The really big problem with Islam, as I see it, is that it's based on an altogether invalid claim, i.e. that there is such a thing as prophecy and/or prophets in our age of the world.
Mormonism (the LSD church) has the same basic problem. Joseph Smith in fact claimed to have derived at least parts of the main books of Mormonism from ancient Egyptian documents written in heiroglyphs using prophecy stones (urim) to translate them and this was before the Rosetta stone was decoded and scholars ever had any sort of a handle on heiroglyphics. Scholars fully able to read and interpret heiroglyphics have later gone back over the same documents and pronounced Smith's "translations" to be gibberish and Smith to be a fraud and a con man.
Fortunately for Mormons, most people don't really give a rat's ass about theology and theology plays little if any part in most people's decision making in choosing a church.
Likewise Mohammed claimed to be a prophet and to have derived the Koran in much the same fashion that Smith derived the book of Mormon and the other documents of his church.
You can find Mohammed's life story on the net easily enough and judge for yourself how "holy" or anything like that the guy was. The important question here is whether or not there's any rational way to think the guy might have been any sort of a "prophet". I claim he wasn't and that it's provable.
All ancient religious practices involved attempts to communicate with the spirit world directly, and this included prophets and prophecy, familiar spirits, idolatry, oracles and the like. The idea of prophecy involved trance states like hypnotism, during which the prophet's mind was joined to the mind of God and communication with the spirit world was possible.
Jews (serious hebrew scholars, not the lawyer down the street or the guy who owns the kosher deli) believe that all such phenomena passed out of the world around 2600 years ago or thereabouts at the time of Zechariah.
They claim that at that time they asked the Lord to lift the curse of idolatry from the world, and that he did, but that the world lost prophecy and all such related phenomena at the same time.
Whatever had been involved in prophecy was lost in a single day, like the story of the tower of Babel in which whatever man had been doing for language stopped working of an instant. For some time afterwards, a number of people went on trying to do the prophecy thing, but it quickly became apparent that, whereas in the past prophets had come back with useful information from the spirit world, what they were coming back with on the day after the whole thing fell apart was bogus information and gibberish and, since societies had depended on such information for their normal operation, there was danger involved in the idea of anybody taking prophecies seriously after the whole thing broke down.
Zechariah refers to prophets (after the end) as "unclean spirits" and suggests that people who go on trying to do prophecy be killed:
Quote:
ZEC 13:2 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD of hosts, that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be remembered: and also I will cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land.
ZEC 13:3 And it shall come to pass, that <font color =' red'>when any shall yet prophesy, then his father and his mother that begat him shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live; for thou speakest lies in the name of the LORD: and his father and his mother that begat him shall thrust him through</font> when he prophesieth.
ZEC 13:4 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the prophets shall be ashamed every one of his vision, when he hath prophesied; neither shall they wear a rough garment to deceive:
Likewise with oracles. The Greek city states had been run on information from Oracles for roughly a thousand years prior to some time just prior to Alexander. Plato described the Oracle at Delphi as the "interpretor of religion to the world", and took oracles very seriously. A couple of hundred years later, and nobody took them seriouisly anymore.
The ancient Greeks were sceptical people and yet they accepted oracles as a fact of life for many centuries and, then, suddenly, the whole thing broke down and they went on a search for a religion for a few centuries before settling on Christianity.
Likewise the first two paragraphs of the Book of Hebrews in the New Testament states that prophecy was a thing of past ages at the time of Christ and that in our age the spirit world is known through faith and through Christ who is the son of God, and not a prophet:
Quote:
BOOK OF HEBREWS
CHAPTER 1
1 God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets,
2 Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds;
Part of the problem which God or something or other in the spirit world apparently solved for the human race is that whatever was had made prophecy possible had also made idolatry possible and idolatry had turned the planet into an insane assylum for a period of a thousand years or so after the flood.
The two definitely hung together and, logically, if the one still existed, the other would have to. Nonetheless since the time of Christ nobody has ever claimed that anybody has ever heard a real voice from an idol (which is what idolatry involved) and, likewise, claims of prophecy in our age (i.e. since Zechariah) are patently bogus.
Mohammed was a bandit chieftain who devised a religion for controlling increasingly larger collections of bandits, and that's basically all he was. Like I say, the guy's life story is easy to find on the web.
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