Robert Spencer Vs David Wood @apologeticsroadshow | Did Muhammad Exist?
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Everyone, please give a warm welcome to the stage, Dr. James Coons. All right, folks, thank you very much. We're very excited for this debate. We're going to do that vote one more time. But before we do, I do want to introduce our speakers. That way you know what their positions are on this debate topic of whether or not Muhammad existed. So who? David will be going first and...

David is a former atheist and ex-con who has a PhD in philosophy. They make me say these things. And makes Christian videos. If you'd give David Wood, Dr. David Wood, a round of applause, please. And then I want you to remember, so David will be arguing that Muhammad did, in fact, exist. And then arguing against David. We are thrilled to have you here for our first time at a debate con. It's a pleasure to have you.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of 29 best-selling books, including The Truth About Muhammad, Did Muhammad Exist?, and Muhammad, A Critical Biography. Please give him a warm welcome as well. Now, if you happen to currently lean towards David's position, that you think Muhammad did exist, would you put your hand up for our little vote? Smart.

Give it a second. If you're watching at home, I want to remind you to hit that subscribe button as we have many more debates coming up. And I like this crowd. For those of you wondering why we do these votes, Manifold is another sponsor of DebateCon 5. You can vote right now. If you look in the description box, Manifold is the world's largest social prediction market. You can click on that link right now and predict who will be the winner of this debate, which will be determined by these hand polls.

If you can put your hands down and raise your hand if you would take or say you lean toward the position that Mohammed did not exist. Very good. Thank you very much. And with that, we'll get started with the actual debate. Thank you very much, gentlemen. We're thrilled to have you here. The first opening will be from David Wood. That's 20 minutes. Thank you very much. The floor is all yours, Dr. Wood.

Thank you James. Good afternoon everyone. I'd like to thank James especially for setting up this conference and this debate and for persevering in the face of various obstacles, setbacks, threats and so on. I'd also like to thank Robert for agreeing to do this debate on short notice and for showing up even after I sent him a message promising to humiliate him.

As you can see, I'm what's called a method debater. I get into character. I went full Dawa here. Don't try that at home. Never go full Dawa. Speaking of Dawa, we should all be thanking Central Dawa, who's threat. James, I'm going to need like an extra three minutes on my time for the laughter I didn't anticipate.

We shall be thanking Central Doha for his threats against AP, which led AP to set up a GoFundMe for a security system. People sent AP more than $100,000. Thank you. Far more than he requested. AP can afford his own personal Iron Dome system right now. I guess I can thank Central Doha directly because we know he's watching from whatever basement he's hiding in.

Let me say, Central Dawa, wherever you're watching from, as you're begging your half a dozen fans for nickels on TikTok, just imagine AP swimming through a sea of money like Scrooge McDuck. All thanks to you, Central Dawa. You suck at debate, but we finally found something you're good at, namely raising money for ex-Muslims who make fun of your profit constantly. Now, there's one other person I'd like to thank.

As we all know by now, James couldn't find a Muslim anywhere on the planet who was willing to come here and defend Muhammad. Sheikh Uthman was invited to debate. He wouldn't do it. Muhammad Hijab said he wouldn't do it for $80,000. He wouldn't defend Muhammad. That's what I call fear. There are zero Da'wah guys apparently left on the planet who are willing to defend Muhammad in a debate. And Issa, where's Issa? You don't count Issa.

You're too nice to be a dawah clown. If you all don't know, Isa, he's part Muslim, part Jewish, and acts like a Christian. In fact, hang on, I got something here. I brought Isa something, actually. This is also not coming out of my time, James. In honor of Isa being such a nice guy all the time, I prepared him something that brought together all of his religious influences. I made a Star of David,

Christmas tree topper from a page of the Quran. Come get your stuff. Come grab it, Isa. That's hard work, by the way. That's hard work. You're darn right he took it. He's cool, that's why. This is what I do. I build bridges with the sacred art of Quranagami. Now, back to the final person I'd like to thank.

I'm apparently the only person on the entire planet right now who's willing to stand up for Muhammad against the Islamophobic attacks of people like Robert Spencer. So, on behalf of the world's two billion Muslims, I would like to thank myself for being the only person who's willing to stand up for your prophet. My goodness, we're starting 2025 with David Wood as the only remaining defender of Muhammad on the planet. This is gonna be a great year for Dawah, ladies and gentlemen.

And for all you Dawah fans out there who are watching, keep in mind this was supposed to be a debate between me and Alex O'Connor. Alex was going to be blasting away at the deity of Christ. Now he's going to be defending the deity of Christ. And because of the threats, Alex got scared, did not want to debate. And so this is what you're left with. Even then, James wanted to replace debate with like a Muslim debate or something. Couldn't find anything. So I'm pointing this out because Muslims of the world...

If you don't like the way I defend your prophet tonight, that's on you. That's on you. You guys did this. There are these little pesky things called consequences, and may this entire debate be a lesson in consequences. All right, enough of this rapport-building chit-chat. Our topic is, did Muhammad exist?

I believe Muhammad did exist. I'm what you might call a Muhammad realist, as are most of you in here apparently. I believe there was a man called Muhammad who claimed to be a prophet and who started a religion called Islam. Robert, by contrast,

doesn't believe Muhammad existed. Robert is what you would call a Muhammad mither or Muhammad mythicist. I'll let Robert explain his own position, but Muhammad mythers often believe that some later Arab ruler invented Muhammad in order to start a new religion. I call this view MOACT, which stands for the mother of all conspiracy theories. Every other conspiracy you've ever heard of is a joke.

compared to Mo'akht. Why do I say this? Well, think about what it would take to pull this off. Some Arab ruler decides to start a religion. So he comes up with the character Muhammad. Then he needs a bunch of people to make up all kinds of stories about Muhammad. And not just about Muhammad, there's the entire supporting cast, all Muhammad's wives, his cousins, his aunts and uncles and so on, the entire Muslim community of the time. They have to come up with all of this stuff.

And they go into lots of detail and genealogies and so on. I have shelves of Muslim sources about Muhammad and the people around him. These sources are all made up apparently, according to Muhammad mythicists. So people had to make up all these stories. And the people who were making up these stories, at least at the beginning, had to know what they were doing. They were all part of the conspiracy.

But they didn't just make up thousands and thousands of stories. They had to convince the population to believe these stories. They had to tell the population that this was their religion all along. Now imagine someone trying to do this to you, for instance, like even if you had the power, even if you had massive political power, imagine someone coming in and saying, "Hey, isn't it great that we all serve our great religion with our hero Bob the Prophet?"

And you go, "Who? What? What are you talking about?" "Oh yeah, you know Bob the Prophet, the one we've all been serving and who gave us the revelations that we've all been following for a long time." If someone actually could pull that off, these guys were absolute masters of mass manipulation. So these would be geniuses. Keep that in mind as we proceed because if they start sounding like insane idiots and simultaneously must have been the greatest geniuses of all time, we're gonna have a problem.

But, so, according to the theory, they somehow pulled this off. They somehow pulled off this great conspiracy. So some ruler conspired with some amazing storytellers and convinced an entire population that they'd all been following Muhammad for a long time. And the entire population climbed on board the Muhammad train. This was, hands down, the most successful conspiracy of all time. Keep that in mind.

But I don't believe in MOACT, the mother of all conspiracy theories. Why don't I believe it? Easy, I don't believe it's the best explanation for the evidence that we have. There's a lot of evidence that just doesn't fit this theory very well. So let me explain what I mean. It makes perfect sense for someone to invent a religion. That sort of thing happens all the time. It makes perfect sense for someone to make up a prophet or a religious figure to be the centerpiece of their religion. That sort of thing happens.

But if you're inventing a religion and inventing the last and greatest prophet of your religion, there are certain kinds of things that you're going to make up depending on what your goals are. What are your goals? And then you make up stories to go along with those goals. If you want people to believe this prophet is from God, you might make up miracle stories or stories of angels coming and helping out and so on.

If you want your religion to be a force that unites you while you conquer the world, you would make up commands to violently subjugate the world and to take captives and so on. So it's easy to understand why someone would make those kinds of things up.

But if you're inventing a new religion and you're inventing the last and greatest prophet for your new religion, you're not going to invent stories that make your hero look stupid or insane or unreliable or evil or cowardly or possessed. In other words, you'll invent things that help your case for your new prophet. You're not going to invent things that hurt your case for your new prophet.

This means that if we open up the Muslim sources and we find lots of stories that make Muhammad look stupid and insane and unreliable and evil and cowardly and possessed, the best explanation for why we have all these stories is that, like it or not, these things really happen. And if these things really happen, then Muhammad obviously existed. Here in my opening statement, I'm just going to give six examples of what I'm talking about. After that, Robert will have an opportunity to agree with me and surrender.

But if he doesn't agree with me, if he continues pushing the mother of all conspiracy theories, I have plenty of additional examples I can share in the rebuttals. So if I have to keep sharing embarrassing material about Muhammad, don't blame me. Blame Robert Spencer. I said this debate was going to be a lesson about consequences. So let's go through six simple examples.

First, we know from Muslim sources that when Muhammad began receiving revelations, his first impression of these revelations was that they were demonic. When Muhammad fled the cave of Hira, he was convinced that the first five verses of Surah 96 had been put into his head by some sort of demon or poetry genie. We read in the earliest Islamic biography of Muhammad,

Muhammad said, now none of God's creatures was more hateful to me than an ecstatic poet or a man possessed. I could not even look at them. I thought, woe is me, poet or possessed. Never shall Quraish say this of me. Whatever Muhammad encountered in that cave, he was convinced that it was something bad. He ran home to his wife for protection from this demon. I could make a point about how this makes Muhammad look like a total coward, what sort of

40-year-old man runs home to his wife to protect him from a demon. But I'll leave that aside. So Muhammad ran home to his wife, and it was his wife and her cousin who weren't there and who had no idea what he encountered who persuaded him that he wasn't possessed. He was a prophet of the great God Allah. Now, if you were making up a prophet for your new religion, would you make up a story about him thinking that he was possessed and possessed?

that he had encountered a demon and that he needed to be talked out of this view by people who weren't there. I wouldn't.

Second, we also know that after Muhammad's experience in the cave, he became suicidal and tried to hurl himself off a cliff. We'll continue reading, same passage. He says here in our earliest biography, "I will go to the top of the mountain and throw myself down that I might kill myself and gain rest." Again, it was his wife and her cousin who had to convince him that he wasn't possessed. He was a prophet of Allah.

