Muhammad’s mother disproves Islam: the coverup of Muhammad’s illegitimacy invalidates the religion

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 five distinct ways.

1. Muhammad taught that he is the descendant of Ishmael and that the previous scriptures specifically expect this Ishmaelite prophet, taking authority from being in the “preferred” line of Abraham as well as inventing a new prophecy in the Qur’an. With an unknown father, he has no basis for claiming to fulfill a prophecy about a descendant of Ishmael.
2. Muhammad affirms his lineage as an Arab, a Qurayshi, and a Hashimite as being “preferred” by Allah over all other lineages. Yet there is no evidence of whom his father really is, and illegitimate children are called by their mother’s names in Islam and have no paternal inheritance. His mother was not a Hashimite.
3. Muhammad does not have divine knowledge if he doesn’t even know that women generally and his mother specifically can’t have natural pregnancies four years in length.
4. Muhammad claims his prophethood is supported by own reputation for honesty among his fellow Qurayshis. If “honest” women are so often having pregnancies they claim to be years long, then the opinion of the Quraysh about who is honest and who is not is worthless.
5. The entire system of isnad rests on the ability of Islamic scholars to accurately evaluate the honesty and trustworthiness of their informants. However, this same method was used for establishing dramatically long gestational lengths in Islamic law–doubtlessly at least partly because of the scholars’ desire to avoid the conclusion that Muhammad was illegitimate. Thus, the entire system that confirms not only the ahadith but the Qur’an itself is unreliable because this method can’t even determine accurately how long pregnancies last, something that is easily verifiable.

Muhammad is shown to be illegitimate at birth in the Islamic sources. Muhammad’s father and Muhammad’s grandfather contracted “marriage” with women on the same day. Muhammad is described as being conceived on the wedding night of his parents. In spite of stray traditions, there is a consensus that his father died three months after this conception–that is, about three months after the marriage. Yet Muhammad’s uncle who was the product of the simultaneous marriage is universally recognized as being years older than Muhammad was. The sources with direct knowledge of his age agree he was four years older, giving a time lapse of at least 4.5 years from the death of Muhammad’s “father” and Muhammad’s birth.

Muhammad’s supposed long gestation is never viewed as a miraculous event. Arabs at the time had a very imprecise biological view, due to the frequency of such claimed long gestations. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that 1) Muhammad was illegitimate and 2) Muhammad’s mother committed paternity fraud.

There were also many events in Muhammad’s early life that pointed to the doubt that his grandfather–and some uncles–continued to hold about his legitimacy. This is plausibly the motivation behind Muhammad telling people that his name was known by the Jews and Christians. In the sources, he is denied a family name, but this shameful incident is reinterpreted the event in an honorable light by claiming that the name he was given instead was special.

This placed early scholars in a difficult position, because they knew that there were plenty of Arabs named “Muhammad” when the founder of Islam showed up. The idea that his name was special was a fabrication against the historical facts known and documented by early Islamic scholars. They tried to remediate this tension in various ways, but their arguments do not hold together.

Muhammad mythicists once again prove to be highly gullible and fall for the lowest-level legend meant to impress the masses: that “Muhammad” wasn’t a name until the founder of Islam. Meanwhile, all educated early Muslims were easily able to name multiple people who had the name Muhammad before the Qurayshi man declared his prophethood. It is quite telling that every fully mythicist theory rests upon not just falling for a “Standard Islamic Narrative” but ends up falling for the stories that only the ignorant among the Muslims ever believed. Muhammad mythicists end up being the strongest defenders of the myths of Muhammad.

A full examination of how early Islamic scholars dealt with the fact that Muhammad claimed his name was part of the “proofs of prophethood” and also the fact that plenty of other people had that name will be done at another time. In this article, we will deal only with the consequences of Muhammad’s unrecognized illegitimacy and how it destroys any claims to credibility that Islam has.

In Meccan surahs and ahadith, Muhammad ties himself most closely to the figure of Moses. Most surahs have layers of emendation created by insertions. Also, retelling stories in other surahs gave Muhammad the opportunity to alter key details that he cannot change within what was already accepted and written down by his followers as coming from Allah. The earliest layer of the Moses narrative alters the Exodus story to match Muhammad’s situation, so that he becomes a parallel to Muhammad. This early Moses comes to his own people, as Pharoah and Moses are from the same folk. He is coming to call everyone, including Pharoah and Pharoah’s council (the elders of Israel in the Exodus narrative) to worship the god named Allah. When Pharoah resists, the inevitable result will be the expulsion of all the disbelievers from the countryside, and thus both Pharoah and his council sees the struggle as being who expels whom, the winner remaining. And indeed, Pharoah’s works are destroyed by a great flood, and the followers of Moses inherit the fountains and gardens of Pharoah’s kingdom.

