immediate successors, consist of hadith in some arrangement or other.
The purpose of such reports was to validate Islamic law and doctrine, not to record history in the modern sense, and since they were transmitted orally, as very short statements, they easily drifted away from their original meaning as conditions changed. (They were also easily fabricated, but this is actually less of a problem.) They testify to intense conflicts over what was or was not true Islam in the period up to the 9th century, when the material was collected and stabilised; these debates obscured the historical nature of the figures invoked as authorities, while telling us much about later perceptions.
The material is amorphous and difficult to handle. Simply to collect the huge mass of variant versions and conflicting reports on a particular subject used to be a laborious task; now it has been rendered practically effortless by searchable databases. However, we still do not have generally accepted methods for ordering the material, whether as evidence for the prophet or for the later doctrinal disputes (for which it will probably prove more fruitful). But much interesting work is going on in the field.
As regards the second source, the Qur'an, its study has so far been dominated by the method of the early Muslim exegetes, who were in the habit of considering its verses in isolation, explaining them with reference to events in the prophet's life without regard for the context in which it appeared in the Qur'an itself. In effect, they were replacing the Qur'anic context with a new one.
Some fifty years ago an Egyptian scholar by the name of Mohammed Shaltut, later rector of al-Azhar, rejected this method in favour of understanding the Qur'an in the light of the Qur'an itself. He was a religious scholar interested in the religious and moral message of the Qur'an, not a western-style historian, but his method should be adopted by historians too. The procedure of the early exegetes served to locate the meaning of the book in Arabia alone, insulating it from religious and cultural developments in the world outside it, so that the Biblical stories and other ideas originating outside Arabia came across to modern scholars as "foreign borrowings", picked up in an accidental fashion by a trader who did not really understand what they meant.
The realisation is slowly dawning that this is fundamentally wrong. The prophet was not an outsider haphazardly collecting fallout from debates in the monotheist world around him, but rather a full participant in these debates. Differently put, the rise of Islam has to be related to developments in the world of late antiquity, and it is with that context in mind that we need to reread the Qur'an. It is a big task, and there will be, indeed already have been, false turns on the way. But it will revolutionise the field.
The third, and immeasurably exciting, type of source is looming increasingly large on the horizon archaeology. Arabia, the big unknown, has begun to be excavated, and though it is unlikely that there will be archaeological explorations of Mecca and Medina anytime soon, the results from this discipline are already mind-opening.
Arabia seems to have been a much more developed place than most Islamicists (myself included) had ever suspected ? not just in the north and south, but also in the middle. We are beginning to get a much more nuanced sense of the place, and again it is clear that we should think of it as more closely tied in with the rest of the near east than we used to do. The inscriptional record is expanding, too. With every bit of certainty we gain on one problem, the range of possible interpretations in connection with others contracts, making for a better sense of where to look for solutions and better conjectures where no evidence exists.
We shall never be able to do without the literary sources, of course, and the chances are that most of what the tradition tells us about the prophet's life is more or less correct in some sense or other. But no historical interpretation succeeds unless the details, the context and the perspectives are right. We shall never know as much as we would like to (when do we?), but Islamicists have every reason to feel optimistic that many of the gaps in our current knowledge will be filled in the years ahead.
http//www.opendemocracy.net/faith-europe_islam/mohammed_3866.jsp
I think she is right on target there. Maybe its time for secular historians to try to follow Shaltut's example and try to understand the Koran from the Koran. She also notices the role archeology plays and how recent archeological discoveries reveal that the center of Arabia was more developed as was traditionally assumed by historians. Mecca and Medina remain the main point though and excavations have to take place there too which means the Wahhabis need to be overthrown. And finally she recognizes that the Koran was not a cavalier amateur but was well aware of the material and topics it was debating.
These are all positive signs. Once again archeology is the key.
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bigmo-
The confession that her earlier books were written in haste & without proper research has come decades later. But, yes, like I have remarked elsewhere, she has admitted her fallacy, & has left behind much of her hearsay. But her self-rejected hypothesis is still being circulated by her puppies.
ma'a salaam.
God bless all.
al'hamd li Allaah Rabb al'aalameen
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Arabia is the most under studied religiously significant area in the world. Thanks to the Saudi governemnt, the Bible and the Quran are still archaeologically in the realm of 'more fiction than fact'.
One of the most striking things is that the Quran says that Mohammed lived in close to the remains of Lot's town. Technically speaking, this could mean that Lot's town is in Arabia near Mecca. Another suprising fact that God states that he is narrating to Mohammed the story of the surrounding villages. Now this is huge. This means that Lot's town, Noah's ark, Aad and Thamud, Solomon's Kingdom are all near Mecca or in the Hijaz region west to the Sarawat mountains which could be the REAL Jordan of the OT not the river BS. It also explains why the Quran call its listeners to walk and see the end of the rejectors which is another proof that all the destruciton was in the same region.
The biggest question is why are these Sunni jokers not interested in this? What a bunch of buffoons.