You’d have to link me to the videos where this is supposedly happening.

Merely citing my work for premises I agree with, while using them to argue for Atwill, is entirely in bounds. And my blog already covers why I don’t agree with Atwill. So it’s not clear what even needs to be said.

Got anything to say about that?

I still see no credible methodology here. Just more dubious assertions you should know better than to rely on.

The king is in fact endorsing that tomb as historical, that’s why it’s the second holiest site in Islam. Second, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia did not exist until the 20th century, so the present king could not have invented the association of the tomb in question with Muhammad. The only way to know for certain is to actually excavate and exhume the body, but in the absence of any other tradition about where Muhammad is buried, I see no reason to think his body is anywhere other than where it is currently said to be. Muslim apologists are typically easier to debate than Christian apologists, but that’s one point I would not want to debate with them. The first atheist I ever heard question Muhammad’s historicity was Hitchens, and he also questioned whether Aristotle was a historical figure!

As I mentioned, the sheer division within the ummah immediately after Muhammad’s death should be enough to establish that he was a historical figure. Paul and Peter didn’t assemble armies for battle after Jesus died. One would basically have to wipe Aisha from the historical record too, since her only importance in history was her connection to Muhammad. Likewise with Abu Bakr, Ali, et al. Muhammad would have been the only person out of those six people to have been able to compose (at least most of) the Qur’an, having incorporated Eastern Christian stories about Jesus and Greek embryology into it. There is no Sunni or Shia tradition of Ali tampering with the Qur’an, so he could not possibly have been the “real founder” of Islam, and I see no reason to think any of the other sahaba could have achieved such a feat, either.

You boasted “haven’t you messaged the King of Saudi Arabia.” That’s a sly attempt to claim he’s endorsing the tombs as historical (and I am not saying your claim is true; just that, that’s what you claimed).

Beyond that, you cited no authority at all. Just rank-and-file “people’s beliefs.”

That’s not how we arrive at the truth about things. And I suspect you know that.

Wait, who is the government propagandist that I’m using as a source? ALL scholars believe that the Battle of the Camel took place. That battle took place because Muslims disagreed as to who was the real caliph. It makes no sense for such a battle to occur if Muhammad never existed. Sure, one can say that the Shias are right that X hadith is inauthentic or one can agree with the heterodox Muslims who say that only the Koran should be followed, but all Muslims, without exception, think that Muhammad was a real person.

If Muhammad is not buried in Madina, then certainly the strict Wahhabis and Salafists would have a field day, since their entire mission since the 1700s has been eradicating anything remotely considered “shirk” or worship towards Muhammad, from praying at his tomb to celebrating his birthday. Muslims have gotten death threats for both of these things, and some have openly called for the destruction of the Kabaa because the current King of Saudi Arabia isn’t “correctly” following Sunnah. All of this could go away if someone had solid proof that Muhammad never existed. No book has been published in Arabic, to my knowledge, that purports to prove this. The whole schtick about Muslims hating Jews goes back to the latter being blamed for poisoning Muhammad, so a lot of antisemitism would go away if we could say, “hey guys, cool it, the Jews didn’t poison Muhammad because he never existed!”

There is more evidence for Muhammad than there is for many Viking kings and Catholic saints. I say this as someone with both the latter in my family tree. Allah didn’t make a xerox machine, but that doesn’t make all of the stories and sayings about Muhammad ahistorical.

I can’t take you seriously at this point.

If you are actually appealing to government propagandists and uninformed randos to defend the authenticity of any religious mythology, you have no credible methodology here to engage with.

As for any of your questions that might have any remote possibility of being sincere, you’ve been referred to the relevant literature answering them.