When he concluded that he's a prophet and then stopped receiving revelations, he again became suicidal and tried repeatedly to hurl himself off a cliff. As we read in Sahih al-Bukhari,

But after a few days, Waraka died and the divine inspiration was also paused for a while. And the prophet became so sad, as we have heard, that he intended several times to throw himself from the tops of high mountains. And every time he went up to the top of a mountain in order to throw himself down, Gabriel would appear before him and say, Oh, Muhammad, you are indeed Allah's messenger in truth. Whereupon his heart would become quiet and he would calm down and would return home. Now, if you're manufacturing any prophet you want,

to unite some Arab tribes. Do you think you portray him as someone who tries to hurl himself off a cliff anytime anything he doesn't like happens? I certainly wouldn't. Third, according to our earliest Muslim sources, Muhammad once delivered a revelation from the devil. Here's what happened when Muhammad was preaching in Mecca. He didn't win very many converts, but he wanted, he really, really wanted his tribe to accept Islam.

Then one day he got the revelation he was looking for. Let's read one version of this story in the history of Atabari.

The messenger of God was sitting in a large gathering of Quraysh wishing that day that no revelation would come to him from God which would cause them to turn away from him. Then God revealed, "By the star when it sets, your comrade does not err, nor is he deceived." And the messenger of God recited it until he came to, "Have you not thought upon Allat and Aluzza and Manat the third, the other?" Allat, Aluzza, and Manat were three pagan goddesses.

When Satan cast on his tongue two phrases, these are the high-flying cranes, verily their intercession is to be desired.

He uttered them and went on to complete the surah. When he prostrated himself at the end of the surah, the whole company prostrated themselves with him. All the Muslims bowed down in honor of this revelation, promoting prayers to pagan goddesses. This is what surah 53 originally said. It said that in addition to Allah, there are three goddesses that Muslims can pray to, Allah, Al-Husayn, and An-Nah.

They're called the high-flying cranes because the idea was that they're like bird goddesses who fly your prayers up to Allah for you. Muhammad bowed down in honor of this revelation. His followers bowed down in honor of the revelation with him. But a little later, Muhammad came back and said that these verses, which he had delivered as part of the Quran, weren't really from God. They were from Satan. And he replaced them with the words we find in the Quran today.

Muhammad even confessed, got it there on the screen, "I have fabricated things against God and have imputed to him words which he has not spoken." Now, if you wanted to invent a prophet and you wanted to make shirk, associating partners with Allah, the worst possible sin anyone could ever commit,

Would you portray your new prophet as a man who committed shirk and convinced the entire Muslim community of his time to commit shirk with him and portray him as someone who couldn't tell the difference between a revelation from God and a revelation from Satan? Of course not. No one would.

Fourth, we know from multiple references in Bukhari and other sources that Muhammad was a victim of a magic spell that gave him delusional thoughts and false beliefs. We read the short version in Sahih al-Bukhari 3175 narrated Aisha, once the prophet was bewitched so that he began to imagine that he had done a thing which in fact he had not done. In the longer versions of the story, we find out that a magician used Muhammad's hairbrush and the hairs that were in it to cast a spell on him.

The spell lasted about a year or so. Eventually, two angels showed Muhammad how to break the spell. Why is this a problem? Well, Surah 2, verse 102 of the Quran says that demons teach magic to human beings. Surah 15, verse 42 says that Satan has no power over true servants of Allah.

So if magic is taught by demons and Satan has no power over Allah's true servants and a magician had power over Muhammad through the magic arts, what can we conclude? That Muhammad isn't a true servant of Allah. So tell me, if you were inventing a prophet to suit your fancy, would you say that his enemies could temporarily overpower him with black magic? Not a chance.

Fifth, according to Islam's most trusted sources, Muhammad made prophecies that were already falsified by the time Muhammad mythers say he was being invented. In other words, he gives a prophecy and maybe later on it turns out to be false, but Muhammad gave prophecies that by the time he's supposedly being invented, when they're inventing Muhammad,

These prophecies had already turned out to be false, which means if they're inventing them, they invented them as prophecies that already showed that he's a false prophet. So look at two examples. In Sahih al-Bukhari, Muhammad prophesied that one of the signs of the end times would be that the buttocks of the women who worship the idol, Dul Qalasa, would shake while walking around the shrine.

But the idol and the shrine were soon destroyed by Muslims. So the prophecy can no longer be fulfilled. You can't fulfill this prophecy. Muhammad said that a sign of the end times would be that the women would be shaking their behinds while walking around this pagan shrine. But the pagan shrine was destroyed soon after that. So this can't possibly have anything to do with the end times. So why would someone invent this when by the time they're inventing it, the shrine had already been destroyed?

Similarly, Muhammad once pointed to a boy and said that before the boy became an old man, the judgment would come. That boy has been dead a long time, so the prophecy failed. Now, here's the point. If Muhammad was being invented long after his supposed death, why would the conspirators invent a prophecy like this, which had already been falsified, which therefore exposed Muhammad as a false prophet?

If they're making up prophecies from Muhammad, wouldn't they make up prophecies that had been fulfilled? Why would they make up prophecies that by the time they were making them up had already turned out not to be correct? Sixth, according to the most common interpretations of Surah 4, verse 157 of the Quran,

Allah rescued Jesus from those who wanted to kill him. So obviously if we're inventing a prophet for Islam, we're going to invent a similarly miraculous story for our new prophet, right? But how did Muhammad die in the Muslim sources? He was poisoned by a Jewish woman whose family had been slaughtered by Muslims. A Jewish woman whose family had just been slaughtered at the Battle of Khyber offered to cook dinner for Muhammad and his companions.

And he accepted the generous offer. One minute. There are, what, eight billion people in the world? Mohammed accepted. I don't have one minute. I said it doesn't count because of all the interruptions from these very cool people. I can't help it. I'm terribly hilarious.

So anyway, a Jewish woman offers to cook Muhammad a meal even though he just slaughtered her entire family. There are about eight billion people in the world. You could ask all eight billion people. If you just slaughtered a woman's entire family and she says, "Hey, I'd like to cook dinner for you," is that a good idea to accept that offer? Eight billion out of eight billion people will say that is the dumbest idea ever. Do not do that. Muhammad is the one exception in all of history who thought, "Gee, this is a great, great plan."

The poison ate away at Muhammad's internal organs and he died in horrible agony. So the conspirators who invented Muhammad made him sound like the biggest idiot of all time. And that's not all they invented because look at what Muhammad said when he was dying.

He then said about the pain of which he died, "I continued to feel pain from the morsel which I had eaten at Kaibar. This is the time when it has cut off my aorta." He described that the poison killing him as cutting off his aorta. "Cut off my aorta." Why is that a strange detail to invent if you're making up stories about Muhammad? Because according to the Quran, that's exactly how Muhammad was told he would die if he was a false prophet.

Surah 69, verses 44 to 46, Allah declares, And if he, Muhammad, had fabricated against us some of the sayings, we would certainly have seized him by the right hand, then we would certainly have cut off his aorta. Muhammad were to fabricate revelations, come up with revelations out of his own head and say these are from God. Allah said he would cut off his aorta. How did Muhammad die? He died going, I feel my aorta being cut.

If a Middle Eastern ruler was inventing a story about Muhammad, why would he make up a story about Muhammad being outwitted by a Jewish woman, dying like a rat, and being completely exposed as a false prophet? It just doesn't make sense. So putting all of this together, we can see a problem. If the defenders of the mother of all conspiracy theories are correct,

The conspirators who created Islam were some of the greatest geniuses who've ever walked the planet. They somehow pulled off the most amazing conspiracy in history. But when we look at the Muslim sources, we learn that the prophet, the conspirators, invented thought

He was possessed by a demon, he repeatedly tried to commit suicide, he delivered revelations from Satan, he was the victim of black magic, he delivered numerous false prophecies, and he died in exactly the way the Quran said he would die if he was a false prophet. If that's the prophet these conspirators came up with, then they were total morons. How can they be some of the greatest geniuses ever and be complete morons?

Makes no sense and that's why the conspiracy theory makes no sense to me What does make sense? Muhammad existed and he had some serious serious problems Thank You David, we're gonna kick it over to Robert Spencer for his 20-minute opening statement When you start talking I'll hit the timer. Thank you very much David. That was most impressive The only problem with it is that we know that stories about Muhammad were made up and

on an industrial scale. After all, Bukhari is said to have traveled around the Islamic world and collected 600,000 stories about Muhammad. And then in Sahih Bukhari, he published 7,000 of them as authentic. What about the other 593,000 stories of Muhammad that he had collected?

he determined through various means, reliable or unreliable, that they were fake. He, in other words, understood that there was a large-scale production of falsehoods and fictions about Muhammad that was going on. And that was one of the reasons why he collected his hadith together, in order to try to winnow out the false from the true.

And how did he do that? And how did the other collectors of Hadith do that?

They did that originally simply on the basis of stories that corresponded to Quranic revelation or what was current in the Islamic world at the time. And those two things are not identical, as I'll come back to later. But the fact is that later on this was determined to be inadequate to the task

And so a further measure of authenticity was developed, which was the isnad chain, the chain of transmitters, that supposedly these stories were passed on from reliable person to reliable person like a game of telephone and through the generations were transmitted in absolutely perfect form until they were finally recorded.

Now, when were they recorded? The other thing that completely demolishes what David was saying is the fact that every story to which he referred dates not from the 7th century when Muhammad is supposed to have lived or the 8th century, but the 9th century, fully 200 years.

after Muhammad is supposed to have lived. Now, in the first place, we all know that if we actually played the game and everybody was completely sincere in here and honest, and we started over there and you whisper something to the next person who whispers it to the next person and it goes on right through the "isnaad" chain back to the back,

that it would be a different message. And if you don't believe it, I happen to have some examples right here. This is a story from Sahih Muslim and it is, of course, one of the reliable Hadith collections. Muslim, by the way, Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj was from Iran. Bukhari was from Uzbekistan. So, in other words, neither of them were walking around in Arabia collecting these stories.

