Blast from the Past: "Why Invent Mohammed?" by David P. Goldman

 Here is the link to the article, which is a review and commentary on Robert Spencer’s book Did Mohammed Exist? Goldman begins his article thusly:

    Some years ago I chided Spencer for giving the Koran too much credibility;  more important than the nasty things one finds in the Koran, I argued, are two questions: “1) Mohammed may never have existed, and 2) If he existed, he may have had nothing to do with the Koran, which well might be an 8th- or 9th-century compilation.” Spencer’s present book will be translated into major Muslim languages and published on the Internet, according to Daniel Pipes. That is an important and welcome development.

    This point was made eloquently last year by the Georgetown University political philosopher Fr. James Schall, who argued, “The fragility of Islam, as I see it, lies in a sudden realization of the ambiguity of the text of the Koran. Is it what it claims to be? Islam is weak militarily. It is strong in social cohesion, often using severe moral and physical sanctions. But the grounding and unity of its basic document are highly suspect. Once this becomes clear, Islam may be as fragile as communism.” Koranic criticism, I have argued since 2003, is Islam’s Achilles’ Heel.

He goes on to observe the evidence supporting the authenticity of the Jewish records (Goldman is Jewish) and notes that no one has suggested that Jesus was anything other than a real person. But, as he details, there is no such evidence for Mohammed. 

    He concludes:

    Why is theological clarity so important?

    For several reasons.

    First, the question of what Islam seeks to accomplish is of first importance. The definitive claim of the religion, if we follow Prof. Kalisch, is the Election of the Arabs to replace the Jews. Any manifest sign of Jewish election (for example, a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael) challenges the founding premise of Islam and constitutes an existential threat to the religion itself.

    Second, the mechanism by which the new religion recasts the figures of Moses and Jesus is Gnostic, that is, the belief that an esoteric knowledge enables the adepts to see past the surface: underneath the Hebrew Bible and Christian Gospels lies the “true” revelation of  Islam. But that is not a revelation at all, not, at least, in the sense that the giving of the Torah or the ministry of Jesus were understood to be revelations, namely, a human engagement with an infinite God. There really is no revelation at all, because Allah always remains infinitely remote and unrevealed: there is merely Gnosis, a new esoteric knowledge, a re-reading of earlier sources that transforms Moses and Jesus into Mohammed.

    This makes Islam far more fragile than Judaism or Christianity. If the West chose to exploit its fragility rather than attempt to appease, engage, or reform Islam, the outcome would surprise everyone.

Will this fragility make Muslims easy prey, so to speak, for the coming Anti-Christ?