Cultish - Mohammed and the Origins of Islam, Pt. 1 @TheAlMaidahInitiative

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Cultish - Mohammed and the Origins of Islam, Pt. 2 @TheAlMaidahInitiative

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come be one of us head over to thecultistshow .com or follow the link in the show notes and click the join button directly support the work of this ministry as the mission is completely funded by you our listener all right welcome back ladies and gentlemen to cultish entering the kingdom of the cults my name is jeremiah roberts one of the co -hosts here as always i'm joined with my trusty co -host and super sleuth andrew it's good to first this is our first recording in 2024 it's been a it's been a while since we've actually we've actually done something together it feels like we it was actually last time was in was in utah with haunted cosmos i'll try and backtrack but it's good to be doing something with you again in a new year i know dude and we're kicking this year off with a boom with recordings we're going to be talking about islam today that's huge man and i missed your face jerry yes and it's good to see your uh digital face over in your super secret headquarters i'm going to go ahead and introduce our guests today this is going to be like an extended series uh so when people are wondering they might be wondering too when when also like part five or six gets dropped or we're like we're wearing the same clothes it's not that we're not we haven't like changed our clothes in a cover a couple of days or over insurmountable amount of time it's like we're all recording this all in one bunch so i wouldn't have changed my clothes but thanks for letting people think that oh yeah oh yeah um but anyway it's good to have you back when you're have you here not back well here and you are uh from seattle uh you made it down here uh yeah just tell everyone a little bit about you and you've got a youtube channel like just tell a little about yourself and what kind of makes you interested about the topic of islam yeah so i'm originally from england and i moved to seattle in 2011 to intern for mars hill church before that exploded oh uh but then but there i um met my wife um and then have stuck around there ever since and basically um after i moved to seattle i got a job working for subsplash which makes the apology app actually i was the one who sold you guys your app back in the day oh wow um and helped luke set it up it was good times um but uh i liked working for subsplash but i found myself living in a bit of a christian bubble and i all my friends were mars hill people and that was that was kind of it and that's not how i grew up because england is kind of like aggressively secular especially the high school i went to yeah like though you know maybe you know four or five other christians in my year at school but for the most part you know my life was a lot of difficult questions and it shaped me in a lot of ways to be you know effective in answering objections to christianity and being able to explain christian ideas to people who thought they were crazy yeah and i just kind of gained this you know conviction that i wanted to get out of my bubble more and meet more non -believers and you know interact with some other ideas more so um the first thing i actually did was i listened through the book of mormon doctrine covenants and pearly great price on audio um because i'd run into more missionaries in england as well yeah and i was listening to some of your guys content back then too and it seems like fun i should i should learn that and then once i was done with that it was the perfect thing to listen to while you're working because it's not like it's like massively engaging most of the time no offense mormons but you know um like but there's occasionally some parts you kind of like you know take note of but it's much less distracting than like listening to songs for me because with the songs every five minutes i'm trying to like find skip skip skip skip okay this one yeah yeah this is five minutes of work five minutes of song searching right um and once i was done with that i decided to jump into the islamic source materials so um read through the quran i listened through um sahih al -bukhari and sahih muslim which are the two largest what's known as hadith volumes um a hadith is like an encyclopedia of everything muhammad said and did categorize into topics and then became convicted it was a very academic exercise i didn't know any muslims in seattle so in 2012 i started attending the muslim student association at the university of washington i walked in super awkwardly partway through one of the meetings everybody saw me come in one guy waved me over offered me a seat invited me back and i just kind of kept going back and like kept learning about islam and um learning all this uh you know information about islam and making muslim friends and just got to kind of appreciate them as people but also learn more about their theology and the way they think and how to communicate effectively and understand figuring out how christians misunderstand islam and muslims but also understanding how muslims ultimately don't understand christianity either and trying to clarify both of those things i want to make so i started the almight initiative as a way to get kind of get christians and muslims together over food um and from a christian worldview perspective we should be accurately representing the ideas that people we disagree with yeah and so a we want a friendly honest conversation about christianity and islam um and the neat thing about it is um muslims have a concept of the sovereignty of god so basically all of our events sort of start with an idea of like look everything we're talking about is bigger than us um and somebody might ask me well you would become christian right i'm like well of course i do i believe that god is offering you eternal life and forgiveness of all your sins for free through the sacrifice of jesus um how if i'm your friend how could i not want that for you right but here's the deal i am not god i'm not in charge of people's hearts and minds god is so my job is to speak the truth and love to be you know to be hospitable to you um and if you believe and if muslims believe basically that same thing that allows us to sit down and have a friendly and honest conversation and still go home as friends at the end of the evening because we're not trying to you know control everybody right so the organization i run is called the almida initiative um probably put that in the comments because it's not intuitive to spell because it's an arabic word that means a table for the food and conversation we'll have links in our podcast too so people can find you yeah perfect yeah um yeah so we we what we do is we we train churches help them understand what islam is as a worldview and who muslims are as people and kind of teach people how to build effective yeah friendship and communication right and so what's important what i want to really emphasize is that you know your experience your queue of knowledge of islam is not is not just taking a bunch of academic knowledge and sort of living in an echo chamber and now we're just sort of like talking about it sort of without really having ever talked to someone who's muslim like this is something that from scratch really came about it just really dialoguing day in and day out you know or just week in week out you know with different people in your area in your community so like how how off would you say like how many do you have like a