And that in itself is important, but this is another thing. Okay, we got Sahih Muslim. I'm sorry I don't have a PowerPoint. I'm a 20th century speaker. You'll just have to try to listen closely. It's a lost art. Amr ibn Sa'd reported on the authority of his father...

that Allah's Apostle gathered for him on the day of Uhud, okay, so this is a story about the battle of Uhud, his parents, when a polytheist had set fire to the Muslims. Thereupon, Allah's Apostle said to him, "Sad, shoot an arrow."

Saad, may my mother and father be taken as ransom for you. I drew an arrow and I shot a featherless arrow at him, aiming at his side. And then he fell down and his private parts were exposed. Allah's messenger laughed that I saw his front teeth. So the story is that during the Battle of Uhud, one of the polytheists, one of the Meccan pagan Quraysh, they

were attacking the Muslims, Muhammad is standing there with Sa'd ibn Abi Waqas and he says, "Shoot an arrow, Sa'd, and kill that guy." And he kills him. The guy falls down and his private parts are exposed. Muhammad thinks that's the funniest thing ever and starts laughing so you can see his teeth.

Interesting, this is a total digression, but I have to tell you, the fantasies and fictions and falsehoods that prevail about Muhammad today are so strong that a noted Islamic scholar, Eric Ornsby, referred to this passage saying, Muhammad was such a charming guy and there are stories about him where he laughed so heartily that you could see his back teeth.

And they don't, he doesn't tell you, Ormsby, that, oh, it's when this guy got shot and his buttocks are exposed. That part he left out. But anyway, that's Muslim's version. Waqidi says, at one point during the Battle of Uhud, one of the Quraysh shot an arrow that struck the hem of Umm Ayman, a Muslim woman who had come at that time to give water to the wounded. As a result, she tripped and was revealed.

And the Quraysh attacker starts to laugh, and his laughter was loud. Muhammad, this grieved the prophet, so he gave Sa'd ibn Abi Waqas an arrow without an arrowhead and said, shoot.

The Muslims shot the warrior of the Quraysh, who had exposed and humiliated Umayman, and he fell down, exposing his buttocks, when Muhammad was again delighted. Sa'd said, I saw the messenger of Allah laugh then, until his teeth could be seen. So, it's clearly the same story, and yet we have...

several details that are different. In the first place, the woman doesn't show up in the other version. But Waqidi has this all about a Muslim woman who first tripped and her private parts were revealed. And Muhammad is so angry about this, he tells Sa'd to shoot the guy. Sa'd shoots the guy and then he is revealed. A lot of obsession with the revealing of private parts here. And then Muhammad laughs so his teeth can be seen.

From another, a third source, Ash-Shemil al-Muhammadiyya says this: Sa'd ibn Abi Waqas said, "I had seen the Prophet laugh at the Battle of the Trench so hard that his molar teeth became apparent.

I said, how was his laughter? He said, there was a man holding a shield while Saad was shooting, and the man was saying such and such and such and such with the shield covering his forehead. He was heaping insults on Muhammad. The source doesn't want to say what he was saying, you know. Saad therefore aimed an arrow at him and shot it when he raised his head, so it did not miss this part of him, meaning his forehead, and the man toppled over and kicked up his foot.

The prophet then laughed so much that his molar teeth became apparent. I said, what made him laugh? He replied, what he did to the man. So it's a battle of a hood, battle of the trench. We don't know. It's about a woman tripping and falling.

Or not. This time it's about this guy taunting the Muslims and hiding behind his shield. "Eh, you can't get me." And then going back behind the shield and so finally Sa'd shoots him. So maybe Sa'd ibn Abi Waqas was standing with Muhammad three separate times, twice during Uhud and once during the Battle of the Trench, and shot people between the eyes three different occasions.

Or maybe this is a story that is in the process of legendary development as so many others were, both those that were accepted and those that were rejected. The big problem that the people who say that Muhammad is

actually somebody whose history has been transmitted authentically, the big problem that they have is that none of the stories are contemporary and the idea that they would all be transmitted perfectly strains credulity. We know that that doesn't even happen in our own day.

The fact that there are differences between various stories, like some of the ones that David adduced, the fact that Muhammad makes excuses and says he doesn't have miracles in the Quran and then in the Hadith, he's making miracle after miracle after miracle. Or some of the other things, let me see, I made some notes about some of them, that...

Though the Aorta story that the Quran says that a false prophet will be struck in the Aorta and then Muhammad is struck in the Aorta, you have to understand that this was not done by one guy. It is true that it all started, we start to hear mention of Muhammad around the time of Abdul Malik, the caliph from 685 to 705.

And it's noteworthy since David said that they had to convince the people that this was their religion all along. We actually have record of that.

that around the time of Abd al-Malik and Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, Malik ibn Anas, in one of the early Hadith collections, he records a story where this old guy says, reading from the Mushaf, that is a copy of the Quran, at the mosque was not done by people in the past. It was Hajjaj ibn Yusuf who first instituted it. Now think about that for a minute.

that Hajjaj ibn Yusuf instituted the reading of the Quran in the mosques, and he's around the 690s and early 700s. And yet the standard story is that Uthman put the Quran together in 653 and distributed the copy that he had made to all the provinces. And then they were quiet about it for 40 years, and nobody even mentioned that they had such a book.

And nobody ever quoted it. And then 40 years later, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf starts telling people to read the Quran in the mosques. But in any case, the larger point is that this was not done all by Hajjaj ibn Yusuf or by Abd al-Malik. This all doesn't come from nowhere either.

We have Muawiyah, the caliph after the rightly guided caliphs. He was the caliph from 661 to 680. And we have him talking to the emperor of the Romans in 651, actually before he was the caliph, when he was governor of Syria. He wrote to Constans II, the Roman emperor. And he's telling him, follow the religion of Abraham. We follow the religion of Abraham.

It seems very clear that the Arabs, once they were unified, whatever may have happened before that, were Abrahamic monotheists who considered themselves to be of the spiritual lineage of Abraham. But they were not exactly Jews and they were not exactly Christians.

They were obviously not Muslims either. They never mentioned, Muawiyah never mentions Muhammad, the Quran, or Islam, neither do any of his contemporaries. There are coins from his reign that say Muhammad, but have a cross on them, which is very weird if you think Muawiyah was the son of Abu Sufyan.

who was the Quraysh chieftain who fought against Muhammad for years and then was finally converted to Islam toward the end of Muhammad's life after the conquest of Mecca. And Muawiyah then grew up as a Muslim.

And yet he never seemed to hear, "They slew him not nor crucified, but it appeared so unto them," as the Quran says in chapter 4 verse 157. He never heard that Jesus is going to come back and break the cross, as Muhammad says in a Hadith. Apparently not, because he put crosses on his coins next to the word Muhammad. Now, how do we make sense of that?

It is clear that from even before that, and before anybody is talking about Islam, that Muhammad was a title. And it was a title meaning exactly what it means, the praised one. And that that title was given to various people over the course of the centuries. And so in the year 518 in Yemen...

there was actually a Jewish ruler who defeated a Christian force in southern Arabia there in Yemen. And his name was Yusuf Asar Yathar, also known as Zunawas. And he defeated Christians coming from Abyssinia to fight and left an inscription there on a rock that says, O Lord of the Jews, by the praised one.

That is Rahab ab-Muhammad. And so the praised one clearly doesn't refer to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, in the year 518. It's a title.

and it's a title that is given to revered figures, to God himself apparently in this inscription, and to others. So that's floating around, and Abrahamic monotheism is floating around. Then, when Abd al-Malik and Hajjaj ibn Yusuf decide this is the time to gather together all these traditions and create a religion,

then they make use of what is there already. It doesn't just come out of whole cloth. They're not making it up out of nothing. They're using the earlier sources. They did this in order to unify their empire. After the great Arab conquests, the unity of an empire was considered to be its common religion. There were two great powers in the world: the Persian Empire, which was Zoroastrian, and the Byzantine or Roman Empire, which was Christian.

And they were not bound together by a constitution or a parliament or ethnic unity or common nationality, anything of the kind. They were both multi-ethnic, multi-national empires that were bound together by a common religion.

The Arabs started to put together Islam out of these earlier materials in order to create a source of unity for their own empire. But it wasn't done by one person. Once Muhammad began to be referred to as a specific individual, then many people began to create stories that were justifying their own positions in various disputes and conflicts.

using Muhammad in order to strengthen that position. And then other people would make up another story that contradicted. This is why the Hadith are so full of contradictory material. And you can find so many where, you know, Muhammad says, "Don't kill the women and children." And then in others they say, "You know, there are women and children in there where you're bombarding." And he says, "They are from them." In other words, it doesn't matter.

So why is it that Mohammed might be completely flighty and schizophrenic, but more likely it's that two different factions were creating stories to justify their own positions. So anyway, before I end up here, there's plenty more, but I wanted to give you some responses to...

what David was saying. Obviously, indeed, you're not going to make up stories that make your hero look stupid or insane or unreliable or cowardly, but that all depends upon your point of view. We have to have a little bit of what Shakespeare called negative capability, the ability to enter into the mindset of people who looked at the world in a drastically different way.

And so, for example, if Muhammad was suicidal but Gabriel saves him from suicide, the point is not, gee, Muhammad was such an unstable personality that he was suicidal. The point for the people who were fabricating the story was that Allah is going to protect the Prophet in all cases and no matter what. When you have

the encounter and he thinks that it was a demon and then his wife takes him to his wife's uncle and he convinces him that it was Gabriel. This is to rule out that it was a demon that is appearing to Muhammad and to show the Arabs of the time, he's not actually poet or possessed, he's really a prophet. We already covered those possibilities and ruled them out.

You have the same thing with the revelation from the devil, the famous satanic verses incident, that if Muhammad can get a revelation from Satan and that it's cast out, that takes care of several things. One is, it accounts for contradictions within this literature when they're bringing it all together. It explains why the material doesn't cohere.

because some of it is from doubtful or even demonic sources. But Allah always protects the revelation, and that's the important takeaway point for the people of the time that this was being put together. It's the same thing with the spells. David said, if you're making up stories, would you have Muhammad temporarily overcome by a spell? Temporarily is the key word in that sentence.

That you don't want Muhammad overcome by the spell, but you want to show that Allah will deliver him from the spells and that Allah has power over all these things that the people of the time took very seriously and thought people could put a spell on me and what can I do? Well, now I know that Allah will deliver me from them if I'm a pious Muslim.

