Two New Findings That Mohammed Didn't Exist | Dr. Jay Smith

To get an introduction, I kind of give you I need to give you a little bit of background as to who and why I'm even talking about this tonight. And to do that, we need to go back to London 1992 when my wife and I were sent there to engage with the radical Muslims in London.

London has a million Muslims in a city of 10 million. One-tenth of the population are Muslims and they are some of the best Muslims you can get. Why? Because they come from three countries, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. That's my background. I was born in India. My parents, my father was born in India. My grandfather's grave is in India. My family have been in India since 1913, over a hundred years. My sister still lives there is where I was born. I grew up. And I grew up in a school where most of the Muslims that came to that school, goodness sakes, they were my roommates. They were my classmates. And almost any big discussion we had was about the trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the authority of scriptures. I had it in the neck and I grew up with this and that's what prepared me for what I'm doing today. Having grown up with those great Muslims.

When I left India 1971, I left high school there. I wanted nothing to do with Islam. I was fed up with all this this this uh this huge amount of discussion and and really aggravation from these Muslims. But what was fascinating is it was those Muslims that really prepared me for what I'm doing. It is those Muslims that really were the ones and I had I could not get over the fact that they absolutely believe that Muhammad was the prophet that the book Quran was his revelation that it was the eternal revelation completely preserved never being created and that Allah was God. Fascinating that they knew those three things and no one really could question those three things.

So when I came to America and did my undergraduate and was going through my graduate course, finishing off my uh divinity, my wife and I went to a seminar, just a one-day seminar in Philadelphia on Islam and we were told three things. We were told that there were 800 million Muslims. This is 1981 when there were only 800 million Muslims. Now it's almost two billion. But 800 million Muslims. Now, how do you compute a number like that? Goes in this year, goes out this year. You can't really compute. It's just too big. And then we were told that there were only 1,500 missionaries working amongst us 800 million. And that this 1,500 missionaries only made up 2% of all the missionaries. Those two numbers slapped me in the face. And I turned to my wife and says, "What in the world are we doing wrong? Why are we sending only 2% of all our missionaries to the fastest growing religion on earth? The religion that is attacking us at our foundation. It's the religion that's attacking our Lord Jesus Christ and our scriptures like no other." And that's why I decided to get back into Islam in 1981 because of two numbers: 15 and 2%. That was my Pauline call, folks. And ever since that's the last 40, what, 44 years now I have been working in Islam. 44 years of engaging with Muslims, the most beautiful people on earth, the most my favorite people because they absolutely believe in everything that they say unlike so many Christians and they're willing to die for what they believe. Unfortunately, they're willing to take you with them. Nonetheless, it's not that they're doing it because they love it. It's because of that book, the Quran. This book right here. This is the one that does all the damage.

But tonight, I'm not going to talk about this book. I did that a year and a half ago. We're not going to talk so much about this book. I'm going to talk about the man behind this book. The man that received this book, the man that supposedly from 610 to 632, that 22-year period, they received these two halves. If you take the Quran in half, look at this is really damaged. Can you tell the Muslims have stolen from me five times and the police have always gotten it back and it is about ready to fall to pieces. But this is the book I've been using for year upon year. They're on the ladder at Speaker's Corner every Sunday for 25 years. I use this book. And when you look at this book, it's you can't even tell the printing on the outside, but it goes this direction. So it goes Arabic. So it goes from the right to left. So that would be Medina. This would be Mecca. Medina means that's the part when Muhammad was living in Medina afterwards. And this is when he lived in Mecca from 610 to 622. This is what he received first. So this is the first part of the Quran, though it's the second half that's written. Isn't that odd? Turn upside down. You get the right sequence. Nonetheless, let's go back to that sequence. And this is the part that really not there's not too much in this part that we would not that we would have problems with. Oh, there's lots of stories here that make no sense. But it's this half that has caused all the problems. This is where the violence is. This is where the misogyny is against women. Chapter 4. Chapter 2. This is the problem that we're all confronting. And I did that for 30, 40 years. I I confronted this part. And I found out that the best place to do that was a place called Speaker's Corner.

So I used to go down to Speaker's Corner. If you ever go to London, go to Speaker's Corner. It only exists on Sundays. And it's the place you need to go to because that's where you engage with Muslims face to face. It's the greatest laboratory in the world because you can say anything you want. I kid you not. It's the bastion of freedom of speech. It's been around for 200 years. It's where they used to execute all the prisoners every Sunday. And people would come because there was no television or or radio back then. How did they get entertained? They would go and watch the executions on Sunday. And before the the prisoners were executed, they were given their last defense and they would get up on these little soap boxes, stand up on those soap boxes, and they would try to defend what they had done. Of course, it never worked. They still got executed, but the soap boxes remained. So when the executions were finished, the crowds were there, thousands of people, and people got up on those soap boxes and started preaching or they started teaching or they started yelling or they started discussing and debating. And so it became Speaker's Corner. Now today, we don't use soap boxes anymore. And that's where that term "get off your soap box" comes from Speaker's Corner. Now we use these little kitchen ladders that let you all have in your kitchen. These little A-frame ladders with two steps just so your head's above the audience so that you can be heard. That's why I feel very comfortable right now because I'm above you looking down on you. The problem is the higher I go, the farther I fall.

And so Speaker's Corner was very violent back in the 1990s. They had not yet become the religion of peace. That only happened after 9/11. They were still quite violent. And when they ran out of ideas, they used their fists and it was not a pleasant place to be. But I would go down there every Sunday and always always I would try to engage with them and I we did what we call but by the seat of our pants because there was nothing there to help us. There was no book written on how to engage face to face with Muslims and how to debate them and how to discuss them. Everything was attacking attacking attacking. When I got down there they all had Bibles in their hands. Yes, Bibles, not Qurans. None of them had Qurans. They always had Bibles with little post-it notes all the way through. And all these post-it notes were about the historical anachronisms of our Bible, the the internal contradictions. Did you know that we have all kinds of scientific errors in the Bible? Have you heard about this? I hadn't heard about this. I have two master's degrees, one in divinity and the other one in Islamics here at Fuller Seminary, and no one had taught me this. I hope Jack's teaching you all this. No, he's teaching you how to answer those kind of attacks. See, they were confronting my Bible, all these confrontations. And I remember the first Sunday I was down there. I was overwhelmed. I had no idea that I was going to get this kind of confrontation. And I wanted to get out of there. And I went home and I was bruised and battered. Not physically. I my ego was bruised, everything. Cuz I thought I knew everything. And these guys ran circles around me. My wife saw how disgruntled I was, and so she kicked me out the door the next Sunday, made me go back down again. What a wife. If you met her, you'd see why. He says, "Get back on the horse again. If you're going to fall off the horse, just get back up and learn. Take a notebook with you and just learn and hear what their questions are and then find answers."

Now, there was no internet back then in 1992 and there was no Google to ask your questions. You had to find out by going to the library or calling up somebody or trying to remember what you learned in seminary. I had nothing to help me. And I noticed that all the questions were coming one way, this way. They're always attacking my Lord. Always two subjects. Jesus and the Bible. Jesus and the Bible. Well, what two subjects do you want to talk about? But those two, right? What great subjects. And these were the Muslims that were asking me, see if you see an an atheist or a humanist or anybody else. I want to talk to you about those two subjects. Only Muslims want to talk about those two subjects. And they should be our favorite subjects. Now to defend against that, that's called apologetics. Apologetics. Apologetics. That's defense. And I had to learn my apologetics by the seat of my pants. It was difficult. I was hard. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know where to go.

And then I went to and I did a course at the University of London by this man here, Dr. Gerald Hawting. He had a course there at the School of Oriental and African Studies on the origins of Islam. Well, I said, "I thought I knew everything. This would be a fun course to do. Let's see what he's talking about." And there were about 50 students in the class and the very first day he started saying, "Do you know we can't find any reference to this man named Muhammad in the seventh century?" I said, "What? Not one word about this man named Muhammad in the seventh century." He said, "The earliest we can find about his biography is not till a man named Ibn Hisham." There it is right there. Ibn Hisham. I just showed it to you. Ibn Hisham right there. This is the first guy that ever wrote down his biography. And he died in 8:33. 8:33. Muhammad died in 632. Do you see a problem, folks? There it is right there. 8:33 when this guy finally writes it down. That's a 200-year gap. What happened? What happened in the intervening 200 years? And he said, "You know, we can't find any mosque facing Mecca at all in the seventh century." I said, "I've never been taught this. Why hasn't I learned that in seminary? Why didn't I learn that at Fuller? Why didn't I learn that from the Muslims who had I was engaging with all these years?" And he said, "Take a look at the Dome of the Rock. Probably the most famous building that's been built by a Muslim in the last 1400 years. The most beautiful building. It's right there in Jerusalem. Notice it has no qibla. Direction of prayer." That's true. It has no qibla. It should be facing Mecca, right? Every mosque or every religious building should be facing Mecca. This has no qibla. I said, "Well, how come I've not heard this?"

As he was putting out these curious little tidbits, half the class were made up of Muslim students and they started getting up, going to the door, slamming the door, turning towards Dr. Hawting and saying not very pleasant things and never came back. Within two weeks, we lost all of our Muslims. Two weeks, 25 Muslims had left. If you're a professor at a university and you lose half your class, what are you going to do for your career? You cannot lose your students. And so he started toning down, toning down, toning down and started stopped coming to conclusions and stopped asking these questions. Well, I love these questions. And I saw the reaction of the students. I said, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. If the Dome of the Rock has no qibla, then what does that mean, Dr. Hawting?" And he wouldn't answer. He didn't want to answer because he didn't want to lose any more students. So I started taking this down to Speaker's Corner and I started putting it up there and I got beat up. I mean physically beat up. They knocked me out and I got one time there were 60 Muslims around me kicking me. I went unconscious. I had no idea what happened. When the police finally pulled me out, they said, "There a black man came and laid on top of me and took the blows for me." I said, "Where is he?" He had disappeared. I call him Barry, my black angel. I have a black angel. Barry. He saved my life twice now at Speaker's Corner in the 25 years I've been there. But I suddenly realized this material is potent. This is heavy material. If this is the only reaction Muslims have is to beat you up or to walk out the door and slam the door and yell at you as you're walking out, if that is the only reaction they have, we've got to learn this material. We've got to know this material.

That was in then in 1995 some of these students came to me and they said, "We can't answer this, but there's a man who can. His name is Dr. Jamal Badawi." And they said, "We want you to debate him." There it is: Dr. Badawi and myself. He is the world's leading authority on the Quran. He had done 400 uh 400, I'm sorry, 300 videotapes. You know these old boxes, these little VHSs for those who are gray-haired. You remember the VHS boxes that we had to use and he had done 300 of these videos just on the Quran. They said, "He's coming back from Malaysia. He's going to stop in London on his way back to Halifax in Canada. Would you be willing to debate him?" Well, I hadn't done a debate before. We don't get trained up in how to do debates in seminary. Not in homiletics class. We're trained just to say, "Make sure that you take a subject, only keep it to 20 minutes. Say three things about that subject. Make sure you support it in scripture and then always have a good conclusion at the end and then as you walk out the door, people shake your hand, say, 'What a great sermon you've done.'" Nothing about debating, nothing about getting confronting or people supporting and people yelling at you and calling you all kinds of names, giving you death threats that we weren't taught in homiletics. So I said, "Okay, let me try it out."

And so I went up to see a woman named who her name was Dr. Patricia Crone. Dr. Patricia Crone is the leading authority on Mecca. She is from Denmark. She reads and writes 15 archaic languages. How many of you can read and write 15 archaic languages? Show of hands. None. She's unique in the world. And these are languages that no one uses anymore. Nabataean Aramaic. Syriac. Akkadian. Amazing woman. She's a linguist. She studied there at the same school, School of Oriental and African Studies. Got her doctorate there and became head of department at Oxford University when I got to know her. And when I started my doctoral thesis, she was my supervisor and she was the one that actually wrote two books, one called "Hagarism" and the other called "Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam." She shut down Mecca and all she did was look for source material from the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth up until the seventh and eighth century. Only using evidence from those centuries, trying to find this city called Mecca. Could not find any reference to the city called Mecca at all. So I said, "Well, I'm going to use her." I went up to her and of course we were she knew me and we went into by this time she had a death threat from Oxford University for writing "Meccan Trade" in 1997 and so she transferred up to Cambridge University, was head of department at that time. And I sat in her office for one afternoon for about three hours as we put together this debate. She said, "Do this. Here's a better way to say it. Here, why don't you use it?" I finally turned to her and I said, "Dr. Crone, why aren't you doing this debate? This is your material. You have the languages. You're the one that's done the research. Me, what do I know? I'm just going to mimic you and copy you." And she turned to me and she started laughing. She said, "Jay, let me tell you something. I have a chair to protect. I have an institution to represent. I could never do this debate. I don't have the freedom to do this debate as an academic. But you, you have no chair to protect. And the only person you represent, his name is Jesus Christ." What an answer. Here's an atheist telling me that we're the only ones that can do this debate. We have a freedom they don't have. As Christians, we have a freedom because of Jesus Christ that they do not have. So I said, "Okay, let's go."