count of like how many hours you think you've put in just like a like dialogue specifically back and forth muslims like how much time have you think you've given to that oh i have i have like no idea but i've been i've been having conversation long conversations with muslims for like 12 years at this point yeah so i've put a lot of i've put a lot of hours into this i've talked to a lot of different people from a lot of different countries um and i've had a ton of fun doing it yeah yeah it's super admirable i just think it's something you know if you're going to be critiquing a worldview you got to be willing to get into the lion's den with those you know in a gracious sort of way with those who are adhere to that so and just real quickly just what are your thoughts initially when it comes to islam or just sort of like the first question maybe you have for james as far as how he got into this what comes to mind for you yeah i was just thinking uh you said you've had a lot of conversations with muslims do you have like a youtube channel or anywhere that people can go to check those conversations out yeah i do um so we're the almight initiative on youtube um you can search for the almight initiative or you can search my name james raymond and you'll find us or go to the link in the comments um and we have a couple of different uh types of content on our channel some is a some of the questions that muslims ask us and we answer um but then we have muslims and muslim leaders from different types on the channel specifically uh so we never wanted to make content which is just talking about islam we want to talk to muslims directly and kind of show people the um kinds of conversations we we want to have um and so there's a lot of very very diverse perspectives on that so if i have any you know muslim listeners who you know object to anything i say in this podcast which i'm sure i will um my invitation would be to come join me on the podcast and have a conversation about it you can go look at what we've done we always have friendly honest respectful conversations and some of the episodes are good um some need some work um but there's all sorts of people we've got kind of hardcore sort of more sort of salafi type muslims we i just i two days ago i just interviewed a sort of sufi muslim which is a much more sort of like liberal and spiritual type of islam um and we have friendly honest conversations with people from all types of perspectives and yours would be welcome too awesome and uh so go ahead yeah so when we're thinking about islam i know you know specifically for me it's like where do we begin right like so if you're getting into a conversation with a muslim where do you kind of start foundationally uh and then where can we start as christians to begin to even understand islam so um when i'm when i'm first meeting a person what i'm trying to figure out is where they get their information about islam from because there's very different ideas within the islamic world and my advice to any christian talking to any muslim and or any but any talk to anybody is you want to figure out the specific world view of the person you were speaking to not assuming that they kind of belong to some sort of greater subset um if you do that there's not much that can go wrong in a conversation um but you're you know my my initial work with anybody is just trying to figure out what is the world view the person i am speaking to how do they individually think about the world and while islam well knowing about islam can give you some good clues on where to start uh it doesn't it doesn't provide all the answers of the individual you're speaking with most of the time no no i definitely make no that's that's good that definitely makes sense well why don't what if we do this maybe like zoom out a little bit you're talking about interactions with muslims and so maybe give a broader context too um could this would be a that maybe this will help too because i mean everyone is looking is in a different part of the world or different part of the country uh the united states and they're gonna they're gonna have someone their proximity who's muslim so in your proximity you're from seattle we talked a little bit before the podcast yesterday and we talked a little bit over the phone like maybe explain to the context of seattle the relationship between muslims immigrants especially when it comes to seattle and sort of like how and and how you sort of use that to your advantage yeah so in seattle when i started we had about 150 000 muslims uh there's about 200 000 now because we got about 50 000 afghan refugees after the fall of kabul um not like directly resettled to seattle but it just more people have kind of moved and come up from brazil um so basically the average muslim in america feels like an outsider to some extent they feel like the rest of society is suspicious of them as an individual so if if we as christians show up just in the ways we're supposed to show up right which is you know loving the foreigner in us as deuteronomy teaches or you know showing hospitality to strangers as hebrews teaches us then we just immediately gain credibility and good relationship if we are willing to see them as an individual not as some scary collective which is exactly how the bible wants us to see people right as individual image bearers of god so we just look at muslims that way if we're courageous and not afraid which again is not an option for christians courage is the only way we're invited to live um so we engage people in that way we just immediately have credibility so in in the west and in arizona too from my few days here like on my way to apologia yesterday i met three armani guys in a coffee shop um people come to the us from all over the world and that you know people spend christians spend you know millions of dollars trying to get christians to these kind of you know obscure places a long way away when all those people are coming here and i'm not saying we shouldn't send people to other countries right but there's an amazing opportunity to show hospitality here and you know engage people here and by doing that it's easier in some ways because one big part about most other religions whether it's catholicism mormonism and islam as well is that the group plays a massive impact in people's lives yeah and people are terrified of the of what the group is going to say right and so if they feel like everybody's watching they can't be themselves but when they feel like they're away from the group they can be themselves um and when that happens you can really make a connection with somebody and learn what they actually think about the world rather than what they think they are supposed to say when they meet you interesting andrew what about you do you um like all your time in utah like have you noticed like mosque or just sort of a like middle eastern muslim couples there like what's your been your observation up in utah i've only seen a handful of muslim people and only one mosque uh out here which is kind of uh interesting but being that it's like kind of like the mormon mecca out here it's not surprising uh that the majority of people would be mormon even though that's changing there's about to be actually in salt lake county more liberals than there are actually mormons out here uh but but yeah i haven't seen too many to have interactions with never on evangelism have i seen one out by byu yeah to interact with yeah interesting uh so what we're going to do is that you know we're this is going to be extended series i'm really excited to unravel this and i there's there's