He's outwitted by a Jewish woman and he dies. Yeah, that looks bad. But who does it look bad for? The Jews who are constantly the demons of the peace and the people who are being villainized here for various reasons. Probably some of most of them, if not all of them, political. You might note that I referred a little while ago to the Jewish kingdom in Yemen.

that was there in 518, where is it now? Well obviously it's not there, it was conquered and overcome by the Muslims who must have thought that the Jews were competition for them in that area as well as in others and demonized them accordingly. How are we doing? - One minute. - I will actually keep to that myself. But anyway,

You have also some of the basic problems that are involved with not thinking that Muhammad is a historical figure. A lot of the story, which I'm sure you're all familiar with in general, takes place in Mecca. And Mecca is supposed to be where Muhammad was born in 570 and where he lived until 622 when he moved to Medina in the Hijrah.

And all of those things happen. There's voluminous material in the Hadith about what happens in Mecca. Okay, and we have the records of tradesmen who traveled the spice road between Constantinople and India, and they kept meticulous records of where they went and where they made sales, and they never went to Mecca. There's no mention of Mecca until the 10th century. So how could any of this have happened? Thanks.

All right, we'll kick it back to David Wood for his 12-minute rebuttal. Hey, who put that shirt up here? I'd like to point out that Robert did go 15 seconds over, despite one minute earlier saying he would not, so I don't know how much we can trust anything he says at this point.

In my opening statement, I presented six things that we read about Muhammad and Muslim sources that someone inventing a prophet to start a new religion wouldn't have invented. I pointed out that Muhammad's first impression of his revelations was that they were demonic. Robert replied that the story was meant to show that Muhammad wasn't possessed.

So you invent a story about Muhammad thinking he's possessed in order to show that actually he wasn't possessed. Why bring that up, right? It's like if I'm inventing someone and I want to show that he's not gay, why would I invent a story about him thinking he's gay and then being convinced that he's not? Like you don't have to invent to begin with. So I don't know. It's weird things. Weird to invent stories that you're just trying to show are false.

I pointed out that Muhammad repeatedly attempted suicide, and Robert interprets this and claims that the point was that Muhammad was, the point wasn't that Muhammad was suicidal, the point was that Allah was going to protect Muhammad. Again, why invent the story?

And if you wanted to show that Allah is going to protect Muhammad no matter what, you could have all sorts of things about people attacking him and Allah just keeps rescuing him to show that he's on his side. You don't need to invent a story about Muhammad being a suicidal person who anytime anything goes wrong, he runs to a cliff and I'm going to jump off again.

As far as Muhammad delivering revelations from Satan, Robert claims that the story was that Allah delivered him out of it. And the same with Muhammad being a victim of a magic spell that gave him delusional thoughts and false beliefs. At the end, Muhammad is delivered by Allah. And so that's the point of these stories. Again, why invent them? And I'll go ahead and point out here. I'll go ahead and point out here.

This is a cumulative case. If you said there's one really, really weird thing about this guy that someone wouldn't have invented, you can always say, okay, maybe they would have invented it. We just can't think of a good reason. Or maybe it is this reason that we can posit and so on.

As these things start building and building and building, and you end up with 10 stories that people will, it doesn't look like people would have invented these. And you can maybe come up with explanations for them all, but the explanations all seem a bit of a stretch. That's the stretch when you start multiplying the stories till you get to 10 and 20 and 50 and 100 and 400 and so on.

That becomes a bit much. And when we have all of these stories combined, really, really weird, you look at this and it's the best explanation is that there was some historical weird person with a lot of issues and a lot of problems. That's the best explanation of the actual evidence that we have. As far as Muhammad making false prophecies, I didn't catch a response to that part. But Muhammad made prophecies that by the time these things are supposedly being invented,

They had already been falsified. So suppose, as Robert was arguing, Robert was claiming that, you know, they were kind of collecting various things of various people, stories about other people over the time. Why do you keep that one? Let's have our source about Muhammad that we're making up right now. Hey, you know, I remember an old story about a guy who delivered a prophecy that never ever came true. Let's put that on Muhammad's mouth. Doesn't make sense.

As far as Muhammad eating the food prepared by a Jewish woman whose family he had slaughtered, which caused him to die in exactly the way the Quran said he would die if he was a false prophet, Robert says, well, you know, that doesn't make Muhammad look bad. It makes the Jews look bad for, makes the Jewish woman look bad for killing the guy that slaughtered her entire family? But suppose you wanted to go with that. If you say, here's the motivation for making up this story, wanted to make Jews look bad. Well, why not say a bunch of Jews got together and kill him? You can make up anything you want, right?

Why not make up something that doesn't make Muhammad look like a false prophet and the biggest idiot in the history of humanity? If I were making up a story about some awesome prophet, it wouldn't be that he's the one person in the history of humanity who thinks it's a good idea to accept an invitation of a delicious meal from a woman whose family he just slaughtered. Sounds really weird.

So as far as Robert's arguments, he says that these stories weren't invented by one person. So it's not like one guy sat down and he's coming up with something completely coherent. There are all kinds of people in different times coming up with stories. And that, of course, can be the case. But you're still looking at these stories, and lots of people are sharing the same stories, which look like they go back to earlier common sources and so on.

And if you know, so if you know this guy over here and he's coming up with a story and you came up with a different story and his makes his makes Mohammed look like a complete lunatic. Why? Why do you share that? Why do you share that story? Like, how do these how do these stories end up in their most trusted sources? Very weird stuff.

So as far as Robert's arguments, he says, "We know Muslims invented tons of stories." Zero disagreement between us on that point. Yes, tons of stories were being fabricated, and that kind of, that's one of the things that leads people to go in the direction Robert has gone. If you got these guys and this is a false story, they're making this up, they're making that up, they're making this up, they're making that up, okay, we're dealing with the biggest bunch of liars the world has ever seen. Why would we trust their story about Muhammad?

That's the idea behind the historical method. You can sit down with a liar who makes up stories, and you can sit down, if you listen to him long enough, you can start detecting things that he wouldn't make up, because you start figuring out the kinds of things he makes up. And that's what we're dealing with in the Muslim sources. Yes, they were making up miracle stories, and yes, they had earlier sources that say he couldn't perform miracles. So you can actually spot those lies. There are other things

When you're reading the sources and they're constantly trying to make Muhammad look like the greatest man who's ever lived, and you read these things, you're like, "Why are these things in here? This does not make Muhammad look good at all. Why are they inventing this?" The best explanation for why they included that material is, like it or not, those things happened. Some of them were actually trying to record as much information about Muhammad as they could.

So again, Robert points out that there are tons of different contradictory stories. Zero disagreement there. Yes, the Muslim sources are a big pile of garbage. I'm not exaggerating when I say that. I'm not even trying to be mean. Scholars would say the exact same thing in different words. The Hadith collections and so on, they come centuries after the events. Very, very, very bad late sources. That's true. But even late sources can be used

by applying historical principles to find out reliable information. Robert says, "It's absurd to think that the history of Muhammad is transmitted accurate." That's true. That's true. Because you do have actual scholars who just treat these sources as totally reliable and so on, and they're not. Robert pointed out there at the very end that Mecca wasn't very important. It's not on the maps and so on. That's true.

And I would agree that tons of stuff about Muhammad was exaggerated, embellished. If you read the Muslim sources, Muhammad's supposedly going around. He's conquering Arabia and challenging all the emperors and leaders of his time. No one's ever heard of this guy, the writings we have. No one's ever heard of this guy. So clearly, clearly, clearly, clearly, lots of things were embellished. Lots of stories were fabricated and so on. That doesn't mean that there wasn't this historical Muhammad who had some of the – that we know some –

a core of historical information about. As far as not having the earliest sources, like Robert's pointing out to the material I'm using is derived from ninth century sources. What about earlier and so on? We actually know-- now, keep in mind, if you don't have the sources

in front of you, you can kind of say whatever you want. You can say they're made up. But we know about this historically, like the pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales and Anaximander and so on. We don't have their writings. We have later people quoting them back then. We have Aristotle quoting these guys. No one thinks Aristotle's just making all these guys up because we don't have the original sources. In the ancient world, if you don't have someone constantly copying and recopying your books, your book doesn't last.

So you could say these sources never existed. The 9th century guys are quoting, or they claim to be quoting earlier people. They claim to be quoting earlier people. You could say, well they're not, they're just making it all up. You can say that, but there's a reason the earlier sources didn't last very long. You eventually got to the Hadith guys. The Hadith guys said, we came up with our new methodology and this is the only way to do history. The earlier guys did not use that method and so sorry, you are not using the Islamic method.

By the time you got to later people like Bukhari and so on, the earlier sources were really embarrassing. Why? Because the later guys are trying to make Muhammad look really good.

And their earlier sources, matter of fact, sometimes they say it. Sometimes they say, we're ignoring these sources because they make Muhammad look really bad. What's that mean? It means early sources make Muhammad look really bad and later guys are trying to get rid of this material. What's that mean? It means there was a Muhammad who did really embarrassing things. And we have probably a fraction, the material I'm presenting is probably a fraction of the weird stuff that Muhammad did.

As far as Robert saying that we don't know what these people were thinking, they could have thought very differently from us. Yes, there's stuff that we wouldn't invent. Muhammad marrying a six-year-old and consummating the marriage at nine, we wouldn't do that.

But we can understand that some people would do that. The treatment of the slave girls, the rape of captives, prostitution in Muslim sources, wife beating, violence against critics, killing apostates and Jews and Christians, subjugating Jews and Christians, robbery, torture, slavery. So if we were inventing a prophet, we would not be inventing these things. But we can imagine other people inventing these kinds of things.

But there are things, again, where why would you invent that? It makes no sense given what your goals are in inventing this religion. So Muhammad having nine wives when he receives a revelation saying they can only have four. Muslims only get four, and then he's allowed to have nine, at least nine that we know of.

So why make your guy a hypocrite? Muhammad takes the wife of his own adopted son after he causes the divorce by lusting after her. So he sees her practically naked, he lusts after her, and his adopted son says, "You can take her then." Why are you going to invent this story? Muhammad taking the wife of his own adopted son. There are all these stories in the Muslim source about Muhammad sucking on little boys' tongues.

I don't know if you can see that because it's kind of small, but there's a story about Muhammad telling this little kid, Hassan, come here, bring the little boy to me.

