MHMD [17] Mel Massacres More Modern Muslim Myths!

In our penultimate episode tracing where the name 'Muhammad' came from, noting that while we can find so many references to this name in the 7th century...none of them are the prophet Muhammad whom Muslims are dependent on for their religion to have any authority or historical credibility.

In this episode Mel looks at the Islamic 'Hijra', which is known in Islam as the movement of their prophet from the city of Mecca to Medina, which they believe happened in 622 AD. If this is so, then perhaps we can find him in that year moving from the one city to the other.

You would think we could find references to it from the sources at that time and in that place...but we can't find anything.

What we can find are references to what exactly was going on near that time, and in that area, but they are almost all Jewish, Spanish and Chinese references...and it is these documents that Mel takes us to in this episode.

According to what he has found, the Jewish Exilarch, Nehemiah ben Hushiel was killed around the year 617 AD, resulting in a large rebellion by the Arabs, especially the Tayaye who lived in what is today northern Iraq.

Note that none of these Arabs lived in the Hijaz, in central Arabia, where their Muhammad supposedly lived, for one very good reason...there simply was no water there to support a large civilization.

These more northern Arabs wanted to kick out the Byzantine and the Persian overlords, who were the 2 great empires in that time and in that area.

There are 3 sources which Mel used to support these events and this time period (617-618 AD).

1) In 651 AD a Chinese document entitled the "Old Book of Tang and the Ce-Fu-Yuan Gui" referred to a rebellion by the 'Tayaye' 34 years earlier, thus in 617 AD. The important of this document is that it was written far away from the later Abbasid empire, and so could not have been tampered with by them, which is what we know they did with almost all the Umayyad documents written during this time, so this would be a valid window into that period and that place.

2) In 719 AD another document, this time a letter of the ruler of Kang (Samarkand), which is in present day Uzbekistan, mentioned that the Tayaye (again in present day northern Iraq) began a rebellion 100 years earlier, which would put it in the same time period as the Chinese document, around 617-618 AD.

3) In 754 AD a Hispanic Chronicle referred to a Saracen (Arab) rebellion in 618 AD, corroborating the earlier Chinese and Samarkand documents.

This period was an apocalyptic period where empires were falling and being replaced by new ones, with new religions and new leaders coming to the fore.

What about the year 622, the year of the Hijra?

Mel then goes on to deal with this date, saying that the Jewish Exilarch, Shallum (ben David), the brother of Nehemiah ben Hushiel (referred to earlier), was deported in 612 AD from Jerusalem to Persia for a 10- year period, which would place it 622 AD, the year later chosen by the Muslims for their 'Hijra'.

Huzziel was killed in 617 AD, and his brother was subsequently exiled in 622 AD.

In conclusion, we can find 4 things of note:

- We have definite evidence of a Jewish belief that Nehemiah Ben Hushiel was the Messiah Ben Joseph and that the Jews expected another Exilarch to be the Messiah Ben David.

- We also have evidence from a 6th century Jewish inscription of the use of 'MHMD' just 3 years after the Exilarch Zutra II was killed by the Persians.

- It is a fair assumption that talk of the MHMD in the 7th century is a messianic expectation in relation to the death of the Exilarch Nehemiah ben Hushiel (the Jews used the word to refer to the coming Messiah).

- His brother Shallum is remembered strongly in the SIN as a companion of their prophet Muhammad. This could simply be due to this dual messiah expectation.

© Pfander Centre for Apologetics & Polemics - US, May 13, 2024
(105,860) Music: 'Country Girl' by aleksound, from filmmusic-io