Who Was Muhammad?

Yesterday, I watched a debate between David Wood and Ali Ataie on the subject "Who Was Muhammad?". It occurred this past April at the University of California, Davis.

Though the debate was supposed to be about Muhammad, Ali Ataie spent a large portion of his time commenting on and asking questions about Christianity. Ataie, like other Muslims, seemed to apply a double standard in expecting people to judge Islam by the conclusions allegedly agreed upon by a majority of Muslim scholars while judging Christianity by a more liberal standard. He cited the agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman by name, for example. What do scholars such as Ehrman think of Muhammad and Islam? He also referred to the gospels as anonymous at one point, but referred to them as pseudonymous at another point. Much of what he said about the New Testament was the usual liberal speculation that gives implausibly little weight to external testimony and largely ignores conservative scholarship. Some of his conclusions about the Old Testament were similarly unreasonable. But the debate was supposed to be about Muhammad, not Jesus or Old Testament morality. And even if we accepted Ataie's assertions about which Muhammad traditions to accept and which to reject (though he never gave a good reason to do so), the fact would remain that Ataie failed to give any reason to consider Muhammad a prophet of God. Muhammad could have been a man of high moral character in many aspects of his life without having been the prophet Islam claims he was.

I think that the most significant part of the debate was Ataie's effort to argue for Muhammad's fulfillment of prophecy. David Wood effectively argued that the alleged references to Muhammad in the Old Testament are dubious. Wood's primary response to Ataie's argument for prophecy fulfillment occurred in the Rebuttal portion of the debate, and I don't think that Ataie ever recovered from it. Ataie later compared Muhammad's alleged fulfillment of prophecy to Jesus' alleged secondary fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14. But even if we accepted the concept that Jesus could only be said to have fulfilled Isaiah 7 in a secondary sense, with somebody else serving as the primary subject of the passage, Jesus also fulfilled prophecies in a primary sense. (See, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Presumably, Ataie would be focusing on the best arguments for Muhammad's fulfillment of prophecy. And if something comparable to a secondary fulfillment of Isaiah 7 is the best argument that can be made for Muhammad's fulfillment of prophecy, then we have no reason to conclude that the Muslim view of Muhammad is justified by prophecy fulfillment.

Ataie sometimes presented Wood with criticisms of Christianity that Wood wasn't well prepared to address, but the debate has to be judged primarily by the issue that was supposed to be debated. Whether David Wood was prepared to discuss what Paul taught about the role of women in the church, for example, isn't as relevant as whether Ali Ataie can make a convincing argument for Muhammad's fulfillment of prophecy or some other sort of validating miracle. Wood made some other good points during the course of the debate, but the highlights of the debate were his refutation of the argument for prophecy fulfillment and Ataie's failure to produce anything that would suggest that Muhammad was a prophet.

You can order the debate here.