Islam: The Untold Story Page #3

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The Bedouin think they know

everything about Mohammed,

his character, his wives,

even his favourite food.

This is a whole world

founded on stories of Mohammed.

But the problem is, how do we know

this was what it was like?

How can we separate what really

happened from hearsay and myths?

Do we know, did the

Prophet Mohammed come here?

Was there a tree?

Was Mohammed even a

travelling merchant?

The evidence is almost non-existent.

The earliest biographies we have

were written nearly 200 years

after Mohammed's lifetime.

In most religions,

the tradition was handed down

through oral history,

for millennia.

This was put aside,

now it's called positive history.

The oral tradition

is completely negated.

Well, oral tradition means that

you remember what you want.

Some of it must be history, but most

of it is clearly not history.

It's just that they had been

reshaped, rethought,

they had been taken

out of their original context,

serving new functions,

they'd been cleaned up by...

Cleaned up, or messed up

if you like,

by all kinds of interests

that people have in the memory.

Supposing there is no written

text of the time of the Prophet

mentioning his name, the same is true

of Christ, the same is true of Moses,

that doesn't mean anything because

there is always the oral tradition.

Sometimes if you have other

sources from other points of view,

you can suddenly see what it is

that's been changed, and then

when you can see that, you can

also see why it has changed,

but because Islam arose

in a relatively remote

corner of the world,

we don't have these checks,

we don't yet have the key

that can unlock the tradition.

I came here to get close

to the tradition,

and when you're here

you can feel its weight.

It's in the air.

It's palpable.

It can't just be brushed aside.

Millions upon millions

of people believe it -

this is their history.

An entire moral universe

has been built around

the stories told of Mohammed.

Listening to all these stories,

part of me is very moved,

the other part of me is wondering,

"Well, how do you know this?

"Where do these stories come from?

"Are they really true?"

Gradually in the West,

for the intellectual elite,

the sense of the sacred was lost.

A tribal person in Africa

or in the Amazon

has a natural sense of the sacred,

whereas a graduate student

at Oxford probably doesn't.

THEY PRAY:

THEY PRAY:

In some places, you have to be

careful where to tread.

Muslims believe

that from the very beginning,

the great Arab conquests

were all about Islam.

But in the 7th century,

you can barely find

a new religion called Islam

anywhere in the historical records.

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