Islam Watch

Islam: A Revelation That Never Happened

How a Caravan Raider’s Hallucinations Became a Global Religion

I. Welcome to the Grand Delusion

Imagine this: a 7th-century merchant with frequent seizures and a flair for drama staggers out of a cave, raving that an invisible being squeezed him and dictated God's final message for humanity — in Arabic, no less, to a barely literate desert tribe. And from this sand-drenched fever dream emerged the Qur’an — a jumbled, contradictory, chronologically incoherent collection of pseudo-monotheistic ramblings that somehow became the foundation for one of the most powerful religions in human history.

This, in case you were wondering, is the “revelation” at the core of Islam — a religion that insists it is perfect, eternal, and beyond scrutiny. So naturally, we’re going to scrutinize it.

Let’s set the ground rules: No special pleading. No "you have to understand it in Arabic." No circular reasoning. We will judge Islam by the same evidentiary standards used to demolish every other man-made theology. And once we do, the only revelation will be that it never happened at all.

II. Muhammad: The Man, The Myth, The Military Strategist

Let’s start with Muhammad, the so-called “Seal of the Prophets.” The historical record for the most pivotal figure in Islam is laughably thin. Virtually everything we “know” about him comes from sources written over a century to two centuries after his death — mainly the sīra (biographies) and hadith literature, which are riddled with contradictions, hearsay, and political agendas¹.

There are no contemporaneous records of Muhammad from non-Muslim sources. Not one Roman, Persian, Greek, or Byzantine chronicler mentions this prophet during his lifetime — strange, given how much noise he supposedly made. The earliest datable Islamic inscription mentioning Muhammad is the Dome of the Rock (691 CE) — a full 59 years after his death². Even the earliest Qur’anic manuscripts show no consistent reference to “Muhammad” as a prophet — or even a person. Some scholars argue “Muhammad” was initially a title meaning “the praised one,” possibly referring to Jesus³.

It gets worse. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad received revelations from the angel Jibril while alone — conveniently untestable. His first reactions to the supposed encounter? Terror, suicidal ideation, and the belief he was possessed by a jinn⁴. This wasn't a confident prophet — this was a man having a breakdown.

So, was Muhammad a prophet, or just a politically savvy warlord whose visions conveniently aligned with his ambitions?

III. The Quran: Patchwork Piety With a Dash of Plagiarism

Islam’s supreme miracle, the Qur’an, is often touted as inimitable, unchangeable, and miraculously preserved. Reality has a more vulgar word for it: cut-and-paste chaos.

Let’s start with its structure: the Qur’an is a non-chronological mess, jumping between topics mid-verse, repeating itself endlessly, and contradicting itself more than a drunk philosopher⁵. Verses about mercy are cancelled out by later verses calling for bloodshed — all thanks to the conveniently vague doctrine of abrogation (Quran 2:106).

And originality? Forget it. Scholars have documented numerous borrowings from earlier Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, Zoroastrian, and even pagan sources⁶. Stories of Moses, Noah, Joseph, and Jesus are retold — often with embarrassing errors and mangled details. The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, a Christian folktale, becomes Surah 18. Alexander the Great becomes "Dhul-Qarnayn," inexplicably presented as a monotheist (Quran 18:83–101)⁷.

The “perfect” Qur’an even contradicts observable reality:

The sun sets in a muddy spring (Quran 18:86)
Sperm originates from between the backbone and ribs (Quran 86:6-7)
The Earth is flat, spread out like a carpet (Quran 15:19, 20:53)

Modern apologists trip over themselves inventing metaphors for these facepalms. But if this is divine language, then God needs a fact-checker.

IV. Revelation by Convenient Timing

Muhammad’s revelations often came at suspiciously opportune moments — just when he needed to justify a decision, desire, or crime. Some greatest hits:

He wanted his adopted son's wife? Surprise! Allah abolished adoption (Quran 33:37).
Accused of adultery? Poof! A verse appears requiring four witnesses (Quran 24:4).
Wanted more wives? Allah graciously grants him an exemption (Quran 33:50).
Caught in a sex scandal with his slave girl? Allah clears him — and scolds his wives (Quran 66:1-5).

This is less divine inspiration and more a political-religious improv show, where every controversy is resolved by God acting as Muhammad’s celestial PR agent.

V. The Myth of Miraculous Preservation

Muslims insist the Qur’an is preserved “letter for letter, harf for harf.” This is a comforting myth. Reality: the Qur’an we have today is a redacted, standardized, and partially lost document.