I did this debate. Took us two hours. At the end of the debate, I gave 10 historical challenges. All of them hurt her challenges. He did not have an answer for any of them. And he turns to me at the end and he says, "You know, Mr. Smith, all you've done is shown us everything you've brought is based on silence. There's just nothing there. Granted, there's nothing there. Everything you've done is based on silence. And the absence of evidence does not prove the evidence of absence." And he hung me. The absence of evidence does not prove the evidence of absence. I had nowhere to go. He was right. I didn't have any evidence. He didn't have any evidence. So, we're just silence. There was no reference to this man named Muhammad. We can't find any reference to the city called Mecca. We can't find any manuscript for any book called the Quran. None of this we can find in the seventh century. But that's just silence. Where's the evidence? How do you prove evidence for something that never existed? Do you see the problem, folks? That was 1995. This is 2025. 30 years later and everything I'm going to introduce tonight is based on evidence. We finally have the evidence. But here's what's fascinating. Everything's turned on its head. Cuz if we have the evidence, then what do they have? Absolutely nothing. Now suddenly everything the Muslims are going to present is based on silence. They have no evidence for their man Muhammad. Okay. Now no one has dared to debate me on this until this year and a man named Raymond Ibrahim.

But before I do that, let me just put go ahead something else I want to bring up because this was causing a huge wave and a lot of problems there at Speaker's Corner. A lot of the Christians were getting quite upset and especially the Anglican church and I was not Anglican and I was an American there in Britain. Who what is this American doing causing all this problems there in Britain? And so Colin Chapman, you can see him over on the right. He was he was in charge, responsible for all the Islamic work for the Archbishop of Canterbury. And so he came to me and he says, "Jay, you've got to stop what you're doing. Do not do not do this." He says, "I'm going we're going to put together a debate and we're going to be it's going to be an internal debate. It's between you and Dr. David Marshall, who you see pictured there with the glasses. Dr. David Marshall has a doctorate from Oxford University on the Quran. So, he's an academic himself. And we're going to bring in scholars. All of them are Christians. So, be this is what we call an in-house debate. And it's between you and Dr. Marshall. And it's going to be on basically two subjects: Should we use historical criticism and should we use polemics in our engagement with Muslims?" Now you know where I stood on both those issues. I said yes to both those issues. He said no to both those issues. We should not use historical criticism and we should not use polemics. Polemics. What do I mean by polemics? Anybody here not know what polemics is? Oh boy. Okay. All right. How do I define polemics? Well, I told you what apologetics is, right? Just defending the faith. Defending means making sure that whenever anybody confronts Jesus or our Bible, we answer them. That's called apologetics. It's much like your football team. You have a football team here. I'm not going to ask you which one is the favorite because you'll start fighting amongst each other. So, let's just say whatever is your favorite football team. Don't you have two teams within within every football team? One called defense and the other called offense. And don't they have two different skills? The defense has to make sure that the others don't score against them and score the touchdown. They're big guys. They're really muscular. And boy, are they hard because they create walls to stop the others from scoring. Right. The offense, however, has a totally different object. They have to push against the others, but they have they can run and they can toss and they're a lot more exciting and they are the ones that actually win the game, right? They are the ones whose names you hear and they're the ones who have the highest salary. And see, in Christianity, defense would be apologetics. Offense would be polemics. It's as simple as that. So, if you're defending the faith, you better know everything you you can about the Bible and Jesus. Those are the two things you need to know. If you're going on the offense, especially against Islam, you better know the Quran. You better know Muhammad. But how many of you have studied the Quran or studied Muhammad? Few hands. We don't teach that here. There is no school in the world that teaches Islamic apologetics or polemics except ours. M.A.P., Master of Arts in Apologetics and Polemics to Islam. And guess at what institution that is being taught? Veritas International University. That's your university, folks. It's a Calvary Chapel Seminary. Did you not know that? Veritas International University is your seminary in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The only place on earth where you can learn Islamic apologetics and polemics. And I direct it. And I have five of us. All of us have doctorates. Every one of us has had either 20 years or more experience engaging with Muslims both apologetically and polemically. Now do you know what apologetics and polemics is? Offense is defense. Polemics is offense. It's as simple as that. Two different sets of skills. And in many discussions you have to use both simultaneously. And I had to do that every Sunday afternoon. I would have to use sometimes defense defense and then I go on the offense. They throw the questions. I'd answer them. Then I throw the same questions right back in their laps. And that we're not teaching anybody until now. I've just come back from England. I have to be careful. I'm not going to say too much, but I there was something that happened about three weeks ago in England in London where we brought all the best polemicists in the world together in one place. I brought them all, over 15 of the top polemicists in the world against Islam and about 300 then showed up and they all had to be people we knew. It was an invitation only. I'm not going to tell you where it was because I don't want the Muslims to find out where it was. And we went for three days just learning how to use polemics, how to use internal polemics and cultural polemics and external polemics. I'll explain that a little bit later. And for three days, 300 of us learned how to confront Islam head-on. And then Sunday, we went down to Speaker's Corner and shut down the corner. It was so much fun. You'll see the videos. It is amazing. And I had my ladder and I had another ladder next to me. And I had 50 different people get up on the ladder the first time for most of them and they used the best polemics they could come across and the Muslims had no idea how to shut us down. And then we went up to a restaurant afterwards and 150 of us had dinner together and I looked at all these guys and gals and they're all in their 20s and 30s, folks. They're young. Every one of them is more eloquent than me, quicker than me, smarter than me. Boy, we're going to lift them off and unleash them on the Muslim world. You've got to realize we are going to take Islam. That just happened three weeks ago. We're going to do it again next year and the year after that. We're raising up a whole new generation of young men and women who are quick and they are bright and they are fearless. There is no fear in any of them. Oh, I love that. It is so nice.

So anyways back to the story. We had this debate, two hours. And there were 50 academics who were there, all Christians. After two hours, I was arguing yes, we should use polemics, yes, we should use historical criticism. He was saying no, no, no, no. After two hours, we finished the debate and then they had a show of hands and they wanted to know how many were with Dr. David Marshall and how many went came with me? 25 went with him. 25 went with me. Who do you think went with him? The academics or the missionaries? Okay, I'm getting both. So, I'm You're right. For those who were correct, you're right. It was the academics who went with him and the missionaries went with me. I couldn't understand that. I thought for heaven's sake, the academics would go with me because this is all academic material. It's all historical. Where else do you learn that but in academia? But they all went with him. And I didn't understand it. And Dr. until Dr. Peter Redding explained to me on the way home. He was in my car with me and he said, "Dave, let me explain something to you. I'm an academic. In fact, he was my the professor for my doctorate. He was the one that help get helped me get my doctorate at Melbourne School of Theology. He's Australian and he's an academic there. And he said, 'We academics, we understand what you're doing. We understand why you're doing it, but we can't do this because in our institution there are many Muslims who are on staff with us. We can't use polemics and certainly not historical criticism, not in our academic institutions. We'd lose our our chairs. We would be thrown out. We'd lose our tenure. But you as a missionary,' he was saying the same thing to me that Dr. Patricia Crone had said back in 1995. Isn't that interesting? And I realized the penny dropped. This is something we have to do. This is something we must do. Those of us who are on the ground."

So since then our material has really matured. We have gone much quicker, much faster. And of course in the last 20, 30 years. By 2023, I came here to this church and I presented the book, "The Man in the Place." Just those three subjects right here in the same hall. And there were about 2,000 people here. They didn't even know who I was because it was a Wednesday night and Jack Hibbs couldn't make it. So he asked if I could do it. I said, "Okay." So it it was kind of an audience of just made of people who walked in to hear Jack Hibbs and I was here instead and they just kind of looked at me like a deer in front of a headlight cuz they had no idea what I was talking about and I didn't sure wasn't sure that they would ever understand what I was talking about. So I just said, "Just look at the screen. Follow the screen." For those of you here, remember that a lot of you who were here, you probably didn't know who I was or what I was going to talk about. And when you left, you say, "What in the world did he just say?" That as John is right, 2.6 million people have watched that all over the world. On my site, over half a million have watched that. So, it's over three million people have watched that. It's gone all over the world. And that's why I then had to come back and unpack it for four hours to get slow it down.

Now, since then, since 2023, no one's really taken me on. They can't because how can you take me on? In order to take me on, you have to have evidence from the seventh century. And as you can see tonight, there just is no evidence that supports that man, that book, or that place until April of this year. And then a man named Raymond, Raymond Ibrahim, who's a Christian, put up these two videos in April of this year. Raymond Ibrahim, how many of you know who Raymond Ibrahim is? Okay, one good man, fine Christian debater, and he's the only one that's dared to do this. And I thank God that he did this because he put up two videos, one on uh April 9th and the other one on April 11th, basically saying that, and he's really attacking me. He says, "You know, I I think I don't think Jay knows what she's talking about. He said, 'This idea that Muhammad didn't exist is not only laughable, it is probably the worst polemic at all to use. It's the weakest polemic we could ever use.' The weakest polemic you can use." Isn't that interesting? So, what I'm going to do tonight is I'm going to shut him down. I'm going to take the 10 accusations and he gave 10 accusations. I you know if you're watching Raymond Ibrahim, thank you for doing this because finally I have an academic who's actually taking me on on these subjects and you gave 10 good questions and these are the same questions you're going to hit if you go out in the world and if you talk to Muslims. And the number one first thing is: Is Muhammad one of the most historically supported people in history? So you cannot say he didn't exist because there's so much historical support for him. Number two: In fact, Muhammad has more historical support for him than Jesus has. Woo! Oh, I love that. Number three: If Muhammad did not exist, how can you explain the Sunni-Shiite divide? The Sunnis who are confronting the Shiites, the Shiites from Iran and Iraq. Look what's going on in the world right now. Look at all the problems. It's all between Sunnis and Shiites. How can you explain that if Muhammad didn't exist? Number four: There are no incontrovertible proofs of Muhammad's non-existence. Woo, that's a real whammy. I can see someone laughing already because you can see that's actually it's a contradicting term. Since the traditions, that's the Islamic traditions about Muhammad are so embarrassing. Why would they write them? He's such an embarrassment, Mr. Smith. Number six: Mecca. You can't use Mecca against Muhammad. It's not an argument. You can use Mecca against Muhammad. Number seven: No one can prove or disprove historical facts. Oh boy, that's a whammy. And it comes down to a matter of faith. Doesn't matter what you find. Muslims will always believe it. Number nine: The claims against Muhammad's existence are merely an academic and subjective exercise. That's all it is. Just because you don't like Muslims is what he said. Boy, I wonder where he got that from. And then number 10: The best polemic is not the historical polemic. The best material polemic is just to show how irrelevant Muhammad is. Confront his character. Confront his morality. That's the best polemic. That's what we call the internal polemic.

