robert spencer-did muhammad exist__ an inquiry into islams obscure origins-intercollegiate studies institute (2012) (1)

writing at the time that Umar actually conquered Jerusalem, shows no awareness that the Arabians had a
prophet at all or were even Muslims.
Pagan Arabians?
Arabia before Muhammad was pagan; the Arabians were polytheists. Islam, of course, is supposed to
have ended all that. Muhammad, according to the standard account, united and Islamized Arabia. Shortly
after his death, some of the Arabians rebelled, leading to the Wars of Apostasy in 632 and 633, but the
Muslims won these. Arabian polytheism and paganism quickly became relics of history.
Here again, however, contemporary accounts paint a significantly different picture. In 676, a Nestorian
synod declared in Syriac of the Christians in the “islands of the south”—that is, Arabia—that “women
who once believed in Christ and wish to live a Christian life must keep themselves with all their might
from a union with the pagans [hanpê]…. Christian women must absolutely avoid living with pagans.” 17
Many later Christian writers referred to Muslims as pagans, and some historians have taken this as an
early example of such usage. There are telling indications, however, that when seventh-century Christian
writers referred to “pagans,” they meant exactly that and not Muslims. The Nestorian synod stipulated that
“those who are listed among the ranks of the faithful must distance themselves from the pagan custom of
taking two wives.” Islam, of course, allows a man to take as many as four wives, as well as slave girls as
concubines (Qur'an 4:3). This synodal instruction may therefore be an imprecise reference to Islamic
polygamy—or a precise reference to a pagan custom. In addition, the synod directs that “the Christian
dead must be buried in a Christian manner, not after the manner of the pagans. Now, it is a pagan custom
to wrap the dead in rich and precious clothing, and to make…loud lamentations regarding them….
Christians are not permitted to bury their dead in silk cloth or in precious clothing.” 18 None of this has
anything to do with Islam as we know it, which does not allow for burial in rich clothing, eschews silk,
and frowns on loud lamentations for the dead.
It appears, therefore, that the Nestorian synod was talking about real pagans, forty years after they were
supposedly cleared from Arabia.
Another telling indication comes from Athanasius II, the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch (683–686),
the Syrian city that was at that time the fourth most important see in Christendom. Athanasius laments that
Christians “take part unrestrainedly with the pagans in their festivals,” and “some unfortunate women
unite themselves with the pagans.” He describes practices that sound more genuinely pagan than Islamic:
“In short they all eat, making no distinction, any of the pagans' [sacrificial] victims, forgetting thus…the
orders and exhortations of the Apostles…to shun fornication, the [flesh of] strangled [animals], blood,
and food from pagan sacrifices.” 19
This is a reference to the apostles' instructions to Gentile converts from paganism to “abstain from the
pollutions of idols and from unchastity and from what is strangled and from blood” (Acts 15:20), but
Athanasius doesn't seem to be simply repeating this as a formulaic prohibition. The pagans he is
concerned about seem to be engaging in at least some of these practices, as Athanasius continues: “Exhort