It's All About Muhammad

ISLAM IS THE CREATION of a psychopath, so call what Muhammad started a religion at your own risk.

One of the difficulties the world faces in dealing with what he created is that it has blindly accepted Islam’s definition of itself as a religion due to superficial characteristics that make it look like an authentic religion. This erroneous idea gets repeated ad nauseam and is most harmfully enshrined in the pronouncement that Islam is a “religion of peace.”

Islam is a conundrum because appearances are so deceiving. Muslims pray, don’t they? They worship God, don’t they? Therefore they must be practicing a religion, isn’t that so? It takes some scratching to get below the hard veneer of this conceit, but when one takes the trouble to investigate the life of Muhammad, it becomes clear that Muslims don’t worship God. What they worship is a God concept and nothing more — a God concept formulated by Muhammad. And who was Muhammad? A very dangerous man, someone given to killing people who did not believe him when he told them that God talked to him.

He claimed divine inspiration, but in fact he took his primary ideas from Judaism and Christianity and then modified them to suit his idea of himself as a “messenger” of God. As evidence, take a look at the prophet stories that make up a good part of his Koran — his “Recital.” A comparison of his verses to the Bible shows that Muhammad was inspired more by the Jewish legends of the prophets — folk tale elaborations — rather than the Biblical versions. He fashioned his Koran stories based on these derivative folk tales, morality tales that had evolved over centuries and were the inspiration for the homilies of the rabbis on the Sabbath. When the Jews ridiculed him about it, he told them they were wrong. He got everything from God. They had it wrong, and if they called him a liar, they were calling God a liar.

His Jesus stories also reveal the strangeness of his mind. To him, Jesus could not be the incarnation of God as Christians believe. If that were so, then he, Muhammad, would have had little if any importance. He had to demote Jesus. In his Koran storytelling, therefore, he characterized Jesus as divinely inspired, but merely a mortal.

Muhammad’s distortion of the Jesus story can be seen in his account of the Last Supper: Before Jesus could be arrested and killed, God put him to sleep, opened up a hole in the ceiling where the Last Supper took place, and raised him up into heaven. One of the disciples volunteered to die in his place, and God changed his appearance so that he looked like Jesus. It was the volunteer who was crucified, not Jesus.[1] Muhammad’s defense against Christian critics was the same as his defense against his Jewish detractors: He got everything from God. They had it wrong, and if they called him a liar, they were calling God a liar.

Muhammad’s theft and distortion does not end there. The Koran is a compendium of warnings about the day of doom, and verses about resurrection and judgment, hellfire and paradise, can be found throughout the Koran — all Christian and Judaic beliefs.

What he superimposed on these stories was a myth about himself as the last and final messenger of God, the final prophet before the day of doom. He made himself out to be the hero of an epic tale. He was the interface between God and man, the intercessor who will assist God on the Day of Judgment to determine who is spared the fires of hell — the Creator’s right hand man. His belief about himself as prophet and messenger of God can be traced to epilepsy, not divine inspiration.

Central to his distortions was his claim that he was a direct descendant of Abraham, yet he and his Meccan compatriots were tenth generation descendants of Yemeni Arabs and had no more genealogical connection to Abraham than they had with the emperor of China. An important facet to this fabrication was his claim that Abraham built the Kabah, yet Mecca was a remote, uninhabited valley until the second century A.D., more than a thousand miles south of the Levant where Abraham had lived out his life two millennia earlier. The Kabah, which means Cube, started out several centuries before Muhammad’s birth as a low rectangular wall of stacked rocks where a meteorite was enshrined. It only attained its cubic form — and a roof — when it was rebuilt as a result of flood damage in A.D. 605, and Muhammad was one of the members of the construction crew.

What Muhammad created is an ersatz copy of other people’s religions, a sow’s ear that tries to pass itself off as a silk purse — a fake, a cheap knockoff. The pirate stands behind his merchandise with a sword and tells people he will kill them if they don’t believe the cheap knockoff he is peddling is a silk purse.

That is what ultimately discredits Islam as a religion: Muhammad’s violence or threats of violence toward people who rejected him. What is divinely inspired about a man who committed almost every crime listed by the International Criminal Court as a crime against humanity? Mass murder, assassination, rape, plunder, genocide, and the enslavement of men, women and children were among the crimes he committed. He was a psychopath with a genius for harnessing the energy of the dark side of human nature.

Muhammad was a deluded fraud, a huckster who needed to resort to terror to force people to submit to him and to keep people within his fold. Without terror, his cult would not have gained a footing in Arabia, let alone anywhere else. Nor would it have been able to perpetuate itself for 1,400 years.

What Muhammad created is anything but religion. Authentic religion strives to elevate people above the dark side of human nature. Islam is the dark side.

[1] Koran 4:157.

This article first appeared in the Truthophobes Newsletter #8. Click here for the YouTube production. The article may be used in whole or in part provided the following attribution is given: F. W. Burleigh is the author of It’s All About Muhammad, a Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet. He blogs at www.itsallaboutmuhammad.com.