So tonight, what I'm going to do, let's go through each one of these 10 to see if I or Raymond, actually I should call him Raymond. I'm going to call him Raymond from here on out because I have two good friends named Ibrahim. One is Iman Ibrahim and the other one is Raymond Ibrahim. I don't know Raymond Ibrahim. I've never met him. I'm sure he's a great guy, but I know Iman Ibrahim and Iman Ibrahim actually is head of SCES on the Islamic branch there. He's in charge of the entire Islamic world and he absolutely stands with me on this position. So rather than call him Ibrahim because people confuse which Ibrahim I'm talking. Let's just call Raymond and Iman. Okay, we'll stick with Raymond from here on out. So here we go. This is what the Muslims claim. This is what the Islamic traditions claim. This is what the standard Islamic narratives say. Isn't that great? Standard Islamic Narrative. S.I.N. This is what SIN tells us. Muslims SIN's traditional claims. They say this: For the past 1400 years, Muhammad was the last and greatest prophet. He modeled Islam as the paradigm for the world. He received the Quran as his final revelation for the world. Therefore, the Quran, his revelation, was sent down only to him between 610 and 632. It is the greatest, the only perfectly preserved revelation and also the final revelation. It corrects the previously corrupted revelation. In other words, our revelation. And therefore, Mecca was the city Muhammad was born in and lived in for the first 52 years of his life. Thus, Islam is completely dependent on three things. Now, this you've seen before for those of you who were here before. These are the three things: One book called the Quran, one man named Muhammad, and one place called Mecca. Since these three areas are foundational to Islam, we should investigate them at the time they all existed. That means in the early 7th century and in the place they existed, that means the central western part of Arabia known as the Hijaz where Mecca and Medina are located. So notice these three things are what holds up Islam. It's like three legs of a stool. You have the Quran, you have Muhammad, and you have Mecca as the three legs. If you start to attack one of those legs and it finally collapses, the other two collapse as well. All three are needed. You can't have one without the other. One without the other two. Are you following that? Yes. With that in mind, let's now look at Raymond's 10 suppositions and assess them one by one.

Supposition number one: Muhammad is one of the most historically supported people in history. How many people, just show of hands, believe that? Wow. Not one of you. I'm already got you converted. Week you go on to supposition number two then no we need to stop we need to go with supposition one so you know how to answer this okay now to understand what he's talking about we need to look at what they're saying this is what he says this is what the Muslims will say they would believe that if you look at that map there that Muhammad Empire included that brown area so that that's that area right there or over on this side right there I'm going have to do this two both sides okay that brown area where Mecca and Medina look where Mecca and Medina farther right in the central western part of that brown area. So when he died in 632 that's as large as Islam was once he died then you have Abu Bakr, Omar, Uthman, and Ali, the next four caliphs, what they call the rightly guided caliphs. Then come to power and they expand the borders out and so it includes all the orange area from Tripoli all the way to India and from uh Turkey all the way down to Yemen over on this side from Tripoli to India and from Turkey all the way down to the Hudma or what is day Yemen in Oman. That's a pretty big area. So it is by far by 661, it is the second largest superpower of its day by that time. And then when the Umayyads come to power in 661, starting with Muawiyah, he then he and others after him up until 749. For the next roughly hundred years, they expanded out to the purple area. So it includes Spain all the way to India. And then from Yemen all the way to Turkey over here. There's Spain and there's India and there's Turkey and there is Yemen. So all that area comes under their jurisdiction. That's their story and there's been no reason not to confront it or uh dissuade you from it because it's a pretty good story. I mean that's all we've been told, right? And you've always believed that there was a man named Muhammad and there were four caliphs that followed after him: Abu Bakr, um um um, and Ali. But I'm going to show you there's a problem with that. Let's look and see where we get Islam's emergence. Let's put it on a timeline so you can see what's going on.

So Muhammad, according to what the Islamic narrative, the standard Islamic narrative SIN tells us, is that Muhammad was born in 570. He started receiving his revelations in a place called Mecca in 610. And then in 621, he suddenly is woken up in the middle of the night and told to get on the back of a winged horse called the Buraq who flies him up from Mecca up to Jerusalem. He goes up to the seven heavens and meets Allah who tells him to pray 50 times a day. He comes down to the fifth heaven, meets Moses. Ah, that's way too many. So he bounces back and forth between the fifth and the seventh heaven getting it down from 50 to 45 to 35 to 15 to 10 down to five prayers. Once he gets it to five prayers, Moses, okay, that's enough. So he shoots back down to Jerusalem, gets on back to the winged horse and flies back to Mecca. That happens in 621. It's known as the Miraj. You've all heard this before. You this is nothing new. And then in 622, he then moves from Mecca up to Medina and takes over and becomes that's where the caliphate starts in 622. He then comes back to Mecca and takes over Mecca. So now he controls both Mecca and Medina in 630. And he controls the holy places where the Kaaba is. And then he dies in 632, poisoned by one of his wives. So that's his life. That's the timeline to show you what Muhammad's life is like. And then Abu Bakr comes. He only lasts two years. He then dies peacefully. Uh that he is followed by Umar who only lasts 10 years. Uh he is killed. So when he is killed, Uthman takes over. He only lasts 12 years. He is killed. But while he is in power, the Quran is put together. When he is killed, Ali takes over, the adopted son of Muhammad. And he only lasts 5 years before he is killed at the Battle of Siffin by Muawiyah. So what am I putting that up there? What we're saying according to what standard Islamic narrative tells us and what Raymond Ibrahim tells us that Islam was fully formed by 661, right? Mid-7th century. We're talking about the seventh century still, 1400 years ago.

Now, here's the problem. How do we know everything I've just told you? And I've not told you much. I've just told you bare bones because we have to be careful of time. That's what they tell us. Where did that story come from? That's what you want to know. Well, the story comes from the Islamic traditions, the standard Islamic narrative. This is what they tell us. And when you go to the standard Islamic narrative, they tell us that Muhammad dies in 632. And the person that writes his biography down is this guy, Ibn Ishaq. Ibn Ishaq. The only problem is look when he died. Whenever you see a D, that means his death date. I'm always I'm putting their death dates because they can't write anything after they die. All right. So, I'm putting the last possible time they could have written something down: 765. Do you see a problem with that, folks? Did Ibn Ishaq know Muhammad? Did he ever see Muhammad? Did he hear Muhammad? So, how did he know his biography? Do you have anything written by Ibn Ishaq? No. So, I held this up. Where does this come from? That's not Ibn Ishaq. His name is Ibn Hisham. This guy is the guy that wrote it down. This is the one that took what Ibn Ishaq said, didn't like a lot of it, so he threw it out and only retained what he liked. And so that's what we have today. So these two books, these two volumes come from a man named Ibn Hisham. Look when he died, 833. That's even later. That's 70 years later. And then another man named Al-Waqidi who wrote down the battles of Muhammad. So they are the ones that actually give us the story of Muhammad's life, not Ibn Ishaq. So bye-bye. We don't need you. Goodbye.

Now that's the first genre. The second genre are known as the Hadith, the sayings of Muhammad. And they're written down by these guys here. Al-Bukhari is the most important. He is the most prolific. He is the one that was given 600,000 of these stories. And he whittled them down all the way down to 7,000, sorry, 7,439. So he throws out 98% and only retains 2%. And he does that before he dies in 870. Then we have Muslim who dies in 875. Tirmidhi 884. Look at the dates they die. 887, 899 for Dawud, Nasa'i 915. One, two, three, four, five, six of them. Did any of them know Muhammad? Did they ever hear him say anything yet? They write down what he said. They all lived 240 and later years after Muhammad. That's not the only genre. We have two more genres. The Tafsir and that's the commentaries that help you to understand the Quran. You can't make sense of this. 25% of this, even though Muslim scholars don't understand. And if those of you who have read the Quran, how much of it can you understand? It goes all over the place, doesn't it? As we say in India, it jumps all over the place. Stories don't begin. Stories don't end. There's no transitional phrase to help you from story to story. Thank God our Bible's not like that, but the Quran is. So you need commentaries to explain it. And that's why the commentaries have to be written. But look who's the first man to write it down. His name is Al-Tabari. 9:23. That's over 300 years. That's almost 300 years after Muhammad. So everything we know about who this man was, what he did, and what he said comes from two to 300 years later. How many of you are happy with that? You're not happy with it. You're happy with it. You're a good man. I like you. I know why you're happy with it because that makes our job a lot easier, doesn't it? See, he's being smart. But let me ask you, sir, you're going to be Abdul, right? Abdul, you're happy. You're a Muslim. You love that. What about Jesus Christ? Don't we also have a hadith of Jesus, the sayings of Jesus? Don't we also have a Sira of Jesus, the biography of Jesus? Yes, we do. Don't we? For those of you who are Christian, not you, Abdul. You're a Muslim. Okay, stay a Muslim tonight now. So as a Muslim, you don't have anything for two to 300 years, but we have the Sira of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, right? Who wrote down what Jesus did? The hadith of Jesus, what he said, that's written in red letters in some of your Bibles. Anytime Jesus spoke, that's the hadith of Jesus. So we have the same genre, right? The Sira of the what Jesus said and did would be the commentaries of Paul's letters. He would take what Jesus said and apply it to Ephesus and to Philippi and to Corinth. Right? So there is the Tafsir. So we have the same genre in our New Testament. And then the, which would be the histories of mankind, that is in the book of Acts, the book, the history of the early church. So we have the same four genres that you see up on the screen there. But when were they written? We're going to get to that. Hold on to that because I that's going to answer one of my questions. So you stay right there, Abdul. I'm going to keep talking to you. I like that when a guy when a guy agrees with me, it's so nice. Funny to have someone that agrees with me. I'm going to put up Abdul Manik's name there because he is the one that actually introduces the name Muhammad.

Did I say Muhammad? Oh boy, slap my mouth. No, he doesn't. He doesn't introduce the name Muhammad. You're going to see why in about 10 minutes.

Nonetheless, he is the first one to get up that title and it's not Muhammad as you're going to find out. But it's these people here, the Abbasids that I've just put up there. They are the ones that actually make him into the Muhammad that we know today. And I'm emphasizing Muhammad for a reason. I'm overemphasizing it for a reason. You'll see why.

So, conclusion, Muhammad was revealed 84 years after the Abbasids created him, 141 years after he was first introduced. Yet 201 years after he supposedly lived, Raymond, however, considers this 200-year gap as perfectly acceptable and thus not a problem. How many of you agree with Raymond? You should raise your hand. You just did. Come on, Abdul. Get your hand up there. He's suddenly getting chicken foot because he knows that he's going to be put on the hot seat. Don't get chicken foot on me. Please stay there. I want you to be a good Muslim tonight. All right.

And here's the other problem. Look at the distance and direction. Now, everything that Muslims, including Abdul sitting here, says is happens in those two cities that you see right there that are circled in green. Do you see them up there? Mecca and Medina. That's where everything happens. That's where all this takes place. That's where Muhammad lived. That's where he was born there in Mecca. Uh, he was there for 52 years, then moved to Medina. And he spent that whole time receiving this book here in those two cities. Do you see where they are? Just so you see them on the map.

But here's the problem. Everything we know that's written about him, about his life, does not come from those cities. They come from that city, Baghdad, which is 200 miles away. Ibnisham, the man who actually wrote then, this guy here who wrote on his biography, he was born in Basra, grew up in Cairo and wrote in Baghdad. Basra is a good 1,200 miles away. Mecca, uh, Cairo is a good 990 miles away and of course, Baghdad is 1,200 miles. The guy who wrote down his sayings came from Bukhara, which is in Uzbekistan, which is 2,600 miles away. The guy who wrote down all the hadith in the comes from Tabaristan, which is northern Iran today, that is 1,700 miles. None of these traditional writers lived or worked in Mecca or Medina. They were way too far to the north of Mecca and came from the west and east of Baghdad. Doesn't Raymond realize that these are Abbasid writers all writing after 750 and way too far away? Has he forgotten about this? Or should we remind him? Abdul, you're his spokesman now. You tell me. Please knock on his door and tell him. All right. And ask him how is he going to, how is he going to answer this question? Let's continue on.

But which Muhammad is Raymond talking about? Which is the Muhammad that you support, Ahmed? Or no, I'm sorry. You're Abdul. I'm gonna keep changing your name. Abdul. Abdul. Abdul. Okay. Abdul, which is the one you support? See, if you support the Muhammad of Islam, then there you have to agree to four things. And Raymond has to agree to these four things.

Number one, he must have the name Muhammad. That looks like that. There it is. This is the only Arabic I'm going force on you people tonight. All right? You don't have to learn Arabic tonight, but learn that name there. You know Arabic? Egyptian. You're Egyptian. Okay. Is that Muhammad up there? Yes. Okay. Is there a damma and a fatha and a fatha up there? Is there a Mima Mimdal? Yes. Okay. So, that's Muhammad. Okay. We got our Arab speakers down here. All right. You're going to help me out. All right. The rest of you, don't worry about it. Just listen to me. Say yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. To everything I say. So, that's what Muhammad looks like, right? And whenever you read it, that's what it looks like. Hugely important. You'll see why.