My time's almost up, so I'll just skip to the end there. Then he said, "Where's the little one? Call the little one to me." Hassan came running and jumped into his lap. Then he put his hand in his beard. Then the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, opened his mouth and put his tongue in his mouth. Then he said, "Oh Allah, I love him, so love him and the one who loves him." Why are you inventing these kind of details about this guy? Hey, you know what we really need about this guy we're inventing? He needs to suck on the tongues of little boys.

And then you have all these sources about Muhammad being just covered in semen. What is the point of this? Who's inventing this stuff? You guys don't even know how bad this is. Look, narrated Aisha, I used to wash the semen off the clothes of the Prophet, and even then I used to notice one or more spots in them. Aisha reported, I used to rub off the semen from the clothes of the Messenger of Allah. He would then pray in it. Narrated Aisha, I used to scrape off the semen from the garment of the Messenger of Allah with my hand.

I asked Aisha about clothes soiled with semen. She replied, I used to wash it off the clothes of Allah's Messenger. He would go for the prayer while water spots were still visible. I used to scrape the semen off the garment of Allah's Messenger, and then he offered prayer with it. I remember when I found semen on the garment of the Messenger of Allah and scratched it off. She's scratching off the semen. She's scraping off the semen. She's rubbing off the semen. She's washing off the semen. Even then she sees more as he's going to the mosque to hug it out with his bros.

I would want a restraining order against this guy to keep him far away from me. This is the prophet that someone invented? Ten seconds. Thank you very much for that spirited rebuttal.

Your sleep number setting.

And now save 50% on the new Sleep Number Limited Edition Smartbed. Limited time. Exclusively at a Sleep Number store near you. Learn more at sleepnumber.com. We'll kick it over to Robert for his 12-minute rebuttal as well. Thank you very much. The floor is all yours. David asks, this is a profit that someone invented? In a word, yes. Ibn Ishaq wrote in the 770s, but his book is lost. We only have a quite substantial portion of it.

by his student Ibn Hisham in 833. Now, Ibn Hisham said that in his own version, he omitted things which it is disgraceful to discuss, matters which would distress certain people.

Now, you look at Ibn Ishaam, if you've read it, it's the basis for The Life of Muhammad Ibn Ishaq Sirat Rasulullah by Alfred Guillaume, very popular book in English, and you will find the story of Aisha, you will find all manner of stories about Muhammad raiding his enemies, seizing their wives,

destroying, torturing the treasurer at Kaibar to get the, having them light a fire on his chest, Kinana, so that they can get, he'll give up where they've left the treasury. And all these, those were not things that Ibn Hisham thought were disgraceful to discuss. So in other words, Ibn Hisham's perspective on what is disgraceful and what ain't is very, very different from ours.

And we have to avoid falling into the trap of imposing our 21st century perspectives onto what is 9th century material. And so David's right.

I could sit here the whole time and come up with explanations for why they would have made up these stories. Like, I think the semen stories are very easy. That this guy is, I know, you're gonna think this is absurd, and it is. But from the perspective of the people who are fabricating these stories, he's a man's man. He's bursting with virility. It is positively gushing, quite literally, out of him.

And so he is somebody that when your paradise is a big bordello and all you're doing, your entire vision of what is the greatest good for human beings is sex, then a guy who's covered with semen all the time, well, he's really somebody to admire. Now, admittedly,

That's a guess, but so is what David is saying. The other problem with what he's saying is that he's assuming that these stories were all kept because they were authentic, even though they were embarrassing. And yet, all through Islamic history, nobody seems to think they're embarrassing.

There is no great literature throughout Islamic history trying to explain away the semen story or explain why Muhammad was poisoned by a Jewish woman who he had just taken captive after killing her husband and her father. There are no stories like that. There is no theology of explaining away embarrassing stories about Muhammad, and the simple reason for that is they were not considered embarrassing.

and that's the key thing here. But were they fabricated? Well, let's look at it. Ibn Hisham, I said, comes from the 8th century, and it's all very neat that you can, from the 9th century that is, that you can read now Alfred Guillaume's edition of Ibn Hisham in English. And so it looks like you're getting 9th century literature. However, that is not actually the case.

Ibn Hisham had multiple students himself. The work of Ibn Ishaq exists actually in 15 different versions, not just that of Ibn Hisham.

Then there are at least 50 different transmitters of all those versions. You're all probably familiar with all the problems of the transmission of the Quran and how there are different versions of that, but there are also different versions of the Sira literature.

And those just exist out there side by side with one another. And there's absolutely no way to tell which version is more reliable than the other because all of them date from at very least 200 years after the story of Muhammad is supposed to have taken place. And David was saying, yes, well, for Anaximander and all these classical Greeks, we don't have the original anyway. We have what was passed on.

And that's a point well taken. But when exactly do we get Ibn Hisham's Sira? Not from the 9th century. We don't have 9th century manuscripts of it. We don't have 10th century manuscripts of it. We don't have 11th century manuscripts of it. And I'm not going to use up the rest of my time going through. The first publication of Ibn Hisham's Sira derived from Ibn Ishaq was in 1860.

by was in 1860, through various Arabic manuscripts of varying reliability and put it together into a coherent narrative that Alfred Guillaume then translated into English and that numerous Muslims as well as non-Muslims have then used to write biographies of Muhammad.

but the Muslims did not actually value this material or pay any particular attention to preserving it, such that it is riddled with variants. Also, there is a great deal more about what you might expect. The Arabs came through the entire

what is not known as the Islamic world, starting in the 630s and conquered huge expanses of territory. The standard story is that they were inspired by verses of the Quran

and teachings of Muhammad in joining warfare against and conquest of unbelievers. We all know this because this is why we talk about Islam at all, because there are still Muslims today who are thinking that Allah is commanding them to wage war against unbelievers. But when you go back to the records of the people at the time, you find a very curious absence.

Now, people will say absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but I think there's a stronger case here. In 639, the patriarch of Antioch, the year 639 AD, the patriarch of Antioch, John I, engaged in a series of discussions with Amr ibn al-As, who is the conqueror of Egypt and other territories.

He refers to the Hagarians and speaks to Amr about how the Hagarians have come and laid waste. But nobody on either side of the discussion makes the slightest mention of the Quran, Islam, or Muhammad. Now if that was the inspiration for the whole thing, then why not? And it's not just him.

In 647, the patriarch of Seleucia, Esho Yahab III, wrote about the Tayyeyeh, or the Hagarians, who do not help those who attribute sufferings and death to God, the Lord of everything. That is, that they rejected the crucifixion of Christ, which the Quran rejects.

But he never says, these are the Muslims, or this is Islam, the Quran, Muhammad. He's talking all about how the Tayyeyeh, who are the conquering people of the area, they don't believe in the crucifixion, and he never gets around to mentioning, oh, they have this whole new prophet, new religion, new holy book.

Mu'awiyah, I already mentioned that in 651 he wrote to Constans and he said, "You should convert to the great God whom I serve, the God of our father Abraham." Not a word about Muhammad or Islam. From the son of Abu Sufyan.

Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, in the late 630s, when the Arabs conquered Jerusalem, there's a very famous story about how he met the Caliph Umar and he showed him around the city. They got to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the church that has the tomb of Christ, where Christ is supposed to have risen from the dead. Sophronius said, "Go in and pray."

And Umar magnanimously says, no, I won't do that because then my followers will claim it for a mosque, and I want you Christians to keep on having it for a church. Great story, bro, but it was a 9th century story. Sophronius left behind voluminous writings.

trying to understand from a Christian theological standpoint why God would allow the conquest of Jerusalem by the Tayyeh or the Saracens. He never calls them Muslims. He never mentions Umar. He never gives a hint that they have a new religion, a new prophet, or a new holy book, even when he is talking about why they came and what they were trying to do. Now that's extraordinary. Why have all these people taken a vow of silence about this thing?

if it existed and if it was the linchpin, the reason why they are carrying out these conquests in the first place. And then on the other side, you've got very strange mentions of Muhammad.

For example, the Doctrine of Jacobi, which Islamic apologists like to point to as an early non-Muslim mention of Muhammad. It talks about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens, this was written in the 630s, who is armed with a sword. So you think, oh yeah, that's got to be Muhammad, the prophet armed with a sword, which is kind of interesting in light of the fact that so many Islamic apologists say he was not armed with a sword nowadays. But anyway...

Then, however, the Doctrina Jacobi goes on to say he is proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come. Now, if you know anything about Muhammad's teachings, he's not proclaiming the advent of Christ. That's not what he's all about. So maybe this unnamed prophet who's armed with a sword is not Muhammad at all, but is one of the people whose stories were incorporated into the Muhammad myth later on when it began to be constructed.

In a fly leaf inscription on an edition of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark from around the same time, it says that many villages were ravaged by the killing of Mahmed, M-H-M-D. But here again, there is no mention of anything that has to do with his being a prophet,

In this case, he's just a warrior. In the other case, he's just a prophet. And in this case, even though it's mentioned MHMD, I already told you how we have from the sixth century, way before Muhammad, indication that this is a title, not a name. And so there is no necessary indication that this is Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Thomas the Presbyter, Christian priest from around the same time, writes also about the Tayyeh de Mehmet, MHMT, in this case,

and says that there was a battle between the Romans and the Taieyeh de Mehmet in 634. But now step back a minute and think about these mentions, which could be of a completely different person. - 30 seconds. - Because no information is given, and the voluminous Hadith material. If they had that, how come nobody ever mentions it? - Thank you very much for that rebuttal as well. I have an abbreviated open discussion.

What? No, we said we're going to cancel that so you can catch up. As long as it's abbreviated, I think we're okay. Do you want to just... Wait, no. But if you'd prefer to... We have second rebuttals. What planet are you from, James? How long have you been doing this? Have you ever moderated a debate before, James? Come on. Was there a... I'm going to call your channel Modern Day Debate. Long, long day, but... Eight minutes. We'll just do eight-minute second rebuttals and then five-minute conclusions, and we'll take questions. You got it. Got it. Whenever you're ready. The floor is all yours. Okay.