With more back-and-forth between Mecca and the Jews of Medina, Muhammad had to alter this narrative substantially. This meant that most of the parallels between himself and Moses were lost. When he was expelled from Mecca, he could no longer hold onto the theology that prophets are immune to expulsion without discrediting himself. And furthermore, when he arrived in Medina, the Jews there saw his Moses parallel claims in a different light, as a claim to being the specific “prophet like Moses.” They pointed out that the prophet like Moses had to be an Israelite, which Muhammad was not. They pointed out that the Arabs were connected to a descent from Ishmael instead.

The Jews meant this as clearly discrediting any claim to any prophesied prophet status under the Mosaic covenant, a stance that is in line with both Jewish and Christian understanding of the Scriptures. But Muhammad took it as their admission that he was “Abrahamic” and was therefore among the lineages preferred by Allah.

This creates multiple issues for Muhammad’s claim to legitimacy, but in this article, we will deal with only one: Muhammad’s unknown paternity and his conception during his mother’s widowhood means that he had neither legal nor biological claim to the paternal descent from Ishmael. As a child of an unknown father, he has no paternal identity. Yet this paternal descent is supposed to be what vindicates him as a true prophet. Even if there were an Ishmael prophet that all the Jews and Christians were expecting, as Muhammad claimed, Muhammad has no basis for claiming to fulfill this requirement. If Jews and Christians recognized him because of his Ishmaelite identity, then they were deceived. Muhammad is a false prophet, and Islam is false.

In a dilemma form, this can be articulated as the Ishmaelite dilemma: If Ishmael is expected to be the father of the prophesied prophet, then Muhammad is a fraud and Islam is false. But if Ishmael is not expected to be the father of the prophesied prophet, then that contradicts Muhammad’s teachings and so Muhammad is a fraud and Islam is false.

Online Muslims seem to not understand what a dilemma is. They think it’s any argument that has two propositions. Let this be an aid, then. A dilemma is a logical structure where there are only two choices. Nothing else can be true except that either Ishmael is prophesied or else Ishmael is not prophesied. Specifically for this type of polemical dilemma, both choices end up at the same conclusion, in this case that Islam is false.

Muhammad does not have a legitimate claim to the divinely ordained Arab-Qurayshi-Hashimite lineage

Muhammad’s paternity fraud relates to a hadith that became very important during the shu’ubiyyah controversy. There are many versions, but here are two.

Narrated Wathilah bin Al-Asqa’:
that the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: “Indeed, Allah chose Kinanah from the children of Isma’il, and He chose Quraish from Kinanah, and He chose Hashim from Quraish, and He chose me from Banu Hashim.”
Jami` at-Tirmidhi 3606

Wathila b. al-Asqa’ reported:
I heard Allah’s Messenger as saying: Verily Allah granted eminence to Kinana from amongst the descendants of Isma’il, and he granted eminence to the Quraish amongst Kinana, and he granted eminence to Banu Hashim amonsgst the Quraish, and he granted me eminence from the tribe of Banu Hashim.
Sahih Muslim 2276

This hadith presents two problems for Islam, in light of Muhammad’s unknown paternity. The least severe problem is that the shu’ubiyyah position is considered heretical in orthodox Islam. This means that the foundations many Islamic believes are based on a falsehood. This includes Islamic anthropology and much of Islamic jurisprudence about interethnic social matters as well as rulings about religious practice in the language of salat (ritual prayer) and the recitation of the Qur’an.

The more serious problem is that if Allah does prefer this lineage over all others, then Muhammad does not fulfill the requirements of prophethood. Yet if Allah does not prefer this lineage, then Muhammad is a false prophet. You can call this the Hashimite dilemma.

Muhammad claimed to bring a deen, a law-code and faith, directly from Allah. Allah legislated about such things as inheritance, fornication, the regulation of marriage and sex-slave relations, and legitimacy. Muhammad’s law could even be considered to be preoccupied with these issues.

