Soviet scholars denied Muhammad existed and redated the Qur’an to the eleventh century

Evidence

Klimovich wrote an article entitled ‘Did Muhammad exist?’ in which the answer to the question so posed was no. All the sources on the Prophet’s life were late and dubious. In The Contents of the Koran (1928), Klimovich sought to lay bare its internal contradictions. It was, he maintained, a document drafted on behalf of the exploiters – the mercantile bourgeoisie of Mecca and Medina – that promised the exploited masses a paradise in the never-never that was the main force behind Islam. The Prophet was a back-formation – a figure retrospectively invented in order to give the religion a founder. N. A. Morozov went further yet and argued in Christ (1930) that, until the shock of the Crusades, Islam and Judaism were indistinguishable from one another. There were indications in the Qur’an that it was composed as late as the eleventh century. Islam could not possibly have originated in the Arabian peninsula, as it was too far from the main centres of civilization to give birth to a new religion. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 419

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader historiographical theme of sacred texts being redated or dismissed as back-formations, echoing how scholars treated Homeric and Arthurian material.