so many layers to this but i think one of the things that is important too is that even there's just when you look at even the foundations of like how to start a dialogue with someone who's muslim or even understanding the quran not even understanding it how they view it it does feel initially like overwhelming like i was skimming through i mean our pastor and elder one of our pastors nelder james white he has a book whatever christian needs to know about the quran i was skimming over that and even just that i was like man this is really good but i feel like this is just heavy rich like thick like how is there a way to kind of decipher this even that from my perspective just starting at the very beginning felt a little overwhelming so i'm really excited to understand how to break that apart in bite -sized pieces but what we're going to do is that we're going to start really at the very beginning so honestly historically the only thing like of the origins i really know is the story of him going into a cave and getting this like vision or private revelation but there's a lot more to it than that i'm sure right what what's what's the like the focus like starting point from all your study is like where's what are the like what's what's the origin story that um that you can bring your audience well once upon a time there was a man and a woman in a garden um no so what you have to understand um in arabia in 570 which is the year muhammad was born or around that time arabia is kind of like the wild west of the ancient near east so you have on the one hand the sassanid persian empire which is very powerful and then you've got the byzantine empire which would have called themselves a roman empire at the time we called them byzantines yeah and they're kind of constantly at war with each other but byzantine has a sort of very strong state christianity at this time and arabia has no centralized government and the government is all kind of tribally run so if it's tribe represents kind of your religion it represents your police it represents your military it really it represents your like social security net as well so you have these massive tribal kind of conflicts between each other um so if you are in arabia and you're part of a prominent tribe your life is pretty good um if you're not part of one of these prominent tribes you can be in kind of constant danger but what that allowed for is the byzantines would persecute christian heretics so think about gnostics you think about um you know or you're whatever you know heretical group you think of that wasn't allowed in the byzantine empire they would often sort of drift down into arabia um also when the romans took over judea and destroyed the temple in 80 70 a lot of jews migrated down to arabia as well away from the watchful eyes of the empire um so the religious milieu that muhammad came into was a mixture of this overriding arab polytheism propped up by the tribal system um judaism and mostly heretical sects of christianity and you can see this in the quran just by the ideas it's reacting to and the difficult thing about this is basically free islamic arabia is not massively literate which means most of the history of the region comes from the muslim perspective you know two three hundred years after the fact but one thing you do see in the things that the quran cites and and references you do get an idea of the religious you know world view of the day and the things it's referencing and there's some gnostic sources that are clearly referenced there about jesus there's some jewish sources that are very clearly referenced and we kind of construct the arab polytheistic paganism from the islamic accounts of it to some extent no that's super interesting so really what you're seeing just a lot of syncretism like at that time like there's other religious leaders that you can see uh you know when they start you think about you know you think about joseph smith you know people there's actually a lot of people who have sort of made parallels between the both of them where you know joseph smith took a lot of the ideas at his time in the 1800s things that were going on in palmyra new york and he really blended those together and does anything come to mind when he with what he mentioned oh for sure like uh i know something which we'll probably get into later is a lot of people uh will argue for the divine inspiration of the quran through the fact that uh there's no way muhammad could have possibly have written it uh they do the same arguments for joseph smith right he was illiterate uh there's no way he could have written it the argument of divine literary excellence i think is what it's called uh a deep dark uh figure overshadowed them over powder overpowered them interesting things like that but i want to go back into this this history real quick james so when we're thinking about the history you think about muhammad how do we know where this history come from comes from and how can we compare it to the gospels right from some of my research i've learned a little bit about the hadiths and i can't even say this other one but the seerah there's two different historical accounts can you define both of those for us and then uh also when they were kind of compiled like what year how far after um muhammad's life was it and then kind of compare that to the gospels by like what we know about jesus as well yeah so the hadith are compiled um the first you know as far as the major sunni hadith that we have now they're compiled between like 225 to 300 years after muhammad and then the seerah literature uh like the earliest being um ibn ishaq which is we don't have the original of that we have a guy called ibn hisham and i believe that's about you know 150 years after muhammad it's it's in that ballpark um and a lot of people today um are kind of making the argument that well because of this um muhammad didn't exist um and the way they're getting there is they're taking this sort of higher critical methodology that the german scholars invented in the uh in the 17 1800s and kind of applying it to this right the things we believe in the things we can find hard archaeological evidence for um but as christians i think we have to realize that there's actually not like a useful way to look at the world altogether there's useful things we can learn from it um but like asking a muslim to prove that muhammad existed is like me asking you to prove that your grandfather existed right like well if your grandfather really existed produce me a letter in his handwriting produce me like something he wore and it's just like you know you'd be scrambling to do that because it's just something you've never even like questioned in your life right so that the fact so when skeptics started asking questions about the bible that christians were caught flat -footed because no one thought okay we have to prove this with some sort of archaeological you know evidence yeah um you know the clothes would come we're having to prove the genuineness of a relic in the middle ages um but once people start asking these questions people start looking for the evidence and they start finding the evidence and i i honestly i think it's a little ridiculous to kind of think that muhammad could be like made up and let me give you a kind of equivalent example of this right so the earliest biography of muhammad uh when it's like written and us you know and us now right would be the difference between us and the first world war so just for context here like let's say you you don't trust the sources okay that's fair enough there's some reasons not to trust