@georgia I always thought that the Israelites were Jews.

@georgia@netzsphaere.xyz Tom Holland has the exact opposite theory for Islamic origins. He thinks it was originally Palestinian and got relocated to Mecca at a later date because there's no evidence of Mecca existing at the time except biographies of Muhammad written 200 years later, and it was supposed to have been a booming cultural hub that rivaled a Roman or Persian city.

@georgia@netzsphaere.xyz I don't really buy it either. A lot of his reasoning was trying to infer the most logical trade routes based on the accounts of places he visited when he was young.

He did convince me that early Muslim history is basically a fabrication, though.

@georgia@netzsphaere.xyz Arabs had already adopted Jewish customs after the Himyarites so I think a more likely inference is that he was just from some random Arabian town, or maybe he was always a nomad, and Mecca was established sometime later in honor of him or something.

Early Muslim history is strange because the archeology suggests the shift toward something like Islam happened before Muhammad. Muhammad isn't even a name, it's a title, and it's used in inscriptions to refer to Jesus.

We also barely have any reliable documentation of anything for over a century after Muhammad's life and death. It's all biographies written well after the fact with contradictory information, Quranic interpretations that seem opposite to their plain reading. It's messier than most realize.

Arabians also composed poetry similar to the Quran before. It could very well just be an aggregation/revision of old folk-jewish Arabic poetry.

I think whatever happened when they started conquering, the first generation of what we now call Muslims completely failed to pass on the memory of whatever they were up to and a lot of it is fragments of truth pieced back together with a lot of creative interpretation and imagination.

@georgia@netzsphaere.xyz Ultimately I wouldn't recommend his book though. It's very... Idk, juvenile, at least in presentation. He mixes in stories with obnoxious potty humor while trying to present an actual revisionist history. I think doing a podcast for normies brain rotted him.