Now, he must have lived in the city of Mecca. In order to be the Muhammad of Islam, he had to have come from Mecca. If he didn't come from Mecca, he's no longer the Muhammad of Islam because he spent 52 years there, folks. He received half this book there. All right? That's where the holy places are. That's where the Kaaba is. That's where everybody focuses five times a day praying towards. So, it has to be Mecca.

Number three, he must have received this Quran, all 114 surahs, from that place and from that time and everything had to have happened in the seventh century. Those are the four things you have to claim. Are you following me? Abdul, you're starting to get a little nervous now. Don't worry if you're getting nervous. What about Raymond Ibrahim? Okay, so those are the four things you have to accept.

Conclusion. All four of the above criteria, the man, the place, the book, and the time must be fulfilled in order to prove that the Muhammad of Islam actually existed. That your Muhammad actually existed. All right. So, let's go ahead and let's start and let's look at this name.

Now, Raymond suggests that we can find the name Muhammed in a written text just like the one I showed you. Mima Mimdal. All right. But that name requires four consonants and three vowels. Am I correct? In the seventh century, there were no vowels. There were no vowels in the Arabic text. Today there are. Right. But back in the seventh century, there were only 16 consonants. How many consonants are there in the text today? 28. 28. That's right. Thank you. 28 today. But 16 back then. Where did they get the other 12 from? They didn't exist in the seventh century. They had to be created in the 8th and 9th century. All right? Are you following this? You're my Arab speakers. Okay? If you get it, the rest of you will not get it. But as long as you get it, that's important. Okay?

So, the earliest Quranic manuscripts. Now, look at them. Here they are. I'm giving you five of the earliest six manuscripts. I want my Arab speakers to go up and read what's up there on that on those scripts. Can you read it? Yes. No, you cannot. Well, of course, it is not Arabic. It is Arabic, but it is not Arabic. Old Arabic. It is old. What's wrong with it? It is, it is written like you can't read a word of it, can you? You can try to guess what it is, but you need five dots, don't you? The letter is not connected. If you have one dot above, little, little bullface, that becomes a noon, right? If you have two dots, becomes a two, a t. If you have three dots, becomes a th. If you have one dot below, becomes a b. And two dots becomes a ya. Do you see them up there? Yes. Not one dot. So you can't read it, can you? And yet these are the earliest Quranic manuscripts. And these are not from the seventh century. These are from the 8th and 9th century.

So what Muhammad are you talking about? Where's Muhammad there? Because Muhammad requires three vowels. Do you see any vowels in any of those manuscripts? Do you see any damas or kas or fats? I don't see any. And this is why Raymond hasn't done his history. Are you listening to this, Abdul? Please listen. This is for you too. I know you don't know Arabic, but they agree with me. In the seventh century, there were no five dots. Today, there are five dots. These critical marks had to be invented because nobody could read that. You can't read it. But that's why they had to be created in the 8th and 9th century.

So, with that in mind, what does the word Muhammad look like today? That's what it looks like today. All right. You both agreed with me that. But since there were no vowels back then, this is what it looked like back then. Now read it. Oo, did you hear? Mhm. So suddenly it goes from Muhammad to Mm. Thank you. Let's give her a hand. Abdul, what are you doing? You're not supposed to be clapping. This is shutting you down. You just keep somber for a while. Okay. So now it's become mimdal with no vowels, which means this is a word. It's not Muhammad, but it's Mm. How do we know that? How can we prove that right now?

Well, we need to go to John of Damascus. Good old John of Damascus. See, John of Damascus was there in the courts of Abdul Malik from 685 to 705. He was a Christian. He was there in Damascus. That's why he's called John of Damascus. He was a treasurer for Abdul Malik. And so he was watching what was happening and he was seeing that this dispute was happening between the Ishmaelites and those who come in the line of Isaac. The Jews and the Christians come in the line of Isaac. But the Umayyads were Israelites and they did not have a prophetic line. They didn't have any scripture like the Jews and the Christians had. And yet they controlled now by the time of the Malik comes to power from Spain all the way to India and from Turkey all the way to Yemen. So they were the second biggest superpower of their day. The problem is they had no identity. The Byzantine Empire, the other biggest empire that there was, the biggest competitor, they had a prophetic line. They had a scripture. They had a whole series of prophets. What did the Ishmaelites have? They needed a prophet and they needed a book of revelation that would equal what was going on. So he was watching this, right? He sees this all happening. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't write anything because he was under their employ. So when he retires in 730, now look at the date. 730, we're well into the 8th century. We're a hundred years after Muhammad had died, if Muhammad had existed, he then writes his greatest masterpiece. And what does he title it? Look at the title, the heresy of the Ishmaelites. Oo, I love that. Why does he say heresy of the Muslims? Because there were no Muslims that early. Muslims, that word did not exist. We can't find any reference for anybody called Muslims. No Muslims. So he calls them Ishmaelites. Ishmaelites. Now we see what's going on. And he talks about this prophet that these Ishmaelites have. This. What does he say? He says that from that a false prophet called Mhm. Now notice he's writing in Greek. In Greek, the vowels are there. Look at the Greek. Those who can read Greek, what does it say up there in the top left that's circled? Mhm. It's Mm. John Damascus tells us what it is. It's Mm. So this Mmed who after conversing with an Arian monk, who are the Arians? They didn't believe that Jesus was God. They didn't believe in the Trinity and they didn't believe that Jesus was the son of God. They didn't believe Jesus at all was divine. Aras was the one that brought this up in the fourth century. The Arian controversy has been around ever since almost from the second century. You have the Ebionites bringing up the same problem. Aras brought this up in the 4th century. Athanasius was told to shut him down at the Council of Nicaea, which he did. And here it raises its head again and there is a, there is John of Damascus watching this. He's ringside seat and he writes this his greatest piece and he says this Mhmmed this new prophet this Arian monk who get your material from and he goes on, he fabricates his own heresy and then he talks about that this monk has four books. The book of the cow, oo, that's Surah 2 in the Quran today. The book of the women, that's Surah 4 in the Quran today. The book of the table, that's Surah 5 of the Quran today. And the book of the camel. There is no Surah called the camel. But what are four books doing when there's supposed to be only one book called the Quran? Isn't that interesting? This is 730, well into the 8th century. But now we know who this Muhammmed is. His name is not Muhammad. His name is Mahm.

So who in the world is Muhammmed? Wait till you find out. Here we go. What does Mad mean in Arabic? It is not a name. It is a title. It means the praised one, the blessed one, the anointed one, or even the Messiah. It's a title, folks. Have any of you heard this name before? You have. Where have you heard it? Okay. In Arabic. But where'd you hear it before? Arabic. How about Hebrew? Anybody here speak Hebrew? Anybody studied Hebrew? Have you looked at the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament? You will find Makm 11 times in the Old Testament. Makmmed is well known in the Bible. You didn't know that, did you? Well, here we go. The Ugarit were the first to introduce this word in 1400 BC. The Makmmet, the praised one, the anointed one. It was then borrowed in Hebrew in 1,000 BC and put into our Bibles 11 times. Song of Solomon 5:16, the Mhmed, the altogether lovely one, the praised one that Solomon's referring to. There's the Mid we're looking for.

Now, by the 4th century, St. Ambrose, the early church father, took it. Remember, Arabic comes from Aramaic, which comes from Hebrew. So, therefore, it's all the same letters. They use all the same letters. They're all Semitic letters. They use the same continental text. And therefore, St. Ambrose writing in Syriac talks about this Mhmmed from Song of Psalm 560 and he says this is a title for Jesus Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah. That's what the anointed one is. From that time on, from the 4th century AD, it was this MBA was employed by many of the church fathers. Here are some examples: Origen in the early 3rd century, a Christian theologian, interpreted the Song of Solomon 5:16 passage as the unique scripture where the eschatological nuptials of Christ and his bride are present. St. Ambrose in the 4th century AD introduced the idea that Song of Solomon 5:16 passage referred to Mahmud was to be considered a title for Jesus Christ, the Messiah. Gregory of Alvara continued that idea in the late fourth century. St. John Cassian continued that in the fifth century. St. Augustine, the great church father, continued that in the fifth century. And then Aonius in the middle of the seventh century also believed that this Mid was Jesus Christ.

Conclusion. The title Mhmmed, not the name Mhm. The title Mhmmed was a common title for Jesus by the seventh century in the church in that part of the world, especially in Arabic, which took it from Aramaic. So, we should not be surprised when we find it written in many places at that time. It's written all over the place. That's why we find Mmed after Muhammmed after. But it's not just the Christians. The Jews also use that title in Hebrew. If you have any doubt, just take a look at this inscription from 523. This is a good hundred years before Muhammad even came in, uh, when Muhammad died. And this is a sixth-century Jewish rock inscription in what is today Yemen. It's there in Najran and it is translated by the Lord of the Jews by the Mhm. The Mad in Sabaic script. I'm just putting it out to you. You can see it there in Sabaic script. This is not the Arabic script that we see in the Quran. This is the Sabaic script that comes from Yemen. It's, it is Arabic, but it's not the same script. Isn't that interesting? But look at the term Mahmud that is used there by the Jews.

So, let's show you a quick synopsis. Makmed means the praised one or the blessed one or the anointed one or even the Messiah later on. So, it's not a name. It's not a name, folks. It's a title. It was used in Ugaritic in 1400 BC, borrowed by the Jews in Hebrew in 1000 BC. That's why you have it 11 times in our Bible. It was subsequently employed by St. Ambrose in the 4th century as a title for Jesus Christ. The Jews also referred to it in their reference. And what was interesting, by the seventh century, the Jews started using that title for their exilarchs. The exilarchs were those who were in charge of the seminary in what is today Baghdad, Arabic. So they have all been speaking Arabic and they had always put Mhm before their name. Mhm. Benhuziel, Mahmmed, Ben David, Mhm. Ben, everyone. They have five different exilarchs where they put Makm before the name, the praised one, the anointed one. It was a, it was a title of endearment, of authority, of credibility, well used in Arabic and Aramaic by the seventh century. Thus, by the seventh century, the Christians and used Mhm to refer to the returning Messiah, while the Jews used Muhammmed to refer to the Messiah yet to come and at times interchanged it with the Messiah.

Conclusion. Therefore, the term Muhammmed was well known in that part of the world and at that time, but it was not pronounced Muhammad like you do today. That is how we now pronounce it. And there lies the confusion that Raymond's having. And same with you, Abdul. I can see you're confused now as well. So folks, knowing that, let's now look and see exactly when Muhammad's story was created within Islam itself. All right? So we're not looking for Muhammad anymore. We need to look for Muhammad. That's who we need to look to. You need to go to the evidence from that century.

So, how well did the Muslims preserve Muhammad's story? Their Muhammad story. Now, we're getting back to the Muhammad of Islam, your Muhammad, Abdul, okay? And Raymond's Muhammad. How well did they preserve their manuscripts? Now, here's the problem. When anyone asks Muslims how they came to be sure that the story they have of Muhammad is true, the one, this one right here, this story by Ibn Hisham, they point to numerous books on their bookshelves, including this one right here, and claim that they were written by those who knew Muhammad. Did I know Muhammad? No. He died in 833. That's 200 years later. He certainly did not know Muhammad. That they saw what he did and they heard what he said. But they never show us their original extant copies or their original manuscripts. Nor do they ever give us any forensically tested dates concerning when exactly those books were originally written. To be valid witnesses for Muhammad, we must have their traditional writer's original extant manuscripts. So the question I'm asking is, where is the original extant manuscript for Ibn Hisham? That's all I'm asking. That which they actually wrote. Remember the compilers of the prophet's life, Ibn Hisham, Al-Waqidi, and what he said, Al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Ibn Majah, and Nasai, all of them were living in the Caliphate courts. They were there in Baghdad. Therefore, they had all the wealth at their disposal. They did not have to depend on papyrus like the early church. The early church fathers had to prepare, depend on all of our texts and our and our and our uh hadith were all written on papyrus, which are these interlocking leaves and they disintegrate within a hundred years. Okay? They get dry and they crinkle away. That's not the case for the Muslims. Are you hearing this, Abdul? That's not the case for you guys because you were in the Caliphate courts. You were in the richest land in the world, the richest place. Therefore, you did not use papyrus. You would have used parchment or vellum, animal skins. If that were so, then those extant manuscripts still be available today. We should still see them. Where are they, Abdul? I'm picking on him because Raymond Ibrahim is not here today. You can go and shake your hands of Abra. You're taking on his place for him. And that's what we need to ask Muslims. Where are these original manuscripts for the Sahih, for the hadith, for the, for the, for all of these references that you're talking about, and including the Sahaba and the Tabi'un? Now, the Sahaba and the Tabi'un, the Sahaba would be the companions of the prophet. Okay? The equivalent that we would have would be Matthew and John. They were the companions of Jesus. They were right there watching what Jesus did and hearing what Jesus said. So they would be our Sahaba. The Tabi'un were those who got it from the Sahaba. So they would be like Mark and Luke, who got it from the eyewitnesses. Okay? So two different generations. First generation would be the companions. The second were those who got it from the companions. Okay? So we have the same equivalent in Christianity. Right? So Muslims are saying that we do have the Sahaba and we do have the Tabi'un. Are you ready? So, we have spent two years. What I'm going to show you now, no one has seen yet. Okay? This is two years' worth of study. We decided to find out where these manuscripts are. No one has done this work until we did it. And it's just coming out of Europe right now. So, you're getting it. Here we go.