the sources and they have a particular bias to them um but like there's this guy online called the people kind of keep telling stories about this guy called carton do we art who has this you know eye patch um and you know fought in all these battles and afterwards says frankly i enjoyed the war right now if you wanted to tell me that he's just made up for the internet i don't think that's true but that's actually pretty plausible to me right you can invent some heroes um as history kind of you know drifts on but could you invent woodrow wilson or or could you invent lenin no you couldn't do that because this is still like so for me right you couldn't invent world war one because my great -grandfather went to jerusalem in world war one um and talked about his war experiences to my father right and that happens on a kind of like a large enough level that people just kind of like intuitively understand these things so i think there's all sorts of ways that you can allege that the islamic sources are you know have some unreliability in them um because they're not written by eyewitnesses they're passed down orally for a long time um but to make them up you know whole cloth i think is um i think is a little bit of is a conspiracy theory oh yeah and it's very popular right now um and i don't think it's massively helpful um to to be on that track there's lots of guys that i respect and have learned things from that believe that i don't believe it i think uh history will uh vindicate my position here hmm now interesting and speaking of history like what's so you explain just a little bit of sort of like the syncretistic there's a lot of syncretism with where he grew up but did did muhammad did he grow up as with sort of like a religious bias or prejudice or what was there something was there maybe a similarity and again i'm just sort of i'm just doing a comparison with what i know with joseph smith like part of his story of his origin story is that he looked around and saw all the different revivals going on he wanted to know which church was true so he went out into the woods to pray and see which church he should join that's where heavenly father and jesus come down separate form was there a part of him wanting to figure out what was true amongst all the syncretism and trying to really find his footing is that is is that how he kind of came about what was what was it like what was his perspective about from which you know yeah so again the only perspective we have on this is the one that comes to us from the islamic sources right but um yeah is it almost exactly the same actually so muslims claim that muhammad was a monotheist even before he was a prophet that he just kind of instinctively believed in one god and nothing quite made sense to him so he was you know then then he went out to pray in a cave and as he's praying on the cave trying to seek direction that's when the angel gabriel appeared to him and says recite and he says i don't know how then the angel squeezes him so you know tight that he feels like he's going to die and then he says recite and then lets him go he can't do it squeeze him again then the third time he starts to recite the words of the quran and initially this experience according to you know sahih al -bukhari and the muslim sources freaks muhammad out um and he goes back to his wife khadija um and so khadija is this you know she's 20 years older than him she's a very successful woman um and she proposes to him actually and he marries her and you know he also works for her and goes up to syria trading things but she she's the one who calms him down comforts him and according to the sources calls her uncle waraka who is a christian priest and khadija and waraka basically explain to muhammad that no don't be freaked out by this the angel is a true messenger from god you're not possessed by a jinn um jinn is a genie by the way it's a big part of arabian folklore um and that god has called you to this work so um it's his wife khadija and her uncle the christian priest that convince him to kind of go on with the work and start teaching this to everybody a christian priest inspires that like tells him to go like pursue this yeah vision yeah wow and so also just to clarify too so there's a distinction from i guess we're understanding between how maybe how muslims view inspiration how christians view inspiration where we see you know like paul is penning a right a letter that's under the inspiration of the holy spirit but it's like paul's one is authoring it where in this instance that uh muhammad is receiving this info from gabriel the angel and so the quran really isn't muhammad's word is supposed to be really gabriel speaking through muhammad or what's the distinction between islam's or christian inspiration when it comes to that no that's that's entirely correct so a muslim would say in no sense is the quran the words of muhammad right it's straight up dictation the angel says something to him he puts it down exactly okay now in the hadith there is a category of things called hadith kudzi which are revelations from allah in the words of muhammad but the quran itself is not considered the word of you know muhammad in any sense whereas if you look at the way jesus talks about the torah he interchanged the users moses said god said the words of moses the words of god right the words of moses and god are the same um without moses being god right right um so the scriptures are you know men are carried along by the holy spirit right um and they're the exact words it was but they're also the words of the individual in a way that's there's no error and that's how christians understand this versus how muslims understand this yeah and so just to recap then so muhammad has really the account the initial encounter with the angel gabriel there's sort of three times where the gabriel tells him to recite but he does he he most but he doesn't really necessarily take down anything he goes and then talks to his wife and the priests about it and then he comes back and then has like the second encounter is that how i understand it um so he basically will get revel he'll get revelations in different ways so the claim is not always that he sees uh the angel every time um in sahih al -bukhari he describes it and he says sometimes it's like the ringing of a bell sometime it sort of comes to me other times i speak with the angel gabriel like a man so it kind of comes from in different times in different ways um piece by piece like the quran is not a narrative right it comes in pieces addressing various situations and even like an entire chapter is not necessarily like revealed all at the same time it kind of comes in chunks and what so what's the time lapse between when he had the initial encounter we talked to his wife and the priests and like like over the time in which all the quran was penned down um so that is going to be about 20 years um but the quran is not actually written down in one place in his lifetime um in in muhammad's time the quran is simply you know an oral recitation because that's the kind of culture he's in right people don't tend to write things down they tend to have good memories and recite things and that's why as you hear the quran recited in arabic it has a cadence to it because it's made to be memorized and recited no fascinating and so really you have really over his entire lifetime where it is sort of accumulating sort of coming together and it's oral tradition but then what he's known for is really at least at least what comes to mind with muhammad and the growth of islam is conquest and advancement so from