Refuting Islam

Part 2: Prophet Without a Paper Trail

The Vanishing of Muhammad

No prophet, no religion.

Islam’s entire structure is built around the life, teachings, and authority of one man: Muhammad.

According to tradition, he:

Received divine revelations in Mecca,
Fled to Medina (Hijrah),
Waged wars, signed treaties, issued laws,
And unified the Arabian Peninsula under Islam.

But here’s the brutal test:

If Muhammad existed and did all of that, his existence should be verifiable by independent, contemporaneous evidence.

It isn’t.

And that alone is a death sentence for the historical narrative.

📜 What the Islamic Tradition Claims

Islamic sources — all written long after Muhammad’s death — claim:

Muhammad was born in Mecca in 570 CE, to the Quraysh tribe.
He began receiving revelations from Gabriel in 610 CE.
After facing persecution, he fled to Medina in 622 CE (Hijrah).
He led over two dozen military campaigns, including Badr, Uhud, and the conquest of Mecca.
He received and dictated the entire Qur’an.
He died in 632 CE in Medina.

These events are central to Islamic theology, law, and ritual.

But if Muhammad was a real, historically significant figure — and if he truly reshaped Arabia — then:

Where are the records? Where is the evidence?

🕵️‍♂️ What the Evidence Shows

❌ 1. No External, Contemporaneous Mentions

We possess hundreds of texts, inscriptions, chronicles, and letters from the 7th century — Roman, Byzantine, Persian, Armenian, and Syriac.

None of them mention Muhammad by name during his supposed lifetime.

No letters from Byzantine officials noting a prophet in Arabia.
No Christian chroniclers alarmed by his revelations or conquests.
No Persian sources noting a new religion spreading across Arabia.
Not even a single inscription or papyrus from Arabia itself naming Muhammad during his life.

“There is no hard evidence for the existence of the Prophet in the seventh century; the first references to him appear only decades later.”
— Stephen Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet¹

❌ 2. No Biography Until 100+ Years Later

The first full biography of Muhammad comes from Ibn Ishaq, written around 760–770 CE — that’s 130+ years after Muhammad’s death.

And even then, we don’t have Ibn Ishaq’s original. We have an edited version by Ibn Hisham, who openly admits to removing anything he found “embarrassing” or “unreliable.”

The Hadith literature? Compiled even later:

Bukhari: mid-9th century
Muslim: late 9th century
Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud, and others: 200+ years after the fact

Imagine trying to reconstruct George Washington’s life using nothing but oral tradition and legends recorded in 1990.

That’s the entire Islamic biographical corpus.

❌ 3. Inscriptions and Coins Appear Only After the Conquests

You’d expect a prophet who founded a religion and a state to appear on early Islamic coinage, state documents, or inscriptions.

But the earliest secure reference to Muhammad is the Dome of the Rock inscription (691 CE) — built under Abd al-Malik, nearly 60 years after Muhammad’s death.

Even Islamic coins struck under the Umayyads don’t mention Muhammad until the 690s.

Earlier coins just say:

“In the name of God” or
“There is no god but God”

Nothing about a messenger. Nothing about Muhammad.

“The earliest datable texts referring to Muhammad are political proclamations... There is no evidence of Muhammad in the Arabian Peninsula before these imperial statements.”
— Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It²

🧠 Deductive Reasoning — No Special Pleading

Let’s put it in black-and-white terms.

Syllogism: The Case Against Muhammad’s Historicity

Premise 1: If a major religious, political, and military leader like Muhammad existed in the early 7th century and reshaped the Arabian Peninsula, we should find contemporaneous external evidence of his existence.
Premise 2: No contemporaneous external evidence for Muhammad exists from the 7th century.
Conclusion: Therefore, the Muhammad described in Islamic sources is historically unverified and likely constructed post facto.

✅ Valid
✅ Sound
✅ Devastating

🤔 Alternative Explanation: The Prophet Construct

If Muhammad wasn’t known to history during his life — but shows up suddenly in the late 7th century, under a rising Arab empire — what explains that?

Answer: Imperial mythmaking.

As Arab forces expanded in the Levant and Persia, they needed a unifying ideology.
A single prophet, with a single message, tied to a single book, offered legitimacy.
The Abbasids inherited and codified this myth, crafting the image of Muhammad as the perfect statesman-prophet-lawgiver.

Muhammad wasn’t remembered because he was historical.
He was constructed because he was useful.

🔚 Final Blow: No Prophet, No Revelation

If Mecca didn’t exist as claimed,
And Muhammad didn’t live, preach, or conquer as claimed,

Then the Qur’an’s origin story is detached from time, place, and person.

A divine message with no verified messenger is a contradiction.

And Islam’s second leg — its prophet — has just snapped.

👤 Verdict: The Second Leg Collapses

Pillar	Status
🧱 Mecca	Historically absent
👤 Muhammad	Historically unverified

What remains?

Just the Qur’an — and that’s next.

📚 Footnotes:

Stephen Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 5–7.
Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Darwin Press, 1997), pp. 548–550.
Fred Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins (Darwin Press, 1998), ch. 2–3.