The Uthmanic recension — Islam’s first “official” Qur’an — was compiled in the mid-7th century by committee, and all rival manuscripts were burned⁸. What a bold strategy for divine preservation: burn the evidence.

But it gets better. Early Qur’anic manuscripts like the Sana’a palimpsest, discovered in Yemen, show multiple textual variants, corrections, and erasures — proof the Qur’an evolved over time⁹. Scholars like Dr. Dan Brubaker have documented hundreds of manuscript-level changes¹⁰.

There is no single, pristine Qur’anic text. There are dozens of qira’at (variant readings) — some with different meanings, grammar, and theology. This isn’t divine precision. This is scriptural roulette.

VI. The Hadith House of Cards

When the Qur’an isn’t enough, Muslims turn to the Hadith — six canonical collections of oral reports compiled 200+ years after Muhammad’s death. Bukhari alone claims to have sifted through 600,000 hadiths to accept just 7,275, tossing out 98.8% as garbage¹¹.

Yet somehow, these cherry-picked stories define Islamic law, ritual, punishment, even hygiene. Want to know how to pee, eat, or beat your wife? There’s a hadith for that.

Worse still, major hadiths contradict each other, or flat-out contradict the Qur’an. And why wouldn’t they? They were collected based on hearsay chains (isnads) with no contemporaneous verification. Imagine trying to reconstruct a historical biography today using only word-of-mouth gossip from TikTok influencers two centuries later. That’s Islamic historiography.

VII. Islam’s Borrowed Theology

Islam is not the fresh monotheistic masterpiece it claims to be. It’s a syncretic Frankenstein — a mishmash of Judaism, Christianity, pre-Islamic Arab paganism, and local folk beliefs.

Allah was a pre-Islamic moon god worshipped alongside daughters Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat¹².
The Islamic Shahada closely mirrors Jewish Shema and Christian creeds.
Angels, Satan, Judgment Day, Heaven, and Hell? All borrowed from Second Temple Judaism and Zoroastrianism.
Ramadan? Likely borrowed from earlier Christian Lenten fasts practiced in Arabia.

Even prayer toward Mecca only became mandatory later in Muhammad’s career — initially, Muslims prayed toward Jerusalem¹³.

This is not divine originality. It’s theological plagiarism with an Arabic accent.

VIII. The Political Weapon Called “Islam”

Far from being a mere spiritual path, Islam was from its inception a political movement cloaked in theology. Muhammad didn’t just preach — he conquered. Medina wasn’t just a sanctuary; it was a base of operations for raids, assassinations, and warfare.

Islam expanded not through inspiration, but by the sword — justified through verses like:

“Fight those who do not believe in Allah…until they pay the jizya” (Quran 9:29)

This isn't moral guidance — it's mafia economics.

Early Islam spread through military conquest, forced conversions, tribute extortion, and dhimmitude. It wasn’t ideas that won; it was armies. And the pattern hasn’t changed much since.

IX. Verdict: Revelation Denied

Strip away the apologetics, the mysticism, and the political correctness, and Islam collapses under the weight of its own fictions. No eyewitness accounts. No contemporary corroboration. A book riddled with contradictions and plagiarism. A founder whose divine hotline seemed perfectly timed to serve his ambitions. And a religion that expanded not through peace, but plunder.

This wasn’t a revelation.

It was an invention.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This post critiques Islam as an ideology, doctrine, and historical system — not Muslims as individuals. Every human deserves dignity. Systems that trap people in cruelty under divine claims do not.

Footnotes

Guillaume, A. The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford University Press, 1955. ↩
Crone, P., & Cook, M. Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. Cambridge University Press, 1977. ↩
Wansbrough, J. Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation. Oxford University Press, 1977. ↩
Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 1, Book 1, Hadith 3. ↩
Luxenberg, C. The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran. Hans Schiller Verlag, 2007. ↩
Tisdall, W. St. Clair. The Original Sources of the Qur'an. SPCK Publishing, 1905. ↩
Reynolds, G. S. The Qur'an and Its Biblical Subtext. Routledge, 2010. ↩
Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, Vol. 6–9. SUNY Press. ↩
Puin, Gerd R. “Observations on Early Qur’an Manuscripts in San'a.” in The Qur'an as Text, ed. Stefan Wild, Brill, 1996. ↩
Brubaker, D. Corrections in Early Qurʾān Manuscripts: Twenty Examples. Think and Tell, 2019. ↩
Brown, J. A. C. Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World. Oneworld, 2009. ↩
Peters, F. E. Allah's Commonwealth. Princeton University Press, 1973. ↩
Watt, W. M. Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman. Oxford University Press, 1961. ↩