The implications of the paternity fraud of Muhammad’s mother are far-reaching for Islam. Far from it remaining a personal matter or a mere embarrassment, the way that Islam and Muhammad himself have dealt with Muhammad’s illegitimacy disproves the religion in four distinct ways.
Series: Muhammad's illegitimacy and its effects on Islam's religious claims
Muhammad’s illegitimacy proved through Islamic sources: Part I, the birth gap
Despite attempts at damage control, early Islamic sources clearly portray Muhammad as an illegitimate child with an unknown father. This illegitimacy disproves Islam in five distinct ways. This article will summarize the direct evidence and context of the age gap between Muhammad and his uncle Hamza that proves that Muhammad was illegitimate. This is a follow up to the article that showed how if Muhammad was illegitimate, Islam has to be false.
Muhammad’s illegitimacy proved through Islamic sources: Part 2, corroborating narrations
Previously, we have explored why Muhammad being illegitimate destroys his claims of being a prophet and Islam’s claims of possessing a “science” that can find truth. We have also laid out the framework which shows that the Islamic sources show Muhammad to have been born some 4.5 years or more after the death of Abdullah ibn Abdul-Muttalib, his supposed father. While this is enough for Muslims to accept Muhammad’s age gap, non-Muslim scholars tend to regard numbers in such sources with a large degree of skepticism. They put more weight on the totality of the evidence. In this final segment, we will be exploring the many other ahadith that point to a continuing disbelief in Muhammad’s legitimacy by his contemporaries and also that he was not treated as a favored grandson of Abdul-Muttalib but as an inferior sort of relation.
Promiscuity among pre-Islamic Arabs, its connection to Muhammad’s family, and continuity with Islam
We have already seen that Islamic society was shaped by a frequency of illegitimacy that caused the Arabs to accept the false idea that women can be pregnant for multiple years. And we have seen that Amina had such a long claimed pregnancy, and that despite accepting that extended pregnancies were possible, Muhammad’s “father’s” family did not really have confidence in his legitimacy. The final question, then, is understanding what was happening in Arab society that was behind all of this. What were Arab women up to, and specifically, how was it that Amina became an unwed mother?