a political standpoint i mean he's going and he had this initial encounter how did that transfer from him sort of really being i guess you call like a political leader just really creating the the movement of his time like what did that look like yeah so for the first for the first few years um so i think it's 605 he has the first revelation and then um and and then so he's in mecca for a period where he's just sort of going around telling everybody look there's not lots of gods there's only one god and this actually brings a lot of persecution and the reason it brings persecution is because mecca is the center of something called the hajj which is this pilgrimage that everyone in arabia makes to offer sacrifices to their gods so that exists in islam today in honor of the one god but at the time muhammad it was done in a sort of polytheistic way right in their view the the pre -muslim arabs believed in allah like meaning the god but also believed in all these sort of associate gods with him and so as they would come from you know their different you know parts of arabia muhammad would come and say this is silly there's not lots of god there's clearly there's only there's only one god here and he had a small number of converts right his daughters believed in him his nephew ali believed in him but the tribal leaders of mecca didn't like what he was doing because he saw them they saw him as a threat to their way of life so the two main opponents is a guy called abu jahl and a guy called abu sufyan who were kind of conspiring against him but can't really do anything because his uncle abu talib is another one of the tribal leaders and abu talib never becomes a muslim but he holds muhammad in high esteem and like basically gives him protection and his wife khadijah is super well connected as well so basically what happens to the early muslims is that muhammad himself is for the most part left alone but his followers are kind of beaten they're threatened one is like buried alive and killed and eventually some of them even have to like flee to abyssinia like modern day ethiopia where they receive like asylum from the christian king there who refuses to you know let them be persecuted there so in the middle of this as people come with these caravans there's a city called yathrib which which is now known as medina which has about half jewish population and a half sort of pagan arab population and according to ibn ishaq and the earlier sources what happens here is um and just a real caveat on ibn ishaq as a source lots of muslims don't really like it um but there really isn't much of an alternative for the history of this era and all the people they do like like um ibn kathir and people they consider reliable rely pretty heavily on ibn ishaq as a source right there's no getting around it um so it's the kind of version we have but the the idea is that these uh the jews in yathrib medina have been telling the arabs that a new prophet's going to rise and when this new prophet arises the jews are going to rule over the arabs and that when people from this tribe meet muhammad and he says i'm a prophet that god has put here to point to the oneness of god they they basically say well our time is coming if the jews embrace this guy but if we embrace this guy first then we can be the ones to subjugate the jews so they say we will follow you and we want you to come live with us in medina and the reason it's called medina is short for medina al nabi meaning the city of the prophet mm -hmm so um in 622 they invite him so his protection has died right abu talib his uncle and khadijah die in the same year and he's in trouble now muhammad muhammad is in trouble because his protection is gone right and so he goes so so these people say we'll follow you but then muhammad claims you know allah speaks to him and makes a condition a new condition on his followers not only do they have to listen to what he says about god but they have to swear allegiance to fight for him as well so up until this point muhammad has been has had no political power and in a lot of ways lives a life that a christian could you know respect and agree with he's almost a mortal christian up to this point because he's teaching that there's one god not lots of gods he is a one woman man and he is suffering he's using persuasion not coercion and he's um suffering persecution patiently right and then and then the hijra comes and the hijra is this might means migration so the migration from mecca to medina and then he becomes the supreme leader of religion and state at this point and so after khadijah has died a woman comes to him and says hey are you planning to remarry and he says uh who would i marry and she said well what do you want do you want a widow or a virgin and he says yes and ends up marrying two women at the same time one is um a widow named saudah and when i say widow don't imagine orally like 24 right yeah and then um a virgin who's never been with a man called aisha the daughter of his best friend abu bakr and um the end so and from that point he starts being a polygamist and eventually has you know 9 to 13 wives and several concubines depending on which source you believe so so um how far is medina from mecca um i actually don't know i've never i've never driven it so uh um i would guess it's about you know three to five days journey on foot or camel um it's probably about you know probably about three hours drive um it's okay yeah i'm just wondering because i'm like uh because doesn't he get into a series of battles and conflicts between like caravans coming from mecca to medina how exactly did he gain power uh in medina so basically the whole premise of him going to medina he immediately has power right that's the that's the kind of conditions he's put upon joining them um but at this point all the muslims are poor refugees um i mean they have suffered genuine persecution and they don't have any stuff anymore so the meccans have these trade caravans that go to syria and the muslims will make raids on those trade caravans and take their take stuff from them as what they see as kind of recompense for what's been taken from them by the meccans so this leads the meccans to decide okay we need to do something about this we need to protect our shipping routes so they send uh an army and they basically fight three battles uh for three years one is the battle of where with inferior forces and equipment the muslims actually defeat the meccans um the next year they fight something called the battle of uhud which uh the muslims lose that battle but not decisively um muhammad is injured but not killed and then finally they come to uh medina a year later and and kind of attack the city but the muslims with a guy called salman the persian dig this trench and basically out maneuver the meccans and basically break the meccan military power on that day and they debate at that point the muslims and the meccans make a treaty called the treaty of hudaibiya and what that is is we're not going to attack each other and we're free to basically just kind of like go and build our own influence around you know arabia so for the next three years muhammad is sending out raiding parties missionaries armies and building more and more influence over the arabian peninsula and then the meccans one of the tribes associated with mecca um attacks one of the tribes associated with muslims and muhammad sees this as cause for war and you know you know in his habit here is when he has a military raid doesn't tell everyone where they're going um so he's gathering all these you know ten thousand people together and they suddenly realize we're going to mecca so muhammad in the night marches and surrounds mecca and the meccans wake up to see these muslim torches everywhere and they think it's the end but muhammad is you know benevolent in this situation he allows them to surrender peacefully um and only you know executes five to twelve people depending on the source which again five to twelve executions may sound a little barbaric for our day and age but you know it's at a time that's very it's a very benevolent conquest um and so at that point muhammad is now the master of all arabia what's up everybody it's the super sleuth here letting you know that you can go to shop cultish .com