So, the Sahaba, the eyewitnesses or the companions of the prophet, and the Tabi'un, those who receive what they knew from the Sahaba. What we're told by Muslims that they, there are many Sahaba. Actually, they only list about five of them. Uh, and the Tabi'un, they were from the, they were writing in the seventh and the eighth century. This is a lie. You ready? Let's see who they quote. These are the ones they quote. Muwatta of Malik. It comes not from the seventh century. It comes from the 9th century. The Sahifa of Hammam bin Munabbih. It does not come from the seventh century. It comes from the 12th century. That's 500 years later. The Musnad of Ibn Hanbal. It comes from the 13th century. That's 600 years later. It comes from the Musannaf of Abdul Razzaq, that's 600 years later, along with the Musannaf of Ali, that's 1300, that century, that's 600 years later, and Abid al-Shafi'i, that's 600 years later. Not one of these are from the seventh and 8th century. All of that has been a lie, and we didn't know that until the last two years because we assumed that they had the manuscripts. They have no manuscripts for any of these guys. These documents were all supposedly created in the seventh century. That's what Muslims tell us. Yet they do not begin to appear until the 9th to the 13th century, thus 2 to 600 years too late. This suggests that they were all written by others hundreds of years later. Consequently, they are all redacted attributions.

Now, let's put that on a timeline, show you what I'm talking about. So, when the Muslims, when you come up and they say, "We know where the Sahaba and where the Tabi'un," they're looking at these five, six guys right here. That's where they put them, right up next to Muhammad there. None of them come from there. The first one, the earliest one is Ibn Malik, that's from the 9th century. Then you have Munabbih, 12th century. You have Hanbal, 13th century, along with Razzaq, and then you have Ali, and then you have Shafi'i. All of them are 12th and 13th century. Can you see the problem, folks? Therefore, the Sahaba and the Tabi'un, they are not first and second generations. They, they are not eyewitnesses. Our equivalent would be Matthew and John. Yet they were written two to 600 years later and simply redacted back to the seventh and eighth century. Thus, they are probably fraudulent.

Now, since we started introducing this onto my, onto Founder Films, which I started doing this spring, the Muslims are coming back, say, "Aha, Mr. Smith. Yes, but we have the Musnad, the Muwatta of Ibn Malik. The Muwatta of Ibn Malik is 9th century." Have you heard them say this? Maybe you haven't, but Abdul, you've been saying it a lot of times because you wonder, you caught me on this a week ago, and you've been hammering me on this. What about the Muwatta of Ibn Malik? You see, that's 9th century. That's 9th century. You say that's only 200 years after Muhammad. Okay, let's go back and see if that's true. Let's take a look.

There is a partial copy of the Muwatta in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. Uh, it is described as the second third of a celebrated treatise on the Islamic Jewish and is dated 890. I will give you that, Abdul. But here's the problem. When does the Muwatta get finalized? It does not. The complete manuscript from the Muwatta does not get finalized until 10:30. That's the 11th century. So you really have nothing earlier than the 11th century. What's more, as of today, a 10:30 manuscript is the earliest fully extant copy of Ibn Malik's work. But here is the problem. Who cares? Ibn Malik has nothing to do with Muhammad. Has nothing to do with the origins of Islam. Ibn Malik is nothing more about the rules of Jewish jurisprudence. It's nothing about the original. He's just talking about the rules that existed in the 9th and 10th and 11th century. So why is he even in this discussion? Do you see the problem? You're using the wrong genre, Abdul. Sorry. I know you're going to have a hard time after this. We'll, we'll go to dinner together and I'll give you, I'll pay for your meal.

Now, knowing that, since we know that, let's relook at the Sahaba and the Tabi'un and let's put them on a timeline. So Abdul and Raymond and the other Muslims, they claimed that they're all hugged up against Muhammad. No, they're not. They first put the Muwatta of Ibn Malik there, but we now know that he's not there. Actually, he is here. So goodbye to Ibn Malik. He doesn't belong there. And the others. So really, they don't begin to appear until the 11th century. So everything we know about the Sahaba or these Tabi'un do not come from the seventh and 8th century. They come from the 11th to the 13th century. That's 4 to 600 years too late. And this is the first time you're hearing that.

What about the Sira? What about the biography? What about this book right here? What about this biography of Muhammad? We've been told that it comes from Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Hisham. And that's the classic book that you will get whenever you go to school. That's the book you have to read. Everybody has to read that book. You recognize it, don't you? And you've always trusted it, haven't you? Until today. Who wrote that book? Well, it's right there on the cover. The name's right there. Allah. The Sirat Rasul Allah written by Ibn Ishaq. Do you have any manuscript from Ibn Ishaq? No. So when you open up the pages of that book and you read the introduction, it's very clear that Ibn Ishaq had nothing to do with that book. In fact, it all comes from Ibn Hisham. That's what it says. But here's the problem. We don't have any manuscript from Ibn Hisham. So who actually wrote that book that you read and that everybody reads today? You want to know? You ready? This old gentleman right here wrote it. Heinrich Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, a German scholar who between 1858 and 1860 compiled the biography of Muhammad. He then published it in 1860. That's 160 years ago. And everybody in the world now knows who Muhammad was. Therefore, the man who Muslims are dependent on, and same with you, Abdul, and Raymond, who's listening, are dependent on to, to know who their prophet is or what he did, is an elderly German linguist who wrote Muhammad's story 160 years ago, thus over a thousand years too late. Did you not know this? Is this the first time you're hearing this? I talked about this over a year ago.

So, where did he get his material from? That's the next question. Where did he get his material from? You just need to read his notes. Look at his notes. He explains where he gets it from. He goes to six different manuscripts. Are you ready? These are the six manuscripts he goes to. He does not go to these two guys. This is the one he should have gone to. Ibn Hisham Al-Waqidi. He goes to. There he is right there. He went to this manuscript in Fez in Morocco dated to 1063. And another manuscript that comes from the, uh, the British Library that's there today that's dated from 1278. Another one that comes from the Bodleian Library in Oxford that's 1300s, and another one that comes from Dublin, uh, in Ireland, that is the 1300s as well. And then another one that comes from the BNF, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, that is 1400. And the one he used the most comes from the, the School of Oriental and African Studies there in London, and it comes from 1589. Those are the six manuscripts he uses. Notice five of them are in Europe. One of them's in Morocco. And the one in Morocco, he only used 25% of because he didn't trust the other 75%. So none of this, none of this comes from anybody named Ibn Hisham or Al-Waqidi. They were all written from the 11th to the 16th century. So goodbye. We don't need you guys anymore. Therefore, every Western and Muslim scholar believes that the Sira compilation was just 2 to 300 years after Muhammad, which is bad enough. Won't they be surprised when they find that they are really much later, between the 11th and 19th century? In other words, between 400 to 1200 years after Muhammad, written by a German scholar.

So, who really created the 9th century and the 10th century hadith? Now Muslims will say that they were all created by, well, we know who they were created by, Bukhari, Muslim, Majah, and all from the 9th century, right? And one from the 10th century. No, that is what they tell us. No, they're all lying. Abu Dawud is from the 11th century, that's 400 years after Muhammad. An-Nasa'i is from the 12th century. That's 500 years. Ibn Majah is from the 13th century. That's 600 years. Jami' al-Tirmidhi is from the 14th century. That's 700 years. Same with Sahih Muslim. The second most authoritative comes from the 14th century. And Sahih Bukhari, the most authoritative one, the one that gives us nine volumes, comes from the 14th and 15th century. That's 700 to 800 years after Muhammad. Folks, not one of these hadith were compiled in the 9th and 10th century. Their final extant manuscripts were not created, were not created until the 11th to the 15th century, which is 4 to 800 years later. Thus, not one of them ever heard a word Muhammad said. This is the first time you're hearing it. Let's put it on a timeline.

So, that's what they say. They were all written there by those men in the 9th and 10th century. No, they weren't. They start to appear by Dawud in the 11th century, Nasai in the 12th century, Majah in the 13th century, same 14th century for Al-Tirmidhi. Same with Sahih Muslim, and the most important, Al-Bukhari, is not till the 14th and 15th century. Goodbye. Don't need those guys anymore. Which means that everything we have about what Muhammad said comes from 400 to 800 years too late. How can you defend him?

Now we come and now we've been told that the Tafsir and the Tasfir were written by this guy here, Al-Tabari, and then there are many that come after Zamakhshari and Al-Baghawi and the others, but he is the first to write down everything that Islam needs. In fact, they, everybody loves Al-Tabari because he tells you everything about how you're to walk, talk, eat, drink, sleep, and he tells you all kinds of messed up stuff and he contradicts himself here and there and gives you the chance to choose what you want. That's why everybody loves Al-Tabari. He was living in the 10th century. So, we're told, "No, we have nothing from him in the 10th, uh, the 10th century at all. Not a thing." So, where do we get Al-Tabari's material from? It was edited by a man named Michael Jean de Goeje, the professor of Arabic at Leiden University in Holland between 1879 and 1901, and is known as the Leiden Edition. He went to two manuscripts written in the 13th century which still exist today in Istanbul. These Arabic manuscripts, these were all written 600 years later, but he didn't put them together and compile them for the whole world to use until the last century. A Dutch scholar. So even Al-Tabari's Tafsir and Tasfir are not 10th-century originals, but are much later 13th-century compilations, which were merely attributed back to Al-Tabari 300 years earlier, yet they are still 600 years too late. What's more, it took a Dutch scholar from Europe to compile them 1200 years later. Why didn't the Muslims do this? Because the Muslims never bare, never wasted time doing this. They had no idea what Al-Tabari said until the last century. Isn't that amazing? And yet Muslims, and Raymond says this is more historically attributable than any other piece of man, any other person.

So I'm going to put everything on one screen. You ready? Let's put them all together on one screen. Really get you confused. So let's start with the Sahaba and the Tabi'un. And that's when they say they're put up there. That's when they believe that they actually were written. No, we now know that they were written here. Well, no, let's put them away because that's actually the 11th century. And the 12th century and the 13th century and the 13th and the 13th and the 13th again. So goodbye to those guys. The Sahaba and Tabi'un never wrote a thing. So we now know. What about the hadith? Well, they were telling us that the six hadith were written there. No, they weren't. They were actually written, uh, in the 11th and the 12th, uh, the 14th and the 15th century. So goodbye to those guys. We don't need them anymore because none of the hadith were written that early. And then we're told that the Sitta was written by those two guys, uh, Hisham and Al-Waqidi, in the 9th century. No, according to our German scholar, looking at his manuscripts, they all start to appear in the 11th and the 13th and the 14th century. Uh, uh, and then up into the 15th and the 16th century, written by this guy here, put together and compiled by this German scholar. So goodbye to Al-Waqidi and to Ibn Hisham. And then we're told that the Tafsir and the Tah were written in the 11th century by Al-Tabari. No, they weren't. They actually came from six manuscripts. I'm sorry, two manuscripts from Istanbul, but put together by this Dutch scholar. So goodbye to Al-Tabari.

