Contradiction, Confusion, and Copy-Paste

The Collapse of Islamic Tradition

Islamic tradition isn’t a preserved record—it’s a contradictory mess. The early sources are riddled with internal contradictions, impossible chronologies, narrative confusion, and duplicated content recycled across generations. This isn’t the behavior of a carefully preserved historical record. It’s the signature of an invented mythology struggling to look coherent.

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🤯 Contradictions That Destroy Credibility

The problem is systemic. Islamic sources constantly contradict themselves—and each other. Patricia Crone summed it up best:

“It is a tradition in which information means nothing and leads nowhere.” (Crone, 1980:12)

She’s not exaggerating.

• Al-Baladhuri says the first mosque in Kufa faced west, not toward Mecca. That destroys the qibla narrative.

• There are multiple Fatimas, and ʿAli is somehow Muhammad’s “brother”—a claim that collapses under basic genealogy.

• Ibn Ishaq says Muhammad took over Medina’s leadership peacefully, yet also says he overthrew a well-established ruler there (Ibn Hisham, 1860: 285, 385, 411).

• The Jews of Medina are described as both cooperative allies and as victims of Arab aggression—in the same source (Ibn Hisham, 1860: 286, 372–378).

So which is it? Crone again hits the nail on the head:

“The stories are told with complete disregard for what the situation in Medina may or may not have been like in historical fact.” (Crone, 1987:218)

This is storytelling, not history.

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📚 Authors Contradicting Themselves

It gets worse. Early Islamic compilers don’t just contradict other authors—they contradict themselves.

• Al-Tabari, the giant of Islamic historiography, often provides multiple conflicting versions of the same event (Kennedy, 1986:362). He doesn’t resolve them—he just dumps them all in.

• As Humphreys (1991:73) and Crone (1987:217–218) point out, the question of whether al-Tabari was editing or just compiling is unanswered. But either way, the result is chaos.

No historian can work with this kind of textual schizophrenia and pretend it's a reliable foundation.

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🔁 The Prophet's Recognition Stories: A Hall of Mirrors

Let’s take one event: Muhammad being “recognized” as a prophet by a non-Muslim.

There are fifteen different versions of this story—none of them agree on the basic facts:

• Some say it happened during his infancy (Ibn Hisham, 1860:107).

• Others: when he was 9 or 12 (Ibn Saʿd, 1960:120).

• Others: when he was 25 (Ibn Hisham, 1860:119).

• Some say it was a Jew, others an Ethiopian Christian, others a Kahin (seer).

• The location shifts between Mecca, ʿUkaz, and Dhu’l-Majaz.

Crone’s conclusion is inescapable:

“Fifteen equally fictitious versions of an event that never took place.” (Crone, 1987:220)

Exactly. These aren’t historical accounts—they’re wishful backstories written after the fact.

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🧩 The Similarity Problem: Copy-Paste Canon

Flip the coin and you get the other issue: everything sounds the same.

• al-Tabari’s Sira is basically a remix of Ibn Hisham’s.

• His Qur’an commentary? More of the same.

• And Bukhari’s hadith repeat the same narrative blocks with slight variations.

Crone (1980:11) notes this isn’t coincidence. It points to a centralized, controlled source emerging in the early 9th century, from which all others pulled. This suggests the Ulama may have created an unofficial “canon” of approved material.

What does that mean?

It means what we’re looking at is not diverse transmission from independent sources—but recycled dogma, dressed up to look authentic.

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❓Did Primary Sources Ever Exist?

Historians are left grasping at straws. These traditions are not grounded in observable data. They don’t cite verifiable sources. They never reference manuscripts, papyri, inscriptions, or external attestations. They just refer back to themselves in an endless circle.

So ask the real question:

• Did the original sources ever exist?

• And if they did, how would we even recognize them buried under centuries of later fiction?

We don’t know—because there’s nothing to work with. All we have is secondary material quoting other secondary material, echoing stories no one ever verified.

This isn’t evidence. It’s religious fiction retrofitted to function like history.

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🛑 Final Verdict: Unreliable, Contradictory, and Constructed

Between internal contradictions, self-referential recycling, and the total lack of verifiable primary material, the Islamic tradition collapses as a historical source.

You can’t trust the sira.

You can’t trust the hadith.

And you can’t pretend this mess is “preservation.”

It’s not. It’s a late-stage invention—patched together by religious elites to establish a usable, uniform narrative centuries after the fact.

In short: the Islamic historical tradition isn’t a window into the 7th century—it’s a mirror reflecting the 9th.