Therefore, Muhammad’s unawareness that women can not be pregnant for years is not merely a detail that Allah failed to divulge to him. Muhammad believed himself to be legitimate and also said nothing about the existing Arab belief of prolonged pregnancy, leaving it to later Islamic scholars to use the tools of Islamic “sciences” to determine the truth. Thus, this becomes a gaping hole in the “perfection” of Allah’s deen. In identifying Muhammad as a prophet partly based on his ancestry, Allah accepts the premise that some human women are prone to pregnancies years in duration, against the observable facts that civilizations of Late Antiquity knew. This places Allah in a highly unfavorable position with regard to his knowledge compared to a common person with a basic working knowledge of sex outside of Arabia.

This disqualifies Muhammad from being a prophet of God.

There are extremely few proofs of prophethood that Muhammad himself gives. Most are made up well after Muhammad’s lifetime and contradict established history. Again, Muhammad mythicists try to deny these issues because they are committed to a situation in which Muhammad was able to be largely (if not entirely) invented as a prophetic figure, and an invented figure should not have these problems.

According to the Qur’an, Muhammad himself, and many different important events during Muhammad’s lifetime, Muhammad’s only miracle is the revelation of the Qur’an itself, which is why each verse is called a miracle or ayah. And the Qur’an is miraculous not because it is sublime language but because it matches what the Jews and Christians have between their hands. The only difference (aside from Surah al-Fatihah and exactly one ayah from Sural al-Baqarah) is the language: the Qur’an is given in Arabic so that its audience can understand it. This is the first and most important proof of prophethood according to a careful reading of the Islamic sources. But again, Muhammad mythicists can’t see this because they continually fall for the lowest-tier Islamic legends meant to trick the masses.

The second proof of prophethood that Muhammad himself taught is that Muhammad is prophesied in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures with information including his name (or at least a form of it), the mole on his back, his particular lineage, his Hejazi origin, his descent from Ishmael, and a general physical description. Knowledgeable Jews and Christians who read the Scripture were all supposed to be able to recognize him upon seeing him like they could recognize their own sons. This expectation was universal among those who read the Scripture. Again, these teachings became extremely problematic for Muslims as soon as they had any level of access to Jewish or Christian Scripture, as it was no longer feasible to believe that almost all Jews and Christians were lying when they said they had no such expectation. They attempted to deal with this with ad hoc explanations. Again, Muhammad mythicists eagerly cover the authentic teaching and endorse later clumsy myths.

The third and final proof of prophethood that Muhammad promoted was his existing reputation for honesty among the Quraysh tribe. This is the only proof that Muhammad’s listeners who did not have access to the Scriptures could test for themselves, and it was an argument that none of those who initially opposed his message found convincing. That is, there is no one who said, “Wow, Muhammad, I thought your stories were nuts, but now that I think about it, I’ve always believed that you’re so honest that this has to be true.”

One reason is that lying isn’t the only option. Muhammad could be sincerely deluded, mentally ill, or possessed. In all cases, his honesty would be moot. So this is not a good standard, while the two proofs that would be convincing–prophecies of Muhammad in and his miraculous matching of previous texts–are demonstrably false.

Leaving the alternatives aside, it is not a tenable position that the Qurayshi evaluation of someone’s honesty has any weight if the Qurayshi also routinely evaluate women who claim two, three, four, or more year pregnancies as “honest.”

If Muhammad were bringing true tests from God, then these tests should have high levels of sensitivity and specificity. But the test of “honesty” among the Quraysh is one that is entirely lacking of any evidence of sensitivity (that is, the ability to detect the presence of honesty with no false negatives). In simpler words, God would not give an obviously stupid and meaningless test as proof of prophethood. But what we have in Muhammad’s appeal to his honesty is exactly this. The Qurayshi couldn’t recognize a dishonest person in their daughters, wives, and sisters who were demonstrably pregnant against all possibility according to their oaths. Therefore, this test cannot be from God and Muhammad is a false prophet.

The endorsement of multi-year pregnancies discredits the isnad method upon which all Islamic credibility rests

In Sunni Islam, authority is decided by isnad. Isnad means the chain, specifically the chain of people who attest to the authenticity and reliability of a recitation. The theory goes like this: if testimony is passed from one reliable and honest person to the next, you could trust this testimony. Islam, then, considers hearsay to be not only admissible but the very standard of truth.