Which means when you look at this, notice Muslims claim that everything happened two to 300 years after Muhammad, right? No, it didn't. What we now know is that everything happened not 2 to 300, 4 to 900 years after Muhammad. We put a big X in the area that they claim is. So, we've been told that the stories surrounding Muhammad's life were written by those who saw and heard him, thus by eyewitnesses or by others within a few generations. Yet, we see above that everything we know about Muhammad was originally written 4 to 900 years after he presumably lived, yet not canonized into written text until 12 to 170 years later, suggesting it is all a fraud. Let me put them all up there. That's what you can give to Muslims. Get that piece. Take that picture. Get this PowerPoint. Get that picture and then just give it to your Muslim friends. They've got to come up with an answer to that.

Looking at this timeline above, how can Raymond Ibrahim suggest that the history of Muhammad is one of the best supported in history? How can he say that when those who wrote it did so a full 4 to 900 years after he presumably lived? And what's more, what will he do with the fact that much of it was not canonized into written form until 12 to 1270 years later? Is this the best in history? Are you listening to this, Abdul? You're kind of losing your smile, aren't you? It's getting harder and harder, isn't it? I love that. He's got a great smile.

Now, as a comparison, folks, be careful. We as Christians have done the same thing. We're just as guilty. You know we are. You know the Gnostic Gospels, 52 found in the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt, written in Coptic, purporting to tell stories of Jesus's childhood, yet were all written in the 4th century and redacted back to the first century. But for instance, the Gospel of Thomas, that's one Muslims love that one, and the Gospel of Judas, written around the second century, but attributed by their authors to have been written by the disciples of Jesus Christ's time. Look at the Gospel of Barnabas, the favorite of Muslims, the favorite gospel by the Muslims, was written in 1634 AD, but was attributed to the companion of Paul in the first century. They were all written in order to give credibility and authority for those who wrote them. So this practice of redaction and attribution is common in every religion, including Christianity.

But here's the difference. Here's the difference. Listen to this. Abdul and Raymond, if you're watching. The difference is that while the later Muslim traditions are all considered authoritative, as you see on that graph that I put up there, the later Christian traditions are all considered fraudulent. That's why we don't read the Gospel of Thomas. That's why we don't read the Gospel of Judas. That's why we throw out the Gospel of Barnabas. Why? Because they are all written too late. So, we throw out that which is written too late. And the Muslims do just the opposite. They hold on and take the latest material and throw out that which gone earlier. Do you see the problem? So, we aren't doing the same thing. We do just the opposite of what the Muslims do.

So, what does all this mean? I'm not saying in suggesting that there never was someone called Ibn Ishaq or Al-Waqidi or Al-Bukhari or Sahih Muslim or even Al-Tabari. I'm not saying that. Please don't get that from me today. I'm not saying that because someone certainly had to have created those names somewhere. These men could very well have lived, and they could very well have lived in the 9th and 10th century where they were attributed. Thomas and Judas and Barnabas did actually live. They were actual people. They were real men who were historical characters in the early church and well respected, and that was why the later compilers attributed their works to them. But they did not write the Gospel of Judas or the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Barnabas. That's all I'm saying. In the same token, neither did Al-Waqidi or Ibn Hisham or Al-Bukhari or Muslim or Ali write what is purported to have been written by them because we have nothing from those men. Similarly, that is why I believe later Muslims attributed the stories back to these earlier men. Consequently, what Muslims today contend these historical writers wrote, they have no support for historically. They have no evidence whatsoever since they have little to nothing of what they wrote outside of the Muwatta, which is not even a member of the Islamic tradition. So, it should not even be in this discussion. All that Muslims can now be certain of is what the later Abbasids and even the early Ottomans believed happened in the seventh and 8th century, since everything that had been written earlier had been destroyed and then replaced with completely new stories to fit a new agenda.

Conclusion: When compared to Christianity, which has manuscript evidence within the first century, Islam is much less historically supported, contrary to what Raymond contends. Yet it shouldn't be considering how recent it is supposedly was created and all of it written on vellum on animal skin. They should have the best material. But they don't. That's just supposition one. I've already got an hour and a half. I have half an hour to go to the next. Don't worry, they get much shorter. That's the hard stuff. That's the heavy stuff. That's the new material.

Here's a second supposition. Muhammad has more historical support than Jesus. Do you believe that? This is what he says. I find it amazing that whereas Christians rightfully cite Josephus and Pliny and Tacitus as early proof of Christ's existence, in other words, the first and second century, the non-Muslim references to Muhammad, which objectively speaking are even more compelling since they were written much closer to their subject's lifetime in the 9th and 10th century are dismissed as irrelevant by those who would make him a figment of our imagination. He therefore claims that since Muhammad is far more historically supported than Jesus Christ, by denying his historicity, we are not only being inconsistent but possibly dishonest. Abdul, he called me dishonest. You don't call me that. Of course, you're standing right there. You can't.

So, is Raymond correct? Is the historical support for Muhammad greater than that for Jesus Christ? Here's my response. Both Raymond and I agree that there are many very early 7th-century, mostly non-Muslim and even Christian references to the word Muhammad. That's why I had to go through that with you, Kirk, at the very beginning. Notice I didn't say Muhammad. The first only two years after he died. Whereas the first non-Christian references to Jesus do not appear until 60 years after he died. I'm willing to say that. But that's not Muhammad. That's Muhammad. Raymond gives only four examples. Actually, there's 15 he could give. He only gave four. So I'm just going to deal with those four because of lack of time.

He goes to the Doctrina Jacobi from 634, citing a dialogue in 634 where Jacob describes what his brother Abraham writes to him regarding a deceiving prophet who had appeared amidst the Saracens, and Abraham recalling a conversation with a Jewish scribe who called the prophet a deceiver who comes with the swords and chariot. Isn't it getting confusing? Nonetheless, you have to read it so you understand what we're talking about. That's number one.

Number two, he goes to the Thomas the Presbyter, 634, citing a battle between the Romans and the followers of Mahmud. Notice it's with a T, not with a D.

And number three, a Syriac flyleaf fragment from 636 which mentions Muhammad by name. He says, and this is what it says: "Many villages were ravaged by the killing of Mahmud." Mahmud, not Muhammad.

And the Coptic bishop John of Nikiu, he puts it at 641, but actually it's written in the 690s, refers to him as the detestable doctrine of the beast, that is Makm. Note, not one of these references uses the name Muhammad. They all use Muhammad or Makm.

Let's go through each one. The Doctrina Jacobi, a Greek Christian polemical tract written in Carthage. Now, here's my problems. It mentions the Saracen prophet. It never mentions the name Mhmed or Muhammad anywhere. And it says that the Christ who was to come. Hold on a minute. Is Muhammad the Christ who is yet to come? No. That confronts chapter 33:40. And that he assumes that Muhammad is alive in 634. But according to their traditions, he died in 632. He had the keys of paradise, which confronts the Islamic traditions. This prophet fits a Judeo-Christian monotheistic background. This Christ, this Christos in Greek, this Mashiach in Hebrew who was to come, not Muhammad. He has the keys to paradise. That comes from Matthew 16:19, referring to Peter's papal papal authority in the Catholic Church. And this Mads or this Saracen prophet who doesn't have the name Muhammmed spoke Aramaic. I don't recall Muhammad ever speaking Aramaic. So coming and going, there is no reference to the name Muhammad in this tract. No reference to the prophet being a Muslim or belonging to the religion of Islam, nor any reference to the city of Mecca, nor of his book, the Quran. He could be anybody. In fact, he sounds more like an Arab Christian brigand employing the status of a prophet to gain for himself more credibility and authority. There's just nothing Islamic about this Saracen prophet.

What about the Thomas of Presbyter, later revised in the 8th century, and refers to a battle between the Romans and the Tay of Mahmmed? Notice Mahmmed is the Palavi spelling, which means he has to come from Iraq if he's Palavi. That's how they spelled it up there. And that he would have come from our present-day Iraq, which is 1,200 miles to the north. He is a Tay. That's the Mm of the Tay dominated by the Lakhmid region. You can see on the map where the Lakhimds are. They're way up in Mesopotamia in Tajkistan in the 7th century. Note on the map where the red circle is is where the Tay were located. Way too far to the north to be the Muhammad of the Hijaz of central Arabia. He fights in Gaza. Yet none of Muhammad's battles were in Gaza, nor anywhere near that far north. As before, he could be any Muhammmed or any praised one. Someone who is referred to as the praised one, an honorific title for the leader of the Tay way up in northern Iraq.

And then you have the Syriac flyleaf, which refers to this battle in Yarmouk in 636. Notice where Yarmouk is. It is in what is today southern Syria. The Arabs of the Mahmed who have a battle with the Gaba in Yarmouk. My problem is the battle is well-documented. But note that it says the Arabs. So who were the seventh-century Arabs? Look at the map up there and you will see where that that red rectangle is. They lived in today's Jordan and Syria, not in the Hijaz. So way too far to the north to be the Muhammad of Islam. The Arabs defeated the Byzantines at that battle. But according to the standard Islamic narrative, Muhammad died in 632. What was he doing in 636 in a battle? Could this be yet another of 7th-century northern Makm, thus someone who is simply referring as an honorific praised one?

And then he goes to the Coptic bishop, uh, the Coptic bishop Niku, and he writes this: "Embrace the religion of the Muslims, the enemy of God, and they accepted the detestable doctrines of the beast that is Muhammad."

Now, didn't I just get done telling you about 10 minutes ago that there is no one called Muslims in the 7th century? But look at the date, 690. What's he calling people Muslims and calling Muhammad with the vowels in place? What does that tell you? There were no vowels in the 7th century. The earliest manuscript of this is quoted in 6002 from an Ethiopic translation from the Arabic, which was from an earlier Greek translation, none of which exists today, suggesting once again that this is a later redaction back to the 7th century. So, there was no reason why to use that because it's way too late. This comes from the 17th century. It's a fraud.

Now, what about Christian historical record? Let's use the crucifixion. Probably the most important event in the history of mankind. What does Islam do? What does this book do, book do with the crucifixion? Well, in one verse, it shuts down the crucifixion. Has another man die in Jesus's place, puts him on the cross instead of Jesus, saying that there was no crucifixion. And in one verse, it just shuts down everything we know about Jesus Christ. That's what the Quran does. Is that historical? No.

Why do we go back to the evidence from the first and second century? Why don't we go back to Thallus and Phlegon, these two Greek Samaritan historians and Roman writers who were debating this event in 52 AD? That's 20 years after Christ's death. And in the debate, they mentioned that when Christ died, the earth shook and the sun went dark. Don't you think you'd rather trust them than the Quran that was written in the seventh and 8th century? I'd go to the first century, wouldn't you?

What about Lucian in the Greek satire that refers to the death of Jesus Christ? Or Mara Bar Serapion, who has a letter to the pagans in 73 AD? Or what about the Jewish historian Josephus, who in between 83 and 90 AD, not only talks about the death of Jesus, but he mentions also the brother of Jesus, James's death. And he mentions that the Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Woo, I love that.

And then, what are we going to do with Tacitus? A Roman historian who hated Christians, had nothing good to say about Christianity. Yet he talked about the death of Jesus. He states that happens during the time of Pontius Pilate under the rule of Tiberius. That's why we know Israel in 33 AD because of Tacitus. So, I've given you Greek, Roman, and Jewish historians from the first and second century who all agree that it was Jesus who was on the cross. Yet, even with just this example, we can see that Christianity has a far better record than Islam historically because of the outside hostile historical evidence.

Now, what about the textual record we have? Remember I said earlier that we have the Gospels and the Acts of Jesus, and we have it in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and also the writings of Paul. You remember I said that? Let's do a comparative. Now, I'm going to step on all your toes. You're not going to like what I'm going to do next because you're not going to like the dates I did put there. I'm going to put the most liberal dates I can find. But I'm doing that for a purpose. Let's see when they were written down and let's see how earlier they are.

So, when you talk about Jesus, we talk about the Gospels, that would be the histories of the early church written by Luke in the book of Acts, written between 52 and 62 AD. That's within 20 to 30 years of Christ's death. Paul's letters to the different churches, uh, that's the Gospels of Jesus. Uh, that was written between 48 and 65 AD, within 15 to 34 years. You have the first Gospel and the first Hadith written by Mark in 70 AD, 37 years of Christ's death. Then you have the next two Gospels, Matthew and Luke, written in 80 AD, that's 47 years after Christ's death. And finally, you have the last Gospel and the last Hadith written by John in 90 AD, that's 57 years after Christ's death. Within 60 years, you have the entire New Testament. Within 60 years. Notice that all of these writers, all of these New Testament writers, lived in the same place Jesus lived. Lived, and they either knew him personally or they got the material from others who saw what he did and heard what he said.