All right, so in my opening statement, I argued that there's so much embarrassing material in the Muslim sources that we just can't conclude that people were inventing it when they were starting their new religion. I mentioned six things in my opening: demonic possession, suicide attempts, the satanic verses, black magic, false prophecies, and the poisoning of Muhammad. Then in my first rebuttal, I added a few more points: the hypocrisy,

You're making your ultimate prophet a guy who violates his own revelations, taking the wife of his unadopted son, sucking on the tongues of little boys. And he would suck on their tongues, and they would suck on his tongues, and so on. Anyway, it's weird. You can actually read Muslim explanations of this. And they say, oh, it was because it was a really hot environment and stuff.

preserve the moist. And then there are Muslims who also argue that Muhammad had miraculous saliva. And if he spit in your mouth and so on, it would sustain you for days and so on. So anyway, the point there is it is kind of embarrassing, some of this material. And then, of course, Muhammad being covered in semen for some reason. Now, Robert points out correctly, correctly, that early Muslims did think very

differently from us, which is, again, why you have to be careful. Why you have to be careful in saying, well, there's no way someone would invent this. There's no way someone would invent this. But I pointed that out. So I gave a list of things that we certainly would find sick and repulsive, but that by looking at their sources, we see they obviously didn't. That's not the case with certain other things.

So as far as Robert points out that Muslims didn't find these stories embarrassing. That's true in some cases. So again, you don't have the great Muslim defense of Muhammad being covered in semen historically and so on. It's not true in other cases. In other words, we don't

have records of Muslims being very bothered by certain things historically. So the story of Muhammad and Zainab, his adopted son's wife, that he sees her practically naked, his adopted son divorces her so that Muhammad can have her, Muhammad marries her. This caused a big scandal. People were really, really, really upset about this, according to the Muslim sources. They thought of it as on the level of incest.

and the result was that Allah had to abolish adoption to make it so that this guy was never his adopted son. It didn't count in order to kind of justify this. There's no adoption in Islam. You could take care of an orphan, but you don't adopt someone into your family. It was abolished because of that. So this was an issue. You have all kinds of Muslim attempts to justify this back in the day. And with the Satanic verses, you have something different. You have a kind of

evolution of the story which makes it less and less embarrassing over time. So the original version of the story is Muhammad again wants his followers, wants his tribe to accept his revelation. So he wants a revelation that's going to make his tribe convert to Islam. And then Satan gives him what he's looking for. Muhammad delivers this revelation promoting polytheism, saying you can pray to pagan goddesses now.

We know that this is embarrassing because a later generation of Muslims, they water the story down so that the next version of the story is, Muhammad never said these words. Satan imitated Muhammad's voice so that people thought it was Muhammad speaking when it wasn't Muhammad speaking. And so Muhammad didn't mess up. People just messed up thinking by thinking that Satan was actually Muhammad because he could imitate his voice and so on. And then you eventually get to where

You know that the part about Muhammad and all his followers bowing down in honor of the revelation you eventually get to the story about everyone bowing down But it doesn't say it doesn't say why even the pagans bowed down in honor in honor of it But it doesn't say why so the story was constantly Constantly being modified to make it less and less embarrassing which means it was embarrassing It was an embarrassing story even back then but here's here's a here's the real reason this is such an issue. I

According, if we take Robert's theory seriously, that entire evolution of the story where it's watered down over time, that was all, that was, that all happened by the time they're inventing the story. In other words, they sat there and said, let's invent a story about Muhammad delivering a revelation from Satan, and then we'll invent another story about it not happening and Satan just imitated his voice, and we'll just keep watering, they invented all of that. Which means they always knew it was embarrassing, which means why in the name of common sense would they have invented a story that's embarrassing and they have to water down for themselves?

As far as the issue of the semen, Robert says, "Mohammed was a man's man, gushing with virility." I have a question: what makes Robert so sure that this was Mohammed's semen? Let's read a couple sources. These may be hard to see, but I'll just go ahead and read a couple of these stories for you. This is Suna Nabata'ud.

Abdur-Rahman ibn Abu Alayla, quoting blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, said that while he was given to jesting and was talking to the people and making them laugh, the prophet poked him under the ribs with a stick. He said, let me take retaliation. He said, oh, take retaliation. He said, but you're wearing a shirt, but I'm not. The prophet then raised his shirt, and the man embraced him and began kissing his side. Then he said, this is what I wanted, messenger of Allah. You get that, right? You got that?

Here's another hadith, and this is interesting. This is an interesting issue, like legitimately interesting, because you have this issue with Deha al-Kalbi.

who is supposedly the handsomest young man in Arabia. When Deha would show up to town, it was said that the women of the town would all run out to just gaze upon him. That's how hot this young man was. In both Sunni and Shia sources, you've got all these stories about people seeing Muhammad in Deha, and Muhammad would say, "Oh, you know that's the angel Gabriel, right? He just looks exactly like Deha al-Kalbi. So when you see me with Deha al-Kalbi, it's actually the angel Gabriel."

Right? Okay, I'll give a couple of examples. Time is short. Narrated Abu Uthman, I got the news that Jibril came to the Prophet while Umm Salama was present. Jibril started talking to the Prophet. The Prophet said to Umm Salama, did you know who that was? She said, it was Deha, a handsome person amongst the companions of the Prophet. Later on, Umm Salama said, by Allah, I thought it was none but Deha, but I heard the Prophet talking about Jibril. So he goes and he actually gives a message that when you see me with Deha al-Kalbi, it's actually the angel Gabriel.

Check this out. If we can't read this, it may be very hard to see, but I'll go ahead. Once Abu Dar came to the Messenger of Allah while Jabril was in the form of Deha al-Kalbi, one of the companions of the Holy Prophet, in a private meeting with the Messenger of Allah.

I'll go ahead and read the next paragraph there. "When Jabril left, Abu Dar came to the Holy Prophet and Messenger of Allah said to him, 'Oh Abu Dar, who stopped you from offering us the greeting when you passed by?' He said, 'Oh Messenger of Allah, I thought the person with you was Dehah al-Kalbi in a private meeting for something of your affairs.' The Messenger of Allah said, 'That was Jabril!'" That was Gabriel. This one's really small, but

Udaifah answered, "The people used to enter upon the Prophet whenever they wanted. The Prophet then prohibited them from entering upon him when he was in a meeting with Deha al-Kalbi." Right? And so it goes on as how Muhammad would have these private meetings with Deha. I'll just read the next little paragraph there. Thirty seconds.

Hudhaifa said, "One day I came to the Prophet for some matter, hoping to meet with him alone. When I arrived at the door, I looked and found a curtain covering the door. I raised it and was about to enter." That's what we're accustomed to do. Muhammad's behind the curtain with Dihya, you leave it alone. But this guy walked in. "Then I saw Dihya sitting beside the Prophet who was sleeping and his head was on the lap of Dihya." Long story short, of course, it turns out to be the angel Gabriel you can see there at the bottom. "Then the Prophet replied, 'That was Gabriel.' So why did you tell him when you entered

And what did he tell-- we all know what this sounds like. Like, why are you inventing this? We all know that if you came home to your wife early and you saw a guy slipping out the window and you ran in thinking, hey, did that guy rob you? What was that guy jumping out the window? Oh, no, that was an angel, honey. We know no one in history would be dumb enough to fall for that. Why would you invent this story? We know where the semen came from, Robert. We'll kick it over to you.

Why would they invent the story? It's very simple, because they wanted to do those things. Islam is a vehicle for Arab supremacism because it was developed by Arab supremacists. It allows for all manner of promiscuity, including the kind of ambiguous but unmistakable allowance for homosexual activity because there were people who wanted to engage in it.

And so they would fabricate these stories that would have the prophet doing what they wanted to do, and then they had carte blanche.

And so that's very simple. We also have to remember this took place over a long period of time. Abdul Malik and Hajjaj Ibn Yusuf lived around the turn of the century, the beginning of the 8th century, around 700, the early 700s. And the Hadith collections come 130 years later. And so you have an awfully long time.

for considerable legendary elaboration. So David asks, how is it that the Satanic Verses story is invented and immediately deemed embarrassing and thus mitigated? That's not how it happened. It was invented by people who were saying this is-- they were, as I explained before, accounting for contradictions in the material and for the ability to retract or cancel certain teachings.

but also they showed that Allah always protected the Prophet. And then as time went on, when they saw that non-Muslims were using this story, that it was indeed embarrassing, they elaborated different versions of it that mitigated the embarrassment. It's noteworthy that that's basically the only example that David could possibly adduce for that. All these other stories, the semen stories, they don't disappear. Nobody's embarrassed by them.

And so it's just as difficult to sustain the idea that these stories were embarrassing, but they were kept because they were authentic, as it would be that these stories were invented by people who didn't think they were embarrassing. It actually makes more sense the other way. As far as Zaynab goes, this one merits some more detailed unpacking.

The first thing is to remember in this case paradoxically the embarrassing parts of the story are Intentional and this is clear from the Quran itself that it's a basic part of the story that Muhammad is overcome by lust for his daughter-in-law and then fabricates the idea that adoption is bad so that he can marry the daughter-in-law and that this causes scandal and

That was all part of the story from the beginning. And this is clear from the fact that in the first place, all the prophets are related in Islam.

In the Quran, chapter 6, verses 84 to 86, it says, And we bestowed upon him Isaac and Jacob, each of them we guided, and Noah we guided previously. And of his descendants, David and Solomon and Job and Joseph and Moses and Aaron. So while they're all related, David and Solomon and Job and Joseph, etc., are the descendants of Isaac and Jacob and Noah.

And of course we know from other stories that Jesus is Moses' nephew in the Quran because Mary is called the sister of Aaron, Moses' brother.

And that there are Hadith that refute that because that was invented by one group and then another group found that it was embarrassing because the Christians were mocking it. And so they made up the stories in the Hadith about how, oh, this is an honorific. It just means she's a cool lady, so we call her Sister of Aaron. But that's contradicted by the fact that the whole story takes place in a chapter called Ahle Imran, the Family of Imran,

which is Moses' father. So obviously it's about Moses' household.

Anyway, the thing about Zaynab is that the story is in chapter 33, very obliquely told in chapter 33 of the Quran. In verse 37, it says, you hid in your mind what Allah was going to bring to light and you feared mankind because Muhammad had said, keep your wife and fear Allah to Zayd. Now, Allah is scolding Muhammad for not taking Zaynab and marrying her himself.

So when Zayd had performed that necessary formality from her, we gave her to you in marriage. Okay, so Muhammad marries Zaynab. And then the story concludes in verse 40. Muhammad is not the father of any of your men, but he is the messenger of Allah and the seal of the prophets. Now, what does that have to do with the story of Zaynab? Absolutely nothing. Now, why is it there? You could say because the Quran just talks about whatever and changes the subject without notice all the time.

