The Myth of Continuity

Why Islam Today Is Not the Islam of Muhammad

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🔥 Introduction: “The Same Islam Since 610 CE” — Or So They Claim

One of Islam’s most common slogans is:

“Islam has been preserved — unchanged — for 1,400 years.”

Muslims are taught that:

• The Qur’an is untouched.

• The Hadith is carefully vetted.

• The rituals are just as Muhammad practiced them.

• The law is divine, unaltered, eternal.

But when you dig beneath the surface, a very different picture emerges — one of doctrinal mutations, legal contradictions, ritual innovations, and sectarian divergence.

This post will expose the myth of continuity and demonstrate that the Islam of today bears little resemblance to whatever Muhammad may have preached — assuming we can even know what that was.

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🧱 Claim vs. Reality

Claim	Historical Reality
“The Qur’an is unaltered.”	Dozens of variant Arabic versions (Qira’at); multiple compilations; missing verses acknowledged by early Muslims.
“The Hadith were meticulously preserved.”	600,000+ collected, 99% rejected; compiled centuries later by men who never met Muhammad.
“Our rituals match Muhammad’s.”	Prayer, Hajj, fasting — all show significant differences over time and by sect.
“Sharia is divine law.”	No single Sharia — 5+ major legal schools with wildly different rulings.

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🧩 The Qur’an: Not As Fixed As Claimed

Muslims insist the Qur’an has never changed.

But:

• Ibn Mas’ud had a mushaf that excluded Surahs 1, 113, 114.

• Ubayy ibn Ka‘b had extra surahs (e.g., Surah al-Khal’).

• Early recitations (Qira’at) contained textual differences, not just pronunciation variants.

• Uthman standardized the text, burning all competing copies.

📉 The Qur’an of today is not the Qur’an of Muhammad’s early followers.
It is a canonized version chosen by political power, not divine preservation.

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📜 Hadith: A Man-Made Construct

Modern Muslims treat Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim as sacred.

But:

• Neither was compiled until ~200–250 years after Muhammad.

• Compilers discarded over 95% of what they heard.

• The entire process depended on subjective criteria:

  • Character judgments

  • Memory assessments

  • Chain reliability — not content verification

Even Muslim scholars today disagree on Hadith classification.

And as we’ve already seen:
If Hadith collapses, so does the Sunnah.
And without Sunnah, you don’t have Islam — just the shell of a book.

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🕋 Ritual Drift: Today’s Islam vs. “Prophetic Islam”

Let’s look at key Islamic rituals and see how they’ve changed.

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1️⃣ Prayer (Salah)

Claim: Prayed exactly as Muhammad did.

Reality:

• Sunnis: 5 daily prayers.

• Shia: 3 prayer times, 5 prayers combined.

• Malikis pray with arms at the side. Others fold.

• Some recite out loud, others silently.

• Number of takbirs in Janazah (funeral) prayer varies by madhhab.

📉 Uniformity? Not even close.
📉 Muhammad’s actual prayer style? Unknowable.

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2️⃣ Fasting (Sawm)

Claim: Done just as Muhammad did.

Reality:

• Shia begin and break fast based on different astronomical calculations than Sunnis.

• Modern Muslims use clocks, apps, and GPS — none of which existed in 7th-century Arabia.

• Cultural practices (e.g., Iftar buffets, taraweeh marathons) are modern inventions.

📉 The “spiritual fast” has turned into a social, political, and even competitive event in many parts of the world.

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3️⃣ Hajj

Claim: Hajj is unchanged since Abraham.

Reality:

• Muhammad made major changes to existing pagan rituals.

• Saudi authorities now control logistics, crowd flow, even rituals.

• The Black Stone was broken, rebuilt, and replaced with fragments.

• Modern pilgrims perform Hajj with:

  • Hotels

  • Tour guides

  • Visa regulations

  • Police checkpoints

  • Air-conditioned tents

📉 The modern Hajj is a government-managed religious tourism industry, not a replication of Muhammad’s experience.

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⚖️ Sharia: A Legal Frankenstein

There is no single Sharia law.

Madhhab	Key Differences
Hanafi	Emphasizes reason (qiyas); allows female testimony in some cases
Maliki	Uses practices of people of Medina as source of law
Shafi‘i	Focuses on Hadith; less on local custom
Hanbali	Literalist; rejects analogy when possible
Ja‘fari (Shia)	Completely different Hadith collections; different rulings on marriage, inheritance, etc.

📉 A punishment valid in one school may be invalid in another.
📉 Marriage rules, divorce procedures, even prayer formats all differ.

So much for “one, unchanging law.”

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🧠 Syllogism: Continuity Is a Myth

1. A religion that claims unchanging transmission must show continuity in text, practice, and law.

2. Islam shows variation, evolution, and contradiction across all domains.

3. Therefore, the claim of unchanging Islam is false.
   🔚 Conclusion: Islam today is not the Islam of Muhammad.

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🧨 The Real Reason for the Continuity Myth

The claim of preservation exists to serve three purposes:

1. Theological Certainty
   If Islam has changed, how can it claim to be the perfect final religion?

2. Moral Immunity
   If Muhammad’s example is unreliable, how can Muslims be bound to imitate him?

3. Legal Authority
   If Hadith and Qur’an interpretation has shifted, then Sharia loses legitimacy.

📉 So the myth of continuity is not based on evidence — it’s based on psychological and theological necessity.

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🧱 Final Conclusion: What Is Islam Without Continuity?

Without real continuity, Islam becomes:

• A collage of traditions

• A system shaped by centuries of politics, scholars, and empires

• A religion whose claim to timelessness collapses under scrutiny

Just like:

• Rabbinic Judaism isn’t the religion of Moses

• Catholicism isn’t the faith of the original disciples

• Modern Islam is not the Islam of Muhammad

It is the Islam of the Abbasids, the jurists, the Hadith compilers, and the state-builders who came after him.

That’s the truth — unvarnished.

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📘 Coming Next:

Part 7 – “Faith in Fabrication: Why the Hadith Forgery Crisis Destroys the Foundation”

Exposing the massive scale of Hadith forgery in the first two centuries of Islam — and why this destroys the claim that Hadith collections reflect divine truth.