So, comparing Christianity versus Islam, when was the earliest biography saying for the both faiths? When we look at Christianity, everything is comes together within 60 years of Christ's death, written by those who either saw or heard what he did and heard what he said, or those who got it from the eyewitnesses. Whereas, when you look at Islam, everything we know about Muhammad, what he said and he did, comes from 4 to 900 years later. Which would you guess is more authoritative? Are you listening to this, Abdul? Are you starting to get the idea? You've got a problem here, don't you? Yeah. No answer. Just put your thumb up. You're starting to come around.

As a comparative comparison, if we had to depend on sources for Jesus comparable to what the Muslims are dependent on for Muhammad, Jesus would not begin to appear until the third to fifth century. How would we defend him with statistics like these? How can Raymond suggest that Muhammad is more much more historically supported than Jesus?

Supposition number three: If Muhammad did not exist, how do we understand the Sunni-Shiite divide? This is what he says. If Muhammad didn't exist, then no descendants existed either. So, how can we understand the Sunni-Shiite divide? Why would there be a huge contention involving the blood descendants of a man who had never existed? Now, to begin with, the first we even hear about Ali as Muhammad's choice is with Sahih Bukhari, volume 5. While the other counterargument, which goes against that, exactly contradicts it, is also found in Sahih Bukhari, volume 5, book number 64, proving that his companions didn't even know what side they were on. Remember, the canonical version of Sahih Bukhari does not appear until the 14th to 15th century. So, this is probably a much later story redacted back. But most importantly, this is a political dispute between Persians and Arabs, not theological. So, it could have been created at any time by either the Abbasids or the Ottomans in the 14th and 15th century and then redacted back first to Ali, and then to the person of Muhammad himself, in order to give authority to whichever position, Persian or Arab, you needed for that time and for your place. This is not surprising, as movements, both political and religious, often split, and the Sunni-Shiite divide could easily have arisen for the same reason as the earlier Abbasid revolt, which at its very roots was due to disquiet over the earlier Umayyad dynasty.

And here is another response. I'm not going to read through this. You can read through it in your own time when you get the PowerPoint by Dr. Pat Andrews. He just shows you, if you have that problem, what are you going to do with the King Arthur and Camelot legend? Did Camelot really exist? Were there a round table? Was there a stone with a sword in it that little King Arthur had to pull out? Well, Disney made that one up, and it still be made up even today. Legends are exactly that. They get concocted. They get recreated. They get embellished. They get deleted and created century after century depending on what your needs are. And that, that's exactly what we're finding with the Sunni-Shiite divide.

What about his reference to, "There are no incontrovertible proofs of Muhammad's non-existence"? Boy, that's a mouthful. My response: I don't have to prove a thing here. The statement makes no sense to begin with. How can someone prove someone who did not exist? It is the person who claims that someone did exist who bears the burden of proof, not me. Okay, I turn that right back. Although, you're not supposed to agree with that. Don't say yes. Say, "Ooh, that's something I hadn't thought about."

Raymond admits in his video that he hasn't even looked at our evidence. Why in the world is he confronting me if he's not even looked at my videos? That shows you right away that the fact that he hasn't even looked at our argument suggests that he is either naive or simply arrogant, or is being typically Arabic with his one-upmanship style. I think it's the latter.

The theories we have, Raymond believes, are only out there. The reason I'm doing this, he says, is because those of us who perpetuate them use simply out of a dislike for Islam. Folks, he is correct. I do dislike Islam, but I absolutely love Muslims. Do you see the distinction I'm making? Yes, I want nothing to do with Islam, but I love Muslims. They are my favorite people. Why in the world have I spent 45 years working with them if I didn't love them? However, isn't Abraham just as guilty of disliking Islam, which would invalidate his later arguments for Muhammad's existence based on the tradition? Be careful, that argument goes both ways. Are you seeing this, Abdul? Don't throw that at me. I'll throw it right back in your face.

Supposition number five: Since the traditions of Muhammad are so embarrassing, why in the world even write them? I love this one. This is what David Wood took me on about two years ago. We had a debate on this very subject, and he said, "Jay, how can you have this guy? He is so embarrassing. Look at all the things he did wrong. Look at all the weaknesses he had. He was deceitful. He killed his enemies. He married a seven-year-old girl and consummated when she was nine, and he was 53. That's just terrible. How can... look at this guy. He was demon-possessed. He tried to commit suicide. He was... goodness sakes, he started wearing female clothes like he was a transvestite. How can you invent somebody like that?" Jay, here's the problem. The difficulty is this. Raymond and David Wood, they are embarrassed by Muhammad because they are comparing him to Jesus. Therefore, they're looking at Muhammad through the grid of Christian Christian cultural views. They're looking at Muhammad, and they want him to be Jesus. But he will never be Jesus. No one can be compared to Jesus. Of course, for us, he's absolutely embarrassing. But Muslims don't do that. They don't look at Muhammad through the big grid of Jesus at all. Therefore, they love his virility. They love his violence and his denigration of others. In fact, Muslims, whenever I bring this up, they tell me this: "Compared to Jesus, Muhammad is much greater. Jesus, he never married. He had no family. He never ruled. He never went to war. He never stood up against his oppressors. He never owned anything. He was a wimp." That's what they tell me. "I want to follow Muhammad. He went to war. He had a wife. He had children. He controlled the whole country. He is his model that we use all over the Muslim world today. And he was a man. Whereas Jesus was a woman." For a Muslim, they love Muhammad because of that. We hate him because he's not like Jesus. Be careful, folks. The more you show these things to Muslims, the more I agree with you. Absolutely. Why don't you come on home? He's a much better man than Jesus. What kind of model is Jesus? Didn't do anything that I want to do. What's more, if you're looking at his depression or his attempted suicide, his demon possession or his cross-dressing, even his homosexual tendencies, which Abraham Raymond loves to talk about, David Wood, they love to go on this. These are typical crises of every prophet. Every prophet goes through these crises, but they overcome every one of them. They didn't remain depressed. He didn't continue to wear dresses. He didn't commit suicide, otherwise he wouldn't have lived. Every prophet goes through them and then they conquer them. And by conquering them, they prove and they show to us what we can do, proving that they were true prophets. The same happened to Muhammad, a true prophet because he surmounted these problems in their eyes. So, be careful about using that argument, folks. Every time I use that argument, Muslims want to invite me to tea. Say, "Yes, thank you. Why don't you come back to Muhammad? What a guy. Whereas, he's my man."

Supposition number six: Mecca is not an argument against Muhammad. Oh boy, I love this one. Though Raymond did not watch any of our videos on Mecca, his response suggests that we are simply arguing from silence, and an absence of evidence does not prove the evidence of absence. He says that in his video, "I could believe that he was actually quoting Dr. uh Dr. I forgot his name, J Madawi from the last century. At some point in the future, references for Mecca will exist." My response: If there was no Mecca, then it doesn't matter what Muhammad or Muhammmed you find. If he does not come from Mecca, but then he is not the Muhammad of Islam. So, it absolutely does matter that Mecca existed. In 1995, we had almost no evidence. Back there when I debated Dr. Madawi, but today we have all the evidence. We have coins, we have inscriptions, we have buildings, we have manuscripts. So, it is now the Muslims who are arguing from silence. Whoops, I finished that one there.

His example of Troy, that he uses, is non-sequitur, since we have ample references for ancient history for the existence of Troy. We just did not know where it was situated until now. Conversely, we have no references from ancient history for even the existence of any place called Mecca in Arabia.

Now, I'm going to go through this very quickly because you've seen this before. Remember the that stool that I showed you at the very beginning? If you shut down Mecca, you shut down the other two. The other two are absolutely are dependent on Mecca. What Muslims say about Mecca, they say that it's the oldest city in history, it's where Adam and Eve went to. You can't get a city that's older than Adam and Eve because in order to have a city, you have to have people. It's where Abraham destroyed the idols in Surah chapter 21. It's was the center of trade, north, south, east, and west. So, somewhere, somewhere, someone should have heard about it.

When you look at the Quran, you will see that it refers to the first sanctuary of mankind, but it doesn't call it Mecca. Isn't that interesting? It calls it al-Haram, the forbidden place of bowing. Now, Muslims believe that is the Kaaba today. In chapter 6 and chapter 42, it says it is where Adam and Eve were there. In chapter 7, it is where Abraham lived. In chapter 21, and where Muhammad was born until 622, and where the Qibla was directed towards in chapter 2. Now, all of the above imply he lived there from the very beginning. But here's the problem: there's only one reference to the word Mecca in the entire Quran. Chapter 48:4, that's it. If it's such an important city, why is it only referred to it once? What's more, when you look at the tradition, suddenly they proliferate with all kinds of references to Mecca, because they're written in the 14th and 15th century, much, much, much later. But notice that they talk about this place with streams and fields and trees and grass and fruit and clay and loam and grapes and grain and pomegranates and olive trees. Folks, that sounds like a very fertile place, doesn't it? Take a look at Mecca. Does it look like it has that kind of fertility? Its soil is so depleted that it's been depleted for thousands of years. You can't get that kind of vegetation in a place like Mecca.

In the Quran, Mecca is referred to as the place of the prophet. But in the 11th to 15th century traditions, the Mecca they portray suggests an author lived much, much further north where there was a lot of fertility. Here are my conclusions. We begin with Mecca because its foundation for both Muhammad and the Quran. So, without it, they both fall, because it does not matter which Muhammad or which Quran you find. If they are not from Mecca, they are not the Muhammad or the Quran of Islam. Since Mecca is the earliest and most important city in the history of mankind, it has to be the center of the world and therefore certainly the best known. Therefore, references suggest that Mecca had lush vegetation such as fruit, trees, grass, grains, streams, which make no sense when you look at the pictures. Just take a look at the pictures. Historically, it's never had any fertility. Ironically, though, it's claimed to be the greatest city in the history. It is only referred to once, signifying that the authors either did not consider it important or it came into existence much, much later.

Even the Arabic, if you look at the Arabic, and if you people, you can read the Arabic here, you notice the Arabic here has the alif-sur and the marbuta and the definite article, right? That's all through the Arabic. That is not the Arabic they would have spoken in Mecca. The Arabic they spoke in Mecca is Arabic from Yemen, from way down south. There is no, there is no alif-sur and there is no definite article in the Semitic Arabic. So, even the Arabic in the Quran does not come from Mecca. So, where does this Arabic come from? It comes from Nabataean in Aramaic, which is from Jordan. That's 800 miles to the north. Can you see a problem, folks? They've got the wrong Arabic.

Geographically speaking, when you look at the Quran, just look at all the references. 65 references. 23 times it mentions that Muhammad goes up and visits these people way up here in way up here. In 24 times, visits the people in Tabuk. He's way down here in Mecca, right? Supposedly, how can he go way up to Ud and back down in one day? Seven times he visits these people in Midian. Folks, that's 600 miles to the north. How does he go up 600 miles and come back in one day? Unless you have helicopters or airplanes, which I don't think they had in the seventh century. Can you see? Obviously, whoever these, whoever wrote the Quran was writing from way further north where these places existed. It also mentions that that these people, there are nowhere that they called them Muslims. They call them Ishmaelites or Hagarines or Muhajirun or Mahajirun or Saracens. Those are the five words they give to themselves. All these people living that far north. And they say that there are 70 to 300 prophets who were buried in Mecca. And when they were buried there, they were buried in a kneeling position so they could keep praying. Which means if you go to Mecca today, you should be able to find them. And they are. They're going to Mecca. And they're building 62 skyscrapers all the way around the Kaaba. When you build skyscrapers, you have to dig deep to get deep foundations. Ask any of the archaeologists. We did so a number of years ago. We asked the archaeologists what have they found. When they dig these foundations, they haven't found a thing. Not one of these bodies exist. And notice what they're doing. They're now cementing up all around the Kaaba. Why do you think they're cementing it up? To shut down the evidence.

