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

had really burst from Arabia fully formed. 20
The Caliph and the Cross
There is another arresting item among the surviving artifacts from the reign of Muawiya: an inscription,
dating from the year 662, on a bathhouse in Gadara in Palestine. (Gadara is one possible setting of the
Gospel story in which Jesus casts demons out of a young man and into a herd of pigs.) The Greek
inscription identifies Muawiya as “the servant of God, the leader of the protectors,” and dates the
dedication of the bathhouse to “the year 42 following the Arabs.” At the beginning of the inscription is a
cross. 21
This was a public installation, bearing the official sanction of the governing authorities. Muawiya
himself most likely visited there, so he probably saw this inscription and apparently did not consider it to
be anything amiss. 22 Although the Umayyads were notorious (or at least so Islamic tradition tells us) for
the laxity of their Islamic observance, it is one thing to be relaxed in one's Islam and another thing to
allow for the promotion of the symbols of another religion altogether—much less one that is rebuked
numerous times in the Qur'an.
Unless, of course, there was no Qur'an, and no Islam, at least in the form in which we know it today,
when the public baths in Gadara were dedicated, as also when the cross-bearing Muhammad coin was
minted in Palestine.
Still more striking is the identification on the bathhouse inscription of the year as “following the
Arabs”—that is, the “era of the Arabs,” rather than the more expected “era of Islam” or “era after the
Hijra.” The Arabian conquests are a historical fact; that the Arabian conquerors actually came out of
Arabia inspired by the Qur'an and Muhammad is less certain. This inscription becomes perfectly
understandable if the centrality of the Hijra—Muhammad's move from Mecca to Medina in 622, marked
as the beginning of the Islamic calendar—and Islam to the Arabian conquerors was projected back into
history, but was not actually a contemporary phenomenon when the bathhouse was dedicated.
What, then, was the beginning of the “era of the Arabians”? The Arabians used a lunar calendar, and a
year in the lunar calendar was ten days shorter than the solar year. So forty-two lunar years equal forty
solar years, and thus the year 622 was forty-two lunar years before the dedication of the bathhouse in 662.
The year 622 saw the Byzantine Empire win a surprising and decisive victory over the Persians, which
led to the collapse of Persian power. Not long thereafter the Arabians filled the power vacuum and took
control of the Persian Empire. Soon they threatened Byzantine holdings as well. What became the date of
the Hijra may have originally marked the beginning of the Arabians as a political force to be reckoned
with on the global scene.
Similarly dating some momentous event to the year 622, and yet containing no specifically Islamic
characteristics, is an inscription that dates itself from the year 64—that is, the Gregorian year 683, which
is sixty-four lunar years from the year 622. This graffito found near Karbala in Iraq states:
In the name of Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate