The Truth About Prophet Muhammad

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

What's the pattern?

Patrick Bet-David (0:00)

So to me, sometimes you hear people say, they start off with being peaceful religious leaders, then they gain power, then they use the military against you. Do you notice a pattern of how they do to conquer places?

Raymond Ibrahim (0:16)

Yeah, and this is actually based on the life of Muhammad and how the Quran was revealed to him. So if you look at the Quran amongst the scholars, the Muslim scholars, they divide it into the... It's one Quran, of course, but they call it... There's the Mecca Quran and the Medina Quran. What they mean by that is Muhammad's life was mostly... It begins in Mecca, this is where he's born, and then he goes to Medina, all right? And there's a difference. So when he's in Mecca, his early years, and he's preaching Islam, he's weak, he's outnumbered, he's being mocked, and he has very, very few followers. Most of them are just relatives and friends.

And he has no political power whatsoever.

During that time, he starts getting revelations from Allah, which are in the Quran. And this is where you get all these peaceful verses, okay? Nothing militant. It sounds, these are the verses that the Muslim apologists will constantly quote to you, okay?

And there's so many of them.

Then he goes to, and he also, you know, he wouldn't, even some of the verses are about not fighting back. Sounds very Christian. Then he goes to Medina, and he becomes essentially a warlord. And this is, he starts becoming more powerful. And at that point, he starts getting revelations that now if you're attacked, you can fight back. Then he gets really powerful and starts conquering various tribes, and then he gets the final revelation, which is now you have to go on the offensive. And he does go on the offensive. So even if someone doesn't attack him, you have to go conquer them. All right, now based on that, the ulama, the scholars have come up with two views. One is, in Arabic, it's called al-nasih wal-mansuh, which means the abrogated and the abrogator, which means when you look at the Quran, because if you don't understand this, the verses contradict one another. Some verses sound like pure bloodshed and murder, go slaughter, like 9.5 is known as the sword verse. And it's just basically whenever the pagans lay in wait and ambush for them, attack them, kill them, enslave them. And then you have the peaceful verses that I mentioned. So they concluded that the newer revelations that came into Muhammad's life have abrogated, which is to say canceled, the older. So the final word on the matter is go on the offensive. The other view, which is very pertinent to today, is that okay, no, the whole Quran still applies depending on your situation. So if you find yourself in Muhammad's situation when he was in Mecca, outnumbered and surrounded by infidels, yeah, you can preach the tolerant verses. If you find yourself now in a position where you're stronger, then yeah, you should go on the offensive and do the jihad. And this actually has been unwavering. I've seen this all the time. In Syria, I remember when ISIS came about, and Iraq, you had all these multiple stories of Christians who basically said, we lived side by side with our Muslim neighbors for generations. We've known each other, we used to help them and take care of them because they were poor, the Muslims. And the moment ISIS came, they completely betrayed them. And they put, remember the noon, like the end for Nassar of the Christian, they went and put it on the houses to identify where the infidel Christian lives. And this isn't just one account, it's multiple accounts. So, and this goes back to another idea in Islam, which is circumstance. Circumstance dictates behavior. So if you're weak and outnumbered, I'll close with a funny story I've given before.

And it was with me and a Muslim colleague, when I worked at the Library of Congress, 20 years ago, and I basically had this argument, I was learning this stuff and I was telling him, and he was like, always moderate, claiming to be moderate, but I saw a radical streak in him, I know better, and he would tell me, I told him about, well, what about abrogation? What about this? And the final word is, you're supposed to do jihad and this and that. And finally, he got frustrated, and I made the point, I said, the Mecca verses are tolerant, but the Medina, say, and then he threw his hands up and said, yeah, but I'm in Mecca. So his point is, I'm in the circumstances of when Muhammad was in Mecca, weak and outnumbered. So of course, I'm talking this way.