To determine whether this hearsay should be accepted in the formation of Islamic doctrine or law, Muslim scholars judge the truthfulness of the testifier using their own standards. The testimony of a dishonest person is not accepted, even if they could have heard from honest people and then spoke to honest people. Indeed, moral corruption is also seen to be disqualifying, because a person who is morally corrupt in other ways cannot be trusted with truth. Even the Qur’an is held to be authentic because it is deemed mutawatir, recited from so many that their combined credibility makes its reliability to be unassailable.

Thus, the entire truth claim of Islam relies upon the ability for Muslim scholars to discriminate between honest people and liars and between virtuous people and the morally corrupt. Additionally, chastity is the primary virtue and sexual impurity the most salient vice of Muslim women in Islamic law.

Very likely under the influence of Muhammad’s mother’s supposed very long pregnancy, all schools of Islam accept that women were observed by the Muslims to have pregnancies at least a year in length and sometimes of an indefinite length. These are the judgments of their best scholars. They give reports about women who have, in their scholarly assessment, given birth long after the supposed event of conception.

But what would they base their scholarly assessment upon? The honesty and virtue of their informants, of course. But first, let us establish that women’s testimony is taken at all in such matters. Al-Zuhri states, “The Sunnah has been to permit the testimony of women in matters that no one else can see, such as women’s births and their defects. The testimony of a midwife alone is permissible in cases of first birth, and the testimony of two women is permissible in other cases.” (Nasb al-Rayah by Jamal al-Din al-Zayla’i, Vol. 3 p.264)

So let us see what this testimony gets us. Here is the report of a conversation with Malik ibn Anas about the maximum length of pregnancy:

“He said: I said to Malik ibn Anas, ‘I was narrated [a report] from Aisha that she said: A woman does not exceed two years in her pregnancy, even by the length of the shadow of a spindle.’

He [Malik] replied: ‘Glory be to Allah! Who says such a thing? Here is our neighbor, the wife of Muhammad ibn Ajlan; she is a truthful woman and her husband is a truthful man. She bore three pregnancies in twelve years, each pregnancy lasting four years.’

Al-Bayhaqi said: “And the statement of Umar [ibn al-Khattab]—that the wife of a missing person must wait for four years—seems to have been said based on the possibility of a pregnancy lasting four years.”
(Nasb al-Rayah by Jamal al-Din al-Zayla’i, Vol. 3 p.266)

Thus, Aisha’s belief about the subject is overruled by the testimony of the virtuous person.

Umar is part of two prolonged pregnancy stories. This is one of them:

“It occurred during the era of Umar ibn al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him) that a righteous woman, known for her goodness and piety, was left by her husband [who went to war]. He was subsequently killed and martyred, and she grieved for him deeply. She later married another man, but less than six months into the new marriage, signs of pregnancy appeared. [Ed: In other versions, it is not “signs” but rather the baby himself, so this may be a euphemism.]

“Umar (may Allah be pleased with him) intended to stone her [the prescribed punishment for adultery] because she was a muhsana (a previously married woman [Ed: this actually means an adulteress, so this gloss is wrong]), and in Umar’s view—as stated in his famous sermon in the Sahih—pregnancy was considered proof of adultery if a woman had no husband. However, as he prepared to carry out the sentence, he inquired about her and found that she was a virtuous woman; it was deemed highly unlikely for her to commit adultery given her known uprightness and piety.

“Being a man of intuition and inspiration (muhaddath)—as confirmed in the Sahih hadith where the Prophet ﷺ said: ‘If there are inspired men in my Ummah, it is Umar’—he refrained from stoning her and wished to consult the people. He consulted the Muhajirun (Emigrants), but found no answer; he consulted the Ansar (Helpers), but found no answer. Then he gathered all the people, but still found no answer. Finally, he gathered the women and consulted them.

“An elderly woman, known for her wisdom, stood up and said: ‘O Leader of the Faithful, I shall tell you her story. This woman conceived from her first husband, but when grief struck her, the fetus ‘settled’ (became dormant/weakened) and failed to emerge at its usual time. When she married the second man, the [physical intimacy] of the second husband stimulated it, and she gave birth to the fetus before its [new] time.’

“Umar praised Allah that he had not stoned her. He dropped the prescribed punishment (Hadd) against her and attributed the child to the first husband.”