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today and get your exclusive cultish merch talk to you later guys yeah and so from this point so and so how how does it i was gonna say how does this theology change like uh during this time like going from mecca being kind of peaceful uh into medina and then like there's like a transfer it seems like here's a quote i have from the ibn ishaq page 596 i don't know what version this is from but you can you can tell me if i'm wrong in this or not it says this from muhammad supposedly it says are you disturbed in mind because of the good things of this life by which i went over a people that made me become muslim while i entrust you to your islam like like so so he's conquering and he's saying we get these spoils from war and uh is it bad that i'm winning over people by doing these types of things it's like when does this theology change from peaceful to being almost like this conquering type of man saying follow me uh and i will give you some spoils of war if you are muslim well i'm not sure how conscientious the change is um other than the circumstances change right he's just not in the position to do that in mecca because he has no state power right so he okay so he becomes the government in medina so he has to start thinking like a government but the things that do develop in that time are really the sort of the muslim idea of the state and muslim society um so so if mecca is kind of like okay what is the nature of god what is god like what is eternity like what is judgment like what is truth and then medina is answering the question how does this truth look when it's embodied in a society yeah and you they're what they're trying to do is they're trying to sort of subjugate all of society to the divine law of of god and that's when you have things like you know the five daily prayers that's where you have the sort of muslim friday services happen and that's really where you start to get the theology of conflict in islam as well so this doctrine emerges that those who die in battle go straight to paradise without having to go through any of the usual judgments that happen um and so you know all the muslim armies that go out go out with this you know um mentality of victory or martyrdom so it's very much similar to like how a viking army would fight that they're they're fighting almost with the hope to die in battle yeah because that's how they'll go straight to valhalla so you take you look at those kind of mindsets they're very they're very similar and that develops in medina and is a sort of you know powerful force so um and then they have to ask so how do we do justice how do we have a legal code and how do we how do we do that and you know i think it's important for us to understand as islam sorry as christians that islam doesn't does lots of things that are that are good in that society as well yeah like so you know so for example um you know you can expose your female daughters and kill them if you don't want them if they're too expensive to take care of in pre -arabian society we don't know how widespread that is but the quran addresses that directly and um wants to eat people to see baby girls as a gift from god and to take care of them and to provide for them um you know it wants to have a unified code of justice that applies to the powerful tribal leaders and the sort of average slave alike which is a good thing right right so there's lots of good things that muhammad believes in um that are good things about islamic law mixed with some things that are unbiblical and you know harmful as well right when you talk about his upbringing going into a society that was very syncretistic as he went from just believing this is what god told him seeking him out for that and sort of being like an abrahamic patriarch all by himself to all of a sudden amassing this sort of political you know influence just the way it was with his associations and then when he took over mecca how did that affect his um beliefs when it came to islam and what he believed that all was telling him that anyway evolve or progress it seems like anybody who sort of gets that ring of power per se like that seems like that would sort of affect or have influence on that yeah for sure um so i think what you what you see because one of the things that happens is your polygamy as well right um so muhammad gets lots of you know lots of wives at this time and there are parts of the quran which seem to very specifically enable him to do something specific for him um so for example um muhammad adopted a son named zaid and um zaid was married to a woman called zainab and muhammad um one day you know goes over to zaid's house and um you know sees zainab not wearing her you know hijab and you know he turns around refuses to look at her and um you know and muslims will argue about the exact nature of this story um but the nature the end result ends up kind of being the same um and so zaid you know hears about this and is unhappy anyway and so divorces zainab and says oh you should marry her now um and then after this um zainab you know muhammad says no no no i can't do that um this is you know socially unacceptable but then a surah of the quran comes down a surah al azhab which is the 33rd one which basically does a couple things one it abolishes adoption in islam meaning that you can't call an adopted son by your last name and um and it also gives muhammad explicit permission to marry zainab um so that's kind of how that you know so you start to see things you know like this yeah um and so he gets a lot of power he gets a lot of um you know he gets a lot of women um and you know and just kind of that kind of grows and grows and grows and and the quran actually seems to you know reflect that to some capacity yeah as well and and so when he's going andrew is there something you got in your mind or oh no i'm listening i'm listening yeah so when it comes this is i mean this fast and there's like a lot of like moving pieces and so like in this whole process when it comes like what like up to the time of his when he saw the vision to the time of his death like what was the year span like how old was he like what is what are the sources say how old he was when he had the initial vision and how long how long did he live till um he lived he was like you know 64 i believe okay i can actually do the math here so he was born in 570 and he died in 632 okay um i guess this is like 60 something right right um and so his time in medina is 10 years and i believe the time in mecca is about you know the same so he's got about a sort of 20 year ministry yeah first half in mecca second half in medina and so like in the whole process like what where like what take took place like after like after his death um was there some sort of uh you know separation or fragmentation of somebody like you a vacuum of power and sort of like wanting someone wanting to sort of wield