And that's true. That's a possibility I will concede. However, if that is a part of the story, I think it's the key to the story of Zaynab, that the whole idea was to show that Muhammad was the last prophet so that there would be political stability in this Arab empire by not having there being constantly new prophets who would be challenging the authority of the caliphs.

So, no new prophets. Muhammad is the seal of the prophet. If Muhammad is the seal of the prophet, he can't have any sons because they would be a prophet's too, because all the prophets are related. So he cannot have a natural son and he cannot have an adopted son. And the whole story is fabricated in order to show Muhammad ain't got no sons. He's the only prophet you need to worry about. He's the last prophet.

So you see, the story is entirely understandable on the basis of being fabricated for political ends. And as embarrassing as it may be for Muhammad, that part is essential to the story to move along the plot line about how he had to get rid of adoption so that he would have no adopted son. So that there's no question whatsoever that he's the last prophet.

and that he has nobody coming after him who's gonna be a prophet in his place. - Thank you very much for that. We're gonna jump into the five minute closings, and then we'll have Q and A from the audience. So David, thanks very much, the floor is all yours. - Well thanks again James and Robert. I did want to point out here in my conclusion that Robert and I actually, we agree on a lot. We agree on a lot. We agree there are all kinds of problems with the Muslim sources, we agree that

If the standard Islamic narrative about Muhammad and the things he was accomplishing in Arabia were true, we should expect a lot more information about him. If Mecca was the trading hub that the Muslim sources say, we should expect to find ancient references to it and so on. We don't. So that's kind of the source of the disagreement.

There's this big gap where there's a bunch of... There's a big place where we don't have a lot of evidence to go on. And if you just have this big gap, you can kind of say whatever you want, right? And so we're coming to different conclusions. We're coming to different conclusions with what to do about that. So we don't have the early sources that we would like to have. That's a problem.

Normally, if you're doing history, the best thing to have is early sources. It's good to have multiple early sources so you can compare and contrast them and so on. That's generally what you're looking for. We don't have that. And so what do we do? What do we do? We can conclude this was all made up, or you can do what I've done is rely on some secondary historical principles, like is this the sort of thing that would be invented and so on. For me, I can understand where Robert's coming from. At the end of the day, it's just too much.

It's just too much stuff. If you were inventing one thing here, or if you couldn't understand why someone would make this up, this thing up, that would be one thing. I can look at that and say, okay, you're right. I have no idea. When it's just hundreds of things and sometimes dozens of versions of the same issue. So, for instance, the Satanic Verses. I have 50 Muslim sources on the Satanic Verses. 50.

So this is just a lot to invent. So here we have this story that we know is embarrassing, and we're just going to invent like 50 made up sources on that. There are lots of things in history that people made up. That's true. People invent stories. The level of detail on a lot of this stuff and the amount, the sheer volume

of material they're producing, on stories they're making up. It's just, I look at it and I go, wow, I see why someone might be skeptical, but this just seems like too much. It's just too many different stories, too many different problems.

Too much embarrassing material and just too many versions of that for people to be just making all of this up. And so I think there's obviously a historical core there that is reliable. Yep, tons of exaggeration, tons of fabrication, tons of embellishment, and so on. But there was definitely a historical Muhammad.

So we have two hypotheses before us. And just think, why do we have such great arguments against Islam today? So much so that we can't even find a dawah guy willing to stand up for Muhammad nowadays. We have this awesome material about Muhammad because Muslims preserved this. And so why does Islam need blasphemy laws? Because of this embarrassing material. They can't defend it and so on. That's why they have to have blasphemy laws against people from arguing about this stuff.

So why is Muhammad such an easy target for us? According to me, it's because Muhammad was the most obvious false prophet in history. According to Robert, it's because the people inventing Muhammad for their new religion made him sound like the most obvious false prophet in history. When they could have made him sound like absolutely anything they wanted.

They could have made him sound like absolutely anything, the most reliable, most trustworthy, most miraculous person who've ever walked the planet. Instead, they come up with a guy who, what did we go through? Thought he was demon-possessed, repeatedly tried to commit suicide, delivered revelations from Satan, was a victim of a magic spell, delivered false prophecies,

accepted a meal prepared by a woman whose family had just slaughtered, died in exactly the way Allah said he would die if he fabricated revelations, married more women and girls than his own revelations allowed, married the wife of his own adopted son after causing the divorce by lusting after her, loved sucking on the tongues of little boys, was constantly covered in semen, and left us with a pretty good idea of where that semen came from. That's what they came up with.

That's the guy they came up with. What's the best explanation here? Again, if it were one thing, one problem, that would be... I wouldn't say that's a huge problem for Robert's theory. When it's 487 different things, huge problem. Huge problem. So I think we can conclude...

that in spite of all the exaggeration, embellishments, problem with the Muslim sources, these guys were reporting on a guy who actually existed. And I'll just say as my time runs out that to all the Muslims who were cheering for me this entire time as I defended your prophet against the accusations of the Islamophobic Robert Spencer, what else can I say but you're welcome.

David, you are some kind of amazing genius. But I got to say, you know, you're saying it's all too much when there's 487 different things. It's all too much, David says. Well, how about 593,000 different things? Because we know that Muslims fabricated at least 593,000 false hadiths about Muhammad because Bukhari himself bears witness to that.

Remember, he collected 600,000 hadith and only published 7,000 as authentic. He rejected 593,000 as fabrications. Now that's a massive industry of fabrication, and I think he was absolutely right about those 593,000. He was just wrong about the other 7,000. They were fake too.

And we know this because there's just no indication, not even the shadow of a hint, that any of this material existed in the 7th century. And it had to have existed in the 7th century if it's authentic. So, for example, from a completely different religion, and I know I'm opening a big can of worms here, but I'm going to do it anyway, in the Acts of the Apostles,

Paul says, remember the saying of our Lord Jesus that it is more blessed to give than to receive. That statement does not appear in the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. It's oral tradition that Paul happened to recall while he was talking and is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. And yet, when we come to

7,000, even just take Bukhari, 7,000 stories of Muhammad that must have existed in the 7th century, there is nary a person anywhere who says, "As Muhammad said this," and quotes them. Nobody even gives a hint that that massive corpus of material exists. Nobody shows any sign that they know of any such stories.

And so you got to wonder, maybe the easiest explanation is they didn't exist then. They were made up later. And David is also correct when he says they could have made him sound like absolutely anything they wanted. They did make him sound like absolutely anything they wanted. But what they wanted was not what we want. And what they wanted was not based on our own values and mores.

They wanted to have a justification for having multiple wives and for having child wives and for having homosexual lovers and all these other things. So they made their guy have all that and more. They wanted to have justification for all these things. And we know that this is exactly what they did. That's why Bukhari was winnowing out 593,000 false Hadiths.

He himself would have been the first to acknowledge, if he could have made it here today, that these stories were made up by people in order to justify their own proclivities or their own point of view in various Islamic factions. And so that's what they did. If these stories existed, I suggest that it would have been entirely reasonable that somebody somewhere

sometime between 632 when Muhammad died and 700, or for that matter, 700 to 800, or 800 to 830, that somebody would have said, you know, Muhammad had a saying for this, because supposedly they're carrying all this around in their heads, and yet it appears nowhere. Very, very strange, unless it just wasn't there at all. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you very much. And if you have a question, please line up, as we'll start the Q&A right now.

Right now. And then we'll actually back up just a bit toward this tape right here. Excellent. And even just a bit more this direction. Thank you very much. Okay, ready. Okay, so my question is to both speakers. So what would it take for you to change your mind on this position? Check, check. Does this work? Check, check.

I think the answer would be similar for both of us. We'd need a bunch of extra information to go on, either information that

Like for me, it would have to be like, oh, we found sources which explain a lot of this stuff, and it has nothing to do with Muhammad, and we see why things were made up and so on and where this information came from and how it was fabricated and so on. And I'm guessing for Robert it's going to be similar in that like, oh, if you suddenly found like in a wall of a mosque, you found a 7th century manuscript or something like this, which is talking about this. I don't know, but what are your thoughts?

Yeah, absolutely, David. There would have to be something like that. And of course, some people would say, well, there has been. There was a fragment of the Qur'an that was discovered a few years back that was carbon dated to 570 to 630, between 570 and 630. And so people were hailing that everywhere saying, look, this could have been Muhammad's own copy of the Qur'an.

And people were writing me, because I wrote "Did Muhammad Exist?" the first edition in 2011, and people were writing me, this was like 2017 or 18, saying, "Oh, you'll have to retract your book now, you see, because we found this early Quran." And actually that's why I wrote the second edition, because the fact is, the dating itself, think about that, the Quran passage comes from possibly 570, wait a minute,

The Quran didn't start getting written supposedly until 610. So maybe they found a source for the Quran and not the Quran itself. So in other words, there would have to be a very great, compelling piece of evidence that would be convincingly dated as early and not be a source material for the Islamic material, but authentically and genuinely discernible as Islamic. And that, well, you know, I'm not waiting up nights for that.

Yeah, so just to recap, based on the information that we have right now, we're kind of at an impasse because, again, when you have a big...

big gap of information you can kind of come up with different theories and we just lean in different directions so it would have to be some sort of new information. I did want to point out since Robert had a copy of his book " A Critical Biography" I will shamelessly plug it for him. So Robert came out, this just came out last year, but " A Critical Biography" and a lot of the information that Robert was sharing he covers in this book and in a lot more detail here. So, everybody's wrong.

All right, so it's a question for Dr. David. So how can we trust what the Quran claims about Muhammad, police be upon him, if we know traditionally that Uthman burned a virgin's die he didn't agree with? Thank you. No, that is an issue. As far as...

So yeah, if anyone doesn't know what he's referring to, the third of the rightly guided caliphs, Caliph Uthman, told everyone to hand over their Qurans and burn them all because there were all kinds of differences and so on that were arising in them. But that's another issue where you can kind of say whatever you want. Like you can say he was massively changing things. You can say, no, he would have stuck to the basic idea or people wouldn't have gone for it or something like that. You can kind of make things up, but that's just the situation

That's just the situation we're in. When you burn all your manuscripts and then issue an authoritative one, you leave everyone in the position of saying pretty much whatever they want about what it was before that. So yeah, but the point is that wouldn't have much to do with whether Muhammad existed. I would still conclude Muhammad existed. Even if Uthman made massive changes to the Quran and put out his own new Quran or something like this, I would still think that Muhammad existed for the reasons I've given.