Dr. Patricia Kurunda wanted to find out if there's any reference to the city of Mecca in any of the ancient civilizations. She went to the Assyrians. She went to the Romans. She went to the Persians. Uh, she went to the Himyarites. She went to the Nubians. Uh, she went to the Nabataeans. She went to everybody that was surrounding all those round red circles, uh, the red circles and the rectangles. Every one of those traditions, and she read all of their documents. Could not find one reference to Mecca in any of their documents. So, she said, "Well, what about the lesser-known towns?" Starting with Aden down here, and then you have Sana, and then you have Najran, and then you have Taif, and then you have Yathrib, and then you have uh, Khaybar, and you have Tabuk, and then you have Gaza in the north. Those are all the oases along the western plateau, and she found reference after reference to all of them all the way back to 300 BC. Reference after reference, they were well known. Not one reference to Mecca, which is supposed to be the greatest city in the history of mankind, the oldest city in the history of mankind, the center of the world. Not one reference in any of those civilizations.

The trade routes, she went and looked at the trade routes, and she went, and she could read their documents. She could read their languages. And from the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, all the way up until the 8th century, she could not find any reference to Mecca on any of the trade routes. Any of the documents, yet neither of the land routes. She went to the land routes, the Red Sea trade routes. She found the Red Sea trade routes, which was going up and down the Red Sea, were all on the African side and not on the Arab side. And they all went up to these five cities along coastal cities along the African coast, not one along the Arab coast. I'll tell you why in just a minute.

The first reference she could find in any documentation to the city of Mecca was not till 741 in the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Aristeas, written in 741. And that's a 100 years after Muhammad died. But Ptolemy, the great geographer, wrote his book on Arabia in the second century. And he put all the different cities that belong to Arabia. And he wrote them all out there. And he put where the rivers were. And he put where the mountains were. Not once did he mention Mecca in the second century. And the reason why is very simple, folks. It has to do with one word. Anybody know what that word is? Say it again. Water. It's as simple as that. Look at any map of Arabia. Look at any geographical map. Look at any topographical map and look and see what you notice. Every one of those maps shows that Mecca is in the middle of a desert. Where there's desert, there's no water. No water, no food. No food, no people. No people, no towns. No towns, no cities. No cities, no history. No history, no civilization. Do you see a problem, folks? You need water. In order to have any civilization, you need water.

So, Muslims come back to me, "Ah, yeah, but what about the Zamzam well?" Oh, I love the Zamzam well. The Zamzam well right there next to the Kaaba, 30 feet away. There it is. See a picture of the Zamzam well. It's 30 feet across and 50 feet deep. And this is inexhaustible water that the Lord has given, that Allah has given to the Muslims so that they can drink from this well. If you go to any Muslim bookshop here in Central or Southern California, you will see Zamzam water there. Liters and liters and liters of it. Four million people go to the Hajj. Two million go to the Hajj. Two million people are already there. Four million people in Mecca drink the Zamzam water. How can they, that many people? How can almost two billion people drink water from the Zamzam well, and it's only 30 feet across and 50 feet deep? Muslims say it's this is the miracle of Allah. Inexhaustible water.

So, I decided to do some research on this. I went back and looked, and I just Googled it. You can Google it. And what happened in 1953? They capped the well and they put it underground. And then they had, you had pipes going into the well, and then pipes coming out of the well. Just follow the pipes, folks. Those pipes go up to a mountain about two or three miles away. And there is these enormous holding tanks, the world's largest tanks for where all this water comes from that goes and fills the well and comes back out again. So, where does the water come for those tanks? Just follow the pipes. And they go down, down, down, down to Jeddah. And they go down to these desalination plants. 27 desalination plants, which take the salt water, put it into fresh water, send it up to those tanks, put it down into the well, put some perfume into it and some sweetening, and then they sell it to the whole world. And boy, the Saudi Arabian government is making all the profit in the world. But it has nothing to do with Allah. Who built those desalination plants? Those desalination plants. Bechtel Corporation, Kansas City, United States. Give ourselves a hand, folks. Everything the Muslims are dependent on comes from us because of Mecca's water.

I won't go into this, but I will go into this. What's fascinating, Dan Gibson, a good friend of mine, decided to find where all the Qiblas were facing. And he saw that none of the Qiblas were facing Mecca. Not until 750. All the Qiblas were facing Petra and Jerusalem, the antecedents to all the to the five major things that they do in Mecca. Take a look. When they circumambulate seven times going counterclockwise around this Kaaba, which means cube, it's the same word in Hebrew. That's where the Holy of Holies was in Jerusalem. They're just following what the Jews did seven times. Why do they go seven times counterclockwise? Because of Jericho. And then they go from Safa and Marwa, running back and forth seven times looking for water. Why do they go from Safa? It's just two rocks just a 100 feet away from the Kaaba. They're only 20 feet high. These are not mountains that Hagar is looking for water in. That's nothing more than a facsimile. So, where's the original Marwa and the original Safa? Marwa is Mount Moriah. Marwa is the Arabic for Mount Moriah. Safa is Mount Scopus on the other side of the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem. It all comes from Jerusalem. They're just copying the Jews. Bring it home.

Certainly, someone somewhere at some time should have known about this city. Yet, no one anywhere nor at any time has, proving that it never existed at the time of Muhammad, nor during early Islam. So, if Mecca did not exist, then what Muhammad is Raymond referring to? His Muhammad had to have been born and grew up there and spent the first 52 years there. He's going to have a hard time. Are you listening to this, Abdul? Help him out, would you?

Supposition 7: No one can prove or disprove historical data. Since nothing historical can be proven or disproven, those who love Muhammad will continue to believe his existence regardless of what we contend. Jesus Christ supposedly did not exist either for the last 200 years. Yet, billions of people still believe he did. No one will investigate the historical claims about Muhammad, just as no Christians did against Jesus Christ existed. So, it is not worthy of our time. He says my response suggesting that nothing historical can be proven or not is not academic. His earlier example of Troy suggests that historical claims can be proven, as have been done, and he was the one that gave that as an example. Raymond is correct. The common person on the street will not investigate Muhammad's existence, as is not healthy. They wouldn't live very long. This is primarily for the academics who are the future leaders of Islam, and who can sway many more Muslims against Islam than either you or me.

Supposition eight: It all comes down to a matter of faith. Why would anyone listen to a white American Christian speak about the existence of their beloved prophet when they have faith that he existed? Muslims will either laugh or mock anyone trying to say that Muhammad did not exist because it comes across to them as ludicrous and even arrogant. My response: True. Most of those who support this material are fellow middle-class educated Westerners like myself. But it is beginning to take traction all over Africa, Asia, and even the Americas. I've been in seven countries since January introducing this material, mostly in Africa. They love this in Africa. They want this in Africa because this is the only material they can use because they cannot confront Muhammad in Africa. Not about all the proclivities. They will be killed. But they can confront this. I'll tell you, I'll tell you in just a minute.

Claims against Muhammad's existence are merely an academic or subjective exercise. "You simply dislike Muhammad," he says. "Therefore, your viewpoint is totally inconsequential and thus the weakest argument. No one will investigate the historical claims about Muhammad, just as no Christians did against Jesus Christ existed. So, it is not worthy of our time." My response: The terms academic or subjective do not negate the evidence which we have and have nothing to do with the historical proof of Muhammad's existence. What's more, Raymond's claims against Muhammad's morality and relevancy are equally academic and subjective and therefore equally inconsequential. So, I'll just throw it right back on his lap.

And number 10: "The best polemic," he says, "is to prove how irrelevant Muhammad is for today. It is a tried and proven methodology. Everyone uses it. You will get many more converts." My response: I used it for 30 years, folks. This is called the internal critique because everyone used it. That's the only thing we had. Cindy was the only polemic that existed, but I had hardly any success. I hardly, I got very few converts using that method. Just got a lot of anger and death threats because when you start talking about Muhammad's violence and about his sexual proclivities, Muslims aren't going to like you too much for mocking that. I felt dirty using these arguments. It causes more anger, resulting in creating walls and censorship by Muslims and Westerners. People in Muslim-dominated countries just cannot use those arguments. When I go to Africa, they say, "We can't use what Raymond's, Abraham's doing. We can't use what David Wood's saying. You can use that in the West because you have the freedoms to do so. But we can't use that." They much prefer this argument. Why? There are three forms of polemics. I'm going to end with this. When you go on the offense, you can either do the internal polemics. That's what Raymond Abraham is using. That's his favorite. Looking at the Quran, unpacking the verses and just confronting them. Or looking at Muhammad, looking at what he said, what he did, and confronting what he said and did. That's the internal polemics. Or you can use cultural polemics, looking at what Islam is doing around the world, looking how irrelevant they are. I prefer external polemics. The one he thinks is the least favorite is my favorite. Why? Because when you look at Muhammad, and you look at Mecca, and you look at the Quran, you have to house them in history. This form of polemics confronts the very foundations of Islam without confronting the people or their revelation or their prophet, and lowers the anger I'm finding.

Why is this critique so popular? First of all, notice everything's up on the screen. You didn't have to look at me once. Everything's up there. It's visual. We didn't get into the coins or the rocks or the buildings or the maps. We didn't get into that night. We didn't have time to do that. We just looked at the timelines. Most of that, most you didn't have to learn a word of Arabic. Now, we did have our Arabic experts down here, and they helped us with MMA, but nothing I didn't teach any Arabic to you tonight. Did you notice that you don't have to learn Arabic? It is foundational to everything Muslims believe. It features one book by one man in one place. Yet, without any of these three, Islam falls to pieces.

Folks, we have the evidence. So, it's the Muslims who now have to argue from silence, not us. It is historically neutral and therefore not Islamophobic or hate speech. Thus, everyone can use it. But I would rather we use this as Christians. Why? For one very good, well, not two reasons. Because we are the only ones that have gone through this process with Jesus Christ. We are the only ones that had to prove that he existed. We are the only ones that had to prove who Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were. We are the only ones that have used historical criticism. And we've come out the other end. We have succeeded in proving Jesus historically, unlike what Raymond Abraham's saying. We absolutely have proved his historicity. Therefore, we understand redacted criticism, source criticism, form criticism, textual criticism. Notice I was using all three tonight. We understand that better than anybody else because we've done it with our own Lord Jesus Christ. And we are the therefore the most public and able to do so. But why? Because we are the only ones that have a response to these questions we're giving Muslims. We are the only ones that are looking at this book, finding it wanting, and bringing them home to this book. We are the only ones that are looking back at the God behind this book, Allah, and bringing him back to a much greater God, Yahweh. Yes, we are the only ones that can go to this book and look at Muhammad, shut him down, but provide the alternative, Jesus Christ. Yes, we need to bring them home. Amen.

Now, I'm going to end with this. This morning, I had to speak at two other churches, both Calvary Chapel churches. And one of them, I decided to do something I had not done before. I decided to have a discussion between Jesus and Muhammad. So, I put Muhammad over here, and I was Jesus. I turn out to be sacrilegious, and I said, "Muhammad, I want to talk to you about some things. First of all, I'm a little upset with what you have done. First of all, who and how can you claim to be a prophet? You're not in the prophetic line. You didn't do anything to prove you're a prophet. All prophets either have to do a miracle or a prophecy. You didn't do either. That which you wrote down here completely confronts what I've written down from all the other prophets. How can you completely confront everything that's in my book? And of course, you have no idea who I am. I'm not Allah. Allah is not a name. It's a title. It means 'the god.' What's my name? Why is you don't even know my name? And look what you did to me. You took me off the cross and put another man in my place. How dare you do that?" And I started getting indignant, really angry. And I said, "By the way, Muhammad," said, "Where are you? You've disappeared. That's right. You never existed. What a waste of time."

Let's pray. Our heavenly Father, we want to thank you for not only who you are, but the fact you did exist. We want to thank you that you did come to earth 2,000 years ago, and that you told us you were going to do so from the very beginning, right there with Adam and Eve. And all the way through history, you have pointed to who you were and what you were going to do. We knew your name. We were expecting. We knew that you were going to be called the Son of God. We knew that you were going to be called the Messiah. We knew that you were going to be called the Son of Man. And we knew that you had a name, Yahweh. What a name. And when you came, some of us saw you. Some of us believed you. Many did not. But Lord, we believe you. We know you existed. We know you came to earth. And you had to come to earth because I'm damned if you didn't. Thank God you did exist. And thank God Muhammad didn't. Because what Muhammad has done to you, what Muhammad has done to your scriptures, what Muhammad has done to your story, what Muhammad has done to everything that we hold to be dear. I'm so glad he never existed. And I don't want to waste time anymore on that man who never existed. In Christ's name, we pray. Amen.

[Applause]