the political uh scepter at that point and how did that affect like what parts of islam was like was was made prior to his death and what came afterwards you think about you know the five pillars of islam you know the call to prayer bowing towards mecca all those things that we view through modern islam you know and even like when your dialogues like what's pre -muhammad what's post -muhammad well that's a very very complicated question yeah because everything that's formulated after muhammad is going to sort of claim to be from like muhammad right um so the way the sunnis formulate islam they're going to say this is the authentic islam of muhammad yeah and the way she is formulate islam they're going to say this is the authentic islam of muhammad um but as far as the the there's this kind there's as far as like what's written down the answer is nothing um which makes this you know complicated but the basic you know outline of what happens when he dies is he is um he's talked about something called the caliphate um so the word caliph means successor and caliphate means the word the um the realm of that successor right um a king rules over a kingdom a caliph rules over caliphate right that's that's how um that's how it works so um but there's a lot of ambiguity into who he wanted to succeed him so there's basically three people that um believe they should be the successor of muhammad so one and this is what she is believe is his nephew and son -in -law ali ibn abu talib and so there's a there's actually a time where muhammad meets with a group of christians um who you know basically want to sort of don't believe he's a prophet and he wants their allegiance and they spend three days arguing about whether jesus is god or not and muhammad says okay we're going to have a curse off basically where he says all right we're gonna you bring your your family your families and i'll bring my family and um the you know and then we'll see who god cursed and who god blesses um and muhammad brings uh his daughter um um fatima um and ali who's married to fatima um and hussein hassan and hussein their sons and they he kind of covers them under his cloak and say these are my these are the people of my house the al -albeit yeah and then the christians like don't show up or decide you know we don't want to do this game and they basically make an agreement that they can live peacefully if they pay muhammad tax money um so that's actually like important to acknowledge just on the starter is that yeah um there's always been space for christians to live in the muslim world to some extent like muhammad didn't kill christians or force them to convert to islam he argued with them but the society he built allowed them to live in it um but um so so basically from that instance and a few other things um you know they say ali is my executor obey him um the ali believed that muhammad wanted him to be his successor um and like it seems like this if you read the literature it seems like there's a bunch of times where muhammad almost says that but there's some ambiguity around it so the sunnis believe that the community as a whole is supposed to decide who the next leader is and do that based on you know quran and you know hadith criteria um but there's a guy called sad ibn abadah who was one of the prominent tribal chiefs of medina and these were the first group of people to really commit to and so his argument is look we're the ones who you know believed in you when you were a struggling artist trying to you know you know trying to make it we were the ones who supported you um and sadam and abadah believe that he should be the caliph because of their their role in that um so he gets together all of the elders of medina and starts saying all right i should be the caliph you guys need to you need to swear allegiance to me yeah then muhammad's best friend and this guy called omar who was like super zealous and super competent basically crashed the meeting like what are you doing guys yeah and it's like well we're appointing a caliph and abu bakr is like no yeah no you're not um no one's going to follow you they the person um they follow has to be from the courage which is the tribe muhammad's from in mecca and then saddam abadah says okay how about this we'll do one caliph from the courage and one caliph from the ansar the people of medina abu bakr says no um they'll never follow you there has to be one there's one god there has to be one leader right so at that point abu bakr you know abu bakr nominates like two guys one of them is omar and omar says i will not be the leader of a community of which abu bakr is a member holds up abu bakr's hand and says i pledge allegiance to abu bakr then everyone starts doing that except saddam abadah um and saddam abadah you know objects but then omar literally goes and like beats the guy up and like grabs him by the beard um knocks out some of his teeth um and then saddam abadah kind of like fades into history at that point um and then um the bet one of the best places to read about all this by the way if you want to source is um the history of al -tabari um again um muslims don't you know are not going to say yeah i believe every single thing that's in al -tabari but there really isn't a great alternative to it either if you want to learn these things it's either al -tabari or it's a mystery and al -tabari does cite his sources and he and he'll sometimes he'll put competing accounts in there um that you know something happened here um and there's lots of different attestations of this event and then um ali however is not at this meeting he is busy with the preparial preparer of muhammad's burial um so omar goes over to ali's house and says come out here and swear allegiance to abu bakr as caliph i'm gonna burn your house down um and ali you know is not happy about the situation but eventually he pledges allegiance because ali is a team player for sure um and that's how you kind of have the first you know successor arise there and that's the kind of hasn't quite sprung up yet but that's the you know the sort of seeds of the hmm that's fascinating go ahead andrew yeah i have a question going back to the the taxes uh situation there because in some of my research i pulled up surah 929 there's a translation of that it says fight those who do not believe in a law nor in the latter day nor do they prohibit what a law and his apostle have prohibited nor follow the religion of truth out of those who have been given the book until they pay the tax and acknowledgement of superiority and they are in a state of subjection so what does it mean specifically to be a christian submitting to islam is it just that they pay taxes and they can preach christianity or is this is it something different i'm trying to understand surah 929 with living in peace by just paying taxes yeah so so this is one of the difficulties with interacting with the quran is it doesn't have its own context contained with it um what that's specifically referring to though from the history is an instance where muhammad marched an expedition up to the very north of arabia um to to book with the intention of fighting the byzantines they weren't there so that it didn't end up being a battle but there was certainly a sort of conquest mindset against the byzantines right so the people of the book when he says that he's talking about the byzantine empire um so he's talking about fighting their armies until that you know subjugated um what submission means has been a nebulous term through islamic history so sometimes it's meant you know pretty a pretty good deal um you know