So wait, those tombs are not authentic, so why haven’t you messaged the King of Saudi Arabia this, so that Wahhabis and more heterodox Muslims can stop killing each other over what is and is not the right way to honor Muhammad’s tomb? Also, if Muhammad never existed, then did Aisha and Ali? Who fought in the Battle of the Camel, then? Why would 1,400 years worth of Islamic scholars insist that Aisha married an imaginary man and why would Shias insist that Ali was an imaginary person’s son in law? None of this makes any sense. I can understand denying that Jesus existed, or even Buddha, but MUHAMMAD? If Muhammad never existed, we might as well throw out virtually any non Greek or Roman from before British colonialism. The question of whether Muhammad existed is not hard at all to answer, it was already solved 1,400 years ago.

Further, if Muhammad never existed, shouldn’t it be a bigger priority to tell Muslims this than it would be to tell Christians that Jesus never existed? Christendom no longer exists but Islam is the state religion in multiple countries. Why are there countless books on Amazon dedicated to disproving Jesus’ historicity, but only one saying that about Muhammad (assuming for the sake of argument that he is a myth)?

Further, if Buddha never existed, then how did Jains, Hindus, and the Bonpa tradition co-opt his story so quickly? It wasn’t until the fourth Christian century that Jews made up Talmudic stories about Jesus being a bastard son of a Roman soldier and even this did not spread far. It was not until Islam that another religion fully co-opted his legacy. With Buddhism, the co-opting took place almost immediately, with Jains calling him a false teaching and Hindus calling him Vishnu.

Further, why didn’t the Hindu opponents of Buddhism bother to point any of this out back in the BCE or during the time of Shankaracharya, or any time during the Mughal period or the British Raj? I cannot think of a single Desi author, including Marxists, who has ever written a book, either in Hindi, Tamil, or English, denying the historicity of Buddha. Indeed, the first book to even suspect Buddha being a non-historical figure, not written by a Christian missionary, was the Englishman (and arguably the least qualified person to write a history on philosophy) Bertrand Russell (who ignored literally all of Eastern thought in his History of Philosophy and seems to have had nothing but contempt for the Orient in general).

We shouldn’t think that X historical figure is mythological until proven otherwise. We should think that X figure, who has been seen as such until a few decades ago, is historical until proven otherwise.

Okay. Now I know you are just a fraudulent reasoner.

The blog article is a popular summary of peer-reviewed scholarship. You have elided that fact and falsely characterized it as just a blog. The historians are the experts they cite; the author is a journalist citing the expert literature. That you chose to misrepresent this tells me you are not a serious thinker but a disingenuous one.

This is all the more proved by your absolutely ridiculous recourse now to citing their tombs! All my readers are ROTFL right now. I think I can safely assume you did not check any of the archaeological literature so as to know those tombs are late fakes with no evidence of authenticity. Any more than the various tombs proposed for Jesus (indeed, even less evidence than that).

That isn’t valid reasoning. As all real historians will explain to you, not having sources does not magically increase the probability of transmitted stories being true. To the contrary, it reduces it. So it serves no use to point out that there was no writing. That is actually one of the reasons we can doubt what is reported from such eras. If you want to bolster a story’s probability of being true, you need evidence that does that. The mere existence of the story is not enough.

But the more pertinent point is that you claimed no scholars doubt these guys, and you were wrong. You don’t even know what’s in these studies, even now, after I linked you to them. You therefore did not know what you were talking about and still don’t. You did not check the state of any pertinent field or its evidence. You simply presumed from the armchair that you were right. You weren’t. That means you are not even methodologically fit to weigh in here. You need to fix your epistemology first.

You reveal this again here by just making assertions about “Jain scholars” but unlike me, you have not cited a single example of a “Jain scholar” who is not in fact just a Jain believer and thus an apologist and not an objective historian (much less an objective historian publishing evidence of historicity under peer review, rather than merely asserting it without evidence). As we see with Buddha and the others, objective historians have reasonable doubts, which would apply even more to Mahavir (since even less evidence exists for him than for Buddha). So you do not even have a grasp of correct methodology when deciding a question like this.