Hi, I'm Joel from the Think Institute. Thank you guys so much for your presentations, your debate. I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot. My understanding of Robert's position seems to be that the early Muslims would not have been embarrassed by these stories, and therefore they made up the stories because, of course, they did, because why wouldn't they if that was their worldview? So my question, Dr. Wood, is,

If the early Muslims were embarrassed by these stories, which is why they seem to have tried to come up with workarounds for them, why did they follow Muhammad in the first place, given that he was such an unstable, violent, erratic, immoral person? As far as people following Muhammad, when you look at Muhammad, Muhammad comes out and starts sharing his revelations.

He did not achieve a ton of popularity based on his powerful revelations. He had a small group of followers early on. In other words, it wasn't like a Billy Graham crusade where he goes out and preaches and thousands of people come forward and so on.

I think it was something like like around 200 followers in his first 10 years or something like that maybe more The point is it wasn't a ton of people He's still a small minority of the population to the point where they actually had to flee Mecca Because they were so massively outnumbered and they were annoying people more and more but when he started receiving getting massive numbers of followers is when the message changed to join me fight for me and and

If you survive the battle, we take everyone's stuff. You take people's daughters and stuff as your sex slaves. If you die, you spend eternity deflowering virgins in paradise. And this resonated with the people of his time. You've got a bunch of followers. But just as an example of what I'm talking about as far as my overview, for the 12 years that Muhammad is in Mecca preaching, he's like,

boasting about how awesome the Jews are. These guys are authorities in matters of religion and he's constantly saying when these guys see me they'll affirm that I'm a prophet because they know me, they know I'm in their books. They all know this, they know I'm in their books. And so when they see me they're going to recognize me as a prophet. Eventually they move to Medina where there are three tribes of Jews and the Jews are ready to laugh him out of the city for claiming to be a prophet. And so they mock him, they make fun of him. What are you talking about you're a prophet? Now

What does Muhammad say? He concludes, "Well, obviously I'm in their sources," and his followers, "Obviously I'm in their sources, and clear as day. They know I'm in there. They know I'm in there." Which means, when they're saying, "I'm not," they're lying, which means they're evil, and so I have to destroy them. My point is, when you get to that point, it should have been obvious to people, right? Like, this guy's, wait, he just spent the last 12 years boosting up the Jews as these religious authorities, and now he's saying, "Oh, they're all liars," and so on. Like, what's going on here?

By that time, you can't cross the guy. You get your head chopped off. And so that's sort of the situation. It's if you get enough people around you, then it becomes increasingly difficult to be the guy who steps up and goes, you're messed up, dude. You are one messed up dude. You shouldn't have done that. You get your head chopped off.

And if you can somehow-- and this goes for anyone, not just Muhammad-- if you can somehow get a big enough mob who are ready to mindlessly kill over anyone slightly disagreeing with you, you very, very quickly get uniformity of all agreeing with this guy. And just as a modern day example, you can look at the Muslim world. It's estimated that about 8% of Muslims in the Muslim world are actually closet atheists. They can't speak out.

And so why? Why aren't they talking? Why aren't they speaking out? Why aren't they coming forward and saying, what are you talking about? This guy's obviously a false. They've concluded that they've concluded there's no way this guy's a prophet. And that's why they're not following him. You can't you can't step up and say it. You get your head chopped off. So I think that's how that's how you could have all these issues arising eventually with Muhammad. And most of them are most of them are later on. Most of them are later on by the time he has this this group of followers who will kill for him.

It's for Dr. Wood. Thank you for making it today. God bless you. I know you're super busy with doing debates, YouTube, being a family man, etc. Little side note. We should do this debate every week.

There's something about this debate with Robert blasting away at the Muslim sources and me saying, "Come on, we know he existed. Look at all this messed up stuff about him." There's something where there's not a lot of debates where you just don't care who wins or loses because either way, Muhammad loses, right? I mean, okay, sorry. Anyway, sorry about that. No, no, of course. Super busy. I'm less interested about Islam. How's your walk with the Lord? Oh. Yeah.

I became a Christian in jail in 1996. I didn't know a lot at that point. At that point, all I really knew was that all the evidence showed Jesus died, and I knew that his followers were willing to go to their horrible, bloody deaths for proclaiming that he had risen from the dead and had appeared to them.

When I became a Christian, it was almost like, "Okay, I could be wrong. There's obviously tons and tons of information that I don't know."

What if I pray right now and it turns out to be false later? Like, what have I got to lose? I was already like already really messed up and so on. And so that point was the biggest, most important moment in my life. Things changed and so on. So even going through, you know, years of philosophy and so on and tons of debates,

I never came across anything that would shake that original faith. I love debating, love my family, love the Lord, and constantly feel blessed. No matter what I go through now, I'm like, "What do I deserve?"

Anything that happens to me right now, I deserve much worse in life. So everything I have, total blessing, always thankful. Question for David. In your opening statement, you posited that if Muhammad did not exist, that Islam is the mother of all conspiracy theories, which I believe hinges on the idea that either Muhammad did exist or that Islam

the stories were intentionally crafted in the way that we have them today, which I don't believe is necessarily the only option. Why should we assume that it's either one or the other instead of, for example, the figure of the Prophet Muhammad being explained by, say, the telephone game as Robert posited in his opening statement?

Yeah, so yeah, you could actually, and Robert did respond to some of this and pointed out along the lines of what you're saying. So yeah, as I presented it, you could say it's an oversimplification, right? So it's either Muhammad existed or...

a group of people sat down and got together and invented all this, invented all this. Whereas that's not-- even with the idea that this is-- that Muhammad is a fictional character doesn't mean that it's like, OK, let's get together and come up with a completely coherent story of this guy we want to invent. But you do need some--

pretty big conspiracy somewhere. Because if it's just a-- if it's Abdul Malik or something like this saying, hey, we need a guy to have a religion. Like, we need to be like the Christians. They have something that they unite around. We need to be like the Jews. They have something that unites them. We have all these competing tribes and so on. We need something that unites us. So that's kind of the background idea for why someone would say, we need to invent this guy. So you do need a conspiracy, because he's not doing everything himself.

And so at some point, you need a group of people putting out a ton of stories. Now, how you can get different versions of the story and so on is these things can spread. And you could still have groups that have a tribal mentality. And so Islam can kind of be regional. Like there are stories that are developing over here in this area and stories that are evolving and mutating over here. And then once you get to, let's all compare and contrast these. Then you can end up with all these issues. So no, it's--

It's possible. It's feasible. It could happen. I just don't believe it's the best explanation for the evidence. But you are correct in that it's not as simple as I stated in my opening statement.

All right. As-salamu alaykum, Iman Wood. Not on my 2025. You know, that was not on my 2025 bingo. But the question is for Robert Spencer. Thank you for coming on short notice. You once said that on a podcast that we were too tolerant. But right now, you guys should write a novel on the love of Prophet Muhammad, right, and his love life. That would be excellent, you know?

I never would have. So much. I learned so much. My next book is about rape and sex slavery in Islam. I seriously thought it was going to be like The Origin of Muhammad's Semen Stains. It's going to be my first R-rated book. The question is, even if... Wait, wait, wait. Are you really coming up with that? When's that? That's not going to be until next year. I haven't even started it. I just signed the contract. It's a done deal. It's going to happen.

God willing. So the question is, even if somehow proven that Muhammad never existed, how do you think Muslims and Islamic theology would adapt or respond? Like a lot of their law and culture is based upon the Hadiths. You would think that even Muhammad is not such a significant figure towards that. How would you think they would adapt? Well, Muslims are already feeling the pain on this because you have, for example, Quran-only Muslims.

which is an increasingly popular view because the Hadith are so very problematic. But it's a completely incoherent view because the Quran multiple times tells people to obey Allah and the Messenger. And you can't possibly obey the Messenger without knowing what he told you to do, and you can't know what he told you to do aside from the Hadith. So that's an incoherent position.

and any other position is also likewise incoherent in other ways. So really this is a question of whether Islam is true or false, whether it survives or falls. And this is why I'm not debating a Muslim here on this. And years ago David and I actually teamed together because David is such a mad genius and so he argued on my side and we did a double debate with Anjum Chowdhury and Omar Bakri.

And the sum total of their argument was, of course Muhammad existed, it's in the Quran. And it shows that they haven't dealt with these problems, they won't deal with these problems because to do so would be blasphemous. And so they just ignore these problems and keep invective on those who call them out. And so it's really, this is, we're living in very exciting times where

Because of the internet, because of the ability that we have to disseminate these views over a large, to a large audience, and to people, you know, who knows, people could be in Saudi right now watching this, any number of places watching this. This never happened before in the history of the Islamic world. And I think that we're going to see, like we already saw a couple years ago,

A survey in the Islamic Republic of Iran, only 40% of the respondents said they were Muslim. Now that's extraordinary because Iran is supposed to be 99% Muslim, but only 40% now are left. And of course, like David said, they have to do it in secret because they'll be killed because of the apostasy law. But at a certain point, that's going to reach critical mass.

And I think we could see it in our lifetimes, but at some point there's going to be a tremendous implosion of the entire Islamic world as a result of these things because they're true. As David was saying, whether he's right or I'm right, it looks bad for Islam. And so it's not going to survive ultimately. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Please join me in giving them a round of applause.

We're going to do that vote, and then we're going to dismiss you for dinner quickly. So first, if you lean more toward David's position, if you could slide your hand up. And folks, if you're watching online, you can click the Manifold link in the description box to predict who you think will win this debate based on our hand poll in person. Huge thank you to our sponsor, Manifold, which is the world's largest social market prediction company.

Thanks, Bob. And then if you agree with Robert, you can slip your hand up. We'll let them do the math and we'll give you the results later, but I want to give you the directions. So a couple of things. We're going to dismiss you for about two hours and you can go ahead and put your hands down. Thank you very much for voting.

so in two hours at 7 30 we'll have our main event debate for today if you were going to the vip dinner so do me a favor if you can hang with me hold on is you want to turn right outside of this door and then head down to the end of the hall and turn right at which point it'll be the first door on the left it's conference room one okay conference room one but otherwise bob follow bob he'll be taking people down there if you're going to the vip dinner

And with that, thank you very much folks. We'll see you at 7.30 in either case.

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