equivalent to like dubai in modern times like being a christian in dubai is it generally is is fine the government leaves you alone there's solid churches there the government's not trying to you know monitor what you say um but you also have something called the pact of omar which people debate all the time whether it's a genuine document but muslims throughout history have believed it as a genuine document and basically that imposes kind of crushing um standards on christians right it so it says if you're if you're not they're not allowed to build new churches they're not allowed to repair existing ones as they you know as they as they uh fall apart um christians are allowed to work in the government they're not allowed to ride horses in the same way that muslims do they're not allowed to teach uh they're not allowed to do that kind of graphic design in the same way yeah um they're not allowed to if a muslim asks to sleep in their church they have to say yes um and they have to pay taxes as well and they can't teach their children the quran they can't you know share christianity with muslims and and so basically what those laws are designed to do is to tolerate the christians that are there but to generally like phase them out yeah over time right um but a lot of later muslim leaders liked having christians and jews in the empire because it meant more taxes right so it was so muslim leaders were actually had an incentive structure to help christian communities prosper because it meant more money for them so and and so and if you talk to either of those sides they're going to completely disagree about what muhammad himself wanted you know from this much more likely he wanted conversions yeah but um you you have because the quran does not have context people can kind of like construct that in several different ways so at times it's been a good deal for christians at times been a very bad deal for christians that answer the question yeah dude great great great answer man that helps clarify for me yeah too yeah just one thing i want to do is then and again we're kind of already i feel like we're almost sort of in the first part of our episode but there's so much we can unravel one thing i just want to comment even as we're up this first portion is talking about some of the history here is that all of us sort of have our confirmation biases like going into uh like this conversation about islam for me personally my introduction did the world of islam was september 11th a couple days later i remember seeing osama bin laden's face on the face of the arizona republic and of course you saw you know some arabic going across the top of al jazeera and even like there's even like words that you're utilizing that i feel like i have sort of confirmation bias words that i was introduced to by way of the geopolitical world of the bush administration in like the 9 -11 era so you just mentioned the caliph or the caliphate my introduction to the word caliphate was this documentary that came out basically as hell as i think it's produced by fox news it was basically made to scare conservatives of islam basically talking about how they want there's certain you know people of radical islam that want to create islamic caliphate to take over the entire world and subjugate every other person who won't submit to islam to die by the sword and so then of course you know and i was like oh man that's kind of scary but even you know there's aspects too you're talking about how they would work with christians and jews and they want to have more taxes so you had a lot of even after muhammad had the political power which we might well we're going to talk about in future episodes even like the crusades like one of the biggest objections that comes up to like why should i to christianity is like well what about the crusades and so you have even like the you have a lot of i feel there's a lot of confirmation bias that just that comes into this so you really giving this holistic perspective i think is very very refreshing yeah so um one thing that comes with that right is we are you know tainted by the world we live in um in this so you know for example right um one thing that people do is they'll read these your verses about kind of jihad and conquest and martyrdom and they immediately think of somebody driving a truck through paris or 9 -11 or somebody with a suicide vest right and um the fact is that when these sources are written there's no gunpowder so gunpowder and that type of warfare is a later development from that so to say okay well the true islam is the islam of the terrorists is is a little um disingenuous because um everyone has had to work out how to work out islam in the modern world and people like ayman al -zawahiri and osama bin laden and the taliban and isis work it out one way but it's not the only way that people have worked that out um and just because you believe in you know warfare in a strong state doesn't at all necessitate you believe in getting there through you know blowing yourself up at some point you know crazy revolutions um again it's easy to see some of the straight lines from the islamic sources to some of those things and you can you know it's worth debating and discussing and thinking carefully about yeah but to you to kind of typically what i think i i did and i think what most christians have done when interacting with muslims is they think of al -qaeda is the conservative people who are serious about it and you have you know then you have nice muslims and they're nice because they don't take islam seriously at all basically and it really is not that simple um there's lots of different conservative liberal spectrums in islam they don't all lead to the same place yeah and that's fascinating i feel like there's a whole lot more we can unravel so what we're going to do is we're going to well we are in another episode so this is really the first segment this is sort of a very quick uh introduction to islam some of the historical aspects timelines seeing how it evolved in something that's really a huge section it pretty much encompasses like an entire you know one full continent of the world and just all other areas of the world as well too you know throughout you know different aspects you know personal geopolitical it's something that's a part of our lives one way or the other um so that being said uh real quickly remind people again where could they if they want to find more about your youtube channel the dialogues you've had with muslims the research the content that you have where what's the home address where should people go to so you can search for us on youtube um you can find us on almida .org

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that's a l dash m a i d a h dot o r g um that has links to everything on it as well or you can just kind of google my name james raymond and you'll find us pretty quickly excellent excellent we'll have links in the description too oh and by the way that's r -a -y -m -e -n -t yes there's a guy that spells it m -o -n -d no sense of humor oh i like that um all right so we're going to go and wrap things up here this is part one i hope you all enjoyed this and definitely comment on your social media let us know your thoughts and all being said we'll talk to you all in part two as we look into the world of engaging and understanding and answering islam talk to you all soon can't wait to get the next episode in the series then join the cultish all access get early release of these series to quench those binging desires along with the host of amazing perks head over to the cultist show .com