[The Encyclopedia of the Beauties of Islam and Refutation of the Misconceptions of the Vile, Vol. 12  p.205]

This is also found in the Explanation of Zad al-Mustaqni by al Shanqiti which emphasizes her virtue even more. This woman pregnant for four years was described this way: “a righteous woman known for her goodness and righteousness was absent from her husband …. when [Umar] intended to stone her, he inquired about her and found that she was a righteous woman, and that it was unlikely that she had committed adultery, given what he knew of her uprightness and righteousness.”

The belief in this sleeping or dormant fetus became encoded in Islamic law in the Maghrib, which colonial powers found very backward and so spoke about in detail. Satyel Larson, a very pro-Islamic scholar, conducted a thesis on the topic, citing examples from Islamic case law where women’s testimonies about their prolonged pregnancies are believed based on the precedent established by testimony deemed credible to Islamic scholars that women can be pregnant for multiple years.

Other examples given by Ibn Qudamah in which scholars found that specific women had long pregnancies include the following:

• Two years: the mothers of al-Dahhak ibn Muzahim and Haram ibn Hayyan. (The mother of al-Dahhak, who was pregnant when her husband returned, was spared by the testimony of the husband that the infant looked like him after birth, and her next pregnancy was reported to be four or seven years long! Source, p. 10 and 16)
• Three years: A female slave of Umar ibn Abdullah.
• Four years: The mother of Muhammad ibn Ajlan, the descendants of Ajlan generally, and a descendant of Muhammad named Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn Ali.

Abu al-Hattab also cited a pregnancy of four years, that of Ibrahim ibn Nujih al-Uqayli. (Source, p. 11) So was Manzur ibn Zabban’s gestation, and he lived during the lifetime of Muhammad (Source, p. 15). So was ‘Abdelaziz al-Majishuni (Source, p. 16) and other women from the same tribe.

Malik ibn Anas himself was credited with being in his mother’s womb three years. (Source, p. 14)

This means that there is objective, irrefutable, scientific evidence that the method that Islamic scholars use to ground their truth claims is unreliable to the point where even other ancient people would find their conclusions comical. Below, without additional commentary, is the summary of Islamic scholars representing different rules laying out Sunni legal rulings for gestational lengths of 12 months or more. (Source)

“Abu Hanifah said: The maximum gestation period is two years on account of a tradition narrated by ‘A’ishah that a woman does not carry a child in her womb for more than two years. Malik, al-Shafi’i and Ibn Hanbal state the period to be four years, on the basis that the wife of ‘Ajlan carried her child for four years before delivery. It is strange that the wife of his son, Muhammad, had a similar gestation period. In fact all women of Bani ‘Ajlan have a gestation period of four years, which indicates God’s power over His creation….

“‘Abbad ibn ‘Awwam puts the maximum period of gestation at 5 years. al-Zuhari at 7 years, and according to Abii ‘Ubayd there is no maximum period of gestation.

“It follows from these conflicting opinions, that if a person divorces his wife or dies and she, without marrying again after him, bears a child, the child shall be attributed to him if born after: two years, according to Abu Hanifah; four years, according to Shafi’is, Malikis and Hanbalis; five years, according to Ibn ‘Awwam; seven years according to al-Zuhari; and twenty years according to Abu ‘Ubayd.

“Legislation in Egypt relieves us from a critical examination of these varied opinions. The Egyptian Shari’ah courts followed the Hanafi code until the passing of Act 25 of 1929. Section 15 of this Act categorically mentions that the maximum period of gestation is one year.”

Here is a final scholarly article on the subject.

Conclusion

The timeline of Muhammad’s life was the catalyst for multiple issues that discredit Muhammad’s own claims to prophethood and Islam’s claims to having access to a means of determining truth. This single historical detail alone disqualifies Islam from having a divine origin or assessment.

Important details such as this are hand-waved and excused by Muhammad mythicists who are eager to endorse presumptions about Muhammad’s perfection based on their own certainty that his narrative was cultivated by the Umayyads or Abbasids. But understanding Islam in context requires careful evaluation and exploration of its sources rather than superficial selectiveness based on preconceptions. The realization that there is sensitivity to the implication that Muhammad was illegitimate in the early sources effectively contextualizes a wide breadth of early Islamic history and reveals the rot at its foundation, but this is only possible when these sources are soberly evaluated.